Loving Frank, but Loving Mamah More: Wisconsin

Loving Frank is the story of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her life from 1903 to 1914, from when she first met Frank Lloyd Wright, until the end of their affair. I selected this book for Wisconsin because I believed that being an architect is all about interpreting place and space, and Wright, most notably, is American in his perspective, creating homes for his clients to live locally-informed lives. I was expecting the book would confirm my bias --- that it was by his works that I would come to know Wright and Wisconsin.

However, Loving Frank is more about Mamah's struggle with her place in society as a married woman, albeit, one actively advocating the expansion of women's voting rights and employment opportunities, somewhat beyond the pale of the regimented upper class social circle that her breeding, education adn marriage to Edwin Cheney had made for her. Wright, as well, is married to a conventional wife, Catherine, who occasionally socialized with Mamah and Frank when they fell in love.

Mamah's attraction to Frank is a complete free fall. Her struggle and the story's tension focus on how to carry on an affair, a juggle that is significantly eased for her by a spinster sister ready to watch over her children and cover her assignations, and by another friend from college who takes her into her home in Boulder when she finally breaks away from her family, before heading off to Germany with Wright. Their behavior becomes a front page scandal. Families are tremendously hurt. Spouses dig in their heels, but with public statements of forgiveness and longed for reconcilation.

Trained as a German scholar, Mamah serendipitously meets Ellen Key, a Swedist feminist, in Berlin, on whom she projects her redemption, if not her justification for abandoning her children, only to realize that Key's premise is that while marriage and the support of a husband are no longer required in her world, to fulfill a woman, her being is best articulated through motherhood. Mamah's rationalization continues unabated.

Nancy Horan, a native of Oak Park, surrounded by Wright houses and intrigued by a society that unfavorably judged his unconventional behavior and iconoclastic style, composes a novel that is, while romantically alluring, ultimately aloof. Mamah is not Frank's muse, more his anchor, as conventional a role for an early 20th Century woman as those of her counterparts with marriage parchments.

Taliesin does align with our blog's goal to acknowledge the centrality of setting to story: it is their refuge, the source of his family's roots, the physical manifestation of his credo -- that a building must come out of its location and must be constructed to ease the lives of its residents. Taliesin does that, but it also the place where the lives Mamah and Frank built come to a distastrous end.

Despite everything that I liked about Horan's rendition of Mamah and Frank, I am seduced to read T.C. Boyle's version of Wright's life and loves, his latest novel, The Women. As I write this review, I am only 50 pages or so into Boyle's book. I prefer it. There is a rhythm to his writing that both moves the story along more quickly and immediately captures attention. His device to tell the story through a "translation from the Japanese" is clever, but apt, given the influence of that culture on Wright's designs. Boyle writes with many more layers of literary allusions. So far, a much richer read. I will add more after finishing it, but suggest to the Slackers that they might want to go with Boyle over Horan for Wisconsin