Loving Frank

Loving Frank book cover

In love with Frank…it’s just what I have always thought, since the moment I first knew him. 

He is Frank Lloyd Wright, She is Mamah Borthwick Cheney. 

From our current perspective: 

He is one of founder of the Modern Movement, father of the Organic Architecture that promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches, American icon, worldwide known; She is the intellectual and cultured woman who chooses the love over her family, who also finds in this love the reason to pursuing her ambitions, in the context of first ‘900s when women were hardly given other roles but wives and mothers. 

From their current perspective: 

He is a rising architect, not yet such famous the way we know today. Besides he was surely well known at Oak Park (Illinois – USA) where he settled down with his wife and six children and he started performing the style of the prairie houses, then travelling around the world, in Italy, Germany, Japan. By his side Frank wants Mamah, who he designed the refuge of Taliesin (Winsconsin – USA) for, dreaming of a happy ending and hoping to escape prying eyes. Unfortunately it will be the set of a tragedy instead; She and her husband gives him the job to design their house in 1903, just like the most of Oak Park residents at that time, and this is how they first met. Silent and sadly quite, she ends up falling in a overwhelming love that gives her a new life, makes her carve out her career and support feminism. This huge passion yet splits her heart with the sense of guilty for acting like an unnatural mother who had left her young children behind. 

F.L.Wright and Mamah Cheney

Loving Frank is a novel by Nancy Horan that depicts this love story, truly happened between 1907 and 1914. A scandal relationship, but yet so passionate and heartfelt, which seems to be cursed by destiny into its tragic end.

The author, who won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize in 2009 with this novel, came to writing through journalism. Starting off with reporting true facts, and the curiosity for people and places she had been living in for 20 years were the factors that strongly supported her over the 7 years it took to write the book, which is a novel and a historical fiction at the same time. It is based upon true facts and real people, official biographies and writings from F.L.Wright, on Mamah’s texts – she was the translator of the Sweden writer Ellen Key – on newspaper reports. Reality was itself spectacular and Nancy Horan felt strongly bound to stay with the major facts she had regarding the historical outline of this story. Though she added some fictional and invented elements - like secondary characters, parts of dialogues and letters - in order to come up with a plausible reconstruction of lacking events or sometimes simply to enhance the described situations. 

Even though the plot is written in third person, from the title “Loving Frank” and even more reading throughout the story, we feel closer to Mamah’s point of view. Her true love, happened outside marriage, is sacred and worthy fighting for. We get to know two sides of her, one is constantly in pain for staying far from her children, the other one finds herself the reason to carry on waiting for a final reunion with them and holding to the love for a charismatic and fascinating man, with his own set of weaknesses and self-conceit. 

Edward and Mamah Cheney house

Prairie house sketch, Oak Park (Illinois - USA)

Private residence with prairie house style, Oak Park (Illinois - USA)

During the years of their love story, Frank is a forty-year old man, whose bright career has just started. Early in the novel, when he gets the commission of Cheney house, he were coning the term and principles of organic architecture, style that F.L.Wright dreamt it became distinctive of the American architecture. All the private houses that he built in Oak park – 24 plus his own house and studio – were such a useful training for him to come up with the prairie houses: dwellings where air, light and outer view come into interior spaces and make the building organically matches with the nature; proportions, windows, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified, interrelated composition at the human scale. 

The love affair proceeds, and so Wright’s fame grows overseas. His travels in Europe and Asia anticipate some important international design commissions and in those journeys the couple is under the public judgment like never before, feeding rumors, notes on the scandal, just the way we can imagine it would have been nowadays, but with the hard difficulty - of that time - of being granted a divorce from their respective partners. Furthermore, in ‘900s society’s view, Wright was merely misbehaving, while Mrs. Cheney was doing something far more shocking. After all, a rising architect could have been forgiven for leaving offspring, wife and debts while traveling around the world with his lover, but that was just not the same for her. Despite he releases an impassioned defense of Mamah to the local press, her reputation gets completely destroyed and can’t survive their romance. The great love of F.L.Wright a Mamah Cheney struggled to resist too big difficulties and the final happening, described in the book as well as in the architect’s biography, shocked him deeply. 

The reality beyond the Novel

This novel touches on a variety of themes – love, family, architecture, poetry, translation, idealism, feminism - and despite the century between today and those events, parts of the story sounds extremely current. The reader can’t help judging the protagonist’ behavior, now just like at that time. As far as I’m concerned, I red the book after visiting Oak Park myself, his home and studio complex attracts busloads of visitors from around the world and his prairie houses dot the town. Thus I had the chance to actually see all these famous houses mentioned in this book - and in every history of architecture manual too – and this has been extremely interesting and useful to recreate in my mind the original set of the events. Not to mention that this novel satisfied my curiosities about the life of an architect who I love. The standpoint of the plot is clearly shifted on Mamah, an enigmatic everywoman, nevertheless “Loving Frank” opens up an insight on F.L.Wright’s life, showing us a bit the man behind the architect.

Loving Frank official web site : http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/lovingfrank/

Author video interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTyE_3GKlj0