The Ionian Mission

Patrick O'Brian

On

deck Gill, the officer of the watch, had everything well in

hand: in the cabin below Killick had arranged cushions in

the Oriental manner under Professor Graham’s direction,

and had lit the hubblebubble laid in for the purpose at

Valetta — tobacco-smoke rose from the cabin-skylight, and

the afterguard breathed it in greedily.

The caique upset all natural calculations by suddenly

darting round to the larboard mainchains at the last

moment; but the Navy, accustomed to the wild vagaries

of foreigners, dealt with the situation directly, facing about

and providing a mirror-image of the proper ceremonies,

bringing the old gentleman aboard without a feather of

the splendid aigrette in his turban being ruffled.

He was led to the cabin, where Jack welcomed him,

Graham acting as the interpreter: his only function was

to invite Captain Aubrey to dine with the Bey, and to

apologize for the lateness of the invitation — the Bey

had been hunting in the marshes and the news of the

frigate’s arrival had not reached him for a great while:

he was desolated; he lay in ashes.

‘What was the Bey hunting?’ asked Jack, who was

interested in these things and who in any case felt that

some polite conversation might compensate for Killick’s

lukewarm version of sherbet and the plain Navy twist in

the hubblebubble, neither of which seemed quite to the

company’s taste.

‘Jews,’ said Graham, relaying the question and the

answer.

Impressionism and

From Explosive Acts:
The younger crowd went to Tanguy’s little shop, then at 14 rue
Clauzel, not least because the kindly old Breton was willing to exchange
colours and brushes for paintings no matter how wild and unsellable they
might prove. His generosity was especially needed in the early years follow-
ing the upheaval, when the official art world, taking its tone from a highly
conservative government, closed its doors more firmly than before against
any form of experiment or deviation from the established ethos set down by
the Académie and the Salon, once again pre—eminent as the guardians of
approved culture. The problem for these defenders of the status quo was the
age-old allure of the new and the irrepressible desire of the young to contra-
dict their elders.
All over Paris, in schools and studios, art students bored with the daily
grind of learning the academic disciplines, gossiped and joked and passed on
news of the outrageous things that were being done by artists who were
openly in defiance of the rules. The best known of these outrageous icono-
clasts were called Impressionists, a name which seemed to say it all, sug-
gesting something intriguingly unclear and ambiguous where the great
history painters were solid, bold and straightforward. No wonder the word
itself was enough to evoke ideas of mystery and romance in those who had
 never seen any of their works. Even Henri, safely immurged so Adéle hoped,
 Princeteau°s studio, heard the whispers and longed to know more about
these painters who were said to daub pigment like children and who made
their canvases so bright they hurt the eyes.
Things had moved on from the days when Monet had been content to
work alongside Courbet, admiring the older man's instinctive attempts to
lighten his palette. Since then the technique had become far more self-
conscious with Monet and a group of like-minded friends studying the work
of optical scientists like Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood in an attempt to
understand the fundamental laws that govern colour and light. What Monet
and his friends discovered were often practices they had been edging towards
while painting outside, direct from nature, but which were now reinforced
and carried out to a more confident degree. The scientists showed how
colours tend to tinge the space around them, which to Monet and his friends
meant that shadows should cease to be nothing more than dark patches and
Jshould reflect colour from the surrounding areas. The resulting brightness
was further enhanced by the use of complementary colours — red and green,
blue. and orange — side by side, which made the canvas shimmer, and this
brilliance was further enhanced by the technique of ‘optical mixing’ where-
by short dabs of pure colour were set down beside each other so that at a
distance they appeared to combine, yet without the lifelessness that often
resulted when the pigment was mixed on the palette before being spread on
 a canvas. Taken a stage further, allowing some of the white underpainting
appear between the dabs of pure colour and the result was, in the vocab-
ulary of the time, ‘luminous’, especially when set against the heavy, deliber-
ately sombre canvases approved by the Salon. Indeed that was the problem- 
the Salon was having none of it, rejecting automatically any of these
impertinent sunny canvases that were not only glaringly bright but which
dared to depict scenes of ordinary life such as people having picnics or boat-
ing on the Seine.
Yet despite this implacabe opposition, by the time Henri began his stud-
ies, there was hardly an art student in the city who was not aware that the
new school existed. Even Princeteau must have learned about them as far
back as 1874 when Monet and his colleagues decided to organise their own
exhibition in what had been the studios of the photographer Nadar on the 
Boulevard de Capucines. It ran for a month, from 15 April to 15 May 1874.
Thirty artists took part, lesser names clustered round the central group of the
movement that the exhibition gave birth to: Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste
Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Auguste Renoir and his brother
Edmond seem to have done most of the hard work. Auguste chose a back-
ground of reddish—brown wallpaper and organised the hanging while
Edmond dealt with the catalogue, doing his best to persuade the participants
to buck up the affair by choosing more exciting titles. Monet was the least
helpful in this regard, tediously dubbing his canvases exactly what they
were, a railway station or a street name. Under Edmondls influence he
renamed a hazy river view, painted near Le I-lavre in 1872, Impression:
Sunrise and when an irate critic seized on this passing invention and
launched an attack on these mere ‘Impressionists’, what had been a loose
gathering of young painters coalesced into a group.
Five further exhibitions were held by the new Impressionists up to 1881,
the year after I-Ienri’s studies began, and while there is no record that he
attended the last show, it is hard to believe that he could have avoided all
knowledge of it. Though some of the more diehard critics continued to rant
about this impertinent new art, a surprising number had already been won
over and while the great names of the Académie fought a tough rearguard
action to ban such stuff from their studios, it was not long before hints of the
Impressionist technique, the short little dabs of pure bright colour, were
spreading across the canvases of the capital’s art students at a speed that was
clearly unstoppable.
Today, we tend to assume that something so radical and so rapid must
have shocked everyone but what the Impressionists were doing only seems
so revolutionary if their small, light, bright scenes of people dancing and
boating are placed beside the great dark ponderous episodes from ancient
Greece, Imperial Rome and the Courts of the Middle Ages that dominated
the Salon. If one moves away from that David and Goliath contest, compar-
ing the new art to other sorts of work that was also painted from direct con-
tact with nature, the shock is far less brutal. Monet and his band were only
one of several groups that had branched out from the line that links Vernet,
Céricault, Delacroix and Courbet, and however and whenever Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec first came across the new school it would be safe to assume
that it would hardly have horrified him. Accustomed as he was to Princeteau
and those like him, whose studies of animals were done from the motif with
quick sharp brush-strokes and a notable lack of Academic ‘finish’, neither
the Impressionists’ open—air practice nor their tiny strokes of colour would
have seemed especially unusual. Discovering this new school was less likely
to have radicalised Henri°s technique than to have simply confirmed what
was already standard practice. To the question Was Toulouse-Lautrec an
Impressionist, the answer has to be no, though his style was certainly impres-
sionistic, which is not quite the same thing.
Even the subjects normally chosen by the Impressionists would not have
seemed strange to Henri. Following Manet, the Impressionists had taken up
Baudelaire’s challenge to be painters of modern life, but their depictions of
the pleasures of the rising urban bourgeoisie, the dances and picnics and the
bustling boulevards and busy railway termini that were central to their lives,
was hardly very radical. Monet may have worked alongside Courbet in
Normandy but his subsequent art reflects little of the older man’s political
concerns. None of the Impressionists joined Courbet when the Commune was
declared and far from being as offensively revolutionary as their first critics
claimed, scenes like their Sunday-afternoon boating parties, hazy under the
sun-dappled surface of their canvases, only create the illusion that life under
the new Republic was very pleasant indeed. Even Pissarro, who held gen-
uinely radical political views, only later expressed them in his art, and while
l\./Ionet and Renoir might express radical opinions, as most artists did at the
time, such things were not allowed to seep into their paintings. Theirs is a
dreamy, unblemished view of fin-de-siécle life that found its sweetest expres-
sion in the work Renoir was doing in the 18'/Os when he lived in
Montinartre, work that shows not a hint of the political sentiments that are
usually associated with the home of the Commune and the heartland of rev-
olutionary theory.
Far from sympathising with Courbet's activities during the siege, Renoir
did everything possible to avoid joining in. Finding himself trapped in Paris
when the Commune was declared and threatened with compulsory enlist-
ment in its defence forces, Renoir persuaded an old friend, who had been ele-
vated to police commissioner under the new regime, to issue him yvith a pass
that would get him through the lines and out ‘to his mother s house in
Louve where he spent the rest of the conflict painting the surround-
mg countryside as if nothing were happening. ‘They were madmen,’ he said
somewhat ruefully, ‘but they had about them the little flame that never dies.’
With peace restored Renoir and his wife to moved into the outskirts of Montmartre
where they stayed for over forty years — at one point with a studio in the
Batueau Lavoir, the disused laundry where Picasso would later work.
Every weekend Renoir would climb to the summit of the Butte where
one of the surviving windmills, the Moulin de la Galette, still stood. Far from
milling flour for the little flat cakes after which it was named, the windmill
and the area around it had long been transf ormed into a ginguette, an open_
air bar which in turn had evolved into a large dance area, outside under the trees.

Maugham and Walpole

The queen of
the metropolitan literati is the influential Mrs. Trafford, wife of an
exquisitely scholarly civil servant; she is regarded with deference, in
particular for her close friendship with a very famous writer indeed,
whose letters to her after his demise Mrs. Trafford had graciously al-
lowed to be published, her husband following up with an elegant bi-
ography, “in which he showed quite definitely how great a part of
the writer’s genius was due to his wife’s influence.” The originals
of the Barton Traffords were a prominent pair, the Sidney Colvins,
he the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, she an
intimate friend of Robert Louis Stevenson; as in the novel, after
Stevenson’s death Colvin produced an edition of his letters, and in
such manner as to shed the most flattering light upon his wife.
The Colvins, together with Gosse, Hare, and Lady St. Helier,
were all leading members of the cultural establishment and, as such,
tempting targets for the irreverent streak in Maugham’s nature. And
yet his treatment of them is positively benign compared to that
meted out to a fellow writer, his old friend Hugh Walpole. By 1930
Walpole, too, was a member of the literary elite, the self-appointed
“viceroy of the literary world.” He was the author of numerous
popular novels, chairman of the Book Society, an indefatigable lec-
turer in Britain and the United States, busy on numerous boards and
committees, a devoted friend to the famous (who, however, quickly
found themselves dropped if their reputations declined), and above
all was an assiduous promoter of his own career. Over time
Maugham had grown quite fond of old Hugh, while at the same
time regarding him as eminently ridiculous. In recent years, how-
ever, the ruthlessness of Walpole’s self-promotion, coupled with a
lack of generosity—“he was mean as cat’s meat,” said Maugham——
had begun to repel him. Hugh, it seems, had behaved badly to a cou-
ple of good friends of Maugham’s, Gerald Kelly being one; he had
also, in the course of a recent and prestigious Cambridge lecture,
omitted Maugham’s name from a list of well-regarded contempo-
rary novelists; and yet in none of these instances does the offense
seem sufficient to inspire such a deadly attack: there must surely
have been something more at the bottom of it. A clue may lie in a
brief reference to the subject by the thriller writer Eric Ambler de-
scribing 3 dinner Party given by the publisher A. S. Frere in Albany.
Maugham was present,‘ as were Noel Coward and J. B. Priestley. In
the course of the evening somebody mentioned Walpole_ “I knew
Hugh Walpole for a great many years,” said Maugham,
“I can ten You from my own knowledge that he behaved dis-
gracefully to several talented young writers, one of whom I
knew personally. Hugh Walpole ruined his life.”
He glowered at us. His meaning was plain. We all knew
perfectly well that what he was really talking about was not a
talented writer but a stolen boyfriend, an unrequited love and
an old canker of jealousy. . . .
Maugham’s depiction of Walpole as the self-serving Alroy Kear
hearty, humorless, and vain, is devastatingly true to life. “I had a
considerable affection for Roy, Ashenden begins innocently
enough before going on to describe with relish the man in all his
glorious fatuity:
Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a
fellow novelist whose name was on everybody's lips, but no one
could more genially turn a cold shoulder on him when idleness,
failure, or someone else’s success had cast a shade on his notori-
ety. . . . I could think of no one among my Contemporaries
who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.
Like Walpole, Alroy Kear is desperate to be liked, anxious to be a
riend to all the world so that nothing will threaten his standing as a
good fellow. When he describes the important biography he Plans
about Driffield, Ashenden can see all too clearly the sort of oleagi-
nous hagiography it will turn out to be. “I’ll tell you the sort of
book I want to write,” says Roy,
a sort of intimate life, with a lot of those little details that make
people feel warm inside, you know, and then woven in with
this a really exhaustive criticism of his literary work, not pon-
derous, of course, but although sympathetic, searching. . . .
Would it not be more interesting to draw the man warts and all?
Ashenden asks.
“Oh, I couldn’t . . . I must behave like a gentleman.”
“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”1
“I don’t see why. . . . Of course I don’t deny that if I were
thoroughly unscrupulous I could make a sensation [but]
they’d only say I was imitating Lytton Strachey. No. I think I
shall do much better to be allusive and charming and rather
subtle, you know the sort of thing, and tender.”
About Alroy Kear’s private life Ashenden is comparatively discreet,
although there was a great deal more he could have said, as Walpole
was as boastful about his sexual conquests as about everything else.
After a vigorously active young manhood, Hugh in middle age had
contentedly settled down with a married policeman; in the past,
however, Maugham had had to listen to a great deal about Hugh’s
affairs, in particular about his frustrating passion for the famous,
and very handsome, Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior, an episode
obliquely referred to in the novel thus:
[Alroy Kear’s] views on marriage were abstract, for he had
successfully evaded the state which so many artists have found
difficult to reconcile with the arduous pursuit of their calling.
It was generally known that he had for some years cherished a
hopeless passion for a married woman of rank, and though he
never spoke of her but with chivalrous admiration, it was un-
derstood that she had treated him with harshness.
To readers who had no personal acquaintance with Hugh Walpole
this would have meant very little, but to Hugh himself it was an
outrageous betrayal of confidence, proof positive of the deliberate
nature of Maugham’s calumny.
Cakes and Ale, ranked by Maugham as his favorite among his
novels, was published by Heinemann on September 29, 1930, and
four days later by Doubleday, Doran in New York. A new novel by
Somerset Maugham was naturally a noteworthy event; no Qne
however, could have foreseen the brouhaha that broke out among,
the cognoscenti over the caricature of Walpole as Alroy Kear de-
scribed by one commentator as “one of the most memorable liter-
ary dissections since Dickens’s treatment of Leigh Hunt as Mr,
Skimpole in Bleak House.” Hugh himself, completely unaware, had
received an advance copy a few days before publication. On Sep-
tember 25, he had come back in the morning in a very happy mood
from a visit to Cambridge, attended a meeting of the Book Society
then dined with a friend with whom he had gone to the theater
Returning home after midnight, he had started to undress when he
caught sight of Maugham’s book on his bedside table. Sitting on the
edge of his bed in his pajamas he idly picked it up and began to 1~ead_
“Read on with increasing horror,” he recorded in his diary. “Un-
mistakeable portrait of myself. Never slept!” At 4:00 A.M., by now
in a frenzy, he telephoned Maugham’s publisher, A. S. Frere, im-
ploring him to stop publication, which Frere told him he was un-
able to do; “I can’t see any resemblance to you in any of @116
characters, he assured him. Walpole spent all the next day, “dread-
fully upset,” calling on his friends, desperate to know what was
being said. Most did their best to persuade him he was imagining it,
while others swore that Maugham was already strenuously denying
the rumor. “But how can he,” wailed Hugh, “when there am in one
conversation the very accents of my voice? . . . He has used so
many little friendly things and twisted them round.”
Having exposed his wounds so publicly, Walpole had to Suffer
the further torment of knowing that everyone was talking about it,
shat therfi was much gloating, by friend and enemy alike, Over his
istress. [Cakes and Ale] contains a most envenomed portrait of
Hugh Walpole, who is out of his mind with agitation and horror,”
WrOte“Lytton Strachey to his sister, Dorothy Bussy, adding delight-
filly, It 1s a very amusing book”; E. M. Forster in a letter to
augham himself admitted “your laudable fiendishness fascinates
me more than I can say”; Eddie Marsh gleefully observed, “I hear
poor Hugh says it has finished him”; Logan Pearsall Smith, in a
wickedly apt metaphor, described the novel as “the red-hot poker
that killed Hugh Walpole,”* while Arnold Bennett made matters
even worse by insisting the portrait was not malicious at all but
“thoroughly just, accurate and benevolent.” The general view was
that that ass Walpole had had it coming——he “cried aloud to be cari-
catured,” said Beverley Nichols- and few blamed Maugham for
succumbing to temptation. In the words of the philosopher Isaiah
Berlin, “I can see why Maugham, why any sharp toothed person,
could not resist the temptation of getting his teeth into flesh so pink
8c innocent, so obviously made for cannibals.”
During October, numbers of reviews appeared on both sides of
the Atlantic, most of them adulatory, even if several critics claimed
to be taken aback by the author’s blatant subjectivity. “No English
writer is more transparently, more unblushingly autobiographic
than Somerset Maugham,” wrote Leslie A. Marchand in The New
York Times. In The Graphic, Evelyn Waugh (whose Vile Bodies ap-
peared the same year) praised Maugham for his “supreme adroitness
and ease. . . . I do not know of any living writer who seems to have
his work so much under control . . . he is a master for creating the
appetite for information, of withholding it until the right moment,
and then providing it surprisingly.” As time passed, admiration for
the novel continued to grow. Desmond MacCarthy, writing in
1934, called Cakes and Ale “a model of construction,” while in the
second half of the century Gore Vidal described it as a “perfect
novel” and Anthony Burgess called it simply “superb.”
In print no reviewer was so tactless as to notice any possible simi-
larity between Hugh Walpole and Alroy Kear; nearly everyone,
however, remarked, mostly with disapproval, on the strong resem-
blance between Driffield and Hardy. Disgracefully, Ashenden in the
novel shows little admiration for Drifiield’s oeuvre, which shows
some striking similarities with that of Hardy. “[Driffield] gave you
* In Marlowe’s play Edward II, the homosexual monarch is famously put to death
impaled on a red-hot spit.
the impression of Writing with the stub of a blunt pencil,” says
Ashenden. “[My] heart sank when he led me into the forecastle of a
sailing ship or the taproom of a public-house, and I knew I was in
for half a dozen pages in dialect of facetious comment on life, ethics,
and irnmortality.” Such unreverent opinion was considered an out-
rage, and TRAMPLING ON THOMAS HARDY,S GRAVE, HITTING BELOW
THE SHROUD, and GRAVE PROFANED BY LITERARY GHOUL were typical
of some of the headlines in the press. When Walpole finally got up
the courage to write to Maugham, complaining of the cruel treat-
ment he had received at his old friend’s hands, Maugham Was able to
use Hardy as a decoy. “I am really very unlucky,” his letter began.
As you may have seen I have been attacked in the papers because
they think my old man is intended to be a portrait of Hardy. It
is absurd. The only grounds are that both died old, received the
O.M. 86 were married twice. You know that for my story I
needed this 86 that there is nothing of Hardy in my character.
Now I have your letter. I cannot say I was surprised to receive it
because I had heard from Charlie Evans [at Heinemann] . . . it
had never occurred to him that there was any resemblance be-
tween the Alroy Kear of my novel & you; and when he spoke to
me about it I was able very honestly to assure him that nothing
had been further from my thoughts than to describe you. . . .
. . . Alroy Kear . . . is made up of a dozen people and the
greater part of him is myself. There is more of me in him than
of any Writer I know. I suggest that if there is anything in him
that you recognise it is because to a great or less extent We are
all the same. . . .
In his reply to this deeply disingenuous explanation,* Walpole
wrote that of course he accepted Maugham’s word on the matter;
* “Hugh was a ridiculous creature and I certainly had him in mind when I Wrote
Cakes and Ale, ” Maugham admitted in a letter written to Myrick Land in 1961, long
after Walpole s death. And in a preface to the 1950 edition of Cakes and Ale (Random
House), he states, “It was true that I had had Hugh Walpole in mind when I devised
the character to whom I gave the name of Alroy Kear.”
although in truth he did nothing of the sort. He continued to ago-
nize over the subject, rehearsing it again and again to anyone Who
would listen. The following month he went to tea with Virginia
Woolf, who described Hugh in her diary as “piteous, writhing &
wincing & ridiculous.” “Indeed it was a clever piece of torture,”
she Wrote of his “flaying alive” in Cakes and Ale:
Hugh palpably exposed as the hypocritical booming thick
skinned popular novelist . . . Who is thick fingered & insensi-
tive in every department. But said Hugh, turning round on his
bed of thorns again & yet again, & pressing them further &;
further in, “That’s not what I mind so much. What I mind are
a few little things—little things that Willie & I had together—
only he and I knew——those he has put into print. That’s What
I cant get over. . . . And he wrote to me & said he could not
believe that I could be hurt. He said he had written without a
thought of me. But that letter is almost worse than the book.”

Maugham and James

From New York Maugham went for a few days to Boston,
where he dined with Henry James, then staying with his recently
widowed sister—in-law in Cambridge. Maugham had met James on a
couple of occasions in London and had been intrigued by him, if
slightly irritated by the atmosphere of “cher maftre” that surrounded
him, by the great man’s expectation of reverence and homage.
Maugham’s attitude to James’s work over the years was to grow in-
creasingly equivocal, a mixture of impatience and admiration, im-
patience with what he saw as a lack of that empathy essential to a
novelist and admiration for a superb technique. “The great novel-
ists, even in seclusion, have lived life passionately,” Maugham
wrote. “Henry James was content to observe it from a window.”
Nonetheless he found James good company, witty when in the
mood, and he was pleased to see him again, enjoying the intimate
evening ti trois, although it was obvious that James on this occasion
was in a nervous and unhappy frame of mind: grieving over the
death of his brother, William, he was also pining to return to En-
gland, restless and ill at ease in the land of his birth. As Maugham
prepared to leave, James insisted on accompanying him to the cor-
ner where he would catch the streetcar back to Boston.
I protested that I was perfectly capable of getting there by my-
self, but he would not hear of it, not only on account of the
kindness and the great courtesy which Were natural to him,
but also because America seemed to him a strange and terrify-
ing labyrinth in which without his guidance I was bound to
get hopelessly lost. . . . The street-car hove in sight and Henry
]ames was seized with agitation. He began waving frantically
when it was still a quarter of a mile away. He was afraid it
wouldn’t stop, and he besought me to jump on with the great-
est agility of which I was capable. . . . I was so infected by his
anxiety that when the car pulled up and I leapt on, I had al-
most the sensation that I had had a miraculous escape from
certain death. I saw him standing on his short legs in the mid-
dle of the road, looking after the car, and I felt that he Was
trembling still at my narrow shave.

From The Victorian Internet

On an April day in 1746 at the grand con-
vent of the Carthusians in Paris, about two
hundred monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking
line. Each monk held one end of a twenty—f1ve—foot iron
wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbor on ei-
ther side. Together, the monks and their connecting wires
formed a line over a mile long.
Once the line was complete, the abbé ]ean—Antoine
Nollet, a noted French scientist, took a primitive electrical
battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of
monks—giving all of them a powerful electric shock.
Nollet did not go around zapping monks with static
electricity for fun; his experiment had a serious scientific
objective. Like many scientists of the time, he was measur-
ing the properties of electricity to find out how far it could
be transmitted along wires and how fast it traveled. The
simultaneous exclamations and contortions of a mile—long
line of monks revealed that electricity could be transmit-
ted over a great distance; and as far as N ollet could tell, it
covered that distance instantly.
This was a big deal.
It suggested that in theory, it ought to be possible to
harness electricity to build a signaling device capable of
sending messages over great distances incomparably faster
than a human messenger could carry them.
At the time, sending a message to someone a hundred
miles away took the best part of a day—the time it took a
messenger traveling on horseback to cover the distance.
This unavoidable delay had remained constant for thou-
sands of years; it was as much a fact of life for George
Washington as it was for Henry VIII, Charlemagne, and
Iulius Caesar.
As a result, the pace of life was slow. Rulers dis-
patched armies to distant lands and waited months for
news of victory or defeat; ships sailed over the horizon on
epic voyages, and those on board were not seen or heard
from again for years. News of an event spread outward in
a slowly growing circle, like a ripple in a pond, whose edge
moved no faster than a galloping horse or a swift—sailing
ship.
To transmit information any more quickly, something
that moved faster than a horse or a ship was clearly re-
quired. Sound, which travels at a speed of about twelve
miles per minute, is one means of speedier communica-
tion. lf a church bell strikes one olclock, a monk standing
in a field half a mile away knows what time it is about
two seconds later. A horse—borne messenger, in contrast,
setting out from the church precisely on the hour to de—
liver the message "It is one o’clock,” would take a couple
of minutes to cover the same distance.
Light also offers an expeditious way to communicate.
If the monk has keen eyesight and the air is clear, he may
be able to make out the hands of the church clock. And
since light (which travels at nearly 200,000 miles per sec-
ond) covers short distances almost instantly, the informa-
tion that it is a particular time of day effectively travels
from the clock face to the monk in what seems to be no
time at all.
Now experiments by Nollet and others showed that
electricity also seemed capable of traveling great distances
instantaneously. Unlike light, electricity could be trans-
mitted along wires and around corners; a line of sight
from one place to another was not needed. This meant that
if an electric shock was administered at one o’clock via a
half—mile—long wire running from the church to a distant
monk, he would know exactly what time it was, even if he
was underground or indoors or otherwise out of sight of
the clock tower. Electricity held out the promise of high-speed signaling.

From 'Tilt'

Galileo was by then aged, infirm, nearly totally blind and
living the interior exile imposed by the Inquisition in 1633
for being “vehemently suspected of heresy.’.’* The master
was still lucid, however, and desperately in need of a
secretary-scribe. Recognizing this, his inquisitors lifted the
str-ict seclusion to which he had been sentenced in order to
admit Viviani. For three years, Galileo rambled and
recited as Viviani furiously took down everything—corre-
spondence, dialogues, mathematical problems, physical
theories, discourses, and, all the while, the recollections of a
long life marked by equal measures of triumph and humil-
iation.
By all accounts, Viviani was as exemplary and devoted a
disciple as any master could hope to find, and not just dur-
ing those few years by Galileo’s side. For although Viviani
would go -on to achieve considerable fame in his own right,
becoming court mathematician to the grand duke of Tus-
cany and publishing a good many competent, if less than
pioneering, works on geometry, throughout his life he
dedicated much of his energies to vindicating his mentor’s
name and propagating Galilean scientific theories. It was
Viviani who edited the first collection of Galileo’s works
and wrote the first biography of the astronomer, mathe-
matician, and physicist, the Vita di Galileo, which became
(Galileo-was condemned of heresy in I633 by the tribunal of the Inqui-
sition in the basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. The
charge arose from Galileo’s defense of the Copernican theory of the
solar system which he published in The Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems, Florence, 1632.)
something of a best-seller throughout Europe. Moreover,
Viviani was the driving force behind Leopold de’ Medici’s
establishment of the Accademia del Cimento, a scientific
institution dedicated to experimenting with the theories of
the late, great master, in Florence in 1657. The ever-
grateful Viviani even left money in his will for the con-
struction of a sepulchral monument to Galileo in
Florence’s church of Santa Croce, to place Galileo along-
side Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Leonardo Bruni. And
finally, and not least significantly, it was Vincenzo Viviani
who first placed Galileo atop the Tower of Pisa, a place
where he would remain more or less fixed, at least in the
collective Western imagination, for centuries to come-
this despite the fact that in none of Galileo’s writings, nor
any, of his personal correspondence, is the Pisan carnpanile
mentioned, never mind anything about conducting a single
experiment from its heights. Nor, for that matter, did any‘
of the other “teachers and philosophers, and the whole
assembly of students” from the university of Pisa whom
Viviani places there have anything at all to say on the mat-
ter. Perhaps the only plausible explanation for such
resounding silence aboutGalileo’s groundbreaking, and
quite public, scientific discovery at the tower-—here, after
all, was a lone genius‘ shattering an Aristotelian dictum
honored for millennia, all before a veritable throng, and,
what’s more, “with repeated experiments”——is that the
events, quite simply, never took place. In all likelihood, the
timeworn and assiduously reported image of Galileo drop-
ping objects from the summit of the Tower is the stuff of pure myth.

Byron and Shelley and Pisa

From "Tilt" a history of the Tower of Pisa:
Romanticism has been called, among other things, the
cult of the extinct,” and the romantics were never better
occupied than when scrambling about ancient ruins. The
remains of Rome, Greece, and Etruria evoked images of
some prelapsarian,'heroic age that the poets and artists
were eager to resurrect.* Granted, Pisa wasn’t Rome, but
there were ruins enough to help to conjure up the glorles
of the past and inspire sublime reverie. The monuments in
the Campo dei Miracoli were already centuries old and
thus sufficiently hoary to arouse the curiosity of the Pisa
Circle. Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron especially
were fond of visiting the Camposanto to examine
Oreagna’s Triumph of Death; they admired Nicola and Gio-
vanni Pisano’s pulpits in the baptistery and the duomo; and
they gazed in wonder at the tower, which, at latest count,
leaned twelve feet, six and a quarter inches askew. “Pisa
with its hanging tower and Sophia-like dome remind me,”
said Byron, “of an eastern place.” ,
The romantic vision of the Tower of Pisa couldn’t have
differed more profoundly from that of more scientifically
inclined men like Edward Cresy and George Taylor. If, as
one would suspect, the English architects had lamented the
campanile’s slanted state -in the name of the classical ideals
of order and symmetry, it was precisely the anomaly of the
tower’s tilt that the romantics embraced. That the cam-
panile was singular, wondrous, irregular, brimming with
pathos, and suggestive of “an eastern place” was, to the
romantic sensibility, at least, cause for admiration and cele-
bration. Indeed, one of romanticism’s greatest contribu-
tions to aesthetics was its ethos that discovered beauty in
unconventional places like a storm-tossed sea, a desolate
heath, a ruin, or a crooked tower.
For all of their impact, however,_the romantics’ stay in
Pisa was actually quite short. On Iuly 8, I822, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Edward Williams boarded the less-than-
seaworthy Don ]uan and set sail across the Gulf of Spezia.
Edward Trelawny was there to see them off, along with a
Genoese sailor who, as the boat slipped away, is said to
have commented, “Look at those black lines and the dirty
rags hanging on them out of the sky——they are a warning;
look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mis-
chief.” They were the last ones to see Shelley and Williams
alive. The poet’s body was washed ashore ten days later,
Williams’s soon followed. In a highly charged rite that no
doubt would have pleased the poet, Lord Byron had the
bodies cremated on the beach at Viareggio, north of Pisa.
“We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams
on the seashore,” he wrote to Margaret Iane King Moore,
another member of the Pisa Circle. “You can have no idea
what an extraordinary effect‘ such a funeral pile has, on a
desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the
sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frank-
incense gave to the flame.”
Not surprisingly, the Pisa Circle soon broke up. Byron,
Teresa Gamba, Mary Shelley, and Leigh Hunt and his
family all moved on to Genoa, while _Pisa reverted to its
somnolent self. The legacy of the romantics, however, lin-
gered on, and not just in the works composed by the
Circle while there. Thanks in large part to these works_—
including much of Byron’s Don ]uan (cantos six through
ten, at least); “Adonais,” Percy Shelley’s elegy on the death
of Keats; and Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga: Or t/are Lzfe
and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca-and the
posthumous fame of both Shelley and Byron (the latter
died just two years after Shelley, fighting for Greek inde-
pendence from the Ottoman empire), Pisa became a de
rigueur stop on a romantic pilgrimage trail. Soon a steady
stream of travelers, poets, students, and nonconformists of
every stripe turned up to pay homage at the haunts where
the Pisa Circle had lived and played in their Paradise of
Exiles. One such pilgrim-traveler was the French poet and _
novelist Louise Colet, whose diary of her stay at Pisa pro- -
vides an intimate glimpse of life in the town in the mid-
nineteenth-century. A passage on her visit to the Tower of
Pisa is particularly revealing, saying much about the evo-
lution of the tower and the shifting sentiments of
observers toward it:
I was anxious to climb this famous leaning tower’
that now stoodbefore me, graceful and weightless, '
standing out against the blue sky with its; eight cylin-
drical galleries of columns; but when I wanted them
to open the door to let me up, difficulties began. No
less than three people at a time are allowed up, I’m
told, since two travellers (likely lovers) jumped over
the rail at the top of the tower tocommit suicide.
I call to my cab-driver and look for a third person _
in the deserted square, but to no avail. While I
debate with the intransigent keeper, a cab arrives
delivering a visitor; the man joins us, and at ‘length
we are allowed up. The tower is 184 ft. tall, and
completely sheathed in marble; the foot slips on the
smooth stone; giddiness overcomes one as you
progress between these open galleries and the eye is
dazzled by the intensity of the light on a summer
day, embracing the vast horizon that stretches out all
around; the body, as if attracted towards the
precipice, staggers through the space between the
columns; I am compelled to lean on the arm‘ of my
accidental companion. i
Once on the platform, an incommensurable
expanse is revealed to our eyes; the blue sea merges
with the sky to the south-west, and in this twofold.
blue the little islands ’ of Gorgona and Caprara v
emerge; further away, the uncertain lines of Corsica
and Elba can be made out; on a closer plane, Liv'orno ~
stands out right by the edge of the waves; following
the coastline you can see the spot where Byron
burned Shelley’s body on the funeral pyre. . . .
I descend reluctantly, despite the queasiness
which the seeming oscillation of the monument pro-
vokes in me. The tower feels unsteady to me, as if it
would drag us along in its fall. It is a known fact that
stretching a rope from its summit to the ground, on
the leaning side, the topwill extend over the base by
over 9 ft. This inclination was used by Galileo in his
experiments on the falling of heavy bodies.
There is a good deal to glean from Colet’s account. On a
tragic note, it seems that travelers (lovers?) were already
turning to the Tower of Pisa asa suitably dramatic setting
from which to leap to their deaths (a sadly persistent tradi-
tion). They were overcome, one presumes, with Zc mal du
siécle, that wholly romantic malady consisting of more or
less equal doses of the jadedness of Byron’s Childe Harold,
the revulsion of Chateaubriand’s René, and the u/eltsc/zmerz
of Goethe’s Werther. As could well be expected in such cir-
cumstances, the Pisan authorities were obliged to restrict
access to the campanile (although it is hard to understand
how the measure of allowing no less than three visitors at a
time would. help to prevent suicides).
*In this regard it is interesting to note that in his memorial portrait of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the painter Joseph Severn tellingly set the Poet in
a landscape replete with ruins. The canvas, entitled Shelley Composzng
“Prometheus Unbound" in the Baths of Caracalla, shows a surprisingly
boyish rebelpoet drawing inspiration from the Roman ruins f0f 1115
dramatic poem on Prometheus’s own revolt against the gods

Moncure Conway and Emerson

After dinner, the two men went for a stroll around
Walden Pond. Conwa found his mentor had reached a fairl
 pragmatic view of religion—a minister, Emerson supposed, was
still moderately useful in the world. Not for saving souls, but “to
 a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at
 meetings, to attend the sick and the dead.” As Conway
mused over the fine points of Divinity School curriculum, Emer-
son cleared away the undergrowth of conversation with one
sentence:"An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly
existent angel."
..............................from Collins' The Trouble With Tom

and finally.....

I can well remember,” the critic Augustine Birrell wrote a
century ago, when an asserted intimacy with the Writings of
Thomas Paine marked a man from his fellows and invested him
 in children’s minds with a horrible fascination. The Writings them-
selves were only seen in bookshops of an evil reputation and when
hastily turned over with furtive glances, proved to be printed in
small type and on villainous paper.”

Fowler's phrenologists

 Fowler and
his brother Lorenzo pounded out books arguing against tight-lacing
in women’s clothes, and for daily bathing. Convinced that the
plasticity of the brain meant that there could be no such thing as
permanent depravity, Orson pestered the head of Sing Sing prison
to turn prisons into reforming institutions, and “declared war on the
gallows” with campaigns against capital punishment; he pointedly
published a magazine titled The Prisoners Friend, and vociferously
argued for the educability of the retarded and insane. And if, he
wondered aloud and loudly, we may all progress in our mental
development, what cause was there any longer for holding back
women? Or blacks?
Reformers flocked to the Fowler & Wells publishing house.
Margaret Fuller became one of Fowler’s authors: so did Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, Horace Greeley, and Susan B. Anthony.
Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, considered her youthful
consultations with Orson’s brother and ‘partner phrenologist Lor-
enzo as nothing short of a conversion (experience: “How can the
value of the results of that month, extending through a lifetime, be
put into words?” Educational titan Horace Mann went so far as to
name his own son after pioneering phrenologist George Combe,
explaining, “I declare myself a hundred times more indebted to
Phrenology than to all the metaphysical works I ever read.” As they
visited the Broadway store, these enthusiasts might have even
noticed one ardently idealistic Fowler employee—well, all of them
were ardent idealists. But this one, John, was especially exercised
over slavery—~“as though his own soul hard been pierced,” Frederick
Douglass marveled after meeting him. He eventually moved to
Kansas, joining a wave of reformist settlers struggling to outnumber
pro-slavery settlers. And it was that quiet and intense Fowler clerk
who, armed with two hundred “Beecher’s Bibles”-rifles financed
by New England reformists—made a disastrous raid upon the
federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
John Brown’s last letter before he was led to the gallows was to
. . . his phrenologist.
If John Brown couldn’t achieve utopia with guns, Orson Fowler
would through books. Fowler readers woke up in the morning and
bathed themselves according to the precepts of Fowler’s Water Cure
Library; after tending to a garden raised from seed packets sold by
Fowler’s Broadway store, they then ate a virtuous breakfast of
porridge and cold water from The Economy of Food: Or, What Shall
We Eat (‘Without exception, both rich and poor in America eat
extravagantly of animal food . . . Every family should eat beans and
peas”); then they could go to the job they’d been phrenologically
directed toward by the Fowler Sc Wells career guide Choice sf
Pursuits, and comport themselves brilliantly thanks to their Fowler
Manual of Business and Guide to Success. After jotting a few business
meeting notes in Fowler shorthand learned from his Phonographic
Teacher, they could go to lunch on food prepared from the Hydro-
 pathic Cooh—Book, perhaps while perusing a volume of poetry or a
novel from Fowler’s press. Then, once their day was done, they
could work out in a Fowler—approved gymnasium, and finally arrive
back home to the gigantic octagonal mansion they had built in
accordance with Fowler’s blueprints in Home for All: Or a New,
Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building.
This last book left Fowler’s most visible legacy. Scattered across
the United States to this day are a motley collection of half-baked
gingerbread Victorians built by Fowler's disciples. They go by local
like the Bandbox, the Inkwell, or—less imaginatively——
the Octagon House. They are the living remnants of a vision that
Fowler as he prepared to build his own family mansion in
upstate New York in the 1840s. “In looking about for some
plan,” he wrote, “I said to myself, ‘Why not take our pattern from
NATURE? Her forms are mostly SPHERICAL . . . What should
we think of a square apple, or right-angled egg?”’ Building a truly
spherical house with all the walls bent like a barrel, he reasoned,
would be beyond the skills of most local carpenters. But an
octagon—why, that should be hardly any trouble at all.
The idea was not a new one: the Founding Fathers whose skulls
Fowler so admired were all well familiar with the form. The ruling
gentry in Thomas Paine’s hometown had their own octagonal
temple, and Thomas Iefferson had built an octagonal house for
his daughter. In fact, Jefferson was so delighted with the result that
he also built her a pair of octagonal outhouses to accompany it. But
Fowler brought a new and nearly religious fervor to octagons. They
allowed more windows and thus were lighter, healthier structures,‘
he insisted—and his readers all knew how essential good health was
to the moral improvement of the world. Fowler imagined cement
and glass houses builtiaround a strange array of new inventions—an
inviting showcase kitchen that formed the center of the house, taps
with running hot and cold water, a central heating system, and most
shocking of all, indoor toilets. “To squeamish maidens and fasti-
dious beaux this point is not submitted,” Fowler snapped, “but
matrons, the aged and the feeble, are asked is not such a closet a real
household necessity and luxury?”
Home for All was a hit: the eight-sided panacea was immediately
demanded by fashionable homebuilders across the country. Henry
Ward Beecher built himself an octagonal house; so did P. T.
Barnum. Clarence Darrow spent his childhood in one. In many
towns, the builders of these homes came from the two intersecting
groups of readers that Fowler’s works had always appealed to:
doctors and ministers. Some of the latter wryly claimed that the
octagonal form was ideal because they couldn’t be cornered by the
devil—and, as was alleged of one minister in upstate New York, “so
he could see the Lord coming from any angle.” Imitators upped the
ante to twelve— and even sixteen-sided houses.
Circulars distributed from Fowler’s store in 1855 announced a
Vegetarian Settlement Company, a joint-stock venture to create an
“Octagon City” in Kansas of four miles square—or rather, almost
square, as it was to be a giant octagon—~in which vegetarian settlers
living on octagon—shaped parcels of land would build octagonal
farmhouses that radiated outward from an octagonal downtown of
octagonal public buildings, culminating in one immense central
octagonal structure and an octagonal public green. Octagon City
was also raising capital to construct “A I-lydropathic Establishment,
an Agricultural College, a Scientific Institute, a Museum of Curi-
osities and Mechanic Arts, and Common Schools”—all octagonal,
of course. It was to be a glorious vision of the progressive future,
with neither slavery, meat, nor alcohol tainting its purity. Checks
poured into 308 Broadway, with prospective settlers committing
anywhere from $50 to $10,000 in funds toward the project.
Right here, along this Manhattan counter—this mahogany
counter that no longer exists, that wind blows through——and filed
in these rolltop desks that our eyes can no longer see, the letters
came each day, excited and hopeful. A blacksmith from Rahway, a
maprnaker from Philadelphia, a printer from Tennessee, and a
whole contingent of farmers from Pontiac, Michigan; envelopes
both scrawled out and finely inscribed by idealistic tradesmen and
farmers rolled in from across the nation. Utopia at last!
What families transported by their Fowler magazine articles into
visions of pure country life among the glorious octagons found at the
end of the trail, though, was not quite what the woodcut illustra-
tions in the Phrenological journal had pictured. Settlers had been
promised working gristmills, fine public buildings, and a veritable
fairyland of Kansan natural beauty. Vl/‘hat they got was mud and
desolation. The splendiferous Central Octagon building proved to
be a windowless mud—plastered cabin of about two hundred square
feet . . . and it was square. The founders had promised tools for every
farmer: settlers found precisely one plow provided for the entire
city. The bewildered vegetarian pioneers contemplated these woes
in wretched lean-tos and huts built of bark, shivering miserably on
their dirt floors, since there were only two stoves for one hundred
settlers. The promoter fled, and his eager and trusting Octagonians
were quickly decimated by malaria and Indian raids. The settle-
ment’s few survivors lacked even the wood to build coffins for their
dead children.
By the following spring, all trace of Octagon City was gone.
Bedraggled Octagonians returning back East found yet more
death and despair. The Panic of 1857 hit Fowler’s business badly,
and he was forced to rent out his own giant octagonal family home
as a boardinghouse. It was not a great success. His newfangled
cement walls had been improperly sealed, with fecal matter from the
house’s cesspool seeping through the walls and into the drinking
water. The tenants of his octagonal palace—-the healthiest building
in America—died in fevered agony, killed off in a horrific plague of
typhoid.

Phrenology and the afterlife

This doctor’s odd notion in Vienna became a national and then inter-
national movement led by Fowler. Practical Phrenology, his distilla-
tion of road lectures and innumerable pamphlets, went through at
least sixty-two printings in the nineteenth century.
There were phrenological children’s books, phrenological alma-
nacs, and a monthly American Phrenological journal, largely written
by Orson himself; you could piously peruse Phrenology and the
Scriptures, or you could examine the heads of your favorite celebrities
in Popular Phrenology. Hundreds of such titles burst forth from the
press of Fowler’s Manhattan shop. You could even study the
phrenology of wild animals in guides copiously illustrated with
grinning cat skulls, hollowed—out sparrow heads, and macerated
monkey mandibles. Indeed, one of Abraham Lincoln’s first employ-
ers, Denton Offutt, was for many years more famous for authoring 'A
New and Complete System of Teaching t/Je Horse on Phrenalogical
Principles' than for mentoring the gangly young manic-depressive
he'd kept in his law office.
*
Beginning in the 1830s, a curious tendency arose in fiction: authors
were expected to introduce their characters with a detailed descrip-
tion of their physical appearance, particularly the shape of their
heads. Rochester of Jane Eyre is granted a noticeably squarish
forehead and “a decisive nose,” while in Moby Dick Melville has
Ishmael declare that Queequeeg “reminded me of General Wash-
ington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same
long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which
were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly
wooded on top.” These were not mere splashes of scene—painting:
such descriptions prefigured the morals and actions of a character.
Oddly, these detailed headscapes of jutting jaws and well-defined
temples can still appear in modern character descriptions, rather like
an ancient coelacanth turning up in a chlorinated swimming pool:
hack authors still use these absurdly detailed cerebral topographies
without the faintest idea of why such a tradition once existed. They
might as well be detailing their characters’ balance of the four
medieval humors while they’re at it. Today it is household objects-
brand names- t/aingr—that have taken the place of heads as a
writer’s means of implicitly delineating character. An old Volvo
Station wagon and an L.L. Bean barn jacket mark out a man as
surely as a high brow and a weak chin once did.
*
Once you ponder the implications of this statement, as Fowler
himself did endlessly, strange things start happening. Fowler's
philosophy is all about the possibility and the real hope of change.
Calvinistic predestination and hellfire are swept away in an instant;
if the brain and its resultant behavior is malleable throughout one’s
life, then nobody is fated to remain bad: they can mend their ways
and their selves.
Suddenly, too, the shaping influence of one’s physical develop-
ment- of one’s diet and exercise and behavior—become of para-
mount importance. “Behold, moreover, the great procuring cause of  I
man’s depravity, and consequent wretchedness,” Fowler explains in
his guide Se§’Culz‘ure. “Namely, MORBID PHYSIOLOGY. An  .
irritated or abnormal state of the body morbidly affects the brain.”
Bad actions become the correctable result of improper development,
rather than machinations of some cloven—footed prat with a fiery
pitchfork. Prayer was not the answer, Fowler snapped: “Ministers
may preach, and revivals be multiplied to any extent, without laying
the ax at the ROOT of the tree of vice. Mankind must also abandon I
flesh, condiments, narcotics, gluttony, and fermented liquors, and
substitute farinaceous food, cold water, and a light diet—must learn if
how to EAT AND LIVE.”
What Fowler holds out is nothing less than the promise of:
redemption. Will it surprise you at all when, at long last Fowler
tears aside his scientific lineaments, and reveals what he has been all
along: a minister leading his flock heavenward? “[Let us] redouble
our efforts for . . . that high and holy destiny hereafter as such
by this great principle of ILLIMITABLE PROGRESSION’
Indeed. Look carefully around this empty plaza: what you see is
nothing less than the birthplace of American progressivism
The publication of Thomas Paine’s spirit—memoir in 1852 came at
the apex of phrenology’s fame. Their fashionable interest in the
latest craze of séances and spirits, though, left some Wondering just
how serious the Fowlers were. Orson’s much younger brother
Edward had suddenly proclaimed himself a spirit medium, and
held nightly conferences on electricity with Ben Franklin, who
would obligingly show up with a spectral set of batteries and wires.
Other poltergeists, less scientific and civic-minded, amused them-
selves by mysteriously moving furniture while the room’s lights were
out. Edward’s spirit interviews were duly published by Fowler &.
Wells in a two-volume edition, though the tome’s copious notes did
not include one Fowler relative’s observation that he’d seen Edward
secretly moving furniture and tossing sofa pillows around when he
thought nobody was looking.
No matter. Lippard’s and Fowler’s resurrection of Paine had
occurred just as dead people themselves were making a curious sort
of comeback: or as -much of a comeback as dead people can make
People could now imagme being dead because they’d just gained,
with the1846 debut of ether anesthesia, the remarkable ability to
sink into a temporarily living death. Ether arrived to find. a culture
already well primed for exploring liminal states: Americans and
Europeans alike had already been fascinated for decades by mes-
s claims of being able to produce states of suspended
animation; newspapers eagerly reprinted Wildly unsourced stories of
frogs found living eons inside geological formations, “mummy
wheat" seeds that sprouted anew after millennia inside the pyramids
of Egypt, and bugs that reanimated themselves from deep inside
household furniture generations after the original tree had been cut
down.
With the dead becoming more than sloughed-off shells of the
spirit, cemeteries developed into respectable places, modeled after
parks and plazas; dead children and adults had postmortem formal
portraits taken by daguerreotypists, so that unseeing eyes could gaze
at you in shades of silver nitrate. For a while, the mysterious realms
of photography and death even had a strange overlap; some believed
that corpse retinas retained their last image for forty—eight hours
after death, so that photographers could capture this dying image on
film. In 1857 the New York Observer went so far as to quote
experiments on a murder victim by a “Dr. Sanford”—“[I used] a
weak solution of atrophine, which evidently produced an enlarged
state of the pupil . . . We now applied a powerful lens, and
discovered in the pupil the rude worn—away figure of a man in a
light coat, beside whom was a round stone standing, or suspended in
the air, with a small handle stuck as it were in the earth . . .
[perhaps] the exact figure of the murderer.” So . . . dead men do tell
tales.
Posthumous narrators made their presence felt with the infinitely
reprinted and pirated stories of Blackwood Magazine, and even
Emily Dickinson began to toy around this same year with unnerving
ghostly narrators: “I heard a fly buzz, when I died . . .” So it’s little
surprise that just three month’s after Paine’s spirit-memoirs ap—
peared, yet another found its way into stores. The author of 14 Series
of Communications, Jacob Harshman, admitted that he, too, was
skeptical when he heard about those spirits writing books up in New
York, but- wouldn’t you know it?- now he’d been getting them
too, swooping down upon his home in Dayton, Ohio,

Puss and Mew

What if, Carlile’s shop assistants reasoned, you couldn’t see your bookseller?
Customers entering the Blasphemy Machine: a gigantic clockwork mechanism with nary a
human in sight. A dial listed the names of all the store’s many illicit
publications-The Rights of Man, say, or an issue of Carlile’s
newspaper The Republican. With the dial set to the right title,
and money dropped into a slot, a book or newspaper would come
clattering down into a receptacle.
It is soberin to think that the freedom of the press once
depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars. But
the “invisible shopman” wasn’t an entirely new concept: during a
crackdown on unlicensed gin in 1737, London taxmen found
themselves confounded by the disappearance of gin shops, despitefji
the streets being as full of outrageously drunk louts as ever. It took
months for taxmen to discover the existence of primitive manned
vending machines called the “puss and mew.” A customer coming
up to one whispered “Puss,” whereupon a vendor crammed inside
answered “Mew.” A hidden drawer popped out to receive coins,
withdrew, and then slid back out with a dram of the demon drink. if
Like the puss and mew, the Temple of Reason’s vending machine
proved only a temporary distraction to authorities, rather like
overturning a chair in the path of someone chasing you; soon they
stepped around it and rounded up employees from behind
clockwork.

Tom Paine

Sometimes the old pieties were still visited upon them. Hearing
that Paine was ailing, ministers and well-meaning folk were forever
stopping by to pester him, hoping to get him to recant his heresies
and to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jarvis was usually able to
keep them out of the studio, but on one occasion let his guard down
when a knock came at the door shortly after dinner. Jarvis opened it
to find a very old woman, wrapped in a large scarlet cloak, and
asking piteously to meet Thomas Paine.
He's asleep, Jarvis explained—he always takes his nap after dinner.
“I am very sorry for that,” she said, “for I wanted to see him very
particularly.”
It seemed a shame to force a frail and elderly lady to make the trip
a second time, and Jarvis relented. Leading her inside and back to
Paine’s room, the painter woke up the slumbering infidel.
“He rose on one elbow”—it was recalled soon afterward with
some mirth—“with an expression of eye that staggered the old
woman.”
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Is your name Paine?” the old woman asked solicitously.
“Well, then,” she began kindly. “I come from Almighty God to tell
you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our h/erred Savior
Jesus Christ, you will he damned and—”
“Pooh! Pooh!” Paine stopped her cold. “It is not true. You were
not sent with any such impertinent message.”
“Jarvis,” Paine sighed, “make her go away. Pshaw, God would not
send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with his message.
Go away. Go back.” And then, preparing to return to sleep, he
added, “Shut the door.”
The old lady left thunderstruck. Jarvis was enough of a gentle-
man that he probably withheld his laughter until the woman was
out of earshot of his house. He was not unsympathetic to her
piety; he had been raised in a strict religious family himself, and
though he had little use for them now, he thought churches served
a worthy purpose for the rest of society. But as for himself—well,
he was busy. He had paintings to paint and wine to drink. Late in
the evenings, after Paine had had his nap, the two would
Philosophize over a bottle; once after a long conversation deep
Into the night at Ja.rvis’s table, the painter retired for a while, only
upon returning at four A.M. to find Paine still at table——or rather,
underneath it.
“I have the vertigo, the vertigo,” moaned Paine from the floor.
"Yes," Jarvis cracked, raising an eyebrow at the remains of the
bottle, ‘You have it deep- deep!”

FLW and Ayn Rand

In the dining room of the Plaza, under faked wooden ceiling beams
that Wright much admired, we would drink Irish whiskey, always with
the same difficulty in ordering it. Wright would tell the waiter, “Old Bush-
mill’s neat, please,” and then add, with emphasis, “That means I want no
ice.” “Of course, sir,” the waiter would reply. As the waiter went off to
the bar, Wright would lean toward me and say, “They never listen. Watch,
now. There will be ice.” Back would come the waiter with the Irish whiskey,
in a glass filled with ice cubes. Wright would pick up a spoon and, lifting
out the ice cubes one by one, proceed to flip them across the green-carpeted
floor, to the astonishment and pleasure of other patrons of the Plaza:
Foxy Grandpa on a rampage. Sometimes we would meet in the ground-
floor bar at “2l,” whose preposterous decor—its dusky low ceiling hung
with model airplanes, model buses, and the Lord knows what—was again
a source of admiring comment from Wright. One day a tiny figure whose
head was topped by a dark velvet beret waved to us from a distant banquette.
“Oh, God!” Wright exclaimed in dismay. “Ayn Rand!”
Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943, has been one of
the leading best-sellers of all time (over four million copies have been
sold), and its hero, an architect named Howard Roark, is widely supposed
to have been based upon Wright, though Rand denied it many times and
so, with reason, did Wright. Rand was bent upon preaching the gospel of
individualism as a political and ethical ideal and denouncing the false doc-
trine of humanitarianism; to the ancient question “Am I my brother’s
keeper?” she answered with a ringing “No!” She decided to use the profes-
sion of architecture as a vehicle for dramatizing her then generally unpopu-
lar right-wing, anti-altruistic principles. As it happened, she knew little or
nothing about either architecture or Wright when she began writing her
trashy classic, but through friends she was able to persuade the distinguished
New York City architect Ely jacques Kahn to provide her with a “cover”
job in his office while she boned up on the nuts and bolts of the profession.
(According to Rand’s biographer, Barbara Branden, it was Kahn who gave
Rand the idea of using a housing project as a major factor in the plot of
The Fountainhead.) Kahn arranged for Rand to meet Wright at a banquet
held in New York. Rand told Wright that she was writing a novel about
an architect and would like to interview him; to her disappointment, Wright
 begged off with some vague words about the uncertainty of his future plans
P _ Rand sent Wright the first three chapters of the novel and he wrote
to her saying that he liked nothing about them. After the publication of
The Fountainhead, she met Wright in Los Angeles, at the home of his son
Lloyd, and on that occasion they got on well. He had not yet read the
novel, but he recalled that among the things he had disliked in the first
three chapters was the fact that Roark had been described as being tall
and with red hair, and he had wanted him to be short, with white hair.
Lloyd Wright laughed and said, “Oh, Father, Miss Rand wasn’t writing
your biography!” Subsequently, Wright read the novel and praised it to
Rand but refused to issue a public endorsement of it. He invited Rand
and her husband to visit Taliesin North; the shabby condition of the house
and the social conditions under which the Fellowship operated were, it
appears, a shock to Rand. Individualism as a theory was one thing, but
the benign tyranny practiced at Taliesin was quite another. Nevertheless,
she commissioned a house from Wright and was delighted with the designs
he furnished her; it remained only a project in part because she wasn’t
sure where she wished to build it and in part because she couldn’t afford
it. As usual, Wright found these reasons unacceptable. He assured her
that with minor changes the house could be built in Connecticut, Texas,
Arizona, or Florida. As for affording it, “My dear lady,” he said, “that’s
no problem at all. Go out and make more money

The Guggenheim

These figures were Solomon R. Guggenheim, Baroness Hildegard Re-
bay von Ehrenwiesen (more commonly known as Hilla Rebay), and Wright.
Guggenheim, who was born in 1861 and died in 1949, a decade before
his museum was completed, was a member of the celebrated copper-mining
family; like any American millionaire of the period, having proved himself
in the world of business, he started to prove himself in the world of culture
by collecting Old Masters. His wife, Irene Rothschild Guggenheim, pre-
ferred collecting contemporary art. (So did other wives; it was in large
part the taste of millionaires’ wives that led to the founding of the Museum
of Modern Art.) In 1927, Mrs. Guggenheim purchased some collages by
a young German artist named Rebay (1890-1967), who was having her
first American show at Marie Sterner’s gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. Later,
Rebay met the Guggenheims at the home of James Speyer, a banker,
philanthropist, and patron of the arts. Rebay and Irene Guggenheim be-
came friends. The following year, Rebay painted a portrait of Solomon
Guggenheim—a realistic likeness of an elderly, pleasant-faced man in knick-
erbockers and knit hose. As Joan M. Lukach says in her biography Of
Rebay, “Convincing Guggenheim to sit for a vivacious, witty, sophisticated
European noblewoman cannot have been difficult.” Rebay took advantagfi
of the sittings to interest Guggenheim in a genre of painting that sh6
had first encountered among her artist-colleagues in Europe and that she
was determined to introduce to the New World; she called the genre “non-
objective” and distinguished it from “abstract” painting as being conceived
by intuition within the mind of its maker and not abstracted from anything
in nature. ‘
In a small studio that Rebay rented in Carnegie Hall were hung works
by such painters as Kandinsky, Klee, and Rudolf Bauer (Bauer was for
many years her lover; Lukach is able to demonstrate that a more disagreeable
and demoralizing companion can scarcely ever have lived). Soon enough,
Guggenheim became a disciple of non-objective art——indeed, the most eager
and generous of disciples, addressed with affection by his newfound artist
friends as “Guggi.” Under Rebay’s vigorous tutelage, Guggenheim put
together an assemblage of paintings that, besides the artists mentioned
above, came to include Chagall, Moholy-Nagy, Gleizes, Mondrian, Delau-
nay, and Balcomb Greene. Within a couple of years, Guggenheim and
Rebay were faced with the problem of finding appropriate shelter for his
ever-expanding collection. According to Lukach, Guggenheim thought at
first of bequeathing it at his death to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This solution to the problem would have angered Rebay, since the collection
would then have passed out of her control; luckily, it didn’t appeal to
Guggenheim for long, as he glanced about and noticed how many of his
fellow millionaires—Freer, Frick, Huntington, and Mellon—were taking
care to provide monuments to themselves in the form of museums. Why
shouldn’t he do the same, and all the more so because of the little-appreci-
ated nature of his collection? When it came to the buying and selling of
art in the early thirties, his artists were more or less orphans; he had
reason to wish to protect their handiwork after his death, as well as to
protect the joyous, eccentric, and sometimes irascible Rebay.
By coincidence, in 1930 some of Rebay’s artist-colleagues contemplated
founding a utopian artists’ colony in a village outside Paris. The colonists
would build a museum to contain their works, and the designer of the
museum would be Le Corbusier, whom Rebay had already met. Le Corbu-
sier wished to design his museum in the shape of a spiral within a square;
its galleries would be connected by ramps and would have moveable walls,
and it would omit the grand entrance and grand staircases that museums
of an earlier day had found indispensable. The little colony never came
into existence, thanks in large part to the Great Depression, but Rebay
continued to speculate on the design of an ideal museum building—a
temple or dome of non-objective art (Lukach assumes that Rebay wrote
“dome” in English as a translation of Dom, German for “cathedral”), where
space would be found for a library, a movie theatre, a shop for the sale
of educational materials and reproductions of paintings, and where the
music of Bach and other classic composers would provide a continuous
accompaniment.

FLW and the mortuary

 Of course I had to
“research” a good deal and that nearly got me down. I would come back
home, now and then, wondering if I felt as well as I should. But Nick
had a way of referring to the deceased always as “the merchandise,” and
that would cheer me up. I pulled through. . . .
This series of chapels (seating seventy-five to a hundred people), each
chapel with its own garden (all gardens in a garden) stands elevated upon
the mass of shale now composing the unique site. The plan of the whole
was an attempt to take some of the curse off the customary undertaker’s
official proceeding. I didn’t expect to make even the funeral of one’s
enemies exactly cheerful, but I did think I could give the obsequies some
beauty without destroying their integrity.
Here five simultaneous funerals may be so conducted that one is
- not too aware of another. All preparation and disposal of the deceased
is from down below in chambers independent of the ceremonial arrange-
ments for special mourners. The place of mourning for the families called
the “slumber room” caused most trouble, as the chief mourners do not
care to be seen, though they do want to see. And inasmuch as for some
time before the funeral the deceased must lie in a private room at their
convenience as mourners, the processes of one funeral immediately follow-
ing another, the proper allocation of this space became a major problem.
Here the synthesis is fairly complete and the business of the undertaker’s
funeral arrangements, choice of caskets, flowers, etc., is located in an inde-
pendent building at the entrance to the chapel yard . . . a colorful, happy
environment abundant with music . . . has been provided . . . the empha-
sis is here laid not on Death but on Life.1O
One readily detects in Wright’s words the pleasure—-the almost boyish
glee-—-that he took in working out a puzzle worthy of him. To keep five
totally immobile articles of “merchandise” from bumping into one another
as they rose and fell from the chambers below to the chambers above,
and to bestow on the mourning relatives of that merchandise the near-
miraculous capacity to see without being seen—! Only the supreme master
of three-dimensional thinking could have brought it off, and only a master
ironist (a peer of Waugh himself) would have dared to claim that in doing
so he had produced “a colorful, happy environment” in a veritable sea of
coffins and corpses. Alas, the cost of this necrophiliac fantasy proved too
much for Daphne’s purse; if it had been built, it would surely have rivaled
in popularity the Wee Kirk 0’ the Heather, in Forest Lawn Cemetery,
in Los Angeles, where happiness in the presence of the dead loved one is
the only emotion that one is expected to feel.

Lacuna

Another Agatha Christie. A Poirot: The Hollow or Murder After Hours. The victim is found with a fatal gunshot wound- his wife, Gerda, is standing over him with a pistol but it is not the pistol that killed him and she is too dim-witted to explain herself so the police let it go at that, and do

not press her for an explanation. Of course she is not dim-witted at all and switched pistols. Hmm.
Then watched the beautifully photographed Peter Ustinov film adaptation of 'Evil Under The Sun'. Again, a big hat is crucial to concealing the victim and the murderer. Honestly! As a young girl, Agatha Christie must have been startled by a haberdasher.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright eagerly defended the principle of conscien-
tious objection; many of the apprentices became C.O.’s, and several of
them ended up in prison. Wright enlisted the aid of colleagues and famous
acquaintances in an attempt to persuade the authorities in Washington
that the Fellowship was at work upon a project indispensable to the future
well-being of the country and that the apprentices should therefore be
exempted from the draft. To this end, he drew up a grandiloquent document
called the Broadacre City Petition, which, submitted to the White House
in the darkest moments of the war, rivals in grotesque self-importance
the letter that James joyce is reputed to have sent to the King of England
during the First World War, asking His Majesty to put aside less important
tasks in order to locate a pair of trousers that had been mailed to ]oyce
from Dublin and that, passing through enemy territory, had failed to reach
him in Zurich. Wright’s petition:
We, the undersigned, respectfully ask that the Administration of our Gov-
ernment authorize Frank Lloyd Wright to continue the search for Demo-
cratic FORM as the basis for a true capitalistic society now known as
Broadacre City. We believe that work should immediately be declared a
worthy national objective and the necessary ways and means freely granted
him to make such plans, models, and drawings as will enable our citizens
and otherpeoples to comprehend the basic ideas the plans, models, and
drawings represent and which, without political bias or influences will be
invaluable to our people when peace is being considered}
Astonishingly enough, Wright was able to accumulate hundreds of distin-
guished signatories to this petition, including Thomas Benton,]ohn Dewey,
Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Milles, Charles A. Beard, Joseph
Brewer, Norman Bel Geddes, Mies van der Rohe, Georgia O’Keeffe (the
only woman), Walter Gropius, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder,
and Wright’s cousin by marriage Robert Moses. The petition fell upon
deaf ears, and the Fellowship dwindled to a scant four or five apprentices.
Eccentrics attract eccentrics, and one of Wright’s new friends during
the war period was the musicologist and promoter Carleton Smith, who
somehow or other had achieved a close personal relationship with many
of the great ones of the earth, or boldly claimed to have done so. (In the
late nineteen-seventies, Smith talked the Pritzker family of Chicago into
setting up the Pritzker Architecture Prize, partly on the basis of a discussion
he said he had once had with the King of Sweden, in which they had
both lamented the absence of a Nobel Prize in architecture. In fact, Smith
had no particular interest in architecture; he had fallen back upon it alpha-
betically as a field of endeavor worthy of receiving a prize when he could
find nobody willing to set up a prize for agriculture. If the Pritzkers had
not bit on architecture, Smith had planned to take his chances with astron-
omy.) In an unpublished autobiography, Smith tells of his friendship with
President Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and of how she intro-
duced him to her son with the admonition, “Franklin knows nothing about
music. You must teach him what he ought to know.” According to Smith,
on one occasion Mrs. Roosevelt was indignant with her son because a
speech he made at the launching of a battleship interrupted a Saturday
afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast to which she had been looking
forward. She asked the butler to get her son on the telephone, in order
to give him a good scolding; after a brief delay, the butler reported that
the battleship wasn’t picking up.
When the government was in need of housing for workers at the
atomic energy plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Smith recommended Wright
to the President, saying that Wright would be able to design half a dozen
basic houses that could then be prefabricated by the thousands. Roosevelt
expressed interest in seeing Wright’s designs, but when weeks passed and
no designs appeared, he urged Smith to bring Wright to Washington to
talk things over face to face. Smith’s memoirs contain a vivid description
of the encounter (which, like so many of the encounters described in
Wright’s autobiography, may never have taken place):
. . . so I took him [Wright] to Washington and he wore a cloak over his
shoulders and had a big cane and never took his hat off when he came
into the Oval Room and he stopped at the door with great drama and
said, so the President could hear, “You know, Carleton, I’ve always told
you I would rather be Wright than President,” and then he wheeled around
and came up to the President’s desk and shook hands with him and he
sald—and I Wlll never know whether he thought this out in advance or
whether it came naturally—he said, “Franklin,” or “Frank,” he called him
“Frank,” he said, “you ought to get up out of that chair and look around
at what they re doing to your city here, miles and miles of Ionic and
Corinthian columns!”
Rarely do we hear of two consecutive feats of tactlessness in which the
Second so‘ convincingly—and so shockingly—surpasses the first. Roosevelt
had an aristocratic distaste for being addressed in an over-familiar fashion,
and to be called‘ by his first name, or, still worse, by a diminutive of his
first name (making it a duplicate of Wright’s) must have enraged him,
but to be urged in his paralyzed condition to get up out of his chair and
look around—l Smith’s memoirs are, alas, silent in regard to what followed;
it is certainly the case that Wright had no part in the housing of workers
at Oak Ridge.

More Frank Lloyd Wright by Brendon Gill

Small as the house was—fifteen hundred square feet in all—the many
ingenuities of its plan made it seem at least twice that size. In the shape
of an L, with the base of the L parallel to the street and embracing the
living room, workroom, bathroom, and entry, and the upright of the L
paralleling the northern boundary of the property and embracing the three
bedrooms, it presented a harsh, even a forbidding, aspect to the street,
having only a narrow band of clerestory windows at the point where the
blank house wall and the overhang of the flat roof met. The family car
would occupy most of what in conventional houses would be a front porch,
while the front door, being set at right angles to the street, was nearly
invisible. If the street facade of the house was uninviting (and must have
distressed the _]acobses’ neighbors, who were used to glancing into one
another’s windows), the inner facade was an unexpected and delightful
expanse of high glass doors, opening from the living room onto a sunny
eastern terrace; the bedrooms looked south through matching high glass
doors and shared with the living room a view of the ample garden.
The house gained an almost instant fame, in part because of the public-
ity aroused by its low cost (emerging from the Great Depression, hundreds
of thousands of Americans were eager to possess a house in the five-
thousand-dollar range), in part because of its unprecedentedly open design,
and in part because of the curious nature of its construction—nobody
had ever tried living on a slab before or had ever tried cooking in something
called a workspace, lit from above and scarcely to be distinguished from
the adjacent dining space. It was all very odd and perhaps, given the
past history of the architect who had designed it, faintly scandalous; so
great was the number of people who came to peer and poke about and
shake their heads as the house went up that, once the Jacobses had moved
in, they decided to charge admission to the premises: twenty—five cents.

&&&&&&&&&&&

One might quarrel with Wright and say of the Jacobs house that it
was Usonia Three, having been preceded by houses designed in the Usonian
vein for the Hoult family, in Wichita, Kansas, in 1935, and for the Lusk
family, in Huron, South Dakota, later in the same year. Both houses, which
never got beyond the planning stage, owed a good deal to the Willey
house of 1934, which must then be categorized as ur-llsonlan, OT even
Premature Usonian. All such labels, creating boundaries in a process that
by its nature is without boundaries, are nonsensical; nevertheless, Wright
himself was willing to establish periods and affix dates-—on occasion, to
alter dates—whenever it served a sufficiently advantageous (and sufficiently
devious) purpose. He invented the term Prairie House foria kind Of house
that had little to do with the prairie and much to do with the suburbs,
and he invented the term Usonian in order to‘ impose an American name
on a style of house having far more to do with the structures that Mies
van der Rohe and other architects in Middle Europe were designing than
it did with the design of houses in Middle America.
As we have seen, Wright plucked the word Usonia from some as yet
unidentified source; what matters is not where the word came from but
the weight that Wright meant it to carry, and why. He was always placing
his literary and oratorical gifts at the service of his profession; often, he
wrote things and said things that were mere repetitious bombast and yet
they were the means—clumsy, indirect, too high in pitch—that enabled
him to accomplish something of value in his career. “Usonian” staked a
claim on behalf of the work that was far more than a mask for whatever
foreign strains may have entered into it. So in its time did “Broadacre
City,” which if Wright hadn’t stamped it as his own would have struck us
as a wisecracking book-title by the sour likes of Sinclair Lewis.
Throughout his entire career, Wright was determined to place an
authentic American stamp upon his work. Drawing inspiration, as well as
certain major principles of scale and volume, from a score of foreign sources
(Austria, Scotland, japan, Mexico), he sedulously covered his tracks with
allusions to an American past drawn not from history—Wright was shaky
on American history——but from American letters.

FLW

 True, the setting
of Wingspread is a landscape of rolling meadows, interrupted here’ and
there by adroitly planted clumps of pines, while the settings of most of
Wright’s turn-of-the-century Prairie Houses were comparatively cramped
suburban lots and therefore not authentically of the prairie at all; neverthe-
less, “Prairie House” evokes a sense of ground-hugging simplicity of form
and, within that form, the prospect of an equal simplicity in the conduct
of life. Wingspread evokes something very different; it is an exceedingly
large mansion, having a floor area of fourteen thousand square feet and
shouldering the sky with the self-important eccentricity of some mock-
Gothic castle in the Thousand Islands. A true folly, it imposes itself upon
its site instead of accommodating to it. Wright may well have sensed this
(to him) unwelcome fact, since he took care to praise Wingspread for the
opposite reason: he boasted that its presence improved the site, giving it
a charm that it lacked when it was merely so much untampered-with nature.
When Wingspread was under construction, Johns0n’s wife died and
Johnson was tempted for a time to abandon the project. At Wright’s urging,
both for the sake of the children and as a memorial gesture to his dead
wife,Johnson finished the house and occupied it for twenty years, accepting
with good humor the fact that it leaked as profusely as the Administration
Building ‘(lid and that its scale was far too grand for the family shelter he
had had in mind. Johnson was an ideal client in his willingness to forgive
the defects that Wright’s buildings almost invariably possessed~defects
that Wright managed in most cases to turn into proof of his high aesthetic
intentions. (At the beginning of the Administration Building project,John-
son visited the house that Wright had designed for his cousin Richard
Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa; innumerable tubs and canning jars were scattered
throughout the house to catch water leaking through the roof. Mrs. Lloyd
Jones apologized to her guest with a kindly witticism: “This is what happens
when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”

&&&&&&&&&

More than a quarter of a century has passed since the Wingspread
Center was dedicated. Today it flourishes under the direction of William
B. Boyd, husband ofJohnson’s daughter Karen (for whom Wright designed,
in 1954, a pleasantly romantic house on a bluff above the Racine River).
It was to Karen that Wright once extended a remarkable invitation. Visiting
Wingspread, he fell ill after lunch and mistook indigestion for a mortal
heart attack. He lay down on a couch in the living room, composed himself,
beckoned to Karen, and said splendidly, “Come and watch how a great
man dies.”