Building Taliesin
Page 22
19. Jens Jensen to Ellwanger & Barry, August 24, 1914, Ellwanger & Barry archive, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library.
20. The social note and the ad are from the Spring Green Home News, August 27, 1914.
21. A large selection of these cards appears in Randolph C. Henning, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).
22. Ernest Wittwer Sr. interview with Ron McCrea, 1998.
23. Fiedler’s son John became a judge in the same courtroom. His grandson Patrick was a Dane County Circuit Court judge in Madison. retiring in 2011. The author is grateful to attorney William Francis Nelson of Madison for his insights into the court proceeding.
24. Drennan, Death in a Prairie House, 147-148.
25. Wright, An Autobiography, 240.
26. Barney, The Valley, 146.
27. Frank Lloyd Wright to Ellen Key, December 8, 1914. Ellen Key Archives, Royal Library of Sweden.
A Summer Day That Changed the World
BY EDNA MEUDT
All the way down the valley the house where Kristin
is going to visit can be seen. Over hills
from home she knows it well—but last night in her dream
it changed to a quarry where skeletons were found.
The mare, Beauty, sun-bleached, often sun-blind and heavesy,
is dependable and their only riding horse.
Balloon-wide to sit astride her little girl legs
stick out like seal flippers, are wobbly afterward.
It is better than walking three miles to the house
built onto the hill. She thinks about the strangeness:
Incense, on the floors creamy bears with no insides,
birds that talk back, shadowy flowers she never knew,
wall-hangings to be put out of her country mind.
Windows too high for her seeing out are hung with boughs
—They say its name, Taliesin, means Shining Brow.
She does not like the place. But neither do Martha
and John who vacation here a month each summer.
The children want to go home. She will not tattle,
or tell them what grown-ups say about their mother.
It is not that they are different, only rich,
so she wears her nearly best clothes. When told
she should not visit there because of “Goings-on”
her father asked, “Are not the children innocent?”
They seldom had company, and Kristen knew why
she had been invited: When her father was young
he worked for maiden aunts who ran Hillside Home School.
Autumns, winters, springs he drove open-span Morgans
back/forth to town for students farmed from city homes.
The school is closed and scary now. It is summer.
Saturday, our Lady’s Assumption in August.
Church again tomorrow. Oxeye daisies suggest
picking for the altar, gophers run a rickrack
across dusty roads. Their pretty valley dozes
that near-noon hour. Beside the buildings grain is stacked
ready for threshing, binders put away in sheds.
Full of happy news and hurry-up she urges
Beauty on with a slap, remembering too late
the collar sore. But joy sustains: She is to ask
the children to her place for watching the thresher work.
Despite coaxing Get-aps! The mare stops, head lifted, nosing air.
Smoke out front? No more than from a stove
at first but soon the whole hill wears a ruffled cap
of smoke. A scream! Others—men voices—children cries—sounds
running together like the wildness of night winds.
She slides to the ground and crawls toward Willow Walk,
Then climbs between the triple trunks of a gnarled one
Where once she and Martha had played house with their dolls.
Smoke coming nearer now—hoarsened voices—Quiet!
Is this still dreaming—bones in the quarry turned black?
Kristin looks at her trembling hands, begins to cry,
prays: “Hail Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with thee …
over and over again: “The Lord is with me.”
It is bad to be nearly nine and so afraid,
fire on the hill, screaming less, the children quiet—She did not come for
this Thing—whatever it is—
an unknown that is sensed all around the willows,
troubling and as secret as reasons the house is strange.
“The lord is with me … The Lord is with me … The Lord
They have found Beauty. She hears them calling, “Kristin! Kristeeen!”
The tree holds her up but no answer comes,
father-arms lifting her from darkness she fights, breath-taste
like fresh blood as from running too fast. No more tears.
They climb the stone stairs to tell people she is safe,
cross the court past covered shapes like statues in Lent
fallen over. One that is half under towels,
hair burned and lashes from eyes that beg: Stay with me!
Please don’t go! The lips move to form her name: “Kristin—“
She is mute yet sees on the blackboard of her mind
the lie: THAT IS NOT MARTHA—even as she knows
the September-sapphires ring on the swollen hand.
She moves ahead of her father, drawing him on,
aware of other men in sooty, bloody clothes,
their faces sweat-striped masks barely recognizable.
Mother is having a spell. Neighbors rub her wrists,
wipe her face. Kristin can smell the digitalis,
sweat from hot arms around them, the stranger’s breath.
Not for such attention to lessen their fears
has she come so far to what is best learned alone—though
foreshadowed when crossing the River in flood,
seeing whirlpools and undertow that take lives,
wild reflections of the sky. At such times her inside-voices
clearly repeated AVES she could not
for heartbeats flipflapping like trout out of water.
More people come to look to judge. Kristin listens:
“The gardener spoke before he died. It was the black
devil Julian.” No! Kristin thinks, Not the new cook.
Julian makes better desserts than anyone else!
But who would care? “This was bound to happen!” they say,
and “The wages of sin!” and then “The will of God!”
are like two strings for their beady words. “Be watchful
children,” they warn, “Don’t go near the walls or ledges.”
Don’t and Do: “Don’t get dirty! Do stay in plain view”
So they play Racetrack, and Trains on the concrete steps
that lead into the cold furnace—all but Kristin
who sits cross-legged to keep her knees from shaking,
and watches a spot under the rubble where smoke
rises as if a teakettle were boiling in there.
This day has erased the dream she tries to recall—but
afterwards remembered when John is not found.
Anxious to leave with her father for the depot
they meet a train that brings two men sharing sorrow;
One whose love-house it was. One whose children they were.
Up those steps again in deep shadows of late dusk,
Changed as summer and the valley, changed as Kristin
Leaving the last sheltered season of innocence.
(O generations!—Whatever it is we are—
never the same after some ruined hill is climbed
and we meet face to face the Thing that makes it Was.)
Reality goes into a created
well,
a darkness for those unfamiliar names of sins,
hatchet truth in the hands of a servant gone berserk.
She does relive that longest night after the fire
when a posse tramped the bypaths, their howling hounds
blood-calling WHOO AWHOO AWHAOOO along the creek
and into a stone quarry that opens the caves.
Sickish again hearing them, all the HAIL MARYS
stick between the pages of her tongue and palate
until sleepiness crowds her like the mare against
a barn stall when not in the mood to be ridden.
Then there is Julian, liver-colored and crouched
on all fours in that furnace, and his teeth are like
unbaked ladyfingers. Kristin wakes dry retching,
afraid to move in the big bed upstairs alone,
till she hears whippoorwills and knows she has dreamed.
Into the well goes singed bearskin rugs, gutted rooms
with shapes beneath blankets and smells best forgotten,
parts to be hidden away—some for years and years.
But when nocturnal creatures converse in the woods
and she is thoughtful, snatches return unbidden:
One man watching with folded arms while another
weeps over rubble, raking with blackened fingers
in trickling smoke for bones eleven summers young—
his son—and the scarlet shame burning her back
forever turned away from eyes that begged—
eyes bluer fire than birthstone sapphire.
Edna Meudt, The Rose Jar: The Autobiography of Edna Meudt (Madison: North Country Press, 1990), 174–178. Reprinted with the kind permission of the family of george Vukelich.
Fig. 181. Kristin Kritz with her parents, John and Kristine Kritz. Kristin changed her name to Edna as an adult.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT TO HIS NEIGHBORS
To My Neighbors:
To you who have rallied so bravely and so well to our assistance—to you who have been invariably kind to us all—I would say something to defend a brave and lovely woman from the pestilential touch of stories made by the press for the man in the street, even now, with the loyal fellows lying dead beside her. I cannot bear to leave unsaid things that might brighten memory of her in the mind of anyone. But they must be left unsaid. I am thankful for all who showed her kindness of courtesy, and that means many. No community anywhere could have received the trying circumstances of her life among you in a more high-minded way. I believe at no time has anything been shown her as she moved in your midst but courtesy and sympathy.
This she won for herself by her innate dignity and gentleness of character, but another—perhaps any other—community would have seen her through the eyes of the press that even now insists upon decorating her death with the fact, first and foremost, that she was once another man’s wife, “a wife who left her children.” That must not be forgotten in this man-made world. A wife still is “property.” And yet the well-known fact that another [woman] bears the name and title she once bore [Mrs. Edwin Cheney] had no significance. The birds of prey were loosed upon her in death as well as in life, to feed the Moloch of the heart that maintains itself at the cost of the “man in the street,” by preaching to him in vulgar language the gospel of Mediocrity.
But this noble woman had a soul that belonged to her alone—that valued womanhood above wifehood or motherhood. A woman with a capacity for love and life made real by a higher ideal of truth, a finer courage, a higher, more difficult ideal of the white flame of chastity than was “moral” or expedient and for which she was compelled to crucify all that society holds sacred and essential—in name.
And finally, out of the mass of lies which forms the article covering this catastrophe in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, is a lie the work of an assassin that in malice belongs with the mad black [killer, Julian Carlton] except that he struck in the heat of madness, and this assassin strikes the living and the dead in cool malice. It leaves me with the same sense of outrage to the dead that the black, cunning face of the negro wears as it comes before me in my dreams. The sting of it is a goad that helps me lift my head again.
In our life together there has been no thought of secrecy except to protect others from the contaminating stories of newspaper scandal; no pretense of a condition that did not exist. We have lived frankly and sincerely as we believed and we have tried to help others to live their lives according to their ideals.
Fig. 182. Mamah Bouton Borthwick, possibly a wedding portrait.
Neither of us expected to relinquish a potent influence on our children’s lives for good—nor have we. Our children have lacked the atmosphere of ideal love between father and mother—nothing else that could further their development. How many children have more in the conventional home? Mamah’s children were with her when she died. They have been with her every summer. She felt that she did more for her children in holding high above them the womanhood of their mother than by sacrificing it to them. And in her life, the tragedy was that it became necessary to choose one or the other.
The circumstances of her life before and after we came to live among you have all been falsified and vulgarized–it is no use now to try to set them straight— but there was none of the cheap deception, the evading of consequences, that mark writhings from the obligations of the matrimonial trap.
Nor did Mamah ever intend to devote her life to theories or doctrines. She loved Ellen Key as everyone does who knows her. Only true love is free love—no other kind is or can ever be free. The “freedom” in which we joined was infinitely more difficult than any conformity with customs could have been. Few will venture it. It is not lives lived on this plane that menace the well-being of society. No, they can only serve and ennoble it.
“This noble woman had a soul that belonged to her alone—that valued womanhood above wifehood or motherhood.”
It has sometimes been a source of annoyance to Mamah that one or two friends to whom she occasionally wrote persisted in reading a meaning between her lines that convicted her of an endeavor to seem happy when they thought she ought not to be. I suppose when we live safe in the “heart of the block” we yearn to feel that in another situation than ours—in circumstances we fail to understand— there must be unhappiness, or in circumstances of which we disapprove—an “EXPIATION.” This is particularly “Christian.”
Mamah and I have had our struggles, our differences, our moments of jealous fear for our ideals of each other—they are not lacking in any close human relationships—but they served only to bind us more closely together. We were more than merely happy even when momentarily miserable. And she was as true as only a woman who loves knows the meaning of the word. Her soul has entered mine and it shall not be lost.
You wives with your certificates of loving—pray that you may love as much and be loved as well as Mamah Borthwick! You mothers and fathers with daughters—be satisfied if what you have invested in them works itself out upon as high a plane as it has done in the life of this lovely woman. She was struck down by a tragedy that hangs by a slender thread of reason over the lives of all, a thread which may snap at any time in any home with consequences as disastrous.
And I would urge upon young and old alike that “Nature knows neither Past nor Future—the Present is her eternity.” unless we realize that brave truth there will come a bitter time when the thought of how much more potent with love and action that precious “Present” might have been, will desolate our hearts.
She is dead. I have buried her in the little Chapel burying ground of my people—beside the little son of my sister, a beautiful boy of ten, who loved her and whom she loved much—and while the place where she lived with me is a charred and blackened ruin, the little things of our daily life gone, I shall replace it all as nearly as it may be done. I shall set it up again, for the spirit of the mortal that lived in it and loved it—will live in it still. My home will still be ther
e.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Weekly Home News,
Spring Green, Wisconsin, August 20, 1914
Fig. 183. A luxury limited edition of Goethe’s “Hymn to Nature” was published in Darmstadt in 1910. Wright bought a copy of the poem in Berlin that year.
A Hymn to Nature
Frank Lloyd Wright’s introduction, August 20, 1914:
“ ‘A Fragment: A Hymn to Nature,’ unknown to us in the works of Goethe, we found in a little bookshop in Berlin. Translated by us from the German—together— it comforted us. It is for the strong and saved from destruction only because I carried it in my pocket. I give it here to those who cared for her.”*
Nature!
We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and powerless to penetrate deeper.
Unbidden and unwarmed she takes us up in the round of her Dance and sweeps along with us, until exhausted we fall from her Arms.
She creates ever new Forms; what is, was never before; what was, comes never again—everything is New and yet ever the Old.
We live in the midst of her and are Strangers to her.
She speaks incessantly with us and never betrays her Secret to us.
We have unceasing Effect upon her and yet have no Power over her.
She appears to have committed everything to Individuality and is indifferent to the Individual.
She builds ever and ever destroys and her Workshop is inaccessible.
She is the very Children—and the Mother—where is she?
* * * * * *
She is the only Artist.
With the simplest Materials she arrives at the most sublime Contrasts.
Without Appearance of Effort she attains most Perfection—the most exact
Precision veiled always in exquisite Delicacy.
Each of her Works has its own individual Being—each of her Phenomena the most isolated Conception, yet all is Unity.
She plays a Drama.