Building Taliesin
Page 19
83. Borthwick to Key, January 5, 1913. “Ibsen and Women” was published as The Torpedo Under the Ark: Ibsen and Women (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1912).
84. Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Some Went This Way: A Forty-Year Pilgrimage Among Artists, Bookmen, and Printers (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1945), 114. Seymour says that Wright placed the Ellen Key texts with him upon returning from Germany, at the same time that he gave him “an elaborate American supplement“ to his ”grand portfolio” to publish, and also a promotional brochure for the Wasmuth Portfolio. The supplement was probably Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, a variant of the Wasmuth photo supplement known as the Sonderheft. (It was labeled “For European Sale Only,” but that may have been a ruse to entice U.S. customers.) Since Wright’s second trip to Germany concluded at the end of March, Wright’s visit to Seymour must have occurred upon his return in April. (Wright attended the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier on January 26, 1911, in Dresden. It would be surprising if Borthwick was not with him.)
85. Borthwick to Key, February–March 1912. It is interesting to speculate whether the offended proofreader was responsible for the misprint of Mamah’s name as “Namah” on the title page of The Morality of Women (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1911). It was corrected in the second printing. Lena Johannesson sees a different plot behind the typo: “Mamah did not use her real name but a thinly disguised pseudonym, namely ‘Namah Bouton Borthwick’.” Johannesson, “Ellen Key”, 131.
86. Seymour, Some Went This Way, 114. Wright actually gave him three books. The third book Seymour does not mention in this recollection is probably The Torpedo Under the Ark: Ibsen and Women, which was very brief.
87. Floyd Dell, “A New Idealism,” Chicago Evening Post Friday Literary Review, December 29, 1911; “Ellen Key’s Revaluation of Women’s Chastity,” Current Literature (February 1912), 200–202.
88. Ellen Key, Love and Ethics (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1912), 5.
89. The Spaulding brothers’ invitation to Wright was sent on December 31, 1912, and a follow-up note saying they appreciated his visit was sent on January 10, 1913. Julia Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 80.
90. Martin says, “There is no possible way for one person to end a romance that the other person thought was going great without causing pain and bewilderment. The chief difference between the Kafka method and those more socially approved ones that come with explanations is that the former engender humiliation as well as pain and bewilderment.” Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 350.
91. Lena Johannesson, “Ellen Key,” 133.
92. Ibid., 134.
93. Ibid. Johannesson says there are 23 letters from Putnam’s to Key between 1911 and 1926 in Key’s archive at the Royal Library. Queries from the author to Putnam’s about the existence of a file of Mamah Borthwick correspondence received no response.
94. Quoted in Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 50.
95. Borthwick held fast to this intention. Wisconsin held a statewide referendum on women’s right to vote in November 1912. Borthwick took no discernable role in the campaign even though its leader, Ada James, was a regular visitor at Hillside and lived just 20 miles away in Richland Center. The referendum failed.
96. Lucian Clay was the editor of The Dial in Chicago at the time. The magazine was a reincarnation of the humanitarian journal originally founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.
97. ”Club Women Depart to Chicago to Attend Twelfth Biennial,” Racine, Wisconsin, Journal-News, June 9, 1914. The paper published the full program.
98. ”Miss Wilson Urges Civic Secretaries; President’s Daughter Gives Address at Madison on Her Special Hobby,” Janesville Daily Gazette, June 20, 1914.
99. ”Mud Delays Miss Wilson; Daughter of President Reaches Portage at Late Hour,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, June 24, 1914.
100. Ibid.
101. Zona Gale, Foreword to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press reprint of 1933 edition, 1990), xli.
102. ”Lend-a-Hand Club of Hillside,” Spring Green Home News, June 18, 1914.
103. ”The Women’s Building and The Neighborhood Club,” Home News, July 16, 1914. The attribution of the rendering to Fritz is by Anthony Alofsin in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 97. Fritz was one of two survivors of the killing spree that occurred five weeks after the school appearance.
104. ”Talented Women Here,” Home News, July 9, 1914.
105. Ibid.
106. ”A Woman’s Building for the Inter-County Fair,” Home News, July 2, 1914.
107. Neither woman appears to have left any account of their visits to Taliesin. The author is grateful to Gilman authorities Cynthia J. Davis and Denise Knight for their efforts to find references to these meetings among Gilman’s papers.
108. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 1943 edition reprint (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998), 507. The full title of the novel is Miss Lulu Bett. Gale’s stage adaptation won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1921. Interestingly, Gale set eyes on Olgivanna, the last Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, months before Wright did. She saw her perform in New York with the George Gurdjieff dancers on January 27, 1924, and became a convert to Gurdjieff. Wright did not meet Olgivanna until the following November 30, when he found himself seated next to her in a box at the Eighth Street Theatre in Chicago. Roger Friedland and Howard Zellman, The Fellowship (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 80, 97.
109. The Wright/Borthwick translation, page 47, reads: “The American feminist of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman type looks at all great problems of life from an inferior point of view, when the question of self-maintenance becomes the chief aim of the woman.” The Huebsch translation by Auralis K. Bogutslawsky, Page 53, reads, “Americanism views all problems of life from a very low standpoint in regarding the question of self-maintenance as woman’s principal aim.” Key, Love and Ethics.
110. Jone Johnson Lewis, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes,” About Women’s History, http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/c_p_gilman.htm.
111. Cited in Floyd Dell, Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (Chicago: Forbes & Co., 1913), 28.
112. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “On Ellen Key and the Woman Movement,” in Larry Ceplair, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 236–237.
113. Lewis, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes.”
114. Zona Gale, foreword, xxxviii.
115. Ibid., xli–xlii.
116. Cyntha J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 116.
117. Dell, Women as World Builders, 82.
118. Gilman, “On Ellen Key,” 237.
119. Mamah Bouton Borthwick to Ellen Key, late fall 1911, undated letter, Ellen Key Archive, Royal Library of Sweden.
120. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 315. The “socially pernicious” quote is Key’s.
CHAPTER 5
TRANSFORMATIONS
Fig. 153. In a photograph taken by Clarence Fuermann of Chicago, cabbages and other plantings grow in grids on the southwest slope of Taliesin in the late summer of 1912. The foundations in the background may have been the bases for cold frames.
“THE REFUGE FOR AN IDEALIST”
Frank Lloyd Wright’s description of the first Taliesin, written 20 years after it was built, defined that building for generations of readers. But there was an outside observer on the ground in the first months. John Reese, editor of the Dodgeville Chronicle, visited Taliesin around Christmas 1911 and filed his impressions.
Here one finds not only Wright’s vision for Taliesin’s development—one that was coming together and soon would take full fo
rm—but also a surprising impression of the building’s interior light and airiness, a striking contrast to the dark rooms of the Prairie houses.
Although Mamah Borthwick was in residence, there is no mention of her. But it eloquently describes her new home.
“On a natural terrace facing northeast and overlooking the Wisconsin River and the Spring Green river wagon bridge Frank Lloyd Wright has builded [sic] his bungalow,” Reese reported. (Wright objected to “bungalow” but Reese said he was using it anyway. The original Taliesin always would be called “the bungalow.”)
“The place is reached from the wagon road on the north by a winding drive which mounts the hill and approaches the building from the rear. The house is of one story, consisting of a long, narrow central portion crossed at either end by broader portions, between which, on front and rear, are broad porches.
“Mr. Wright might almost be said to live literally in a glass house, so numerous are the windows in the building, further light being admitted through skylights, making the interior practically as light as out-of-doors.
“All well here—place quite transformed.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright telegram to Taylor Woolley, July 10, 1912
“At one end of the structure are apartments occupied by the head draftsman employed by Wright, while the apartments at the other extremity of the building are occupied by Wright himself.
Fig. 154. The garden of the forecourt next to the studio, with the breezeway and house beyond, are in bloom, with gourds hanging from a trellis at left. Photograph by Clarence Fuermann.
“The place is beautifully situated and the location is finely adapted to the purpose intended; the artist-owner intending to make of it a fruit farm, devoted to the culture of apples, grapes, and bees. His plans for the beautification of the spot are comprehensive, including the damming of a brook which runs through the valley at the base of the terrace, and the creation by this means of an artificial lake or pond of some 18 or 20 acres in extent, which will be stocked with fish and aquatic fowl and plants.
“Shrubbery and flowering plants occupy an important place in Mr. Wright’s designs. Indeed, the bungalow itself is built around open-air courts, flower-bordered, and is worked into the hillside and the landscape in an ingenious and interesting manner.
“The whole is eminently the refuge for an idealist, and the artistic bent of the mastery of the place is apparent throughout, in the selection of the place, in the improvements already executed, and in the designs for future arrangement of grounds, buildings, and landscape.”1
A FRUIT FARM
Wright ordered a lot of fruit for the farm he wanted. In Taliesin’s first spring, the great Chicago park and garden planner Jens Jensen made an order on Wright’s behalf to a Rochester, New York, nursery that included more than a thousand fruit-bearing trees and bushes.
Jensen’s letter to ellwanger & Barry’s Mount Hope Nurseries, dated April 27, 1912, ended with a line typed in red: “Kindly rush this order.”2
Jerry Minnich, author of the authoritative Wisconsin Garden Guide, assessed the order for this book. “Aside from a host of ornamental perennials ordered, which is not unusual for an estate of this size, Jensen ordered 285 apple trees, 300 gooseberry bushes, 150 currant bushes, 200 blackberry bushes, 175 raspberry bushes, and 50 grape vines—a total of 1,160 fruit trees and bushes! (Strangely, no strawberry plants.)
“This is enough to start a midsize commercial orchard. Did Wright intend to support Taliesin through fruit sales? Because, at maturity, these plantings would produce enough fruit to feed several thousand people. I now suspect that the staking shown in some of the photos must have been the laying out of the orchards.”3
Fig. 155. Jens Jensen sent a nursery order on Frank Lloyd Wright’s behalf on April 24, 1912. The order includes more than 1,000 fruit trees and berry bushes.
Wright planted orchards and vineyards, but much of Jensen’s order did not survive the trip. The shipment was sidelined by a railroad strike and many plants died or arrived damaged. The dispute over what Wright owed the nursery stretched into 1914; there were 23 letters back and forth in 1912 alone.4
CONTOURS AND GRIDS
The vegetable and flower gardens of Taliesin flourished in their first season. Clarence Fuermann’s 1912 photographs show rows of cabbages in the garden and banks of flowers in the upper courtyard.
In cultivation, Wright departed from the usual straight-line tillage and used both contour and grid tillage, which he had seen in Italy, to productive and artistic effect.
Of these methods, Minnich says: “Contouring is used on slopes to prevent erosion and water runoff. The procedure is actually thousands of years old, and is heavily used in Italy because of the hills, but is far older in China, where rice paddies are built on slopes. The uSdA first promoted contour farming in the U.S. in the 1930s.
“Mr. Wright might almost be said to live literally in a glass house, so numerous are the windows in the building, further light being admitted through skylights, making the interior practically as light as out-of-doors.”
—John Reese, Dodgeville Chronicle, January 5, 1912
“Grid planting is also hundreds of years old. The gardens of the Taj Mahal were designed in a grid pattern (1632). The greatest advantage of grid gardening and orcharding is as an aid to pollination and, thus, fruit production. Sweet corn is also planted in a grid, rather than in long rows, for the same reason. (The bees, moths, and bats get around to more plants when they’re in a block instead of a long row.)
“Thus, it is not unreasonable, I think, that Frank Lloyd Wright, designing an orchard and garden on a severe slope at Taliesin, would use both the grid and contour concepts.”5
Fig. 156. Taliesin can be seen from the southeast across the valley with hills in the distance in late summer 1912. Photograph by Clarence Fuermann.
Fig. 157. The southeast slope where men could be seen staking and laying down chalk grids in the spring of 1912 (Fig. 95) is now coming toward harvest. The belvidere and walled entrance to the residence can be seen at the top of the hill. Photograph by Clarence Fuermann.
GATEWAY TO THE VILLA
In the early spring of 1912 Wright dammed the creek running through the property to create both a “water garden” and a spillway at the entrance. Landscape architect Charles Aguar and his wife, Berdeana, in Wrightscapes, say that the pond “in 1912 was very small and very oriental in its free form and intricate relationship with the creek, so that it more closely captured the essence of the Japanese water garden than the constructed pond seen today.”6
Taliesin was “a special kind of oasis, in which the raw and hostile forces of surrounding life had somehow been reorganized into a landscape of blessed peace and plenty.”
Both pond and spillway contributed to the experience of entering the Taliesin grounds. “Wright’s gateway feature was framed on either side by pillars of striated stone and designed as a unit with the thick stone dam that impounded the creek to form the pond and spillway,” the Aguars write. One traveled “under a canopy of trees, passing the water garden on the left and the lower edge of the vegetable and flower gardens to the right, which emulated the Italian grid tillage Wright had admired in umbria.”7
It was the first impression visitors would have of Taliesin as a villa.
THE TEA CIRCLE
In 1912 Wright built a retaining wall, stone steps, and a hillside garden on the far side of the courtyard, opposite the roofline of the house and studio. The focal point was a semicircular stone bench on a plaza shaded by tall oaks called the Tea Circle. Its inspiration was both Japanese and Jensenesque; one of the signature features of Jensen’s parks was the “council circle.” Wright’s was more open, more Japanese, with a pool in the center.
The Tea Circle offered a view of the residence and courtyard, or of the garden and hills beyond, depending on where one sat. Neil levine points out that the hillside circle and its garden were a buffer between the refinement of the courtyard and the untended natural crown o
f the hill. Built of rough-cut limestone, the Tea Circle offered the Japanese quality of sabi, “the appearance of antiquity, age, hoariness rusticity, natural textures,” while the garden offered wabi, “the sense of quietness, astringency, good taste, and tranquility.”8
A visitor came away from Taliesin remarking that it was “a special kind of oasis, in which the raw and hostile forces of surrounding life had somehow been reorganized into a landscape of blessed peace and plenty.”9
THE SCENT OF TALIESIN
Wright’s sister Maginel Wright enright, a well-known illustrator of children’s books, came to visit her brother at Taliesin I after she was married. She later recorded her impressions of the house in her memoir The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses.
“Taliesin is full of surprises; full of delights,” she writes. “There is no other house on earth quite like it. It has its own smell. Set down in it by magic with my eyes closed I would know I was there by breathing the scent of wood smoke, dried pennyroyal, pearly everlasting, and the faint elusive fragrance that emanates from oriental objets d’art. But it can’t really be described.”
“The first incarnation was marvelous enough. I was bowled over, and I went home, full of enthusiasm, to tell Pat [her husband] and my friends about it, never dreaming that I would return so soon; sooner than I ever imagined I would, with all the joy gone, and only desolation in its place.”10
Fig. 158. Taliesin’s living room and chimney, seen from the east, show the “pop-out’’ masonry that Wright used for the first time. Photograph by Clarence Fuermann.