Building Taliesin Frank Lloyd Wright s Home of Love and Loss 1st Edition Ron Mccrea All Chapters Instant Download

Download the full version of the ebook at ebookfinal.
com
Building Taliesin Frank Lloyd Wright s Home of

Love and Loss 1st Edition Ron Mccrea
https://ebookfinal.com/download/building-taliesin-frank-
lloyd-wright-s-home-of-love-and-loss-1st-edition-ron-mccrea/
OR CLICK BUTTON
DOWNLOAD EBOOK
Download more ebook instantly today at https://ebookfinal.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...
Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought 1st Edition

Jerome Klinkowitz
https://ebookfinal.com/download/frank-lloyd-wright-and-his-manner-of-
thought-1st-edition-jerome-klinkowitz/
ebookfinal.com
Young House Love 243 Ways to Paint Craft Update Show Your
Home Some Love 1st Edition Sherry Petersik
https://ebookfinal.com/download/young-house-love-243-ways-to-paint-
craft-update-show-your-home-some-love-1st-edition-sherry-petersik/
ebookfinal.com
Confronting Corruption Building Accountability Lessons

from the World of International Development Advising 1st
ed Edition Lloyd J. Dumas
https://ebookfinal.com/download/confronting-corruption-building-
accountability-lessons-from-the-world-of-international-development-
advising-1st-ed-edition-lloyd-j-dumas/
ebookfinal.com
Young People s Experiences of Loss and Bereavment 1st

Edition Jane Ribbens Mccarthy
https://ebookfinal.com/download/young-people-s-experiences-of-loss-
and-bereavment-1st-edition-jane-ribbens-mccarthy/
ebookfinal.com
Wounds of Love The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima
1. / /Special E Edition Frank Graziano
https://ebookfinal.com/download/wounds-of-love-the-mystical-marriage-
of-saint-rose-of-lima-1-special-e-edition-frank-graziano/
ebookfinal.com
Jabber Developer s Handbook 1st Edition William Wright
https://ebookfinal.com/download/jabber-developer-s-handbook-1st-
edition-william-wright/
ebookfinal.com
Frank Miller s Robocop Omnibus Edition Frank Miller
https://ebookfinal.com/download/frank-miller-s-robocop-omnibus-
edition-frank-miller/
ebookfinal.com
Kirkbride s Diagnosis of Abortion and Neonatal Loss in

Animals Fourth Edition Njaa
https://ebookfinal.com/download/kirkbride-s-diagnosis-of-abortion-and-
neonatal-loss-in-animals-fourth-edition-njaa/
ebookfinal.com
Down s Syndrome The Biography Biographies of Diseases 1st

Edition David Wright
https://ebookfinal.com/download/down-s-syndrome-the-biography-
biographies-of-diseases-1st-edition-david-wright/
ebookfinal.com
i
BUILDING TALIESIN
ii
Rendering by Jim McIntosh

n n n
BUILDING TALIESIN
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S HOME OF LOVE AND LOSS
RON McCREA
Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Publishers since 1855
© 2012 by Ronald A. McCrea
For permission to reuse material from Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss, ISBN: 978-0-87020-606-1, please access
www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a
not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.
Photographs identified with WHi or WHS are from the Society’s collections; address requests to reproduce these photos to the Visual Materials
Archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street, Madison, WI 53706.
Front cover: Entrance to Taliesin construction site, 1911. Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.
Insets: Frank Lloyd Wright ca. 1906 and Mamah Bouton Borthwick ca. 1914. Photos courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Back cover: Taliesin embraces its hill crown overlooking Jones Valley. Craig Wilson, Kite Aerial Photography.
Inset: Taliesin entrance plaque, photo © Pedro E. Guerrero.
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Earl J. Madden, M.F.A.
17 16 15 14 13 2 3 4 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCrea, Ron.
Building Taliesin : Frank Lloyd Wright’s home of love and loss / Ron McCrea.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87020-606-1 (pbk.)
1. Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867–1959—Homes and haunts—Wisconsin—Spring Green. 2. Borthwick, Mamah Bouton, 1869–1914—Homes and
haunts—Wisconsin—Spring Green. 3. Taliesin (Spring Green, Wis.) 4. Spring Green (Wis.)—Buildings, structures, etc. I. Title.
NA737.W7M365 2012
720.92—dc23
2012021754
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
This book is for Elaine
. . . and in memory of Robert LaBrasca (1943–1992), who knew I could.
vii
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction
Taliesin I: Lost and Found 1
Chapter 1 From Tuscany to Taliesin 13
Chapter 2 “The Beloved Valley” 33
Chapter 3 Building Taliesin 59
Chapter 4 Life Together 121
Chapter 5 Transformations 173
Acknowledgments 210
Illustration Credits 215
Index 217
ix
PREFACE
Taliesin is a house in three acts.
In Act Three, Frank Lloyd Wright battles back from obscurity, marital
strife, and financial reverses in the 1920s to become America’s first
superstar architect. The artist born two years after the Civil War becomes
a TV celebrity in the 1950s. Taliesin in Wisconsin becomes the home
of Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship of apprentices and is the scene of lordly
black-tie musicales.
In the second act—an act of complications—Taliesin is deserted while
Wright is in Japan and California, then falls hostage to a jealous, deeply
troubled wife. After a second fire, the estate is seized by the Bank of
Wisconsin.
This book is about Act One. It begins with the decision of two people to
risk everything for love and build a home for it, rises to a time of triumph—
then ends suddenly in fire, murder, and Wright’s resolve to go on.
R.M.
xi
BUILDING TALIESIN
INTRODUCTION 1
INTRODUCTION
2 Building Taliesin
Fig. 1. It’s high summer at Taliesin in a photograph taken about 1913. A man and boy tend the garden bordering the carriage entrance while a young woman gathers flowers and a girl in
knee-stockings stands with a horse. The photo was likely taken by a traveling photographer as a souvenir for sale with the oval mat as part of the print. The print is in an album belonging to the
farm family. Photograph courtesy of Carla Wright.
INTRODUCTION 3
TALIESIN I: LOST AND FOUND

In the fall of 1911 Mamah Bouton Borthwick wrote to her mentor, Ellen Key, at
Strand, Key’s home in Sweden, to answer Key’s criticism of her love affair with
Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was a married man of 44 whose wife of 20 years
would not grant him a divorce. Borthwick, 42, had divorced Edwin Cheney on
August 8 after being married to him for 15 years.
“I have, as you hoped, ‘made a choice in harmony with my own soul’—the
choice as far as my own life was concerned was made long since—that is
absolute separation from Mr. Cheney,” she said. “A divorce was obtained last
summer and my maiden name is now legally mine.
“Also I have since made ‘a choice in harmony with my own soul’ and what I
believed to be Frank Wright’s happiness and am now keeping his house for him.
In this very beautiful Hillside, as beautiful in its way as the country about Strand,
he has been building a summer house, Taliesin, the combination of site and dwell-
ing quite the most beautiful I have seen anyplace in the world. We are hoping to Fig. 2. Frank Lloyd Wright, ca. 1906 Fig. 3. Mamah Bouton Borthwick, 1914
have some photographs to send you soon.
as 36 at a time. Mr. Wright’s sister has looked after this all summer but when I
“Faithful comrade! came it was turned over to me and I have done very little of your [translation] work
A dream in realization ended? in consequence of the building. The house is now, however, practically finished
and my time again free.
No, a woven, a golden thread in the human pattern
“Mr. Wright has his studio incorporated into the house and we both will be
of the precious fabric that is Life: her life, built into the busy with our own work, with absolutely no outside interests on my part—my chil-
house of Houses. As far as may dren I hope to have at times, but that cannot be just yet.”
Mamah’s description of their lives and plans in this remarkable letter is the
be known—forever!” fullest account yet of the early days of Taliesin, Wright’s estate at Spring Green,
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1932
Wisconsin, which observed its 100th anniversary in 2011. The letter is the third
“I believe it is a house founded on Ellen Key’s ideal of love. The nearest neigh- of 10 discovered in Key’s archive at the Royal Library in Stockholm and brought to
bor half a mile away is Frank’s sister [Jane Porter, at Tanyderi] where I visited the world’s attention in 2002.1
when I first came here. She has championed our love most loyally, believing it her Mamah apparently did send the photos she promised to Key, because in an-
brother’s happiness. other letter, written around February 1912, she speaks of sending more. “I enclose
“I have been thus far very busy with the unfinished house and because of the two other views of the house,” she says. “The interior looks pretty bare, for there
fact that workmen were boarded here in a nearby farmhouse, sometimes as many are no rugs yet nor many other things which will make it look more home-like.”
4 Building Taliesin
That description matches photographs in this book. The pictures of the living friend, partner in architecture, and brother-in-law, Clifford P. Evans, at the J. Wil-
room and dining areas show “pretty bare” rooms without rugs or much decora- lard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. Evans also was at Taliesin in the fall
tion. These and other primitive photos of Taliesin were taken by Taylor A. Woolley. of 1911 and appears in several Woolley photos. He was 22.
The third portion of Woolley’s photographs is contained in an album once
owned by a Spring Green couple and acquired on eBay by the Wisconsin His-
THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHER torical Society in 2005 for $28,200 after an intense fund-raising campaign. In a
Woolley, 26, was a draftsman who lived at Taliesin from mid-September 1911 write-up in the New York Times the album was hailed as “a Rosetta Stone for the
through the spring of 1912 and took pictures the whole time. In Italy the previ- building” but its creator was a mystery. I have discovered that 21 of its 35 images
ous year he and Borthwick had become friendly. He had lived with the couple in are exact matches to Woolley negatives in Utah, including all three photos that
Fiesole above Florence while working on Wright’s two-volume Wasmuth Portfolio. make up the triptych of the living room, the album’s signature display. It can now
Woolley also took photos in Fiesole. Some of them are included in these pages be said with high confidence that Woolley was the photographer.
because Fiesole is where the idea of Taliesin took root. Woolley’s photographs not only match Mamah’s words, they match Wright’s
own recollections of the first Taliesin summer and the craftsmen on the site. In them
“I have since made ‘a choice in harmony with my own we see carpenters, stonemasons, and foremen of the sort who Wright remembers by
name. We see chalk lines being laid down in a grid on Taliesin’s northeast slope to
soul’ and what I believed to be Frank Wright’s happiness prepare for the vegetable gardens that Wright croons about in his chronicle.
and am now keeping his house for him. In this very Woolley left Taliesin in the summer of 1912 to be with his ailing mother. In a
letter dated July 10, 1912, Wright tells Woolley to “take your time, enjoy yourself”
beautiful Hillside, as beautiful in its way as the country
in Utah, and notes: “All well here—the place quite transformed.”2
about Strand, he has been building a summer house, Mamah echoes this impression—that Taliesin has been transformed—in a
Taliesin, the combination of site and dwelling quite the letter to Key dated November 12, 1912. She says: “The place here is very lovely;
all summer we had excursion parties come here to see the house and grounds,
most beautiful I have seen anyplace in the world. We are including Sunday-schools, Normal School classes, etc. I will try to send you some
hoping to have some photographs to send you soon.” new photographs—you will scarcely recognize them from the others.”3
—Mamah Bouton Borthwick to Ellen Key, 1911 Both kinds of photos are represented in this book—the early, rough ones by
Woolley (“the others”) and the “new photographs,” taken in the late summer of
1912 by Clarence Fuermann of Henry Fuermann and Sons, professional photog-
Woolley’s collection of Taliesin photos—the first photos of the first Taliesin— raphers from Chicago. Wright needed a polished portrait of Taliesin to illustrate
has until now been scattered among three collections in historical societies and his achievement in the January 1913 Architectural Record. A second illustrated
libraries in Wisconsin and in Utah, where Woolley was born and spent most of article appeared a month later in Western Architect. In an introduction, the editors
his career. The most important collection, a file of 58 negatives at the Utah State of Western Architect confess that photos cannot do Taliesin justice.
Historical Society that sat unnoticed, possibly for decades, and was not processed “Wonderfully situated on a site commanding every view of one of Southern
until 2002, contains rare views of Taliesin under construction. Additional photo Wisconsin’s most beautiful valleys is Taliesin, the country home of Frank Lloyd
prints from the series by Woolley found their way into the collection of his lifelong Wright, Architect” they say. “Photographs giving an adequate conception of the
INTRODUCTION 5
layout of the house and grounds with Wright in his autobiography is able to remember and recite the names of
their beautiful surroundings are impos- carpenters, stonemasons, and foremen who worked on the construction site. He is
sible to procure. Here and there the even able to quote them. But he is not able to name the woman who cooked for
photographer is able to secure charm- the crew and was Taliesin’s reason for being.
ing little details . . . but the Architect’s In fact, Wright never names Mamah in An Autobiography except for one
drawings themselves show more com- first-name reference in the first edition and two in the second. He names all his
prehensively the beautiful and artistic other wives—Catherine Tobin Wright, Miriam Noel Wright, and Olgivanna
arrangement of this estate as planned Lloyd Wright—the last two of whom were also mistresses before they were
by Mr. Wright himself.”4 wives—and even Zona Gale, the Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist whom he
In February of 2011 a previously courted but who rejected him.
unknown collection of 25 photograph- But references to Mamah are elliptical.
ic proofs of Fuermann’s Taliesin set, She is “her who, by force of rebellion, as by force of Love, was then impli-
plus a few other unidentified images, cated with me.”
was put up for sale on eBay and ac- She is “the best of companionship” (though her companionship is omitted from
quired by the Wisconsin Historical So- his account of their 1913 trip to Japan).
Fig. 4. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright (photographed in
1949 at age 51) was the heroine of Frank Lloyd
ciety. They became available in time She is “a kindred spirit” at Taliesin, “a woman who had taken refuge there
Wright’s late career, helping him through hard for a selection of them to be included for life.”
times and organizing the Taliesin Fellowship.
in this book. These beautiful photos, In the discussion of her death, she is “she for whom Taliesin had first taken
some never published, show Taliesin at its peak, with its gardens, stone steps, and form.”
Tea Circle fully formed, its courtyards in bloom, and its vegetable gardens pop- But she is never Mamah Borthwick.
ping with cabbages and other crops, ready for the first harvest. In a coda to the tender account of their sojourn in Tuscany in 1910, Wright
exclaims: “Faithful comrade! A dream in realization ended? No, a woven, a
golden thread in the human pattern of the precious fabric that is Life: her life, built
THE LADY VANISHES into the house of Houses. As far as may be known—forever!” He is saying that
One Fuermann photo shows a horse and two young people under the porteco- Mamah’s spirit always animated Taliesin and always will. But he cannot utter
chere, as seen from the hill garden. The next photo presented here, taken two her name.5
years later by an anonymous photographer from the same perspective, is horrify- It was not always so. Five days after she was killed, Wright names Mamah
ing. It shows Taliesin in smoking ruins, the porte cochere crashed to the ground. If five times in an open letter to his neighbors. After thanking them for their kind-
the two young people in the previous photo were the Cheney children, John and ness, he fires a parting shot at married critics: “You wives with your certificates
Martha, they are now dead, killed with their mother while having lunch on Satur- of loving—pray that you may love as much and be loved as well as Mamah
day, August 15, 1914, during their annual summer visit. Borthwick!”6
The mass murder and fire claimed seven lives and eventually the life of Julian Immediately after her death, then, she is still a real woman, an individual with
Carlton, the killer from Chicago. Perversely, it claimed both the life and the identity a history. But in Wright’s 1932 autobiography she is a ghost. She has become,
of the woman for whom Taliesin was built. in the words of Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, “an almost ephemeral, mythical figure, too
6 Building Taliesin
close, too precious, to be able to describe. He does not even mention her name.”7
There are many reasonable explanations as to why Wright did this, but the
net result is that in his memoir the first lady of Taliesin has vanished.
CREATIVE TOGETHER
The creative legacy of the original Taliesin was also pushed into obscurity almost
immediately after the fire. It was forgotten that during their brief years together
Wright and Borthwick were a powerhouse of production.
Between 1911 and 1914 Wright developed a new design vocabulary and
his talent flowered in some of his most distinctive works. They started with Taliesin
itself and included the Avery Coonley Playhouse, with its famous balloons-and-
confetti “kindersymphony” windows; the Francis Little House, whose tawny living
room is now installed in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art;
and Midway Gardens, a modernist fantasy of buildings, restaurants, and an
outdoor concert garden that occupied a full city block in Chicago.
Wright also opened a second career as a major collector and dealer in
Japanese art, taking Mamah to Japan with him in 1913, purchasing thousands of
Frank Lloyd Wright had been lost to a generation,

a critic for the Los Angeles Times observed in 1988,
speaking of “the dark ages for Wright designs, which
preceded his death in 1959 and spanned the following
generation.” Tastes in modern design had shifted to
Bauhaus and Scandinavian styles.
artworks, and landing the contract to build the new Imperial Hotel for the Imperial
Household in Tokyo. He published The Japanese Print: An Interpretation in 1912,
while still promoting U.S. sales of his two-volume Studies and Executed Buildings
of Frank Lloyd Wright, which had taken Europe by storm. Fig. 5. Robert Orth, appearing in the role of Frank Lloyd Wright, sings a love duet with Brenda
Wright and Borthwick became publishing partners in the effort to spread the Harris, portraying Mamah Borthwick Cheney in the Chicago Opera Theater’s 1997 revival of the
Daron Hagen opera Shining Brow. The opera premiered with the Madison Opera in 1993 and has
gospel of women’s liberation and marriage-law reform being promoted by the had other revival performances in Florida, Nevada, and Buffalo, New York.
INTRODUCTION 7
Fig. 6. Grief-stricken townspeople mourn as Frank Lloyd Wright, sung by Robert Orth, places wildfowers on Mamah’s grave and pledges to rebuild Taliesin, in a scene from the Chicago Opera Theater’s
Shining Brow. In the actual 1914 event, Wright buried Mamah alone after filling her casket with the flowers from her garden.
8 Building Taliesin
TURMOIL AND TRIUMPH

That deeper appreciation was delayed until well after Wright’s death. Mamah’s
memory was first buried under a heap of melodrama and scandal generated by
Wright’s nine-year liaison and marriage with the volatile Miriam Noel that be-
gan in 1915. That bad pairing culminated in a brutal custody fight over Taliesin
and an attempt by Miriam to have Wright’s new love, Olga (Olgivanna) Lazov-
ich, deported.
By the time the mess was sorted out, the professional cost to Wright had been
heavy. Then the Depression hit, and Olgivanna became the undisputed heroine of
Taliesin and Wright’s career. She pulled them through the hard times resourcefully,
persuading her husband to pursue two moneymaking ideas: to write the Autobiog-
raphy and to create a paying school of architecture.
After the founding of the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932 there were new worlds to
conquer, a new philosopher-guru to follow (George Gurdjieff ), and a new “truth
against the world” to proclaim: organic architecture versus the International Style.
Fig. 7. Mamah Borthwick’s grave marker in the Unity Chapel churchyard carries her married name. The eras of Mamah, Japan, and Oak Park were strictly Old Testament.
She stopped calling herself Cheney and reclaimed her maiden name even before she was divorced in
August, 1911, before she arrived at Taliesin. She called herself Mamah Bouton Borthwick in all her When Wright died in 1959, Olgivanna concentrated the work and resources
published translations. of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin West in Arizona, where business
prospects were better for the foundation’s architects, where she had friends and
popular Swedish philosopher-activist Ellen Key. With Borthwick working as her of-
felt at home—and where the house was not haunted. Taliesin East, as the Wiscon-
ficial American translator and Wright handling publishing contacts and financing,
sin campus was now called, went into 30 years of physical decline.
they published three books through Wright’s Chicago publisher, Ralph Fletcher
In a final act, Olgivanna desacralized Taliesin by ordering Wright’s remains
Seymour. Mamah’s translation of The Woman Movement was issued by Putnam’s
exhumed from the Unity Chapel churchyard, cremated, and shipped west to be
in New York with an introduction by Havelock Ellis. A final translation, Key’s
mixed with hers at her death in 1985. Mamah, buried nearby, was given a stone
profile of the French peace acvitist Romain Rolland, was published in 1915 in
marker reading “Mamah Borthwick CHENEY,” emphatically restoring to her
Margaret Anderson’s experimental Chicago-based Little Review, which Wright
the married name she had renounced when she began to live with Frank Lloyd
had helped get started with a $100 donation.
Wright.
Anderson published a tribute to the couple in October 1914. It was a piece of
poetry that Wright said survived the fire only because he carried it in his pocket.
Anderson’s preface says: “This fragment, a ‘Hymn to Nature,’ unknown to us in A VOICE FROM THE PAST
the published works of Goethe, was found in a little bookshop in Berlin and trans- The recovery of Taliesin’s creation story and the revival of interest in Wright and
lated into English by a strong man and a strong woman whose lives and whose Borthwick had to wait for the death of the last Mrs. Wright. Taliesin under Olgivan-
creations have served the ideals of all humanity in a way that will gain deeper na had come to resemble China’s Forbidden City under the Dowager Empress in
and deeper appreciation.”8
INTRODUCTION 9
some ways—insular, wrapped in intrigue, wary of outside scholars. Mamah Borth- a critic for the Los Angeles Times observed in 1988, speaking of “the dark ages for
wick and the first Taliesin were off-limits topics. Wright designs, which preceded his death in 1959 and spanned the following gen-
After Mrs. Wright’s death in 1985, that began to change. Taliesin and its eration.”10 Tastes in modern design had shifted to Bauhaus and Scandinavian styles,
archival treasures became accessible. An early result was the organization of the writer said—an ironic development, since the mother of Scandinavian modern
Wright’s massive correspondence by Anthony Alofsin into the five-volume Index to design was none other than Ellen Key. Her pamphlet Beauty for All (1899), expand-
the Taliesin Correspondence (Garland, 1988). The entire Wright letter archive was ed and published as Beauty in the Home (1913), set off the revolution, but Mamah
copied on microfiche and made available for research at the Getty Museum in Los Borthwick never translated it. It was not available in English until 2008, when the
Angeles. Taliesin archivist Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer issued a stream of original writings Museum of Modern Art published Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts.
and renderings. It took another shift in tastes—to the glowing copper, fumed oak, matte-green
Solid biographies and groundbreaking studies followed, including Meryle pottery, and stained-glass glories of the American Arts and Crafts Movement—to
Secrest’s Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (HarperCollins, 1992), Alofsin’s indis- revive interest in Wright’s early decorative objects and Prairie houses. Wright had
pensable Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910–1923 (Chicago, 1993), Neil been a major contributor to the Arts and Crafts campaign for domestic reform and
Levine’s The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, 1996), Julia Meech’s simplicity in design, which peaked between 1890 and 1920. David Hanks’s The
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan (Japan Society, 2001), and Narciso Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright (Dutton, 1979) opened a roadmap to
Menocal’s edited Wright Studies volume, Taliesin I: 1911–1914 (SIU–Carbon- connoisseurship in the 1980s for star collectors such as Barbra Streisand; action-
dale, 1992), which brought together all the known information at the time.
Brendan Gill’s skeptical but admiring Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd
Early Wright designs became big box office,
Wright (Putnam’s, 1987) publicized Wright’s correct birth year (1867, not 1869)
and possible original name (Franklin Lincoln Wright). His dossier on Wright’s commanding record prices at auction houses and
mother, Anna, whom Wright had painted as a saint, revealed a cruel, controlling prompting a wave of affordable knock-offs. Suddenly
side to her personality.
Mamah Borthwick’s comeback began with the discovery in the Swedish Royal
everyone was wearing “balloons-and-confetti” scarves
Library of the letters written by her to Ellen Key between 1910 and 1914. The and putting Midway Gardens sprites in their gardens—
letters finally gave her a voice of her own. Lena Johannesson, a professor of art
both products of Frank and Mamah’s Taliesin.
history at Linkoping University in Sweden, first revealed the contents in a Nordic
women’s studies journal in 1994. An English version appeared in 1995, followed
by a widely admired article published in 2002 by Wellesley architectural historian film producer Joel Silver; and the insatiable Thomas Monaghan, owner of Domi-
Alice T. Friedman.9 The Key archive also includes a wrenching letter written by no’s Pizza and the Detroit Tigers.
Wright in December of 1914, replying to Key’s condolences. Early Wright designs became big box office, commanding record prices at
auction houses and prompting a wave of affordable knock-offs. Suddenly, every-
one was wearing “balloons-and-confetti” scarves and putting Midway Gardens
BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT sprites in their gardens—both products of Frank and Mamah’s Taliesin.
After scholarship, the second avenue through which the story of the first Taliesin was The run on Wright designs, which led some Wright homeowners to cannibal-
rediscovered was popular culture. Frank Lloyd Wright had been lost to a generation, ize their residences for prized windows, lamps, and pieces of furniture, led to the
10 Building Taliesin
creation of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago in 1989. Like Brigadoon, the mythical village that appears once in 100 years, Taliesin I is
Wisconsin caught the wave that same year, and Governor Tommy Thompson emerging from the mists.
created the Taliesin Preservation Commission. In return for preservation funds the I expect—and hope—that the new images and information in this book will
Fellows agreed to allow a nonprofit group, Taliesin Preservation Inc., to restore the be eclipsed by even newer discoveries about the first Taliesin. It was Frank Lloyd
buildings and run public tours. Taliesin tourism got its start. Wright’s most personal creation—his labor of love—and deserves attention. But I
Stage and film productions came next. The Wright-Borthwick story was drama- am pleased, as a third-generation journalist, to be able to deliver some hundred-
tized in Daron Hagen’s opera Shining Brow, written in 1989 and first performed year-old scoops.
by the Madison Opera in 1993. Their life together was a subject of Jeffrey Hatch- This book began suddenly in February 2010 when I discovered an Internet
er and Eric Simonson’s three-act play Work Song, which premiered in Milwaukee reference to a Taylor Woolley photo collection at the Utah State Historical Society
in 2000. Ken Burns included the story in his 1998 PBS documentary, The Legacy that included photos of “Taliesen [sic] I under construction.” I ordered the collection
of Frank Lloyd Wright. and was amazed by what arrived. There was no descriptive information with the
“The Murders at Taliesin,” a cover story I researched and wrote for The images, but Keiran Murphy, Taliesin Preservation Inc.’s knowledgeable historian,
Capital Times of Madison in 1998, attracted the attention of the E! Entertainment helped me fill in the blanks with thirty-seven pages of notes.
Network’s Mysteries & Scandals documentary series, which produced an often- Although many Taliesin views were new, I recognized others as being the
repeated Wright segment in 1999. The BBC’s Channel 9 used the article for Frank same as pictures in the anonymous album titled “Taliesin” that the Wisconsin
Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth and Modernism, an hour-long documentary that aired Historical Society had captured on eBay in 2005. After matching Utah negatives
in 2005. And William R. Drennan built a book around the article, Death in a Prai- to a majority of the album’s pictures, I concluded that the photographer for both
rie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders.11 was Woolley.14
The Wright-Borthwick saga hit the fiction bestseller list in 2007 with the pub- I then discovered that Woolley had not been alone when he was present at
lication of Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank. Horan, an Oak Park native with the creation of Taliesin, but had a Utah friend with him, Clifford P. Evans, then 22,
reporting experience, combined her own research with Mamah’s letters, Wright’s with whom he shared the rest of his professional life. The picture of both of them
autobiography, other recent biographies, and her own imagination to produce standing and holding brushes and buckets of wood stain outside Taliesin—two of
a sympathetic retelling of the story from Mamah’s point of view.12 So popular the “young men in architecture” of whom Wright was so fond—was tucked away in
has this story been that Taliesin Preservation Inc. in 2010 added a “Loving Frank Evans’s papers at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. My researcher in Salt
Tour,” which until recently would have been simply unthinkable. Lake City, Butch Kmet, who lives in a 1911 Woolley-designed bungalow, dug out
that photo and others as well, helped me document Woolley’s illustrious Mormon
pioneer family history. (Both the Taylors and Woolleys were eminent founding
NEWS FROM 1911 families. Taylor Woolley himself was not religious but benefted from his legacy.)
In 1992, Anthony Alofsin wrote: “The photographic history of Taliesin I is very short.” Another discovery came closer to home. I had seen Frank Lloyd Wright’s
In 1997, Kathryn Smith, another Wright authority, said: “Little is known of the 1900 photos of Jones Valley and his aunts’ progressive Hillside Home School in
details of Wright’s daily life with Mamah Borthwick at Taliesin between 1911 and the Wisconsin Historical Society’s archives. But it took the sharp eye of my wife,
1914.”13 Elaine DeSmidt, to discover that three of Wright’s winter landscapes fit together
Both statements were true when they were written. Neither is true today. into a single valley-wide panorama.
INTRODUCTION 11
Checking out leads buried in Mamah’s letters produced Floyd Dell’s previously
unnoticed defense of her in the Chicago Evening Post, which she sent as a clip-
ping to Ellen Key early in 1912. Dell, editor of the Post’s Friday Literary Review
and leader of Chicago’s avant-garde, was incensed at the “hunting and harrying”
of Mamah and worried that Wright would be ruined as an artist. There was no
copy of Dell’s article to be found at any institution in Chicago, but Whitney Har-
rod, a tenacious journalism graduate student at Northwestern, tracked it down for
me at Harvard.
Another Mamah reference, to a visit in 1914 by women’s movement leader
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, led me to reconstruct a meeting at Taliesin of three
important feminists: Borthwick, the voice of Ellen Key in America; Gilman, Key’s
arch-nemesis on the question of whether all mothers are born to raise children; and
Zona Gale, a playwright and leader of the Wisconsin suffragist movement who
had recently traveled from Chicago to Wisconsin in the company of Gilman and
Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the president’s singing daughter.
My biggest thrill was exploring a single photo, the picture of Wright’s newly-
built puppet theater sitting in the unfinished living room of Taliesin. The only known
photo of the theater was taken at Wright’s Chicago Art Institute show in 1914,
where he labeled it “Marionette Theatre, Made for Llewellyn Wright.” The Taliesin
picture speaks volumes about the father’s conflicted situation—building a lavish gift
for his youngest son at the same time he is building a permanent home away from
him.
Studying the scenery in Wright’s color rendering for the theater, I saw that
it depicts a villa with a low-walled terrace and cypress trees and hills in the
distance—a memory from Fiesole, which I had visited in 2004. Feeling like the
photographer in Antonioi’s film Blow-Up, I zoomed in. That revealed a tower with
a balcony, and in the balcony the figure of a woman leaning over to listen. On the
terrace stands a man delivering a speech.
They are without a doubt Romeo and Juliet. Wright, as he builds a hillside
refuge for himself and his beloved, has created “a world in little” depicting Shake-
speare’s classic drama of impossible love. It is a play within a play.
RON McCREA
Madison, Wisconsin, November 15, 2011
Notes 1995, 126–136; Alice T. Friedman, “Frank Lloyd Wright and Feminism:
Mamah Borthwick’s Letters to Ellen Key,” Journal of the Society of Architectural
1. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, undated letter. Ellen Key Archive, Royal Historians (June 2002), v. 61, No. 2, 140–151.
Library of Sweden, Stockholm. The author is grateful to Nancy Horan for 10. Elizabeth Venant, “The Wright Time for Household Objects: The Great
sharing her set. Architect’s Creations for Homes Are Now Commanding Respect—and Top
2. Frank Lloyd Wright to Taylor Woolley, July 10, 1912. Used with permission, Prices,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1988, Calendar, 8.
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ. 11. Ron McCrea, “The Murders at Taliesin,” Capital Times, August 15,1998, 1A.
3. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, July 10, 1912. Ellen Key Archive. Drennan’s book was published in 2007 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
4. “Taliesin, the Home of Frank Lloyd Wright and a Study of the Owner,” 12. Nancy Horan, Loving Frank (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977). Another
Western Architect (February 1913), v. 19, 16. To view Wright’s evolving novel, T.C. Boyle’s The Women (New York: Viking, 2009), offers vivivd
drawings and plans, see Anthony Alofsin, “Taliesin I: A Catalogue of portraits of each of Wright’s loves in reverse order and with a more ironic
Drawings and Photographs,” in Narciso Menocal, ed., Wright Studies, tone. Mamah is portrayed as a proselytizing feminist and seductress with a
Volume One: Taliesin 1911–1914 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University “carefree, rippling laugh that was calculated to freeze any woman to the core
Press. 1992), 98–141. and make any man turn his head.”
5. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932), reprinted in Frank Lloyd 13. Anthony Alofsin’s quote is from Alofsin“Taliesin I, 124. Kathryn Smith’s quote
Wright: Collected Writings, v. 2, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed. (New York: Rizzoli is from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Taliesin West (New York: Harry
International Publications, 1992), 221. Wright’s sole reference to Borthwick N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 49. In this book she is the first to publish Taylor
by name in this edition is the sentence “Totally—Mamah was gone.” Woolley’s 1911–1912 photos of the Taliesin dining area and the triptych of
6. Home News, Spring Green, Wisconsin, August 20, 1914. For the full text, the living room (on pp. 54–55). In an e-mail to the author on January 31,
see p.145. 2012, Smith says that she did not see the original prints but “published a
7. Pfeiffer, introduction to An Autobiography, 103 copy of a copy.”
8. “A Hymn to Nature,” The Little Review (October 1914), v. 1, 30. Wright 14. The reference number of the Taylor A. Woolley Collection at the Utah State
published this poem in the Spring Green Home News on August 20 with his Historical Society is C-340 and the photos are in Folders 1–4. The society
own introduction: “A fragment: A ‘Hymn to Nature,’ unknown to us in the says it has no background information about how and when it acquired the
works of Goethe, we found in a little bookshop in Berlin. Translated by us collection, and notes that it would not be unusual for it to have sat for decades
from the German—together—it comforted us. It is for the strong, and saved before being noticed. The society posted the Woolley Taliesin photos with
from destruction only because I carried it in my pocket. I give it here to those identification information provided by Peter Goss for the first time on October
who cared for her.” A gold-stamped, color-illustrated edition of 100 copies of 10, 2011. The Woolley photo additions to the Clifford P. Evans Collection at
Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Die Natur: Ein Hymnus was published by the Ernst the University of Utah Marriott Library are under reference number P0002.
Ludwig Presse of Darmstadt in 1910, while Wright and Borthwick were in The Woolley collection that includes photos from Italy is under P0025. The
Germany. It is the kind of little luxury Wright would have found hard to resist. Wisconsin Historical Society Woolley and Fuermann collections may be
Goethe’s Die Natur: Fragment was first published in 1783. accessed by keyword search at www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/. A combined
9. Lena Johannessen, “Ellen Key, Mamah Bouton Borthwick and Frank Lloyd gallery of Woolley images, showing sources and overlaps, appears in this
Wright: Notes on the Historiography of Non-Existing History,” NORA/ book on pp. 109–113.
Nordic Journal of Women Studies (Scandinavian University Press), No. 2
FROM TUSCANY TO TALIESIN 13
n n n
CHAPTER 1
FROM TUSCANY TO TALIESIN

Fig. 8. Elaine DeSmidt and Ron McCrea arrive at the doorway to the Villino Belvedere in Fiesole, where Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick lived from late March 1909 to mid-September 1910. The walled
garden at left is part of the residence, which overlooks Florence on the other side.
“How many souls seeking release from

real or fancied domestic woes have sheltered in
Fiesole!”
—Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobigraphy
By the time Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick reunited in a garden resi-
dence overlooking Florence, Italy, in the spring of 1910, they faced a challenge.
How would they proceed with their lives?
Each had made a break with their families in the United States the previous
fall when they had met in New York and sailed for Europe. Mamah had started
the clock on her own divorce in June 1909, when she left for the West and
made it clear to Edwin Cheney she was not returning. Wright wrote to Darwin
Martin, his client and patron, on September 16 to tell him that he was “deserting
my wife and children for one year, in search of a spiritual adventure. You
probably will not hear from me again.”1
Fig. 9. Wright and Mamah Borthwick enjoyed this view of Florence and the Arno River valley from all Fig. 10. Bougainvillea cascades from the crannied wall that supports the Villino Belvedere and its
levels of the Villino Belvedere. He called their home “this little eyrie on the brow of the mountain above garden, above, on the valley-facing side of the house. The photo is taken from the lower Via della
Fiesole—overlooking the pink and white Florence, spreading in the valley of the Arno below.” He Doccia.
would later use similar terms to describe Taliesin.
Fig. 11. Taylor Woolley took this photograph of the drafting work room of the Villino Belvedere in 1910. A draftsman, possibly Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., is hunched over a drawing at left. The view from the desk
beside him is blocked by a potted plant that Woolley may have placed there for effect. The drawings on the wall that they are retracing for the Wasmuth Portfolio are identifiable. From left: Plate XIX, ground plan
and site plan, Emma Martin House (Fricke-Martin), Oak Park, Illinois; Plate XXVIII, ground plan and site plan, Francis W. Little House, Peoria, Illinois; Plate XXXI(b) (behind the plant), ground plan, Susan Lawrence
Dana House, Springfield, Illinois; Plate XXIII (top), “A Small House With Lots of Room in It,” Ladies Home Journal, 1901, described in the portfolio as “Typical low-cost suburban dwelling”; Plate LV (bottom),
ground plan and site plan, Yahara Boat House, Madison, Wisconsin.
Wright and Borthwick were exposed when a Chicago newspaper reporter In February, with Mamah’s arrival imminent, he sent his two young
found them registered as husband and wife at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. They draftsmen off to tour Italy. Lloyd continued on to France and sailed for New York
traveled to Paris and temporarily parted ways, with Mamah going to Nancy, on March 12. Woolley returned to Fiesole and lived with Wright and Borthwick
France, and then Leipzig. There she found work teaching English as a second until mid-June. Then he departed, carrying with him a gift of dictionaries from
language. her and a letter of recommendation from Wright praising him as a “faithful and
Although his business was in Berlin, Wright went to Florence. There, in an an effective draughtsman.”4 After that, the couple had the house and garden and
apartment of the villa Fonte della Ginevra overlooking the Arno River, he was Italy to themselves.
joined by his son Lloyd Wright, 19, and Taylor Woolley, 25, who had come Even 20 years later Wright could summon up detailed memories of that time.
to assist him with the prepress work for a lavish two-volume compendeum of “Walking together up the road from Firenze to the older town, all along the way
his pioneering architecture. Its title was Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von the sight and scent of roses, by day. Walking arm in arm, up the same old road
Frank Lloyd Wright (Studies and Executed Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright). at night. Listening to the nightingale in the deep shadows of the moonlit woods
Its publisher was Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin, and it became known as the Wasmuth . . . trying to hear the songs in the deeps of life: Pilgrimages to reach the small
Portfolio.2
In February 1910, anticipating Borthwick’s arrival, Wright moved the “[Mamah] told her husband one year before she
studio and living quarters to the two-story Villino Belvedere in the hillside town
of Fiesole. The garden residence enjoys a panoramic view of Florence and the
went away with me that she would go with me
Arno River Valley. The entrance is on the upper level, on the Via di Montececeri, married or not whenever I could take her.”
which splits off from the Via Verdi below the larger Villa Belvedere next door. A —Frank Lloyd Wright to his mother, July 4, 1910
thick door and a brick wall protect the home and garden.
From the Villino Belvedere it is a two-minute walk to the town plaza, where solid door framed in the solid blank wall in the narrow Via Verdi itself. Entering,
in 1910 one could catch an electric tram for a 30-minute ride down the hill into closing the medieval door on the world outside to find a wood fire burning in the
central Florence. It is also a two-minute walk from the Fiesole main plaza to a small grate. Estero in her white apron, smilingly, waiting to surprise Signora and
beautiful archaeological park set in a natural bowl. Wright could stroll among Signore with, ah—this time as usual the incomparable little dinner, the perfect
the remains of a Roman amphitheater, walk a Roman road, climb Etruscan roast fowl, mellow wine, the caramel custard—beyond all roasts or wine or
steps, and imagine the pleasures of what once had been a Roman spa with hot caramels ever made. I remember.”5
and cold baths and lap pools. At this cool and inviting altitude, visitors to the It was an idyllic time in an idyllic setting. Wright told his mother he wished
classical retreat enjoy a refreshing view of Tuscan hills framed by cypress trees. she and her sisters could “take a cottage for three months here in this garden
It was in this setting that Wright and Mamah reunited to ponder their future spot of the earth. I would know how to tell you how you could get the most out of
together. Wright’s work on the Wasmuth Portolio was well along. He told his it.” But as good as life was, both Wright and Borthwick worried about the future.
mother, “The work of the publication has prospered. It is going to be all I expected “I have been so troubled and perplexed that I have not known what to write,” he
and more. There will be twenty-five plates from my own handwork done here said. “It might be one thing one day and another the next.”6
beside all the redrawing, retouching, arranging, the editing, etc. . . . There will Borthwick wrote to Ellen Key, her feminist mentor in Sweden, “My perplexity
be one hundred in all. I am depending upon this to give my feet a secure footing and doubt is great that perhaps that path was not after all the one I should
when I come back . . . The financial return from it should be considerable.”3 have taken—perhaps it is not mine. Your torch however will also light me to the
Fig. 12. Steps built by the Etruscans in the fourth century BCE lead up to the site of a former Etruscan, and later Roman, altar. The religious site has a privileged view of the valley and
hills beyond. The vista resembles Frank Lloyd Wright’s scenic backdrop for the puppet theater he built a year after he left Fiesole.
true path—the path true for

myself—if I have mistaken
it.”7
Key’s writings gave
them a rationale for their
relationship. In Love and
Marriage and Love and
Ethics, Key argues that the
only moral basis of marriage
is love—not law, not religious
sanction, not family custom;
and that marriage based
on anything other than love
is dangerous to the health
of society and children and
the progress of the human
race. (Key was a dedicated
social Darwinist.) Borthwick
translated Love and Ethics
from German with help from
Wright, who had a flair with
English, during their summer
in Italy. It was published in
Chicago in 1912 at Wright’s
expense with both of them
listed on the title page as Fig. 13. Houses are built organically into the side of the hill on
translators.8 the street just above Wright’s Villino Belvedere.
NO GOING BACK
At some point in their Tuscan summer, Wright and Borthwick devised a plan to
reenter the United States and resume their life together in one year. It worked: In
August 1910 they were together on a hillside in Italy, and in August 1911 they Fig. 14. Taylor Woolley photographed the Villino Belvedere in Fiesole in 1910. He stayed there with
Frank Lloyd Wright, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and Lloyd Wright, and worked in the studio.
were together on a hillside in Wisconsin.
20 Building
20 BuildingTaliesin
Taliesin
Fig. 15. Etruscan steps, retaining wall, and terraces grown with olive trees resemble the landscaping of the hill garden above Taliesin’s forecourt and the steps to the Tea Circle. This site
was used in a scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini (1999), in which Lily Tomlin plays an American archaeologist.
FROM
FROM TUSCANY
TUSCANY TO
TO TALIESIN
TALIESIN 21
21
For them to return to Oak

Park, Illinois, and resume the
status quo ante was out of the
question. In Wright’s letter to
Anna Lloyd Jones Wright on
July 4, he says he can just
imagine their reception: “I am
the prodigal whose return is
a triumph for the institutions I
have outraged. A weak son
who, infatuated sexually, has
had his passion drained and
therewith his courage, and so
abandoning the source of his
infatuation to whatever fate
may hold for her.”
For Mamah, life will
become “a hard, lonely
Fig. 17. The Villa Medici, shown in a tinted postcard from the 1920s, interested Frank Lloyd Wright
struggle in the face of a world with its terracing and hillside views. It has been called a possible inspiration for the siting and gardens
that writes her down as an of Taliesin.
outcast to be shunned—or a
craven return to another man, Wright finds this idea unbearable. He accuses his family members of making
his prostitute for a roof and return impossible through their failure to tell the simple truth about the rupture of
a bed and a chance to lose two marriages. Rather than admit to the press that the breakups were expected
her life in her children, [so] and long in coming, he says, they gave credence to the story that Wright had
that something—some shred suddenly and deceitfully “eloped with the wife of my friend.” He spells out the
of self-respect, may clothe her true story as he sees it:
nakedness. While I return to
my dear wife and children [Mamah] had left her home forever three months before she went away with
Fig. 16. Taylor Woolley, 25, stands in the garden behind the
who all along ‘knew I would’ me, as her husband knew. You knew and Catherine knew that I was going
Villino Belvedere in 1910, wearing his protective smock.
and welcomed by my friends The draftsmen used crow-quill pens and India ink made from to take her away with me as soon as I could, as I had declared openly
lampblack in their work. This photo was previously thought
with open rejoicing and to you both and her husband a year before I did take her. There was no
to be of Lloyd Wright, but Anthony Alofsin confirms that it is
secret contempt.” of Woolley. deception that makes the ‘runaway’ match of the Yellow Journal anywhere.
Fig. 18. Roman arches frame the hills and a monastery in Fiesole. The arches were part of the bath complex built by Augustus and expanded by Hadrian In the first century AD. They
housed the cold, warm, and hot baths, called the frigidarium, tepidarium, and caldarium. Beyond are long swimming troughs resembling lap pools.
She went with me knowing what you and Catherine knew, that I would in college education, I am sure.” The younger children “have their pony still—and
any case have separated from Catherine—though I might have continued what they can have lacked in money or luxuries is beyond my imagination.”
under the same roof with her for the sake of the children—even that I told Wright reports that his wife is spending $275 [$6,353] per month “for
you I was determined not to do. household expenses merely,” and that he has provided cash totaling $4,500
She told her husband one year before she went away with me that she
would go with me married or not whenever I could take her. Marriage was “I would like to farm it beside him—with that tract of
never a condition with her any more than it was with me—except that in
order to work I felt this must take place when it might, if it might. It seemed
Reider’s and Uncle Thomas’ farm joined together.”
at one time (owing to the requests of her husband solely) as though this were Wright’s first mention of the site of Taliesin, next to the Porter farm,
to be made a condition—and so I misunderstood it myself for a time, but this written in Italy, July 4, 1910
was never her stipulation nor did she ever hide behind it.
I may be the infatuated weakling, she may be the child-woman inviting [$104,000]. “It is a constantly increasing load.”10
harm to herself and others—but nevertheless the basis of this whole struggle Then he makes a threat: If it comes down to his life or theirs, he will cut the
was the desire for a fuller measure of life and truth at any cost, and as such family loose. “The personalities of the children are dear to me—just the same,
an act wholly sincere and respectable within, whatever aspect it may have and I must make the struggle—I can see in no way how I can do otherwise than
worn without. This by my return I discredit because I seemingly endorse the let this load drop and die to them one and all if I [am] to find the happiness in
character made for it publicly by those whom by my returning to them I seem the life I planned and hope to lead anew.”
to endorse. This bitter draught seems to me almost more than I can bear . . . Wright’s threat may have been calculated to mobilize his mother to help him
I turn from it in disgust.9 acquire that Wisconsin land. Ten months later, she would. He never made good
on his threat.
What is the alternative? Wright drops a broad hint to his mother: He
would like to buy land in her Wisconsin valley, next to his sister Jane and her
husband Andrew Porter’s farm. “I would like to farm it beside him—with that SISTERLY ASSISTS
tract of Reider’s and Uncle Thomas’ farm joined together.” He has just described The elements of Wright and Borthwick’s one-year plan were simple but would
the site of Taliesin. demand stealth. Wright, pretending to give up Mamah, would reassemble his ar-
“But my situation is too discouraging to contemplate such luxury,” he chitectural practice in Oak Park and Chicago. He would quietly set up a separate
adds. “I must earn at least $5,000 every year [$115,000 in 2010 inflation- income stream to support Catherine and the children. He would quietly build a
adjusted dollars] to keep two boys in college and pay household expenses at the new home far away from Chicago.
rate they have gone in my absence—this with no account of my own needs . . . Mamah would stay behind in Europe, out of sight. When the way was
This doesn’t look much like a farm to me.” clear she would come back through New York, spend time with her children in
He says that he has spent money to bring Lloyd to Europe and has Canada, divorce her husband, and quietly join Wright at their new home.
just sent money to bring their daughter Catherine, 16, to England to spend Both of them found support from their sisters. Wright’s sister Jane (Jennie)
two months with Charles and Janet Ashbee, “which will be more to her than a Porter named her newborn son Frank on May 29. “Jennie certainly nails
Fig. 19. Wright designed a house for himself in the Italian manner with the Via Verdi in Fiesole as the site. The writing over the drawing says, “Studio for the architect / Florentine study, Florence 1910.” The
writing below says, “VILLA: Florence Italy—Via Verdi. Madame Illingsworth—1910. Feb.” She was the owner of the Villa Belvedere and the Villino next door. Wright’s plan has a walled garden on the street
side—visitors walk through it to the house in an enclosed entryway that also contains a work space. The home is of two stories and opens to a garden in the rear.
her colors to the mast and such courage to name the child after a brother in Mamah’s sister was Elizabeth V. (Lizzie) Borthwick, a teacher who lived in
disgrace,” Wright wrote to his mother. “It was like her, though, and through this the Cheney household in Oak Park and looked after Mamah’s children. “Only
perhaps we see Jennie as she really is.”11 When Borthwick arrived at Taliesin, my sister’s being there made my absence possible,” Mamah wrote to Key. It has
she stayed initially with the Porters at Tanyderi. “She has championed our love recently come to light that Lizzie Borthwick traveled to Europe in the summer
most loyally, believing it her brother’s happiness,” Borthwick wrote of Jane to of 1910. No doubt she had a serious consultation with her sister about the
Ellen Key.12 course ahead. “We do not know when and where the two sisters met,” writes
Filippo Fici, the Florentine architect beauty and ideality of their relationship and feared that by staying with her that
who made the discovery, “but we he would grow to loathe her.”15
know that Lizzie left from the port of That was hardly the truth. But if Wright dissembled about Mamah with
Rotterdam for New York aboard the Catherine, he lied openly to Darwin Martin. “The unfortunate woman in this case
ship Noordam on August 20.”13 is making her way herself,” he wrote Martin on November 22. A week later, he
She would have had just enough told him: “I have left the woman you have in mind to make her future plans as
time to get back to Oak Park for though I were dead.”
the opening of the brand-new Anthony Alofsin notes: “Wright was now obliged to lead a double life: a life
Washington Irving Elementary School, of denying his love for Mamah Cheney while planning his future around her.”16
where she was one of three founding Eight weeks later he was back in Germany, having sailed aboard the
teachers.14 Lusitania on about January 16, 1911. He needed to resolve issues with Ernst
Wasmuth, his publisher, but those issues were settled by February 13. Wright
stayed on through the end of March, and no doubt met again with Mamah.
HOMECOMING Events leading to the establishment of Taliesin unfolded rapidly after his return.
On April 3, he wrote to Darwin Martin requesting $10,000 to help his mother
On October 12, 1910, Catherine
purchase property “up country” for “a small house.” On April 10, Anna signed
Wright wrote Janet Ashbee to say that
the deed to purchase the Rieder property he had mentioned in Italy—next to
her husband was home again. “Mr.
the Porter farm, including a hill with commanding views of the Wisconsin River
Wright reached here Saturday eve-
and the valley of his ancestors. The first plan of Taliesin was in Anna’s name.
ning, Oct. 8th, and he has brought
This deflected attention from Wright and protected the property from any legal
many beautiful things. Everything but
claim by his wife. Site preparation began in the spring.17
his heart, I guess, and that he has left
Borthwick arrived in New York in June and paid a visit to the office of
in Germany.”
George Putnam, president of G. Putnam’s Sons, which would publish The
She added, “As near as I can Woman Movement. According to her letters, she then joined her children in
find out he has only separated from Canada for the summer, perhaps with help from Lizzie. Mamah’s divorce was
her because he wishes to retain the made final in Cook County Court on August 5, with Edwin claiming desertion.
He remarried a year later, as soon as he could, and sent the children, John
Fig. 20. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a and Martha, with Lizzie to stay with Mamah at Taliesin in 1912 while he
townhouse in 1911 to be built on a narrow lot
on Goethe Street, a fashionable address on honeymooned in Europe.18 His new bride was Elsie Millor, whom Mamah
Chicago’s near north side. It could have served described as Lizzie’s “dear friend.” Elsie and Edwin later had three children and
as a winter residence and studio for the architect
and Mamah Borthwick but was never built. Its moved to Missouri.
features included skylights and a music balcony Mamah Borthwick, her maiden name now officially hers (she had begun
over the dining area. It has an exterior balcony
on the gracious second level, known in Italy as to use it in Europe),19 came to her new home in Wisconsin in August. Wright
the piano nobile.
Fig. 21. A 1910 postcard shows the Roman amphitheater and women tourists in the architectural park just off the main piazza in Fiesole. The amphitheater, built in the first century BCE, has been restored and is
now used during summer festivals.
called Taylor Woolley back from California on August 31 to work at Taliesin children, the other for an income property for Catherine. The rental house
and provide Mamah with a familiar face. Wright divided his time between was advertised in December. By that time, Wright had moved permanently to
Taliesin and the remodeling of the Oak Park home and studio. He separated Taliesin. The one-year plan was complete.
the property into two buildings, one for a home for Catherine and the During the summer Wright had drawn plans for a four-story townhouse on
Goethe Street in a fashionable neighborhood on Chicago’s near north side. in 1469, and the house gained fame as a gathering place for artists, writers,
It featured skylights and a music balcony overlooking the entertainment area, and philosophers.
much like the one he built for Susan Lawrence Dana in Springfield, Illinois. In her Architectural writers say the Villa Medici was a departure from the castle-
first letter from Wisconsin, Borthwick told Key that Wright “has been building a style villas built to defend rural landholders. It was an open and artistic “villa
summer house,” suggesting that a winter residence was also being considered. suburbana,” enjoying full communion with surrounding nature—gardens, pools
But the Goethe Street townhouse was never built. For the next three years, of water, breezes, and the changing seasons.23 Taliesin would be like that.
Taliesin was their home for all seasons.20 In his introduction to the Wasmuth Portfolio, Wright shows how far he has
come in his appreciation of Italian style. He has been privileged, he says, to
be able to study the work of “that splendid group of Florentine sculptors and
VILLA TALIESIN painters and architects, and the sculptor-painters and painter-sculptors who were
In a letter from Italy to Charles Ashbee, Wright had described his situation lyri- also architects.” But greater than all these is the organic beauty of Tuscany’s
cally. “I have been very busy here in this little eyrie on the brow of the mountain “indigenous structures, the more humble buildings everywhere, which are to
above Fiesole—overlooking the pink and white Florence, spreading in the valley architecture what folklore is to literature or folk songs are to music.”
of the Arno below—the whole fertile bosom of the earth seemingly lying in the In these buildings, which do not reflect the religious piety of churches or the
drifting mists or shining clear and marvelous in this Italian sunshine—opalescent— “cringing to temporal power” of palaces, one finds “the love of life which quietly
iridescent.”21 Wright had discovered la bella vita—the beautiful life. Florence and and inevitably finds the right way.“
Tuscany, with their lush gardens, good food, musical language, civilized manners, Wright continues: “Of this joy in living, there is greater proof in Italy than
and folkloric as well as historic architecture, had given Wright a new feeling for elsewhere. Buildings, pictures and sculpture seem to be born, like the flowers
organic living. of the roadside, to sing themselves into being. Approached in the spirit of their
He looked at buildings and made drawings. Marie Sophie (Mascha) von conception, they inspire us with the very music of life.
Heiroth, a multilingual Russian pianist, and her husband, Alexander (Sasha), an “No really Italian building seems ill at ease in Italy. All are happily content
actor and painter, shared the villa Fonte della Ginevra complex in Florence with with what ornament and color they carry, as naturally as the rocks and trees and
Wright and the young men. When he moved to Fiesole they visited on Easter garden slopes which are at one with them. Wherever the cypress rises, like the
Sunday and he showed them drawings of houses inspired by Tuscan Villa touch of a magician’s wand, it resolves all into a composition harmonious and
traditions. Her grandson, Claes von Heiroth, notes, “He had especially studied complete.
Michelozzo’s Villa Medici in Fiesole.”22 “The secret of this ineffable charm . . . lies close to the earth. Like a handful
That villa has been identified by several architectural authorities as a of the moist, sweet earth itself, it is so simple that, to modern minds trained in
possible inspiration for Taliesin. Like Taliesin, it is terraced into the side of a intellectual gymnastics, it would seem unrelated to great purposes. It is so close
hill, with the top garden level above the house and another below. It enjoys that almost universally it is overlooked.”24
commanding views of the Arno River Valley and Florence. It dates from mid- Here, in a few sentences, is the kernel of Wright’s manifesto for the natural
fifteenth century, when Cosimo the Elder hired Michelozzo Michelozzi to house. Taliesin would be the first example to come from his hands.25
design it for his son Giovanni dei Medici. Lorenzo the Magnificent inherited it
IN WRIGHT’S WORDS
In Exile
In ancient Fiesole, far above the romantic city of Cities in a little cream-white villa on
the Via Verdi.
How many souls seeking release from real or fancied domestic woes have shel-
tered in Fiesole!
I, too, sought shelter there in companionship with her who, by force of rebellion
as by way of Love, was then implicated with me.
Walking together up the road from Firenze to the older town, all along the way
the sight and scent of roses, by day. Walking arm in arm, up the same old road at
night. Listening to the nightingale in the deep shadows of the moonlit woods . . .
trying to hear the songs in the deeps of life: Pilgrimages to reach the small solid door
framed in the solid blank wall in the narrow Via Verdi itself. Entering, closing the
medieval door on the world outside to find a wood fire burning in the small grate.
Estero in her white apron, smilingly, waiting to surprise Signora and Signore with,
ah—this time as usual the incomparable little dinner, the perfect roast fowl, mellow
wine, the caramel custard—beyond all roasts or wine or caramels ever made. I re-
member.
Or out walking in the high-walled garden that lay alongside the cottage in the
Florentine sun or arbored under climbing masses of yellow roses. I see the white
cloth on the small stone table near the little fountain, beneath the clusters of yellow
roses, set for two. Long walks along the waysides of the hills above, through the pop-
pies, over the hill fields to Vallombrosa.
Back again, hand in hand, miles through the sun and dust of the ancient winding
road, an old Italian road, along the stream. How old! And how thoroughly a road.
Together, tired out, sitting on benches in the galleries of Europe, saturated with
plastic beauty. Beauty in buildings, beauty in sculpture, beauty in paintings until no
“chiesa,” however rare, and no further beckoning work of human hands could draw
or waylay us any more.
Faithful comrade!
A dream in realization ended?
No, a woven, a golden thread in the human pattern of the precious
Fig. 22. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney dined at this table in the Villino Belvedere’s private
fabric that is Life: her life built into the house of Houses. So far as may be known— garden in 1910. Wright writes of “the white cloth on the small stone table near the little fountain,
forever! beneath the clusters of yellow roses, set for two.” Photograph by Taylor Woolley.
THE RUSSIANS NEXT DOOR Viktor Tourjansky, in which he played

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.28
The play was later revived by Peter
During the winter of 1909–1910 Frank Lloyd Wright, his 19-year-old son Lloyd, Shaffer as Amadeus. Algar grew up
and 25-year-old draftsman Taylor Woolley shared a building in Florence with a to become Finland’s ambassador
Russian family. As Lloyd recalled it, “The villino was divided into two parts open- to Mexico and Israel.
ing from a tiny inner court. A charming Russian couple who played chamber mu- Mascha kept a diary written in
sic with their friends had one apartment and we enjoyed the cultured company.”26 French. In 1910 she recorded a visit
The family included Alexander “Sasha” von Heiroth (also spelled Geirot), a to the home of Frank Lloyd Wright
painter; his wife, Marie Sophie “Mascha” von Heiroth (formerly Djakoffsky); and and Mamah Borthwick, who had
their little boy, Algar, who was not yet two. Mascha, beautiful and gifted, spoke invited the whole family, including a
six languages, played piano, and sat as a model for several famous artists, ac- nanny, to come up to their new rent-
cording to her grandson Claes von Heiroth, Algar’s son.27 She was married four ed home in Fiesole for Easter. Mas-
times; Alexander was her third husband. They later divorced and he went on to cha was pleased, because the family
act at Stanislawski’s Moscow Art Theatre and to appear in early Russian films. was a month away from leaving Italy
One was the 1914 silent production of Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri directed by and it would be a last chance to see
Fig. 24. Marie “Mascha” Djakoffsky von Heiroth
old friends and also visit Fiesole, (1871–1934) lived near Frank Lloyd Wright and
where they had lived and had con- Mamah Cheney in Fiesole in 1910 and kept a diary
in French. Her grandson says she played piano and
ceived Algar. entertained often with her husband, Alexander von
Heiroth (also spelled Geirot), a young artist who went
on to act in Russian films. Frank Lloyd Wright bought
one of his paintings. Mascha sold this portrait,
Diary entry: painted in Finland in 1896 by Albert Edelfelt, to the
March 24, 1910 State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia,
where it hangs today.
We are in an aviation craze! . . .
People are talking of nothing but
aviation, which will take place here for the first time. The show will take place on
Easter Monday [March 28] at the Campo di Marte. Sasha will go see it; that sort
of thing interests him a great deal. I would gladly go too, if someone would only
offer a seat in the stands. Otherwise I won’t, because it’s too expensive, and if
there is a huge crowd, I would rather not go.29
I’m beginning little by little to say my goodbyes! We are only here for one
more month! . . . Sunday we are invited to the home of the architect Wright, who
Fig. 23. The 1910 Florence air show was one of the first in Italy. On March 27 Enrico Rougier made the lived near us in the house of the woman who has a husband in Alaska. He has
first flight over the city in a Voisin biplane. rented the magnificent Villa Belvedere in Fiesole and he invited the entire family
there: Sasha, me, Algar,

and the maid, as well as
the two Halles. Thus it will
be a pilgrimage on Easter
Sunday and it will prob-
ably be our last visit to
Fiesole. I would like Algar
to see the place where he
was conceived two and a
half years ago.
Diary entry:
April 1, 1910
Our garden is all white
with pear tree blossoms.
On the wall behind the
house climb the few flow- Fig. 26. Alexander (Sasha) Von Heiroth, Gertrude Stein, Leo Stein, Marie (Mascha) Von Heiroth, Sarah
ers of the peach tree that Stein, and Harriet Lane Levy socialize at the Villa Bardi in Fiesole in 1908.
our landlord intended to
Fig. 25. Mascha von Heiroth kept a diary in French.
cut down because it does extremely interesting drawings of houses, palaces, and churches, after which
not bear fruit. I, who love we went to the piazza.
it so much for the pretty Japanese pattern that it makes on the wall, did not allow We stopped a moment at the Casa Ricci where the two elderly ladies Gi-
it. I had the double windows taken off to replace them with green shutters the other useppa and Filomena cried out joyfully on seeing us. Nothing had changed in
day, since the nice weather continued. But since yesterday the Tramontana [north- the little garden. The same romantic clutter ruled as when we were there. No one
ern wind] has been blowing, the mountains are once again all white with snow, lives there at present, but Leo and Gertrude Stein come back there for the month
and we fear that this weather is going to continue. of July.31 So many good memories flashed before my eyes at the sight of this
Last Sunday [March 27] we made our pilgrimage to the Wrights in Fiesole charming little spot. I would have liked to go everywhere I lived in Fiesole—to the
who received us quite well. They live in the charming little Villa Belvedere near Villa Bardi, and toward the lovely pine forest whence the superb road leads to
our dear old Casa Ricci, with its lovely little garden and its impressive view Vincigliata, to Settignano—but time was running out. We had tea one more time
of Florence. Algar misbehaved without bothering anyone since I brought the on the Hotel Aurora’s terrace before taking the tram to the duomo. It was probably
maid along with us to take care of him. After lunch, which we ate in a tiny the last time I would see Fiesole!!
dining room, I accompanied Sasha on Wright’s cello,30 then we looked at his —Translation from the French by Jonah Hacker
Fig. 27. A fencing demonstration follows luncheon at the Villa

Bardi in Fiesole in the summer of 1908. Alexander (Sasha) Von
Heiroth, right, fences with Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude Stein.
Sasha later had a career as a stage and film actor. Watching them
are Allan Stein, 13, son of Michael and Sarah Stein; Gertrude
Stein, grinning as she rests her head on the leg of Alice B. Toklas,
her new love; Harriet Lane Levy, who traveled to Europe from San
Francisco with Toklas but would lose her to Gertrude and return
home alone; Maria (Mascha) Von Heiroth; and Sarah Stein, Allan’s
mother (behind Sasha’s sleeve). Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of
Allan in 1906. Michael Stein, Allan’s father and Gertude’s brother,
is the likely photographer. Photos from Mascha’s albums are
courtesy of Claes Von Heiroth.
Notes article; the record established by Anthony Alofsin in Frank Lloyd Wright: The
Lost Years, 1910–1922 (Chicago, 1993), 307–309 and Neil Levine in The
1. Frank Lloyd Wright to Darwin Martin, quoted in Roger Friedland and Harold Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, 1996), Ch. III–IV; and the letters
Zellman, The Fellowship (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). The authors of Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, Ellen Key Archive, Royal Library of Sweden.
credit the SUNY-Buffalo University Archive as their source. I use Borthwick as The author visited Fiesole in May, 2004, and the descriptions are direct
Mamah’s surname because that was her practice in Europe and afterward. reporting.
Wright mentions Mamah leaving Edwin Cheney in June 1909 in a letter to 2. An English adaptation of the Wasmuth Portfolio is Frank Lloyd Wright,
Anna Lloyd Wright dated July 4, 1910, © Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Period (1893–1909)
Scottsdale, AZ. This letter was first mentioned by Filippo Fici in “Frank Lloyd (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1983).
Wright in Florence and Fiesole, 1909–1910,” Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, 3. Frank Lloyd Wright to Anna Lloyd Wright, July 4, 1910.
vol. 22 no. 4 (Fall 2011). The author is grateful to Fici for receiving him at his 4. Frank Lloyd Wright Wright to Taylor Woolley, June 16, 1910, Taylor Woolley
studio and providing helpful information about Florence in 2004 and again Manuscript Collection, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. The
in 2011 and 2012. The chronology for this chapter relies in part on Fici’s information about Lloyd’s travels is from Fici, “Frank Lloyd Wright in Florence.”
32 Building
32 BuildingTaliesin
Taliesin
5. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932), reprinted in Frank Lloyd plan is from Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the detail
Wright: Collected Writings, v. 2, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed. New York: Rizzoli about the Dana House is from a visit by the author.
International, 1992, 220. Wright’s spelling of the female servant’s name as 21. Alan Crawford, “Ten Letters from Frank Lloyd Wright to Charles Robert
Estero is questionable. Esther in Italian is Ester. Ashbee,” Architectural History, v. 13 (1970), 67.
6. Both quotations are from Frank Lloyd Wright’s July 4, 1910, letter to Anna 22. Claes von Heiroth e-mail from Helsinki, Finland, to Nancy Horan, December
Lloyd Wright. 1, 2010. Copied to author with von Heiroth’s permission to publish, January
7. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, undated letter from Pension Gottschalk, Berlin 2, 2011. He says his grandmother preferred the German spelling Mascha to
Ellen Key Archive, Royal Library of Sweden. the Russian Masha.
8. Ellen Key, Love and Ethics (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co., 1912). 23. Donata Mazzini and Simone Martini, Villa Medici, Leon Battista Alberti and
9. Frank Lloyd Wright to Anna Lloyd Wright. the Prototype of the Italian Villa (Florence: Centro Di, 2004), 2. For a siting
10. Ibid. The calculations for today’s dollars use the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics comparison and assessment of Taliesin and the Villa Medici, see Charles E.
CPI Calculator and other online inflation calculators. Aguar and Berdeana Aguar, Wrightscapes (McGraw-Hill, 2002), 152–156.
11. Some years later, after a dispute with her brother, Jennie changed her son’s 24. Frank Lloyd Wright, Studies and Executed Buildings, A scanned edition of the
name to Franklin, according to Taliesin historian Keiran Murphy. Frank’s original portfolio inscribed to Taylor A. Woolley by Wright on the title page is
original name may have been Franklin, according to Brendan Gill, Many online at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.
Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), 25. Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, makes this argument and
26. declares Taliesin “the first natural house.” The author is not claiming originality
12. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key from Taliesin, circa December 1911. Ellen here but seconding Levine’s assessment after having visited Tuscany and
Key Archive. Taliesin.
13. Fici, “Frank Lloyd Wright in Florence.” 26. Lloyd Wright letter to Linn Ann Cowles, quoted in Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright:
14. Oak Park, Illinois, city directory, 1911, and Washington Irving Elementary The Lost Years, 41.
School. 27. The diary pages and a wealth of helpful family background information come
15. Catherine Wright to Janet Ashbee, quoted in Gill, Many Masks, 213. courtesy of Claes von Heiroth, who lives in Helsinki. He was referred to the
16. Wright’s letters to Martin and Alofsin’s comment appear in Alofsin, Frank author by Nancy Horan. He wrote to Horan after his architect wife, Ilona,
Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 66–67, and the details of the German trip on read Loving Frank and suggested that its author might like to know more about
75–76. Wright’s Russian neighbors. His sister in France, Bianca Maria Andersen,
17. The land was purchased on April 10 but the purchase was recorded on April retrieved the diary and scanned the entries.
22; Keiran Murphy e-mail to author, June 7, 2011. For a detailed account of 28. ”Alexander Geirot,” The Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com.
the land transactions and evolving plans, see Alofsin, “Taliesin I: A Catalogue 29. It would be surprising if Wright did not attend. He loved speed, and his 1909
of Drawings and Photographs,” in Taliesin 1911–1914, Wright Studies, vol. Gilmore House, perched on a rise in Madison, Wisconsin, was dubbed “The
1, Narciso Menocal, ed. (Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 98–141. Aeroplane House” by fans of the Wright Brothers. He used the term himself.
18. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, November 10, 1912. “My sister brought my An Autobiography (New York: Horizon Press, 1977), 277.
children here for the summer during Mr. Cheney’s absence in Europe for his 30. Lloyd Wright played the cello. This confirms that there was a cello and a
wedding trip.” piano in the home.
19. While still technically Mamah Borthwick Cheney, she signed her name 31. Gertrude Stein writes of Mascha and Sasha: “There were amusing people in
“Mamah Bouton Borthwick” on the guest book at Ellen Key’s Strand on June Florence. . . . There were the first Russians, von Heiroth and his wife, she who
9, 1911. She also used her maiden name on the title page of Love and Ethics, afterwards had four husbands and once pleasantly remarked that she had
prepared in Italy, and in all of her letters to Ellen Key. always been good friends with all her husbands. He was foolish but attractive
20. “He has been building a summer house, Taliesin,” Mamah Borthwick to Ellen and told the usual Russian stories;” The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Key, undated, circa December, 1911. The description of the Goethe Street (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 55.
‘the beloved valley’ 33
n n n
CHAPTER 2
“THE BELOVED VALLEY”

Fig. 28. An aerial photograph taken by Madison kite photographer Craig Wilson shows Taliesin III and the valley beyond in September 2008. Taliesin I was smaller and did not include the projecting “bird
walk” that Frank Lloyd Wright added for his third wife, Olgivanna.
“Life, love, and work to be

transferred to the beloved Valley.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography
When the Jesuit explorer Jacques Marquette canoed down the Lower Wisconsin
River in 1673, he saw a scene that is recognizable today. “[It] is very wide; it has
a sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that render its navigation very difficult.
It is full of islands covered with vines. On the banks one sees fertile land, diversi-
fied with woods, prairies and hills.”1
Frank Lloyd Wright saw the same scene. In his essay “Why I Love Wisconsin”
he calls the river “this wide, slow-winding, curving stream in the broad sand bed,
where gleaming sandbars make curved breaches and shaded shores to be over-
hung by masses of great greenery.” When Taliesin was built, the river bend was
Fig. 29. Spring Green, 1912, an oil-on-canvas painting by George Mann Niedecken, depicts a scene
visible from the house. along the Wisconsin River in the vicinity of Taliesin. Pear and apple trees are in the foreground, with
“I come back from the distant, strange, and beautiful places I used to read the river and a slough below. The ridge across the river shows an exposed rock outcropping of the
sort that Wright wanted to imitate with “Shining Brow.” The painting was executed during Taliesin’s
about when I was a boy, and wonder about; yes, every time I come back here it is first year, when Niedecken, a Milwaukee furniture builder and designer, was working with Frank
with the feeling there is nothing anywhere better than this is,” Wright says. “More Lloyd Wright on the Avery Coonley Playhouse and Gardener’s Cottage in Riverside, Illinois.
dramatic elsewhere, perhaps more strange, more thrilling, more grand, too, but
nothing that picks you up in its arms and so gently, almost lovingly, cradles you as Jennie and Nell also launched a Wright legend by allowing him to build
do these southwestern Wisconsin hills . . . So ‘human’ is this countryside in scale “Romeo and Juliet” (1896), an unorthodox, sculptural windmill tower. His skepti-
in feeling . . . more like Tuscany, perhaps, than any other land, but the Florentines cal uncles protested and scoffed and predicted it would blow down; it outlasted
that roamed those hills never saw such wild flowers as we see any spring, if the them all, to Wright’s permanent satisfaction. In 1907 he built Tanyderi (“Under the
snow has been plentiful.”2 Oaks”) for his sister Jane Porter, a shingle-style house where Mamah Borthwick
Wright had lived in the hills of Tuscany during the spring and summer of stayed as a guest while waiting to move into Taliesin.
1910, but he had memorized the Wisconsin valley since childhood. As a teenag- For Wright, moving to the Jones Valley in Iowa County, Wisconsin, meant re-
er he had worked on his Uncle James’s farm and added the “Lloyd” in his mother’s connecting himself to his maternal roots and the land where he had discovered na-
family name to his own.3 The Lloyd Jones uncles put him to work in the barnyard, ture—both the natural world and human nature. Wright opens his autobiography
but the women of the clan gave him commissions. His first independent commis- with a story of himself as a nine-year-old boy, walking through a frosty meadow
sion at age 20 was from his aunts Jane (Jennie) and Ellen (Nell) Lloyd Jones, for and up a slope with his uncle John Lloyd Jones. While the uncle walks ahead, the
the main residence of Hillside Home School in 1887. He called the barnlike struc- boy scampers off, collecting dried weeds and grasses. When Frank catches up
ture a product of “amateur me,” but made up for it in 1901–1903 by giving the to his uncle to show him his treasures, the uncle reproaches him and points to his
aunts a Prairie Style building, Hillside, that looks modern today. straight path, comparing it to Frank’s errant zigzag.
The boy was crushed, and the experience made

such a deep impression on Wright that he put an ab-
stract rendering of it on the cover of his life story. It was
his baptism in adult indifference to the natural world.
The valley was his teacher.
DRIFTLESS
Taliesin is a unique creation in a unique landscape. The
floodplain, prairies, and hills are part of the trench of a
vast prehistoric Wisconsin River. The resulting sandstone
and limestone ledges and outcroppings of the valley are
hallmarks not just of a primeval riverbed, but of a quirk
of nature: the Driftless Area.
“Driftless” refers to the lack of foreign rocks and
pulverized soil—drift—that glaciers collect and carry
with them during their invasions and leave behind after
their retreat. By accident, the Ice Age glaciers missed
this area of Wisconsin, making it “famous the world
over because it is completely surrounded by glaciated Fig. 30. A Craig Wilson kite photograph looks over Taliesin’s hill crown toward the bend of the Wisconsin River. In the far distance at
territory,” Lawrence Martin says in his Physical Geogra- left, the hills of Blue Mound can be seen. Taliesin embraces the hill crown and enjoys a commanding view of the valley.
phy of Wisconsin. “It preserves a large sample of what Or so he hoped.
the rest of Wisconsin, as well as the northern and eastern United States, were like Wright captured the land in a striking portfolio of landscape photos in the
before the Glacial Period.”4 winter and spring of 1900. They were published by his aunts in a promotional
This means Taliesin’s valley is older than old. Its landforms have been shaped brochure for Hillside Home School that was sent to parents of prospective students.
since primeval times only by wind, frost, and thawing. It has a primitive, craggy Wright’s son John remembered that his father developed his own plates in a bal-
solemnity. cony off his Oak Park studio.
“I scanned the hills of the region where the rock came cropping out in strata Asian art authority Julia Meech praises Wright’s landscape photographs in
to suggest buildings,” Wright says in An Autobiography. “How quiet and strong Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan. “The horizontal format and spare, poetic
the rock-ledge masses looked with the dark red cedars and white birches, there, composition are reminiscent of Japanese ink paintings in the form of handscrolls,”
above the green slopes. They were all part of the countenance of southern Wis- she says. Wright was proud of them himself. “In mounting these almost forgotten
consin. I wished to be part of my beloved southern Wisconsin and not put my little views of Hillside for a small Arts and Crafts exhibit I have enjoyed them so
small part of it out of countenance.”5 His home with Mamah would be their private much—I did take them myself—that it occurs to me they might give you pleasure
rock-ledge and they would fit in unobtrusively, camouflaged as a part of nature. too,” he wrote to the mother of two former students. “If so, kindly accept them.”6
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S VALLEY PORTRAITS
Fig. 31. In the winter of 1900, Frank Lloyd Wright positioned his camera looking northward up Jones Valley, in the direction of the Wisconsin River, from a location near the junction of Highway 23 and
County T not far from Unity Chapel. The left-hand view, above, shows the hills where Taliesin would eventually be located. Fig. 31.a shows the valley between the hills. Fig. 31.b shows the hills across the
valley, including Bryn Mawr. Knit together, they create a single panorama. (Fig. 31.c). Julia Meech, author of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, says of these images: “Wright experimented . . . with
Japonesque photographs of the scenery around the Hillside Home School. . . . The horizontal format and the spare, poetic composition are reminiscent of Japanese ink paintings in the form of handscrolls.”
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Maum Hannah’s own teeth were strong and sound, and set in deep
blue gums which stressed their yellow tinge. The cane stem of a
rank-smelling pipe showed above the top of her apron pocket.
“Lawd, you’ pipe do smell pleasant!” Big Sue sighed. “But looka my
li’l’ boy. Who does e favor?”
Maum Hannah’s warm wrinkled hand gently lifted Breeze’s chin so
the sun could shine full on his face. “Dis boy is de very spit o’ April.
Gawd bless em, all two!”
Breeze felt that her wise old eyes took account of everything he was.
No secret could be hidden from them.
“I glad you got a li’l’ boy-chile fo’ raise. I too love boy-chillen myself,
even if dey does bring most of de trouble what’s een dis world. My
old mammy used to say ev’y boy-chile ought to be killed soon as it’s
born.”
“I ruther have boy-chillen dan gal-chillen,” Big Sue said. “But I know
good and well boy-chillen does bring most o’ de misery dat’s een dis
world.”
Maum Hannah nodded sorrowfully, as if she weighed Big Sue’s
words, then she spoke slowly:
“I dunno how come mek so.
“Gawd mus’ be makes boy-chillen and trouble, all two, one time.
“Eby ’oman hab joy when e buth one.
“Eby gal hab joy when e love one.
“Dey ain’ see misery hide behime joy.
“Till de misery grow.
“Grow big till e choke de joy!
“Till e bust de ’oman heart open.
“Boy-chillen brings most o’ de misery dat’s een dis worl’.
“Boy-chillen!”
“Dat’s de Gawd’s truth, Maum Hannah! I know so. I was so crazy
’bout my Lijah, yonder to Fluridy, an’ e run off an’ left me when e
wasn’t much higher’n dis same boy-chile.”
“How’s Lijah when you heard las’?” Maum Hannah inquired.
“Fine! Fine as kin be. E sent me a’ answer to say e’s de baddest
man at de town whe’ e stay.”
“Dat’s nice. I glad to hear good news f’om Lijah. But e better not be
too rash. No. When you write em back tell em I say don’ git so bad e
can’ rule hisself.”
Big Sue laughed.
“I’ll sho’ do it. I’m gwine git a letter wrote to him as soon as Uncle Bill
has time to come by my house an’ do em.”
Maum Hannah raised her eyes to Big Sue’s face and laughed. “Git
de letter wrote to you’ boy, but don’ tarry too long wid de writin’. Gi’
Uncle Bill time to court some, too.”
Big Sue laughed too, until Maum Hannah added, “Better keep out de
Big House, honey. You’ll hab sin if you don’ mind!”
“How come so, Maum Hannah?” Big Sue appeared to be surprised.
“You know how come good as me. Better’n me, too. But dat’s you’
business. Not my own. My business is workin’ for Him up yonder.”
Maum Hannah held up her arms to the sky and lifted her face as if
she were praying, but her gaze became so fixed that they all looked
up. There, away above them in the sky like a tiny bird, sailed
something so high that its buzz was hardly more than the hum of the
wind.
Maum Hannah got to her feet, and quickly untying her white apron,
held it up and waved it overhead as she called out loud as she could:
“Pray, chillen, pray! Talk wid Jedus! I too sorry to see you dis
mawnin’!” She shook her old head, and shouted again. “Gawd don’
like mens to go up in de elements! Dis is His day, too! Pray, chillen,
pray! Do, Jedus, hab mussy on dem. I hope dey ain’ none o’ we
white folks.”
“I hope not,” Big Sue joined in. “But most white folks is sinners,
Maum Hannah.”
“I dunno, gal. I can’ see inside nobody’s heart, an’ I tries to love de
sinners same as de rest.”
“You love sinners, Maum Hannah?” Big Sue was amazed.
“Sho’, honey, I loves de sinners, an’ hates de sin.”
“Dat’s right, Mauma. Right.” She gave the old shoulder an
affectionate pat. “Dat’s how come you has such good luck catchin’
chillen. Gawd blesses you. How much did you catch last night?”
Both old hands went up with a gesture of importance. Two!
She’d caught two children last night. Two angels since first dark. The
spring love-making was bearing fruit early this fall.
“When’s de white folks comin’ home?” she asked with a sudden
change of expression.
Big Sue didn’t know for certain, but she thought soon as white frost
came to kill the fever.
“How come you want to know?” Big Sue was curious.
Maum Hannah hoped they would hurry and come while she was well
and able to talk with them. Something was on her mind, worrying
her, and she wanted to get it settled. She was fretted about the
graveyard. It was too full. Every grave dug lately uncovered old
bones. There was no more room, and a new graveyard ought to be
started.
“Do, Jedus!” Big Sue exclaimed. “I sho’ would hate to be de first one
buried in a new graveyard. Dey say you wouldn’ never rest, not till
Judgment Day, if you gits buried first, off by you’ lonesome self.”
“Not if you trust Gawd, honey.”
“I trust Gawd, Maum Hannah, but I ever did hear dat de first one to
be bury in a new graveyard is bound to be unrestless.”
A gentle smile shone on Maum Hannah’s face. “I know, honey. I ever
did hear so too. Gawd knows if it’s so or not. But I done made up my
mind to dis: I’m willin’ to be de first one. I’m gwine ask de white folks
to set off a piece o’ new ground an’ when my time is come to let me
be de first one to be buried in em.”
“Great Gawd!” Big Sue panted. “You’s got a strong heart, fo’ true,
Mauma. I couldn’t do dat to save life.”
“I know, chile. My heart gits weak as branch water too when I t’ink on
death. But I’m done old. I got to go soon. I may’s well put my trust in
Jedus. E knows I done de best I could. I talk wid Him every night. I
talk wid em ’bout de graveyard in de new ground. I’m gwine to hab
faith dat E’ll help me to rise up on Judgment Day an’ fly straight to
glory, same as if I was a-layin’ yonder longside my mammy an’ all
dem what’s gone befo’ me.”
Big Sue pondered and shook her head. She couldn’t stand to let her
mind run on death. She couldn’t sleep at night if she did.
“Dat’s ’cause you’s healthy. If you was weakened down wid a
sickness you’d as soon go as stay.”
“Not me! No, Jedus! I hope I kin stay till I’m old and dry as Aun’
Trecia!”
“I hope you kin if you craves dat. But I know my time is most out. I’m
willin’ to sleep in new ground when my work is done.”
“Nobody else’ll mind a new graveyard if you sleeps dere ahead of
dem, Mauma.”
“I can’ do nobody no good if dey dies in sin. You must git right befo’
you’ time comes. Do, honey, git right. Right wid Jedus!”
Big Sue answered she was right. And she wanted to stay right. But
she was worried half to death now, because she had broken a
looking-glass.
“Now, dat is a pity! I too sorry you broke a lookin’-glass. But you go
see Emma. Emma kin help you git shet o’ dat back luck. Po’ chile, e
had ear-ache e’se’f las’ night. Dat cow make em run an’ fret e’se’f so
bad. Emma pure cuss de cow!” Maum Hannah burst into a laugh.
“Emma’s bad! Bad! I haffa all de time lick em! Po’ li’l’ creeter! Emma
will cuss dat cow!”
“Emma is too small to lick fast, enty, Mauma? Looks like lickin’ would
stunt em worser.”
Maum Hannah laughed again, and all the children laughed too.
“Lickin’ don’ stunt chillen! No. Lickin’ loosens up dey hide, an’ makes
’em grow. Now, Emma’s small, but e hab sense. Since de nights is
cool e sets by de fire an’ warms e feet on de pots. Dem same smutty
pots I cooks de victuals in. I tell em to don’ do so! But Emma keeps
right on. Dat smut leaves de pots to stick on Emma’s feets, den
when Emma goes to bed de smut leaves e feets to stick on my clean
sheets an’ quilts. It takes tight scrubbin’ to make ’em git off. Smut too
loves cloth! Dat’s how come I lick Emma so much. I try fo’ make em
hate smut same ez I hate sin. But Emma’s feets is so black e can’
see de smut on ’em.”
“Why you don’ git Emma some shoes, Mauma? Dey’ll keep her feets
warm, better dan de pots.”
“No, honey. I ain’ got de heart to make po’ li’l’ Emma wear shoes. E
too love to jump round an’ dance an’ shout. Shoes would hinder em.
I’ll dis keep on lickin’ em till e knows better. I’ll break em f’om de pots
soon ez I git time. I been too busy lately. All de chillen needs so
much doctorin’. De womens run round too much, a-pleasurin’
deyselves, to hab good chillen dese days. Times is changed, honey.
Womens ain’ quiet an’ steady like dey used to be. No.”
She sighed and pointed to the head of a little girl where a bit of wool
was tied so tight right over the middle of her forehead that the poor
child could hardly blink her eyes.
“I had to tie up Tingie’s palate lock dis mawnin’.” Tingie’s big eyes
looked up solemnly, and Tingie’s sore throat gulped with a great
effort to swallow. “Tingie hab de so’ t’roat, bad.”
“I’s feelin’ better now,” Tingie declared huskily.
“You’ll soon be well, honey,” Maum Hannah told her with a kind
smile, and the child smiled back, sure that Maum Hannah knew.
“I needs some buzzard-claw mighty bad, Big Sue. I wish you’d tell
Uncle Bill so. De babies is teethin’ so bad dis fall. I tried puttin’ a
hog-teeth on a string roun’ dey neck, but hog-teeth is too weak to do
any good. Do tell Uncle Bill to shoot me a few buzzards. De gal-
chillen is teethin’ ’most hard as boy-chillen dis year. But boy-chillen is
mighty scarce. De womens pleasure deyself too much to hab boy-
chillen. Boy-chillen picks sober womens fo’ dey mammy. Dese gals
buy so much trash out de sto’ to eat, dey breast-milk is weak as
water. I tell ’em so, but dey don’ listen at me. No.”
“My Lijah was plagued wid de grow-fast. You ’member, Mauma?”
Maum Hannah nodded. “I ’member, but grow-fast is a easy
complaint to cure. I had to work on one yeste’day.” She told how she
and the mother had taken the child into the room where it was born,
and stood in opposite corners to throw it back and forth to each
other, singing the grow-fast song as they did. A sure cure for grow-
fast. “When de room is big, it’s stiff treatment. My arms mighty near
broke yeste’day.”
Instead of going home the way they came, Big Sue followed a path
through the woods, and crossed a clear brown stream that flowed
without a single ripple to break its smooth dark surface, or coat it
with foam. The water’s breath smelt warm as it rose into the cooler
shadows.
In a small hollow, near its banks, washtubs were turned upside down
on wooden benches, and a big black washpot sat over dead embers.
Waiting for Friday, the plantation wash-day. All the first days of the
week are field-days. On Friday the women gather and wash their
clothes and gossip. It is a great day for them. A sort of holiday. Full
of things to talk about. Every bit of the sunshine between the trees is
strung with clothes-lines, heavy weighted with clothes, the old trees
stand around silent and dolesome, with black shadows cooling their
feet.
By Saturday noon the ironing is done, the week’s work over, then the
fun begins. Crap games and parties and dances for the sinners;
prayer-meetings and church for the Christians. Something goes on
all the time until Monday morning. Everything that matters happens
between Saturday night and Monday morning. A week’s earnings
can be lost, or a wife, or a sweetheart.
Even one’s soul!
When they passed a smooth clean piece of ground with a pile of
charred blackened sticks on it, Big Sue laughed and said, “Do look!
De crap-shooters been here last night. See where dey had a fire?
Firelight makes de bones rattle better, so dey say. An’ naked ground
brings luck to de players.”
“Is you a sinner or a Christian, Cun Big Sue?” Breeze blurted out
before he knew it.
“Who? Me? Great Gawd! I been a Christian ever since I was twelve
years old.” After a minute she added, “I did got turned out o’ de
church one time. I stayed out mighty nigh a year. Silas was de cause
of my havin’ sin. E deviled me too bad befo’ e left me. But de
earthquake come dat summer, an’ I got so scared it didn’ take me
long to seek and find peace. I joined de church an’ I been in it ever
since. You’s mighty nigh twelve, enty? When you’s twelve Gawd’ll
hold you responsible fo’ you’ sins.”
Near the creek stood the schoolhouse for the black children on the
plantation. A log house with a doorway cut in one end, and fitted with
a rude door made of clapboards swung on iron hinges. The big
chimney at the other end was overspread with clay mortar. This
cabin occupied a lovely spot, overshadowed with a great oak tree
from whose roots a small spring trickled and ran to join the larger
stream behind it.
Big Sue said there were too many children to get inside the
schoolhouse at one time. Half of them had recess while the other
half recited lessons. The teacher taught with a long keen whip in her
hand, and she made every child learn the lessons. One word missed
brought a sharp cut across the palm of the offender’s hand. Two
words brought four cuts that would not soon be forgotten. Big Sue
said she had never bothered to learn to read and write. She didn’t
have any use for either. Sometimes she’d like to read a new receipt.
Still, she could cook better out of her head than most people could
cook out of a book.
The old people didn’t believe in book learning. They thought learning
signs and charms more important, and they discouraged having a
school. But Zeda’s girl, raised right on the plantation, was the
teacher, and she worked wonders with the children. Lijah had never
liked books. Playing and riding and shooting and swimming
interested him more. He’d have made a good conjure doctor. Once
he put some of his own hair in a hole in a tree, and it cured his
sprained ankle. He cut an elder stick for Maum Hannah’s asthma,
and tied it by the neck and hung it up in the loft, and it cured her, too.
For a while, before he ran away, he saved all his toe-nails and finger-
nails to put in his coffin, but that was so much trouble he quit after he
got one little bottle full. It takes a lot of learning to be a good conjure
doctor, for there’s black magic as well as white. Magic can save as
well as kill. Breeze ought either to pray now or start learning magic.
He was almost twelve.
The path ran close to a group of trees surrounded by an old rusty
iron fence, where tombstones gleamed white. Deep shadows rippled
whenever a breeze made its way through the thick, moss-hung
woods. Enormous live-oaks stood at regular intervals, all of them
festooned with trailing moss that made a weird roof overhead.
Cicadas chanted shrilly in a tangle of rose vines and honeysuckles.
White oleanders and japonicas crowded one another, the fragrance
of the blossoms mingling with the stench of decaying leaves and
wood. Raising the rusted creaking latch of the iron gate, Big Sue
tipped inside the enclosure where gnarled roots of the old trees
crawled across the paths and slipped under pink-plumed tamarisk
bushes. They disappeared, but they tilted the heavy tombstones,
and crumbled the brick foundations from under marble slabs thick
with words.
Some of the graves were smooth and clean, others were smothered
with vines stretched across sunken hollows. Plantation masters and
mistresses had been crumbled, melted, to feed blind groping roots.
Big Sue went toward a corner where a massive gray stone marked a
grave. “Old Cap’n lays here. Gawd! Dat was a man! Not scared o’
anyt’ing or anybody! Mean! Jedus, he was mean!”
Big Sue sighed. How times change! That same man lying in his
grave had lorded it over this whole Neck, once. Not only over the
black people who worked his fields after freedom the same as in
slavery days, but over the white people too. Most white people
hereabout now were trash. Poor buckra. Gray-necks. Children and
grandchildren of overseers. When the war to free the slaves was
going on they stayed home and sold whisky. They ran under the bed
and hid if anybody started a racket. They made money and saved
their skins. Some of them owned plantations now, and lived in
houses whose front doors had been shut to their grandfathers!
Times had changed. The man who had ridden over this country with
the loosest rein and the sharpest spur, was down under the ground
feeding tree roots and worms to-day. One little boy, one lone
grandson, was all that was left of his seed, and he was being raised
up-North, among Yankees. The child’s own ma was dead and his
stepma had taught him the strange ugly speech of the Yankees.
Enough to make his grandpa turn over in his grave! Wouldn’t the old
man curse!
This land must be too rich, too rank for white people to thrive on it.
Their skins were too thin, their blood too weak to bear the summer
heat, and the fevers and sickness that hid in the marsh in the
daytime, then came out to do their devilment after dark.
Black people ruled sickness with magic, but white people got sick
and died. White people leave money to their children, but black
people leave signs. Give her signs every time! Uncle Isaac was
getting old. He might die soon. Breeze had better start learning all he
could right now, before Uncle Isaac’s mind failed. She’d see Uncle
Isaac and tell him.
As she spoke a faint rustle of wind went through the trees and a
lizard, carefully colored to match the soil, scurried across the path,
rattling dead leaves as it slid under the solid gravestone. Big Sue
leaned over the grave and stirred the earth, selecting bits of the
coarser sand.
“I want seven li’l’ rocks now. One fo’ ev’y night in de week. I gwine
keep ’em tie up in my pocket-hankcher, so I would stop havin’ so
much bad dreams all de time.”
Breeze shivered. If spirits of the dead ever haunt the paths of the
living, they lurked in the deep gloom of the shade made by the
overgrown shrubbery, by those coiling, writhing twisted vines. The
swift wings of a cardinal spun a scarlet thread before them. Clear
notes were flung in a spray of song from the top of the tallest tree.
Big Sue called up at him: “It’s twelve o’clock, enty? I hear you sayin’
dis is de brightest time o’ de day!” She tried to make her lips smile
bright enough to fit her words, but Breeze could see that the
graveyard had made her afraid too. “Le’s go, son. Le’s git out o’
here,” she said.
She trampled on a wild rose, full of frail blossoms. As Breeze
stepped aside to keep from crushing another, a soft wind seized the
delicate petals and scattered them over leaves that were already
dead.
The road went through the woods past a cleared place, then brought
them to the negro graveyard. Every grave held something valued by
the dead. A white china pitcher and basin. Old bottles, still holding
medicine. Small colored glass vases. Cups and saucers. A few
plates. Some of the graves were decorated with clusters of wooden
sticks, skilfully carved to make heads of wheat. Breeze wanted to
take one, but Big Sue objected. To take one off a grave would be
bad luck. Uncle Isaac would be glad to make him one if he’d ask
him.
Bright and early Monday morning, Big Sue began fitting together
small, carefully cut scraps of cloth, sewing them into squares with
strong ball thread. Breeze sat on the step in the pleasant sunshine
threading her big-eyed needle as fast as it worked up arm-lengths of
thread into firm-holding stitches, while she sat in a low chair on the
porch.
Squirrels chased one another across the yard, and up into the live-
oak trees. Showers of ripe acorns jarred down by their playing
spattered over the ground. Those acorns were sweet as
chinquapins, and the squirrels were fat with eating so many. But Big
Sue would not let Breeze kill even one for dinner. His fine new sling-
shot, made out of a dogwood prong, could hit almost as hard as a
gun, but Big Sue said the white folks who lived in the Big House
wanted the squirrels left. Even if they ate up all the pecans in the fall,
and all the peaches in the summer, not one was to be killed. White
people have foolish notions, but it is better not to cross them if you
can help it.
She was working hard to get her quilts quilted before the white folks
came down for the duck shooting this winter. They didn’t stay long
these last years. They had another home up-North, so li’l’ “Young
Cap’n” could go to a fine school there. Poor little boy! He liked this
home a lot better, but his Yankee stepma ruled him and his pa too.
Each day got shorter now. She must sew fast. Get all her squares
patched and ready. She’d scarcely have time to draw a long breath
for the turn of cooking to be done after they came. Nobody else on
the plantation could season victuals to suit them. Zeda helped
sometimes, but Zeda didn’t know when ducks were done to a turn
and not too done. Zeda was apt to get venison as dry as a chip, and
if she as much as looked at a waffle it fell flat.
Uncle Isaac’s wife was the cook before Big Sue. She used to be the
finest cook on the whole Neck. Nobody knew how she made things
taste so good. She wouldn’t tell. One day she dropped dead. Right in
the kitchen. Some people thought she was conjured, but too much
rich eating may have done it. After that Uncle Isaac tried to train two
or three people to fix the food, for he knew a lot of his wife’s secrets
from watching her. Big Sue was a girl then, but she was a natural-
born cook. When Uncle Isaac found that out, he let her have her own
way. She could beat everybody now. Lord! When she had the right
kind of victuals, people gnawed their fingers and bit their tongues
just to smell the steam when she lifted the pot lids.
The next moon might bring cold weather. She must hurry and get
these quilts pieced and have a quilting. She had quilts enough for
herself. These were for Joy. She’d ask all the plantation women to
Maum Hannah’s house, where the big room stayed ready for
meeting on Wednesday nights, and for quiltings any day in the week.
If it turned cold, Sherry would kill enough wild ducks for her to cook
for the women to eat with the rice. Wild ducks and rice are fine. If it
stayed warm, she’d cook chickens and rice, instead. Make a pilau,
with plenty of hard-boiled eggs. Uncle Bill would give her the
chickens.
Sherry loved Joy so much he’d get anything she wanted for this
quilting! The women could easily quilt ten quilts a day. If they came
early and worked fast they could do fifteen, but she’d be satisfied
with six, for she wanted hers quilted right. With fine stitches, run in
rows close together. Then the cotton batting could never slip, no
matter how many times the quilts were washed.
She was piecing a “Monkey wrench” quilt now. She had a “Log-
cabin” finished, and a “Primrose” and a “Star of Bethlehem” and a
“Wild-goose Chase” and a “Pine-burr.” She had begun a “State-
house Steps,” but that was a hard one to do. It couldn’t be worked
out in a hurry and look right. She’d wait and finish it next year. Joy
could wait for that one.
Some women don’t care how their quilts look. They piece the
squares together any sort of way, but she couldn’t stand careless
sewing. She wanted her quilts, and Joy’s, made right. Quilts stay a
long time after people are gone from this world, and witness about
them for good or bad. She wanted people to see, when she was
gone, that she’d never been a shiftless or don’t-care woman.
XI
HUNTING ’POSSUMS AND TURKEYS
Breeze learned something new almost every day. He grew taller

each week. His skinny muscles were filling out, his arms and legs
growing longer and tougher. Big Sue said he’d be useful if he kept
on. He fetched all the water they used from the spring, three full
buckets at a time, one bucket on his head, one in each hand. He cut
all the wood they burned, without fatigue, since Sherry had taught
him the trick of swaying his body forward from the hips as he brought
the ax down on the wood. Sherry made a game of wood-cutting, and
could cut a thick oak log in two with nineteen whacks. Breeze took
two or three times as many, but he did it with one or two less each
day.
He made up both beds every morning and swept the floor so clean
that Big Sue couldn’t find a speck of dust anywhere. He knew how to
crack hickory nuts and walnuts so the goodies came out whole for
Big Sue to put in sweetened bread. He had helped make soap with
ashes, pot-grease and the fat of a lot of spoiled hog-meat April gave
Big Sue. He took a sack of corn on his shoulder to mill every
Saturday morning, and brought it back, ground fine, and hot from the
grinding rocks. He milked the cow, churned the cream, fed the
chickens, and the hog in the pen. He could even patch his own
clothes.
The regular field-hands drew rations on Saturday, one peck of corn,
three pounds of cured hog-meat. The women who had no man living
with them, paid rent for their cabins with one day’s work a week.
April saw to it that every one paid. He was close and careful.
Everybody had to come right up to the notch since he was foreman,
but the house of Big Sue was rent free, since she was the cook.
Breeze drew rations like a regular field-hand, and by hunting and
fishing with Sherry and Uncle Bill he provided many a good potful of
meat. With a line tied to the end of a long swamp cane, and a slick
wriggly earthworm for bait, he caught strings of perches that made
rich morsels when dipped in cornmeal and fried.
Sherry’s coon dog, Zip, had a faithful nose, and when Sherry and
Breeze took him out at night they seldom came home without coons,
or ’possums, enough to satisfy both Big Sue and Zeda.
They came in earlier than usual one night with nine ’possums and
found April sitting by the fire with Big Sue. Breeze saw Sherry’s
frown and the two men hardly spoke to each other, until April eyed
the ’possums with a sneering smile and said:
“Yunnuh’s got a lot o’ ’possums to-night. I heared Jake’s calf got in a
bog. E must ’a’ died.”
April poked the fire until sparks flew into the room.
“Wha’ you doin’, April? Is you crazy?” Big Sue cried sharply.
April spat contemptuously far back into the live embers. “I’d as soon
eat a buzzard as one o’ dem ’possums!”
“How come?” Breeze, Big Sue, Sherry, all darted astonished looks at
him.
“Dey’s full up wid carrion. A ’possum ain’ decent as a buzzard. Dey’s
so coward-hearted, dey durstn’ come out in de daytime to eat. No.
Dem sleek-tailed devils wait till night, den goes creepin’ to carcasses
and stuffs on all what de buzzards scorns.”
“Shut you’ dirty mout’, April! I declare to Gawd, you’s a-turning my
stomach! Torectly, I couldn’ eenjoy eatin’ dese possums at all!” Big
Sue laid stress on every word.
“When did you git so awful delicate, Big Sue?” April asked with a
grin.
“I ever did have a delicate stomach. I don’ hardly have no appetite at
all lately.”
Sherry gave a loud guffaw and April frowned in sudden ill-temper.
“Wha’ dat tickle you so turrible, now, Sherry?”
April’s irritation showed in the jerky shifting of his hands and feet,
and Big Sue’s eyes stretched open and rolled toward Sherry, who
answered sourly:
“Oh, I ain’ so awful tickled. No. I just had to laugh when I thought on
how it takes a thief to catch a thief. Night-walkers meets night-
walkers, enty?”
“I do’in’ un’erstan’ wha’ dat you’s a-drivin’ at.” April stroked his
mustache and eyed Sherry coldly.
“Me neither,” Big Sue chimed. “Whyn’ you talk plain talk, Sherry? It’s
mighty no-manners to stand up an’ laugh a horse laugh in
somebody’s face.”
“Do ex-cuse me, Cun Big Sue. Ev’y now an’ den, I forget an’ speak
out o’ turn. I was just talkin’ fool talk. I ain’ laughin’ at nobody. Come
on, Breeze. Le’s divide de ’possums. You take four, I take five. We
sho’ had good luck to-night. Good night, ev’ybody!”
Sherry flung himself out of the door and April sat silent, vexed, upset;
but his anger lasted only a short time. When he spoke, his tone was
pleasant enough. He ought not to have joked with Sherry. The boy
was too easy to get plagued. Zeda had spoiled him all his life,
instead of breaking him of his sassy ways. Such a pity to ruin a nice
boy. April got to his feet and stood stiffly erect.
Big Sue’s gimlet eyes watched his face, then leaning to knock her
pipe on the hearth she said sadly: “Lawd, I wish dem ’possums was
somet’ing fit to eat. A wild turkey or somet’ing. If dey was a wild
turkey, I could stuff dem wid oysters an’ roast dem. Jedus, wouldn’
dey taste good! Whyn’ you kill a turkey, April? Looks like nobody else
can shoot one but you? Ain’ you got a blind baited?”
She smiled up at him so sweetly, April smiled back.
“Whyn’ you take Breeze an’ go in de mawin’?” she pressed. “We
could eat turkey to-morrow night.” She smacked her lips.
April turned her words over in his mind, thinking, calculating.
Presently he asked, “How ’bout gwine turkey huntin’ wid me in de
mawnin’, boy?”
Breeze was rapt with pure joy. April’s smile made him tingle all over.
Instead of being bashful and afraid, he looked straight into April’s
eyes and nodded.
“Lawdy! Lawdy!” He murmured low, and his heart went pit-a-pat. He
was going turkey-hunting with April, the foreman, who had scarcely
ever noticed him before!
“Git on to bed, son!” Big Sue said so gently, so kindly, Breeze was at
a loss to know why. He walked slowly back to the shed-room, the
blood beating clear up in his cheeks, but Big Sue sat down in her
chair by the fire to smoke another pipeful. “Set down, April,” she
said. “De night is young, yet.”
She woke Breeze before daylight when the black sky held only a
narrow moon, without any sign of sunrise. A thin gray mist hung over
the earth and all was quiet except a few crickets and the occasional
bark of a dog. Breeze had slept little, but he felt wide awake,
breathless, as he followed April’s slow ponderous steps. April spoke
seldom. He seemed to be brooding over something. Breeze pitied
him. A foreman has so much to think about, so many people to rule,
so much land to manage. Sherry was wrong to be impudent last
night.
They turned off from the road into a path which Breeze could barely
see although his eyes worked well in the dark. April led the way, and
Breeze hung close at his heels for the silence in the forest was full of
strange sounds and shapes.
The turkey blind was a great bush heap, with one small opening in
its side, looking straight out on a narrow trench. The bottom of the
trench was strewn with white shelled corn, so when April called the
turkeys, and they got to eating, their heads would be down in a bee
line. One shot might blow two or three heads off. Wild turkeys fly too
fast for any gun to have a good second chance at them.
Breeze sat perfectly still inside the blind, while April yelped and
yelped. Once a hen yelped back, but she came no nearer. Breeze’s
feet went to sleep. Both his legs got cramp. His back ached. The
cold morning air chilled his very bones, but he dared not move so
much as one muscle. April had warned him not even to whisper. The
silence made him drowsy, but when April sniffed and Breeze drew in
a long breath of air, then his body’s discomfort fled! Cold fear took its
place, for a rattlesnake was near.
“Le’s go, Cun April!”
“I’m gwine git dat snake first, son. You set still till I call you.”
Day was coming. Tree branches overhead talked softly to one
another. Leaves brought down by the wind fell rustling. Birds chirped
and twittered. Squirrels barked. Breeze’s blood drummed in his
temples.
The forest around them was old and great, most of the trees gums or
poplars, with an occasional pine appearing. The undergrowth
crowded close together, twining and tangling with limbs and
branches so dense the light could scarcely reach the ground.
April found a dogwood tree and cut a long forked stick, then he
moved slowly, stealthily, in the direction of the smell. Breeze thought
his heart would stop beating altogether, so great was his terror. If
that snake struck April and killed him, how’d he ever get home
himself? He didn’t know the way. His hands thrust deeper into his
pockets and one felt his knife. Uncle’s directions for helping a snake-
bitten person came to him. Cut the wound wide open and suck out
the poison. Could he do it? Could he cut April’s flesh and suck his
blood? He’d have to, if it came to the worst.
April thrashed about in the undergrowth with his long forked stick,
calling out as he did so, “Whe’ is you, snake? Hurry up an’ rattle! I
wan’ git you!”
When a clear dry rattle sang out, he laughed. “Now we’ll see who’s
de best man, me or you! Breeze, git you’ pocket knife! Cut a shell
open! Have it ready so if I miss an’ git bit you kin pour de powder in
de bite an’ set em afire. I got a box o’ matches here in my pocket.
You better take ’em. You understand, enty? Burnin’ de pizen out is
better’n suckin’ it out. Fire kin fight em stronger’n you’ mouth.”
The thick-bodied, large-headed snake was coiled, ready to strike.
The rattles on the end of its tail raised and shook angrily. But instead
of dread, April showed a fierce pleasure in the dry ear-splitting whir.
Breeze’s throat went dry, but April laughed.
“You’s too slow, you pided devil! Summer’s gone! I kin kill you easy
as Breeze kills a chicken! Lawd! you is old! You’ rattles looks like a
cow’s horn. Come on!”
He batted the snake’s head to one side with a deft blow, and, putting
the stick’s fork over its neck, held it fast to the ground, until he could
seize it below the throat in a steady powerful grip. As he lifted it up
off the ground, the thick body wound wildly around his arm in a
terrible struggle to wrench loose, the flat eyes glared, the wide mouth
yawned. April stood firm as a tree.
“Fight, boy, fight! Stretch you’ mouth wide as you kin! Dat ain’ wide
enough yet! I want to spit clean down in your belly! Show you’ fangs!
Dey ain’ nuttin! I got blue gums too! You may as well stand still and
pray! You’ time is out! You gwine meet you’ Gawd to-day!”
With a whoop April threw his head back, then he spat straight into
the yawning mouth.
“Dat shot got you!” he cried, and spat again. “You can’ harm me, son!
You is a-weakenin’! I see it! My spit is pizen as you’ own!”
“Come, Breeze! Looka dis scoundrel! Lawd, e sho’ is a whopper!”
The snake’s muzzle was covered with plates, its scaly brown body
marked with yellowish square shapes; its eyes, full of hate, stared
out from the front of its heart-shaped head. Breeze’s own blood had
frozen in his veins, and his legs were almost too numb to carry him.
“You got blue gums, Breeze. Come spit in dis mouth so you’ll know
how to do it next time!”
“Don’ make me do dat, Cun April.”
“You ain’ no gal-baby, is you?”
“No, suh.”
“Den come on. Git you’ mouth full. Now, aim straight fo’ de fork in his
tongue.”
Breeze’s lips twitched so that he missed the snake completely the
first time, but the next effort was a success.
“Dat’s good. You got mo’ grit dan Sherry. Sherry never would try dis.
But den, Sherry ain’ got blue gums like me an’ you.”
The snake’s plunging and twisting grew less violent. The huge body
writhed sluggishly. Had April really poisoned the creature by spitting
into its tongue? Or had he choked it to death? Its life was going out,
that was certain.
Suppose April’s fingers took cramp. What would happen then? April
turned his face toward home.
“Le’s go, Breeze. It’s too late to git a turkey. I’ll take dis snake to
Uncle Isaac. He axed me to git him one to make some tea for his
rheumatism. Po’ ol’ man. Rheumatism’ll make a Christian out o’ em
yet!”
Full daybreak shed its light everywhere. Night and stars were gone
out of the sky. The sun would soon be up. But at Uncle Isaac’s cabin,
the doors and windows were shut tight.
The snake couldn’t die altogether until sun-down, but April dropped it
on the ground and used his forked stick to beat hard on the sides of
the house.
“Hey, Uncle! Hey! Wake up!” He shouted until the old man opened
the door. “I got a present fo’ you! A rattlesnake! Me an’ him had a
tight time dis mawnin’! Lawd! Yes! I sho’ love to fight wid a snake!”
Uncle Isaac hopped around, exclaiming over the snake’s size. He
was glad to get him. He’d fix some snake tea to-day.
As they walked home down the avenue, April talked cheerfully. He
said Uncle Isaac had taken so much snake cut that snakes got weak
if they crossed his path. If one came near him it got stiff as a stick,
and helpless. Next time Breeze saw the old man he must look at his
ankles where they’d been cut and cut for snake poison to be rubbed
into them. His feet were full of scars too, but Uncle Isaac had worn
shoes ever since he chopped off a big toe.
April had walked up on snakes that were stricken by getting too
close to Uncle Isaac. They’d be blind and numb, unable to move a
step. God gave Uncle Isaac a strong sweat too. If he had never
taken snake cut, he could send any snake into a trance by wetting
his hands at his armpits and waving them in the snake’s face. They’d
faint right off, and stay dead a long time.
Breeze ought to learn Uncle Isaac’s magic. He’d been born with a
second-sight. Learning magic would be better for him than learning
books. Black magic, as well as white magic; Uncle Isaac knew both.
Uncle Bill too. But Uncle Bill gave magic up for religion. A poor swap.
A deacon or a preacher is not much more than a woman. Not much
more!
April’s down-heartedness had completely passed. Loitering along, he
chatted pleasantly. Although the sun had risen he was in no hurry.

Building Taliesin Frank Lloyd Wright s Home of Love and Loss 1st Edition Ron Mccrea All Chapters Instant Download

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Building Taliesin Frank Lloyd Wright s Home of Love and Loss 1st Edition Ron Mccrea All Chapters Instant Download

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Building Taliesin Frank Lloyd Wright s Home of Love and Loss 1st Edition Ron Mccrea All Chapters Instant Download

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Download the full version of the ebook at ebookfinal.

Building Taliesin Frank Lloyd Wright s Home of

Download more ebook instantly today at https://ebookfinal.com

Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought 1st Edition

Confronting Corruption Building Accountability Lessons

Young People s Experiences of Loss and Bereavment 1st

Jabber Developer s Handbook 1st Edition William Wright

Frank Miller s Robocop Omnibus Edition Frank Miller

Kirkbride s Diagnosis of Abortion and Neonatal Loss in

Down s Syndrome The Biography Biographies of Diseases 1st

Rendering by Jim McIntosh

Wisconsin Historical Society Press

© 2012 by Ronald A. McCrea

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Earl J. Madden, M.F.A.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chapter 1 From Tuscany to Taliesin 13

Chapter 2 “The Beloved Valley” 33

Chapter 3 Building Taliesin 59

Chapter 4 Life Together 121

Chapter 5 Transformations 173

Illustration Credits 215

TALIESIN I: LOST AND FOUND

Frank Lloyd Wright had been lost to a generation,

TURMOIL AND TRIUMPH

FROM TUSCANY TO TALIESIN

“How many souls seeking release from

true path—the path true for

For them to return to Oak

THE RUSSIANS NEXT DOOR Viktor Tourjansky, in which he played

there: Sasha, me, Algar,

Fig. 27. A fencing demonstration follows luncheon at the Villa

“THE BELOVED VALLEY”

“Life, love, and work to be

The boy was crushed, and the experience made

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S VALLEY PORTRAITS

Breeze learned something new almost every day. He grew taller

You might also like