nunia
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2005/11/04
文章: 2184
经验值: 5079
|
|
|
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
once a master find one, he _has_ to elope with her...
Books of the Times
When Frank Lloyd Wright Scandalized Chicago
Published: August 2, 2007
Unlike most writers of historical fiction Nancy Horan has not had to inflame the passions of real people in order 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.
Kevin Horan
Nancy Horan
LOVING FRANK
By Nancy Horan
362 pages. Ballantine Books. $23.95.
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. Mrs. Cheney, the Oak Park, Ill., wife of a sedate businessman, began as a Wright client and wound up the great love of Wright’s life. When they impulsively fled Oak Park for Europe in 1909, Frank and Mamah (this book is on a decidedly first-name basis) 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 two ruptured families but also for architects, feminists, criminologists and armchair moralists of every stripe.
Any writer, even one as level-headed as Ms. Horan, would be accused of histrionic overkill if she had not hewn closely to the facts. But her 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 that 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 Ms. 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. For instance Mamah’s husband foreshadows: “Everyone likes pirates, no matter how bad they are.”
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 Ms. 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, by way of 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.)
Ms. 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 quotidian obligation. Ms. Horan explains how Mamah became Key’s translator and disciple, only to grow disillusioned by Key’s 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,” Ms. Horan’s Mamah comes to face as much inner peril as outward jeopardy.
If “Loving Frank” begins dutifully, it 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.
Ms. Horan sees the events in “Loving Frank” as devastating. She writes this book vibrantly enough to make her readers agree. But according to Mr. Drennan, Wright played host to a party for rural mail carriers barely three weeks after Taliesin’s conflagration. “We are told,” wrote a local Wisconsin newspaper, “that this was one of the most successful and enjoyable meetings the assembly has held.”
[url] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/books/02masl.html?ex=1186891200&en=801e815f3b2ca232&ei=5070[/url]
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
|
|
神迹
