The Fellowship, the untold story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship
by Roger Friedland & Harold Zellman. 2006; Harper Collins, New York. 690 pages. $34.95. ISBN 13: 978-0-06-039388-5 or ISBN 10: 0-06-039388-2
a review & critique by William Allin Storrer

If you want to read one of the best novels, namely a work of superb fiction, about Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, look no further than The Fellowship, the untold story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship. Or consider it non-fiction, if you like muckraking. In point of fact, it would have been more interesting and sold more as a novel with the accompanying poetic license. As a biography it spends more time on Georgi Gurdjieff and Olgivanna Hinzenburg/Wright than on its putative subject.

The Fellowship is at times more interesting than any previously published work of fiction or biography revolving around Frank Lloyd Wright. It is salacious, and some will revel in that. One wonders what interviewing techniques and standards were employed. How did the authors separate sensationalist meanderings from fact and truth by those who knew Wright, or at least thought they did? Did they have only one or two disgruntled apprentices supporting their claims, or did they have multiple, verifiable, sources?

Or did the authors rely too much on letters and other printed artifacts, which don’t always carry the tone of voice of the writer? While quotes are usually scrupulously footnoted in hundreds of citations, statements of fact are not documented with equal zeal. For instance, we get Frank Lloyd Wright’s parents; father Wright standing before wife Anna with his violin under his arm. How do they know this, or is it a part of romanticizing Wright’s life? Or common knowledge? This statement is not footnoted, so we don’t know. I've heard the authors intend to publish all their sources, and this would be most welcome.

The first rule for any work of scholarship is correct writing style. Opening the book with Iovanna Wright does little to move the narrative forward to its title subject, the (Taliesin) Fellowship. It is nearly two-thirds through the book before she is woven into the texture of the story.

When the lead quote on the book cover is from Ken Burns, famous for quoting Wright-haters in his attack on America’s architectural icon in his PBS biography, one must wonder just what these authors are up to. Is this book exposé or scholarship? The authors make sweeping psychological statements with limited evidence, while at the same time revealing their own psychological attitude towards their subject by using FLW to indicate Frank Lloyd Wright who, when he signed his houses, did so with FLlW. Or are they just following Taliesin's own mis-guided standard?

Throughout the book we must laud Zellman’s and Friedland’s efforts for the detailed information presented in no other biography of the Wrightian world, but condemn at least some of the interpretation placed on that information. This, then, is really two or three books, and should have been written as such. The story of Gurdjieff and his influence on Olgivanna is a book in itself, and could have been sensational. The presentation of Wright leading up to the foundation of the Taliesin Fellowship is largely rehashing of known material, and here the authors missed an opportunity to delve into areas not covered by other writers. When they get to the Fellowship, they spend their time on sexual activities and browbeating of the members by Olgivanna, all the time saying the Fellows never did anything more creative than Gurdjiefean dances. We never learn why the Fellowship did not come up, or even close, to Wrightian design standards.

I am disappointed that they not in the William Marlin writings find his discovery that Wright was born in Bear Valley, not Richland Center. Yet Marlin's discoveries are voluminous and much is left to be found in them.

One of the most annoying elements in this book is the frequency of unwarranted assumptions. Page after page of these raises how much can be said in a work of scholarship without proof. For instance on p. 154, “Only sixty miles from Taliesin, Toomer’s spiritual community would certainly have caught Olgivanna’s eye.” “Certainly”? This is immediately followed by “Indeed, it captured the nation’s attention — though for reasons Toomer would surely have preferred to avoid.” What “reasons”? Why “avoid”? Even negative publicity is sought out by some, for it gets you better known, and name recognition is the politician’s meat and potatoes. And directly opposite on page 155, “With her talent for teaching the movements, her estate, and her pending school, though, Olgivanna must again have seemed a promising field asset.” Yet, in the preceding sentence, the authors claim “Gurdjieff believed that women were incapable of the same level of self-development as men,” so why is Oligvanna so “promising,” even as a “field asset” to Gurdjieff?
On page 305, the Hanna residence (S.235) is called the first Usonian on a hexagonal grid, yet Paul Hanna admonished me when I suggested it was the second Usonian (by Wright’s public definition, following S.234, the First Jacobs Residence), saying that the walls were standard frame, therefore the house was not (board and batten) Usonian.

A “perhaps” here, a “probably because” there, and such, are not the sign of reliable research.
While other authors have doted on early Wright, missing the sources of his artistic development, and giving heavy obeisance to the failed Prairie era - failed because, though it was American, it was not democratic - these authors do give full weight to the Usonian era, even as they deride its buildings. According to Wright’s earliest use of the term, Usonia began with the California textile block houses. Little more than a year after the Alice Millard “La Miniatura” (S.214, 1923) came Olgivanna with the baggage of Gurdjieff.
And there’s the rub. Olgivanna is present everywhere in the narrative, given more importance than Wright himself, and Gurdjieff overshadows even her until his death intervenes in that narrative. Where is the Fellowship, except in the belittling of its members by Olgivanna?

Why did Wright not throw out Olgivanna and her Gurdjieffean proclivities from the Taliesins? Why did apprentices stay in the Fellowship, given how badly the authors say they were treated? Certainly it was not that the Taliesins were a haven for homosexuals, or the authors would have said so directly. Friedland and Zellman give us no other answer, yet a hint is there, if well-buried. Ultimately, what is the point of all the sex and sexual innuendo? Why have none of the Fellows I know ever heard of “sex clubs”? Are Wright’s architectural achievements in any way altered in their cultural significance by his or the Fellowship’s sexual adventures? No more than Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling’s cultural and religious significance is altered by his love life. We judge artists by their work, nothing else.

In his Swedenborgian Memorial (Wayfarer’s) Chapel overlooking the Pacific in Rancho Palos Verdes, son Lloyd, who ranted against Gurdjieffean influence, gives us a better clue to Wright’s philosophy. Wright knew Prairie was not his desired Democratic American architecture. He gave it up, fled to Italy with his beloved Mamah, and closed that chapter with the Wasmuth folio. Mamah was a translator of the work of Swedenborg, and it is that influence that fed Wright’s spiritual world. Yet there is no mention of Swedenborg in this entire book.

The authors demean the work of those who practiced Organic principles, whether learned at the Taliesins or by other means, who went out into the commercial world and succeeded in spreading Organic architecture. They name E Fay Jones and John Lautner, both of whom were world famous. Yet I’ve viewed the work of Morton Delson & Edgar Tafel (NY), Alden Dow (MI, Bob Beharka (CA), Milton Stricker (WA), Aaron Green (CA), Delton Ludwig (MT), Curtis Besinger (KS), Nils Schweizer (FL), Karl Kamrath (TX), James Fox (NC), and a host of others including my own brother Bradley (MI), and I find as many different approaches to “Organic” as there are Taliesin Fellows. I am dismayed at how the authors dismiss Jack Howe’s architecture, “He was doing what he had always been able to do – produce Frank Lloyd Wright houses with little help from the master.” Yes, Jack could do additions to Wright structures that complemented the original, but when he did his own house it was Baroque to Wright’s Renaissance, no copy in any way, yet recognizably Organic. Did the authors visit any of the buildings by those named above?
Further, the authors suggest that most of the later Usonian houses were designed by the apprentices. Wrong. Apprentices drew Wright’s Usonian houses, they did not design them. Wright gave Jack Howe all the instructions that were necessary for the apprentices to begin the drawings, engaging them in the process of creating Organic architecture. Wright would look at the work, often scribble directly on the drawing, or otherwise indicate changes, in order to achieve the house that he had seen as fitting to the site. The apprentices couldn’t have designed the houses because they didn’t understand the source of Wright’s ability to create individual designs for each Usonian house! They couldn’t have designed them because they didn’t know how to abstract a specific design from the site! And this is also why those buildings “built from Wright’s plans” at different sites can never be “Wright houses.”

It was with the first Usonian structures that Wright made his architecture not just American, but Democratic. Wright’s designs up to the first Prairie structures were eclectic Victorian with no central style. It is when he abstracted the Gothic cathedral - Notre Dame de Paris was familiar to him through Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame - into the cruciform Prairie house that he found the “American” in his domestic world, and created his domestic cathedrals. It was when he found a way to abstract directly from the site for his designs that the “Democratic” element was added, for then every structure would be individual. It is the failure of those in the Fellowship who stayed on at the Taliesins that they never understood this, and even rejected the principle of abstracting from the site when Taliesin Fellow and successful Seattle architect Milton Stricker taught a session on the process at Taliesin West.

What is missing in this story of the Fellowship is what it was that kept the apprentices at the two Taliesins. Both in Spring Green and in Scottsdale, the apprentices were surrounded with beauty, a level of beauty they had found nowhere else, especially in the commercial world of America. Ultimately, the story of the Taliesin Fellowship should be a story of that beauty, encompassing a lifestyle that enveloped the apprentices and Fellows at the two Taliesins, versus the ugliness of the world beyond. This is what kept them from leaving the Fellowship. It is this beauty that is lacking in the ugly tale of The Fellowship.