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Scandal has lurid end

Architect icon's love affair explored in good fiction almost as strange as fact

By Janet Maslin New York Times

Published on Sunday, Aug 12, 2007

Unlike most writers of historical fiction, Nancy Horan has not had to inflame the passions of real people to create a transporting drama. If anything, she has had to tamp down the truth behind Loving Frank, a novel about the most fearsome chapter in the wildly eventful life of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Telling a love story that is known to this great architect's admirers but will stagger those not braced for its monstrous resolution, this book describes the runaway romance between Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Cheney, the Oak Park, Ill., wife of a sedate businessman, began as a client and wound up the great love of Wright's life. When they impulsively fled for Europe in 1909, Frank and Mamah left behind two baffled spouses, nine aggrieved children (including a daughter of Mamah's dead sister) and a salivating American press corps eager to see the Faustian side of the lovers' rash move.

Not even the most tabloid reportorial imagination could have foreseen how luridly this story would explode five years later. And beyond its shock value, the outcome would have ramifications not only for the families but also for architects, feminists, criminologists and armchair moralists.

Any writer would be accused of histrionic overkill if she had not hewn closely to the facts. But Horan's book has been pieced together and extrapolated from Wright's autobiography, newspaper accounts, a handful of Mamah's letters and other matters of record.

Loving Frank opens on a revealing image: that of Mamah frantically trying to crank up her Studebaker so that she can race off to hear Frank address a Nineteenth Century Woman's Club meeting. The year is 1907, and Mamah already knows Frank: She and her husband live in a house they commissioned from him four years earlier. Now Mamah and Frank plan to add a garage. And that's not all they are brewing. ''It's going to be the best damn garage in Oak Park,'' he tells her, not long after Horan has described ''the naked landscape of his body gliding over hers'' in keeping with the book's architectural imagery. ''But it could take years to finish.''

The author's biggest challenge is that of finding conversational ways to integrate cultural landmarks (Mamah reads Ibsen) and artistic ideals (''He's a visionary, Mattie, and he's going to be famous someday for developing a true American architecture'') into an otherwise forthright narrative. No crowbar is needed, despite the occasional sign of a heavy hand.

The book chronicles how Frank and Mamah arrive at the point of no return, how they construe their rebelliousness as idealism and how they reconcile self-interest with inconvenient family obligations. This last matter is trickiest, since it is potentially so polarizing.

But Horan makes a point of keeping the children at a distance, mirroring her subjects' myopic if tormented state of mind. And she echoes the quaint tone of contemporary press coverage in explaining the runaways' decision. ''Spouse Victim of a Vampire,'' one Chicago newspaper wrote, illustrating what Catherine Wright claimed had befallen her husband.

The first great mystery in this story is what made Frank and Mamah sever their family ties. To its credit, Loving Frank humanizes its main characters so successfully that this seems no mystery at all. But the second question has to do with trouble in paradise, and it is more complex. After their sojourn in Europe, they settled in Wisconsin, where Frank designed his legendary prairie house Taliesin as their new home. It was an exercise in optimism that nearly destroyed them both. (William R. Drennan's recent Death in a Prairie House offers a more detailed factual account of what transpired.)

Horan has the novelistic imagination to conjure the psychic storm clouds that arose, as well as the freak criminal outburst. And since Mamah is the more obscure figure, the book's main challenge is to breathe life into her transformation. Invigorated by nascent feminism as powerfully as she was smitten by Frank, Mamah also succumbed to the gravitational pull of Ellen Key, a Swedish advocate of true love's ability to trump obligation. Horan explains how Mamah became Key's translator and disciple, only to grow disillusioned by her manipulative nature.

This novel shows not only how Key influenced Taliesin, but also how she executed a philosophical about-face, one that suddenly transformed her into a champion of motherhood. That left Mamah demonized and in the lurch. Caught in these pincers as well as in the arrogance that led Frank ''to mistake his gift for the whole of his character,'' Horan's Mamah comes to face as much inner peril as outward jeopardy.

Loving Frank takes on the impact of truly artful fiction when all these forces come into play. In the end, it shows how Mamah and Frank faced dangers more deep-seated than a murderous accident of fate. If Loving Frank clings to any blind romanticism, it is in the measure of how deeply a personal tragedy could dent a swaggering figure like Frank Lloyd Wright. In his capacities as prophet, guru, narcissist, chick magnet and inspiration to Ayn Rand, Wright showed many signs of being impervious to loss.

Horan sees the events in Loving Frank as devastating. She writes this book vibrantly enough to make her readers agree. But according to Drennan, Wright played host to a party for rural mail carriers barely three weeks after the tragedy. ''We are told,'' wrote a local newspaper, ''that this was one of the most successful and enjoyable meetings the assembly has held.''

Unlike most writers of historical fiction, Nancy Horan has not had to inflame the passions of real people to create a transporting drama. If anything, she has had to tamp down the truth behind Loving Frank, a novel about the most fearsome chapter in the wildly eventful life of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Get the full article here.


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