细节
WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD. Nine autograph letters signed, two typed letters signed, and one postcard signed to his daughter Catherine Wright Baxter one ALS and one TLS to her husband Kenneth Baxter, two ALsS and one telegram to his first wife Catherine Tobin Wright, and three TLsS and one telegram to his granddaughter Anne Baxter, most signed "Father" or "Frank", written from various places including Spring Green, Wisconsin, Chicago, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, 1909-1954. Together 19 letters and two telegrams, approximately 51 pages, 12mo-4to, nine letters on Wright's personal printed or embossed stationery with his orange square emblem, two from Tokyo on Imperial Hotel stationery, 11 letters with original stamped envelopes addressed by Wright, a few short fold breaks, one letter with minor tape repairs; with one TLS from his son Lloyd Wright to Anne Baxter, 24 June 1974, one page, 4to.
"YOU ARE THE DAUGHTER OF A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF--AND THAT HAS FALLEN"
A dramatic and revealing series of family letters, documenting Wright's tumultuous and often painful relations with the children of his first marriage and his confused sentiments toward their mother Catherine Tobin Wright after their separation in 1909. Following his failed attempts to persuade her to let their six children spend time with him, Wright's letters to his daughter Catherine reveal a man deeply concerned about his children's well-being, but whose guilt at having left them and bitterness at their estrangement were at times unjustly directed against them, in repeated and lengthy recriminations for their selfishness and ingratitude.
Chicago, [n.d., envelope postmarked 16 Sept. 1912]: "...it isn't likely that anyone could turn me against my own children were they ever so determined to do so--and in this case you wholly misunderstand the feeling of Mrs. Borthwick [his companion Mamah Borthick Cheney, who was killed in the first fire at Wright's house Taliesin in 1914] toward you all. Naturally she feels that she is in a way keeping my children away from me and it is a sorrow to her I am sure--just as it was to me to feel that I in the same way was keeping her children from her...I know she would be happy to have you children with me whenever you cared to come...There is more than one possible basis for parents and children to get good from one another. The regular basis in our case has been lost--let us see if we can't set up one that, tho calling for more restraint, more circumspection and consideration--has yet fine qualities..."
[Spring Green], 15 May 1914: Reproaching Catherine for having made frivolous use of her time in New York City, where he had sent her to stay with his sister Maginel and her husband: "...It seems that your time is spent in the old proposition of pleasuring oneself anyhow... I didn't send you to New York to continue the 'Vaudeville Follies' idea of life that you seem to be drifting toward. It will leave you a discredited, cheap, spent affair before you are thirty with nothing to go on afterward..You see such women around you by the thousand--the ones who tried to beat the game of life by shirking work...There is no short cut by which you can succeed in any artistic calling without more hard, grinding, plain everyday work than you would find in any other pursuit, that of wife and mother not excepted..."
[Spring Green, n.d., envelope postmarked 1 and 3 August 1914]: "...were you to be a daughter of mine in spirit as well as in the flesh you would only be an unhappiness to your mother--while if you remain as you are--a daughter of hers in the spirit you can only be a disappointment to me. This is the misfortune which has befallen us all...There is much in me that would be helpful to you were it not considered...canceled by the harm the circumstances of my life might do you...I want you to do anything in which you will put your whole heart. No sacrifice I can make would be too much to provide the means for your doing so...I have always indulged my children beyond my limit and dragged my credit at the tail of their chariot. Yet strangely enough all feel poor and in a desperate struggle with infinite wants. I do not doubt that no matter what the income was the dissatisfaction and pressure would rise to the brim and overflow the same...You are the daughter of a 'house divided aginst itself'-- and that has fallen...."
[Chicago, n.d., envelope postmarked 12 October 1914]: "...You need to develop physical stamina. You are soft...
[N.p., n.d., ca. 1914]: "...No, I can not assure your mother a regular monthly allowance--She will have to take her chances on it as I take mine...Neither you as her children nor has she ever felt that any of you should do anything for me--except hang onto me as a financial asset for all I was worth...I expected to find on [my children's] part a love and kindness, and in time an understanding that could be based on something besides selfishness and 'interests' and the animal pursuit of 'a good time'. How bitter my disappointment is I think no one can ever know. Everything I have invested of myself...in my children has...found its way into a bottomless pit of thoughtlessness, of rampant animalism unbelievable [sic], of gross appetites and a thankless assumption of rights in a parent to whom they yielded neither true allegiance nor respect and toward whom they recognized no duties...they have put the blame upon him for finding his life with them under former circumstances intolerable and upon the terrible break and tragedy that ensued..."
To Catherine Tobin Wright, 2 Oct. 1918: "...You have done nothing toward helping me to establish myself in good standing these past ten years. On the contrary you have kept me hanging by the thumbs in the market place, an outlaw! Yet as an outlaw I have with greatest difficulty, as a miracle even, fed, warmed, clothed, educated and even amused you--all. Now the children (six) show the first signs of economic independence. You tighten your thankless grip and demand more. I am sorry for you with your fool friends and advisers...I am sorry for your children who have no love and no mercy...What is it I am paying toll to you for? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Is it perhaps the privilege to live and work for myself now that I have devoted 30 years to working for you and yours?.. You say it was no fault of yours the past is dead--but you show in your every act good reason why it could not live. If this is what you are...thank God the past is dead! Could I cut it out of any future harm it may do as the offspring go their self-same way I would. It would be better they were never born!"
Wright later begged his ex-wife to intercede on his behalf, in a telegram dated 28 October 1926, eight days after his arrest for violation of the Mann act: "An interview with you at this time publicly stating what you wrote to me...would do more for the character of the father of your children than anything else that could now be done. Your faith in his character and purposes and the fact that we are all friends if only we were allowed to be, that is if this public slander on our relations were dropped...". A month later he wrote to her in a tone of near contrition, laying the blame for his former vindictiveness on the pernicious influence of his second wife Miriam Noel: (Minneapolis, 26 November 1926) "...this vicious 'wife'--so-called--declares it her intention to show us all up--as at each others throats, quarrelling, vicious, a truly disreputable family...during the years that I was taking care of her, she would urge me to write you about divorce, I would do so employing some harsh language which I would of course regret. I would write sometimes in a bitter spirit and discard the letter, ashamed to send it. It seems that she would keep such letters or copy them intending even then...to blackmail me...she was cleverly undermining me with the children always...It is too late to mend the horrible waste of those years... Had I the companion I now have ten years ago we might have all had a compensation for the griefs of the misfortune that was ours. For Olgivanna is good. Just as Miriam was bad...".
After Catherine's marriage to Kenneth Baxter (the collection includes a response from Wright to Baxter's request for his daughter's hand, Tokyo, 18 Jan. 1919), Wright's letters to his daughter and son-in-law grow considerably milder in tone. On 7 February 1921 he wrote from Tokyo, thanking them for their New Year's telegram: "...It was a rather lonely Christmas and New Years this year...The work here [on the Imperial Hotel] is progressing rapidly--a great building it is going to be...I am sorry to see and hear so much about Japan's hostility to America and Americans because it is all false. It is Hearst propaganda or English propaganda--Perhaps both...My work is very hard--intense concentration and immense responsibility--I would like to rest at Taliesin more than I have done these five years past.--Especially has this past year been strenuous with the Los Angeles work [Hollyhock House, commissioned by the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall] coming in on the New Imperial work...We seem no nearer 'peace' in [the] old world...than when we were at war--ugly peace is worse than open war--but I am an architect--not a statesman. I wish we had a statesman or two just now, in any country anywhere...".
Taliesin, 17 March 1954, to Ken Baxter: "Your Bronfman Brothers could knock off a million dollars worth of advertising right now by putting up a sign on their vacant lot on Park Avenue. 'Tallest building in the world will be built on this site for Seagrams (or whatever) by Frank Lloyd Wright'. This is to be followed up by presentable sketches of the project--price only one hundred thousand dollars, payable ten thousand per month after delivery of sketches". (22)
"YOU ARE THE DAUGHTER OF A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF--AND THAT HAS FALLEN"
A dramatic and revealing series of family letters, documenting Wright's tumultuous and often painful relations with the children of his first marriage and his confused sentiments toward their mother Catherine Tobin Wright after their separation in 1909. Following his failed attempts to persuade her to let their six children spend time with him, Wright's letters to his daughter Catherine reveal a man deeply concerned about his children's well-being, but whose guilt at having left them and bitterness at their estrangement were at times unjustly directed against them, in repeated and lengthy recriminations for their selfishness and ingratitude.
Chicago, [n.d., envelope postmarked 16 Sept. 1912]: "...it isn't likely that anyone could turn me against my own children were they ever so determined to do so--and in this case you wholly misunderstand the feeling of Mrs. Borthwick [his companion Mamah Borthick Cheney, who was killed in the first fire at Wright's house Taliesin in 1914] toward you all. Naturally she feels that she is in a way keeping my children away from me and it is a sorrow to her I am sure--just as it was to me to feel that I in the same way was keeping her children from her...I know she would be happy to have you children with me whenever you cared to come...There is more than one possible basis for parents and children to get good from one another. The regular basis in our case has been lost--let us see if we can't set up one that, tho calling for more restraint, more circumspection and consideration--has yet fine qualities..."
[Spring Green], 15 May 1914: Reproaching Catherine for having made frivolous use of her time in New York City, where he had sent her to stay with his sister Maginel and her husband: "...It seems that your time is spent in the old proposition of pleasuring oneself anyhow... I didn't send you to New York to continue the 'Vaudeville Follies' idea of life that you seem to be drifting toward. It will leave you a discredited, cheap, spent affair before you are thirty with nothing to go on afterward..You see such women around you by the thousand--the ones who tried to beat the game of life by shirking work...There is no short cut by which you can succeed in any artistic calling without more hard, grinding, plain everyday work than you would find in any other pursuit, that of wife and mother not excepted..."
[Spring Green, n.d., envelope postmarked 1 and 3 August 1914]: "...were you to be a daughter of mine in spirit as well as in the flesh you would only be an unhappiness to your mother--while if you remain as you are--a daughter of hers in the spirit you can only be a disappointment to me. This is the misfortune which has befallen us all...There is much in me that would be helpful to you were it not considered...canceled by the harm the circumstances of my life might do you...I want you to do anything in which you will put your whole heart. No sacrifice I can make would be too much to provide the means for your doing so...I have always indulged my children beyond my limit and dragged my credit at the tail of their chariot. Yet strangely enough all feel poor and in a desperate struggle with infinite wants. I do not doubt that no matter what the income was the dissatisfaction and pressure would rise to the brim and overflow the same...You are the daughter of a 'house divided aginst itself'-- and that has fallen...."
[Chicago, n.d., envelope postmarked 12 October 1914]: "...You need to develop physical stamina. You are soft...
[N.p., n.d., ca. 1914]: "...No, I can not assure your mother a regular monthly allowance--She will have to take her chances on it as I take mine...Neither you as her children nor has she ever felt that any of you should do anything for me--except hang onto me as a financial asset for all I was worth...I expected to find on [my children's] part a love and kindness, and in time an understanding that could be based on something besides selfishness and 'interests' and the animal pursuit of 'a good time'. How bitter my disappointment is I think no one can ever know. Everything I have invested of myself...in my children has...found its way into a bottomless pit of thoughtlessness, of rampant animalism unbelievable [sic], of gross appetites and a thankless assumption of rights in a parent to whom they yielded neither true allegiance nor respect and toward whom they recognized no duties...they have put the blame upon him for finding his life with them under former circumstances intolerable and upon the terrible break and tragedy that ensued..."
To Catherine Tobin Wright, 2 Oct. 1918: "...You have done nothing toward helping me to establish myself in good standing these past ten years. On the contrary you have kept me hanging by the thumbs in the market place, an outlaw! Yet as an outlaw I have with greatest difficulty, as a miracle even, fed, warmed, clothed, educated and even amused you--all. Now the children (six) show the first signs of economic independence. You tighten your thankless grip and demand more. I am sorry for you with your fool friends and advisers...I am sorry for your children who have no love and no mercy...What is it I am paying toll to you for? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Is it perhaps the privilege to live and work for myself now that I have devoted 30 years to working for you and yours?.. You say it was no fault of yours the past is dead--but you show in your every act good reason why it could not live. If this is what you are...thank God the past is dead! Could I cut it out of any future harm it may do as the offspring go their self-same way I would. It would be better they were never born!"
Wright later begged his ex-wife to intercede on his behalf, in a telegram dated 28 October 1926, eight days after his arrest for violation of the Mann act: "An interview with you at this time publicly stating what you wrote to me...would do more for the character of the father of your children than anything else that could now be done. Your faith in his character and purposes and the fact that we are all friends if only we were allowed to be, that is if this public slander on our relations were dropped...". A month later he wrote to her in a tone of near contrition, laying the blame for his former vindictiveness on the pernicious influence of his second wife Miriam Noel: (Minneapolis, 26 November 1926) "...this vicious 'wife'--so-called--declares it her intention to show us all up--as at each others throats, quarrelling, vicious, a truly disreputable family...during the years that I was taking care of her, she would urge me to write you about divorce, I would do so employing some harsh language which I would of course regret. I would write sometimes in a bitter spirit and discard the letter, ashamed to send it. It seems that she would keep such letters or copy them intending even then...to blackmail me...she was cleverly undermining me with the children always...It is too late to mend the horrible waste of those years... Had I the companion I now have ten years ago we might have all had a compensation for the griefs of the misfortune that was ours. For Olgivanna is good. Just as Miriam was bad...".
After Catherine's marriage to Kenneth Baxter (the collection includes a response from Wright to Baxter's request for his daughter's hand, Tokyo, 18 Jan. 1919), Wright's letters to his daughter and son-in-law grow considerably milder in tone. On 7 February 1921 he wrote from Tokyo, thanking them for their New Year's telegram: "...It was a rather lonely Christmas and New Years this year...The work here [on the Imperial Hotel] is progressing rapidly--a great building it is going to be...I am sorry to see and hear so much about Japan's hostility to America and Americans because it is all false. It is Hearst propaganda or English propaganda--Perhaps both...My work is very hard--intense concentration and immense responsibility--I would like to rest at Taliesin more than I have done these five years past.--Especially has this past year been strenuous with the Los Angeles work [Hollyhock House, commissioned by the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall] coming in on the New Imperial work...We seem no nearer 'peace' in [the] old world...than when we were at war--ugly peace is worse than open war--but I am an architect--not a statesman. I wish we had a statesman or two just now, in any country anywhere...".
Taliesin, 17 March 1954, to Ken Baxter: "Your Bronfman Brothers could knock off a million dollars worth of advertising right now by putting up a sign on their vacant lot on Park Avenue. 'Tallest building in the world will be built on this site for Seagrams (or whatever) by Frank Lloyd Wright'. This is to be followed up by presentable sketches of the project--price only one hundred thousand dollars, payable ten thousand per month after delivery of sketches". (22)