T. Boyle - The Women

78

I wouldn’t want to indulge in amateur Freudianism, but perhaps the trials of these years were what molded her into the unsmiling and unyielding taskmaster of Taliesin, known universally among the apprentices as the Dragon Lady.

79

Woe betide the apprentice who let even one of them go dead on his shift.

80

Including Billy’s son, Marcus, who was born three months after the murder of his elder brother, Ernest, at Taliesin in 1914.

81

This adventure, of course, was to provide the seed for Taliesin West. I have concentrated memories of making the pilgrimage to Arizona each winter, Wrieto-San out front of a procession swollen to seven or eight vehicles and some twenty-seven people, his hair flowing like the fur of a pinniped in a heavy sea, going, as the expression has it, hellbent for leather. He always seemed genuinely surprised, if not shocked, by the presence of other drivers, as if the national matrix of lanes, cart-paths, thoroughfares, boulevards and interstate highways had been created for his use and pleasure alone.

82

1929, that is.

83

Welsh for father. Richard Lloyd Jones, Wrieto-San’s maternal grandfather — father, that is, of the clan — took the fortieth chapter of Isaiah as his personal testament and had Wrieto-San and his sisters memorize it. Its view of human life and endeavor is, I think, especially bleak. There is nothing like it in the Shinto tradition.

84

One of the local women had prepared the body, wrapping it head-to-toe in a pair of linen sheets in order to mask the outrages inflicted on it, the skull cloven, brains loosed, limbs and torso blackened by fire.

85

For Wrieto-San, every building at Taliesin was in a state of flux. When he accidentally set fire to the theater at Hillside one windy afternoon in the thirties (brush, kerosene, poor judgment), he took me aside with a wink and a nod and told me he’d been looking for an excuse to renovate the shoddy old thing for years.

86

Notable among them, the preliminary designs for the Imperial Hotel. Wrieto-San was then negotiating with a representative of the Emperor, using all his charm and persuasion in the hope of landing the commission.

87

Combative as ever, Wrieto-San’s statement to the Weekly Home News reads, in part: “You wives with your certificates for loving — pray that you may love as much and be loved as well as was Mamah Borthwick.”

88

Edward C. Waller Jr., initiator of the project, who’d raised $65,000 against a final reckoning of some $350,000. He was to declare bankruptcy two years later. Since he’d persuaded Wrieto-San to accept stock in the company in lieu of his fee, Wrieto-San was left holding the bag, as they say.

89

Wrieto-San, I’m afraid, was something of a mama’s boy ( okāsan ko ), and throughout his life, especially in times of duress, he sought the company of women.

90

Again, one wonders how Wrieto-San was able to come up with the financing to purchase materials and employ a cohort of some twenty-five masons, carpenters and laborers, many of whom had to be housed and fed on the premises. I can imagine him working his legendary charm, of course, and perhaps even trading off the sympathetic reaction to Mamah’s death as a wedge to separate friends, tradesmen and prospective clients alike from their resources, and yet still. .

91

Having left Paris two months earlier in the expatriate exodus following the first Battle of the Marne.

92

Throughout his career, Wrieto-San made a point of arranging meetings in his studio, where he could feel both impregnable and masterful, rather like a tortoise encapsulated in a gilded shell.

93

Miriam was forty-five at the time. It may be interesting to note, for contrast, that Olgivanna was then a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl living in Tiflis with her sister, Hinzenberg and Gurdjieff not yet blips on the horizon. I imagine her fast asleep at that hour — it would have been three a.m. in the Russian province of Georgia — her hair splayed out over the pillow, girlish dreams revolving in her head.

94

See Welsh mythology, the Taliesin chapters of Pwyll Prince of Dyfed , beginning with “The Cauldron of Ceridwen.” Taliesin is often translated as “shining brow,” and Wrieto-San was fond of this designation for his Taliesin, the house on (of) the brow of the hill.

95

The book was Science and Health . Miriam was a devotee of the author’s “curative system of metaphysics” and “spiritual healing.” Wrieto-San, as I understood him, was somewhat more pragmatic.

96

Miriam’s second daughter. She also had a son, Thomas, who was a traveling man of some sort and didn’t seem to have much time for his mother. Or inclination either.

97

Miriam, as I understand her, did tend to be self-dramatizing, though perhaps O’Flaherty-San lays it on a bit thick here.

98

Wrieto-San adopted the square as his symbol because he understood it to represent probity, solidity, the virtues of the foursquare, and, of course, it is testamentary to the rectilinear patterns of his early and middle work. In contradistinction, we Japanese believe the circle to be the ideal form, as it is perfectly harmonious, sans the sharp individual edges of the square. But Wrieto-San was, if anything, a rugged individualist, a one-man, as we say, like the lone cowboy of the Wild West films. Personally, I like to think that it was the Japanese influence that inspired him to employ a circular design for his final major work, the Guggenheim Museum of New York.

99

Why Albuquerque? No one seems to know. But Miriam’s pattern, as has been seen, was to go west rather than east, when the east, one would think, would have been a more natural destination. Perhaps — and I’m only speculating — she was imbued with a residuum of that great American pioneering spirit and a personal sense of manifest destiny.

100

See page 78n.

101

It seems a mystery how two such people could ever willingly come together again. O’Flaherty-San maintains that the adhesive was as much sexual as emotional, but we didn’t discuss the matter in any depth, because as you may imagine, certain subjects are strictly off-limits between the white-haired patriarch of an unimpeachable and time-honored clan (buzoku) and his grandson-in-law, even if — or perhaps particularly if — that grandson is an American.

102

William Cary Wright (1825–1904). Said to be one of the most charming and charismatic men of his time, who unfortunately proved to be too unreliable, too footloose and casual about earning a living to suit Wrieto-San’s mother. Anna divorced him and wrapped herself instead in the enfolding arms of her family, the Lloyd Joneses of the rich farmlands of Wisconsin’s Wyoming Valley. Wrieto-San was seventeen at the time. Shortly thereafter he changed his middle name from “Lincoln” to “Lloyd.”

103

I ’m sorry, but no matter what O’Flaherty-San might say about sexual adhesion, this seems to me another of those suicidal leaps into oblivion Wrieto-San was repeatedly making. Certainly he must have known that the community — and the press — would universally condemn him for establishing a second mistress in the place of the first, as if he had learned little from the tragic consequences. Or worse: as if he cared less.

104

Even in old age, Anna Lloyd Jones Wright was an imposing woman, five feet eight and a half inches tall, a height to which her celebrated son could never quite rise, despite his elevated heels. It was she who decided on his profession while he was still in the cradle and she who made him her okāsan ko.

105

This was the famous Steinway, which had lost its legs when hauled through a window to spare it from the 1914 conflagration. Ever resourceful, Wrieto-San had adapted drafting stools as temporary supports.