My last name is Warner, but it should be Fiske. At the close of the 19th century my great-grandmother divorced Mr. Fiske. She kept custody of my grandfather but not his brother, who remained with his father. Perhaps ten years later, after my great-grandmother remarried, my grandfather, then a young man in college, agreed to change his last name to Warner to match the name of his stepfather. That is how the Fiskes turned into Warners.
I often wonder what caused the divorce, how it came to be approved by a court at that time, and what impact the divorce had on her, on my grandfather and his brother, and within their larger family and communities.
Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan, gave me fresh appreciation for the family and societal conflict that surrounded divorce around that time. This is a work of historical fiction, imagining and filling in the details of the story Frank Lloyd Wright's extra-marital relationship with Mamah Borthwick.
The book charts the course of their relationship, a chilling and sad tale. At the start, around 1905, Frank and Mamah are each married with several children each. They meet when Wright builds a house for Mamah and her husband. They fall in love and in 1909, after a few years of sneaking around, they leave Chicago to live in Europe together, leaving their children behind in Chicago. Frank does not divorce his wife at this time, periodically returning to Chicago to see his family, but Mamah divorces. After the divorce her unmarried sister and her husband raise her children and she has some, but little contact with them. After some years in Europe the couple returns to Wisconsin, where Wright's extended family lives, and Wright designs and builds the Taliesin estate for them to live in. In 1914 a cook working at Taliesin sets fire to the residence, murdering Mamah, her two visiting children, and five others.
In imagining the life that Mamah lived, the author sketches a woman who is intelligent and creative in her own right, but gives up all she has, her work, her community and her family, to love the great architectural genius. This is the central theme of the book, and the author notes the irony of it:
"If you saw one of his houses," Mamah tells her best friend,"you wouldn't laugh when he talks about the hearth as some kind of altar to the family. It's the heart of the house."
"It's the heart of his dilemma," mutters Mamah's friend. "The man's values have flown right out of his abstract windows." (p. 66)
When Mamah tells her husband she wants a divorce he says, "You can take them (on a trip) with you...(b)ut don't think for a minute you could ever get custody of them." (p. 54)
If Mamah Borthwick had had the same access, as a woman, to the opportunities that Frank Lloyd Wright had, would she have given up everything she had to pursue the love affair? Would she have needed the relationship with Wright? Who is accountable for the emotional harm that befell the children who were left behind - their parents, for choosing to start new relationships, or society and the legal system, for forcing them to leave children behind?
I had heard the climactic tale of this book, the story of the murder/arson of Taliesin, long before I picked up the book this summer. It was a pleasure to hear it again from the perspective of Mamah Borthwick. The typical telling in Art History classes describes the horror and agony that Frank Lloyd Wright must have felt as he rushed back on the train from Chicago to Taliesin, hearing more news at each stop about the burning of his architectural masterpiece and the growing body count. I appreciate Nancy Horan's effort to shift the point of view away from the famous man, to the woman who perished.
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