Tuesday: Book Report: Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Today was my day off, so I don't have a lot to report.  For this reason, I will report on the latest book that I have finished.  Just to start us off on the right foot, I can say without hesitation that it was one of the most frustrating, disappointing and foolish, utterly foolish books that I have ever read.  It wasn't the writing really, or maybe it was.  This is not starting out well, so I will start again.

Loving Frank is Nancy Horan's historical fiction about the real life romance between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheyney.  They met while Wright was designing a house for Mamah and her then husband.  She had a son and later a daughter by her husband, before deciding that Frank made her feel alive in herself as an educated woman.

Mamah's husband was apparently perfectly nice, but she felt that she was more intelligent that he was.  He deferred to her at parties as having more knowledge of literature and art.  This was in the early 1900's, so when Mamah told her husband about the affair, she did not have any right to her children.  After much soul searching, Mamah decides to go to Europe with Frank Lloyd Wright and leaves her children with a friend in a remote frontier town.  In Europe, Mamah is happy with Frank for about 15 minutes before he begins to systematically ruin her life.

The most tragic part of this ruination is that the author continues to try to rouse a spirit of feminism and intelligence is us, while we watch Frank pretend Mamah is his wife to business associates so that he won't be embarrassed, leave her destitute in Europe when he decides to return to his wife and children, and finally to deal with his rampant inability to handle his finances as well as his arrogance in dealing with the young architects and workmen that labor under him.  Finally, throughout the book, as Mamah is making huge sacrifices like being away from her children, living in constant instability, and cleaning up one of Frank's financial fiascos after another, we get the impression that he is probably cheating on her with other women whom he has somehow managed to draw into his web.

In fact, in the end, I decided that Frank only continued to have use for Mamah because she constantly cleaned up his messes.  He moved her to the Taliesin (a home he was building in Spring Green, Wisconsin) where it seemed to me, he really needed her to serve as cook and housekeeper to the workmen who were building the home.  He couldn't really pay anyone else to do it OR find anyone else that would sleep on the floor (since there was no furniture) and deal with his mother.

The final straw for me in terms of Wright, was that he often did not pay the workmen who put in hours and hours building and rebuilding to his specifications.  When they asked for pay which they needed to feed their families and run their own households, he often told them that their payment was working with his genius.

The most tragic part of the whole story was that Mamah, who must have been unhappy most of the time, kept forging ahead believing that she was doing what she was doing in a spirit of enlightenment and true understanding of women's suffrage.  She was finally able to earn money for herself by translating the works of a German suffragist who eventually expressed concern about the choices that Mamah was making.

Anyway, the end of the book is very tragic and since I don't think you should bother reading the book, I will just go ahead and spoil it.  Mamah is alone at Taliesin with her children, whom she has missed dreadfully.  They have been allowed to visit and she is trying to renew her relationship with them.  Frank is out of town, and a crazed workman on the property kills Mamah and her children with a hatchet before burning the house down.  IT IS AWFUL.  JUST SO AWFUL.

Anyway, Frank Lloyd Wright is so horrible that some of my ability to mourn his poor mistress and her children was dashed under my sneaking suspicion that he had had something to do with it.  He is just such a horrible, self-centered person that I can easily see him being finished with Mamah and wanting to move on and maybe collect a little insurance money and just hiring a hit and assuming it would all work out in his favor.

My report really really hasn't covered how terrible Frank Lloyd Wright as a person must have been if this book is even remotely accurate.  It is almost impossible to convey just how horrid, self-serving and parasitic he really seemed in the book.  We just arrived home from Chicago and I thought briefly about taking an architecture tour while we were ther, but Chicago is Frank Lloyd Wright's town and you know, it is just too soon.  Maybe I can go back next year and separate the man from his work, but this year I just don't have any Loving Frank in me.