Part 3

Frank Lloyd Wright
by Ada Louise Huxtable

(Page 4 of 4)

After the family returned to Madison, Anna apparently decided that her son's carefully nurtured artistic sensibilities might have gone a bit overboard. Unlike the large, robust Lloyd Jones men, Frank was a small, solitary child content to read, draw, listen to music, and "make things," daydreaming and following his own pursuits. Although she had encouraged his aesthetic interests, dressed him in velvet suits, and cried when she cut off his curls, she may have had some fears for his masculinity, or at least felt that even an Architect needed a bit of hard work and a dose of reality. When he was eleven years old, she decided a little corrective therapy was needed. The Uncles were consulted and a solution was found; Frank would spend his summers helping on Uncle James's farm. As Uncle James noted, the boy "had as much muscle as a blackbird's got in his leg."

At the time, Frank dreaded and despised those summers; his memories were of backbreaking tasks and he recoiled from the gross aspects of animal husbandry. While there was much solace in the fields and woods, where he would steal time until recalled to his tasks, he found farm life demeaning and distasteful. For the next five summers, he endured what he described as a living hell of hard work, where he learned to "pile tired on tired," as he was constantly required to do by rigorous Lloyd Jones standards, "adding it again...and again." He would count the days until September and his return to Madison and school. But he developed work habits and stamina that stayed with him; in his fifties, and even in his eighties, he would exhaust his young staff, urging them to "pile tired on tired." For the rest of his life, he would refer to himself as a farmer, although he would see to it that the farm he established at his Wisconsin home, Taliesin, was worked by others; the live-in apprentices of the Fellowship he established in the 1930s, who paid for instruction in the great man's studio, also labored and brought forth the crops, while he rode grandly by on horseback, the epitome of the gentleman landowner.

He described the detested summer routine with almost total recall more than forty years later in the Autobiography. But let him tell it himself - he does it so well. He wrote in the third person, but the tone is intensely immediate throughout. He would arrive at the farm, to be installed in the same white attic room with one small window, heated by a stovepipe from below. At four in the morning: "Sharp rapping on the stovepipe - loud. Again, sharper, louder," and he would reach for the work clothes Uncle James provided, dressing to the rapping on the stovepipe - "a hickory shirt, blue-jean overalls with blue cotton suspenders, coarse blue cotton socks, clumsy cowhide shoes with leather laces" - the shoes and a hated hat soon discarded. A quick splash to his face with water in a basin drawn from a cistern by a bucket tied to a rope, and off to the barn, "where he dutifully began milking as shown, until his hands ached," and "the strange smells sickened him."

He learned the hazards of country life - the cows that "would lean over and crush the breath out of you against the wall of the stall. Beating them over the back with the milking stool only made them push harder." Bare feet in fresh cowpats. Washing the manure off the teats, pinging the milk into the pail, with an occasional spurt to the mouth, as taught by the hired man. Then breakfast, farm plentiful and revolting to the fastidious young aesthete. "Potatoes, fried. Fried cornmeal mush, fried pork, green cheese and cornbread. Pancakes and sorghum. Buttermilk and milk. Coffee and tea, but not for him." Watching the "red-faced, yellow-haired hired man pour sorghum over his big piece of fat pork" would take his appetite away. He remembered the hired man's name - Gottlieb. And with all the milk, there was never any cream.

Next, feeding the calves with Aunt Laura - "teaching the crowding, pushing, bunting things to suck the milk by holding the fingers in the pail...a nasty business." Then "carrying sticks of wood to the cross-cut saw." Dinner - "boiled fresh beef, boiled potatoes, carrots, turnips, homemade bread and butter, jam, pickles, prunes, sorghum, honey, green cheese, pie or cake." Afternoon - "holding the split oak rails while Uncle James nailed them to the fence-posts, hands full of slivers, going off to get the cows for the first time, at five. Home to supper at six. Fried potatoes, as regularly as the sun set. Homemade bread and butter. Cornbread, cornmeal mush, milk, honey, homemade preserves. Fried salt pork or smoked beef, creamed." After supper, milking again. "In bed, about half-past seven, too tired to move.

"Again the outrageous banging on the stovepipe...the clothes sweat-stiffened. They went on stiff and stayed stiff...until limbered up by working in them....Endless, the care of the animals, horses, cows, pigs, sheep." Currying and brushing the workhorses, cleaning the stables "under and behind them," hitching and unhitching them, "putting them to the plow, harrows, seeders, markers, plankers, planters, cultivators and lumber wagons,"..."hauling fodder and boiling something...for the hogs...getting the heavy sows off their own little pigs," alerted "by the infernal, heart-rending squeals....Sickened as you assisted at butchering by seeing the knife stuck deep in the fat-throat and the hot blood gushing and steaming from the one marked for family 'pork.' The smell of their yard - devastating!" Hens: "getting pecked by the lousy things. Getting covered with lice from them...striking off the heads of superfluous young roosters when their turn came to be eaten...throwing the flapping, convulsive fowl aside in its headless tumble over wood- pile and door-yard in frantic letting go of life...."

The harvesting of the grain, the bundling, hauling, and pitching of the hay, the rhythm of the motions still felt and described: "Aching muscles in the morning." And then there were the mosquitoes "to pester him, and the flies to torture the cows. Cut-grass and nettles and poison ivy. And wasps and bumble bees. Hidden sticks and stumps to stub one's toes. Quicksand in the streams. And hornets' nests in the barn rafters."

But there were also other things to learn, as he fetched the cows, so tired that he hung on to the one with the longest tail, or cut through meadows, or stole time in the woods. "He knew where the lady-slippers grew, and why...he could lead you surely to where Jack-in-the-Pulpit stood in the deep shade of the wood, to wild strawberries in the sunny clearings of the hills. To watercress in the cool streams flowing from hillside springs. He knew where the tall red lilies could be found afloat on the tall meadow grass....The choke cherry with its pendent blooms and black clusters of cherries that puckered your throat....The white birches gleaming. Wild grape in bloom festooning the trees and fences. Sumach with its braided foliage and dark red berry-cones. Herbs, and dripping leaves in rain. In the fields, milkweed blossoming, later scattering its fleece on every breeze. The sorrel reddening the fields...." And the boy things: "He would go catching sleek frogs or poking stupid toads. Catching crazy grasshoppers. Listening at night to the high treble of the frog-song. He delighted in devils' darning needles, and turtles, too."

He evokes the sounds, sights, colors, beauty, and wonder of the summer world with an elegiac pleasure almost worthy of the Whittier or Lowell his mother read to him. But being Wright, he cannot resist turning it all into gorgeous grist for the future Architect: "He was studying unconsciously what later he would have called 'Style.'" And then, blending nature into architecture, making that connection between the physical and natural worlds with Olympian certainty and fuzzy abandon, "the boy was some day to learn that the secret of all the human styles in architecture was the same that gave character to trees."

He ran away twice, brought back once by Uncle Enos, sent to look for him, to whom he poured out his tearful tale of fatigue, pain, and anguish, and once by Uncle James. He would hide in the hay barn all night while they called for him, feeling gratified and guilty to have turned his suffering into someone else's concern. His mother visited, and cried.

And then Sunday, blessed Sunday - "salvation for the 'tired to tired' week." A bath on Saturday night, water carried from the cistern, part heated on the stove. In the morning, he would put on his city clothes. The Aunts and Uncles would be seated in rockers on the platform of the small, shingled wooden family chapel, its pulpit covered with a cloth of purple velvet and wildflowers gathered by the children. They would have gone out early to bring back a wagon box full of branches of Frank's choosing. It was his delight to display them - "broad masses of blooms and verdure freely arranged, pretty much as they grew...only more so."

Wright never forgot the pleasure of those Sundays at church and the solidarity of family life - going to the still cool woods in the early hours to gather those "tremendous riches" to place on the altar, a display indelibly entwined with a family at worship together. The memory was enhanced by the picnics that followed, each family wagon filled with baskets that carried far more than the standard daily fare: stuffed chickens, hard-boiled eggs, corn on the cob to be roasted, sandwiches and pickles, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers to be eaten in the hand with salt, sugared doughnuts, turnovers, cookies, gingerbread, and pies and cakes of all kinds. "Bright colored cloths would be spread on green grass in some cool selected spot...in the shade of beautiful trees...always near a spring or stream," where the fresh milk would be set to cool.

Half a century later, Wright would call for picnics at Taliesin; the apprentices who spent as much time in the kitchen as at their drafting boards were expected to spread out the same kind of sumptuous repast on the same kind of gaily colored cloths, in the same meadows and hills, in nostalgic homage to the pleasures of childhood and family life, although Wright himself was never a good family man, and the way of life he recalled was gone forever.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Ada Louise Huxtable is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. She is the author of several books, including Inventing Reality, Pier Luigi Nervi, and, most recently, The Unreal American. A MacArthur fellow, Huxtable is the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal and was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1963 to 1982.