Brendan GillBesprekingen

3/16/22

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is often described as the greatest of American architects. His works-among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum--earned him a good measure of his fame, but his flamboyant personal life earned him the rest. Here Brendan Gill, a personal friend of Wright and his family, gives us not only the fullest, fairest, and most entertaining account of Wright to date, but also strips away the many masks the architect tirelessly constructed to fascinate his admirers and mislead his detractors. Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages.
Source: Amazon - September 30, 2021

Gill chronicles the amazingly long and fruitful life and career of Wright with the dual advantage of having known him yet not blindly in awe of him. He sees the flaws of the man, a deceitful egomaniac, reckless with finances, both his own and those of his clients, careless of reputation, both his own and that of the women who fell under his spell, his churlishness in hiding what he had learned by studying the work of others, especially his contemporaries.
Yet Gill remains convinced that Wright was one of the greatest architects of all time. Not every building he designed was a masterpiece—he was never reluctant to flaunt the principles he proclaimed—but the best of them are unsurpassed not only in their technical achievement but in their ability to elevate the spirit of anyone who enters.
Does this balance out the flaws, to raise the question often posed in considering such geniuses? Gill struggles not to place his assessment on these terms, but in the end must concede that while many take more from the world than they give back, Wright was not among them; he struck a good bargain with the world.
The title expresses an aspect of Wright central to Gill’s interpretation: Wright spent a lifetime inventing and discarding a series of personae, from teenage runaway who transformed himself into boy wonder, all the way to ancient sage. Gill applies his reportorial skills to explode some of the founding myths of the Wright cult, including the dream his mother was purported to have had while pregnant with him revealing his destined profession.
Together with Gill, the reader shakes his head, wondering why such an undeniably great man felt the need to embellish as he did. Yet this mystery is not nearly as great as the level of creative innovation Wright was able to seemingly “shake out of [his] sleeve,” as Wright himself repeatedly described it.
A good read, highly recommended.

Brendan Gill's clarity of vision and his characteristic elegance, Gill gives us a meditation on one man's unprecedented accomplishment, and the world's overwhelming response.Draws on Lindbergh's full life to present him as a characteristic nineteenth-century American compelled to succeed in the twentieth century and as an intensely private man compelled to live his life in public.
Brendan Gill is perhaps best known as the witty and urbane author of the New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town" column.
Remarkable insights to who Charles was. Reeve was right - "Gill had a real and deep instinct about who my father was." Not a typical biography - no beginning to end of life journey. Instead, jumps about linking elements of Lindbergh and his life thematically rather than chronologically.

Our culture is so heavily tilted toward the beauty and freshness of youth that we seem to have forgotten the worth of the old. This little book reminds us of that, reminds us that, over and over again, the old have created art, written books, invented helpful devices, and sparked revolutions in thinking.

A good thing to remember. It’s not over yet.

When Elizabeth Kirby Rowan dies an untimely death from cancer, her husband and three young children, who have been watching her die for over a year, must now learn to cope without her. The novel traces the first twelve hours after Elizabeth's death and shows the emotions and actions of Elizabeth's family (including her sour bitch of a sister and her domineering mother-in-law) as they try to make sense of what has happened.

The book is a very realistic study of how death affects a family, especially one with young children. Characters display anger, fear, spite and many of the adult family members treat the children as pawns in their attempts to control the situation. The children's father, a doctor who has never been close to them and who is not particularly likeable, blunders painfully as he tries to figure out a way for his family to live without falling into the hands of any of his harpy female relations.

The book is not very kind to its female characters. The dead woman is shown in flashbacks as being lovable, but nearly all the other adult females are unsympathetic.

[The trouble of one house] was a finalist for the National Book Award in the mid-1950s.

Poorly written and hard to get through. Quit after two chapters.

In one of the essays collected here, Brendan Gill identifies as one of the ordinary, workaday inhabitants of his city -- but the moment passes. Elsewhere he is at pains to let us know that he is a Bones man, that is to say a member of Harvard's exclusive and secretive Skull and Bones club (of which George W Bush is probably the least distinguished member), and the book could be described (meanly) as an extended exercise in name-dropping: it's a collection of portraits, ranging from intimate accounts of friendship to smooth journalistic 'profiles', of distinguished writers, architects, film stars, patrons of the arts, and other luminaries. He quotes the famous exchange between F Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway -- 'The rich are different from other people.' 'Yes, they have more money.' -- and laments that Hemingway's clever riposte blocked what would have been an interesting line of enquiry. This book isn't about the very rich, but nor is it about struggling working class artists. Some of his subjects came from poor immigrant backgrounds, but almost all are, or were, part of what he calls 'society'; there are a number of Jews, Gay men and Lesbians, and even at least one Black woman (Ellen Stewart of New York's LaMama). But this definitely isn't the New York of Spike Jones or Andy Warhol.

Brendan Gill wrote the first words of the book when he came home from the celebration held in lieu of a funeral for Charles Addams (cartoonist for The New Yorker -- the TV show inspired by his cartoons isn't mentioned). In many of the pieces there's a feeling that he wants to set the record straight -- mostly to give credit where people have been underestimated or misrepresented, but occasionally (as for Joseph Campbell and perhaps Brendan Behan) to suggest that their reputations weren't entirely deserved. The tone is generally elegiac: in his seventies at the time of writing, he sets out to capture the feel of a generation that has passed or is passing, of people who have created fine things (any number of artists, writers and architects), lived admirable lives (Eleanor Roosevelt), or just been interesting (like Nigel Nicholson, son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson), made their marks as film stars (Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton). Some of the stories, especially to my mind the one on Dorothy Parker, are heartbreaking. Among the portraits one finds mini-essays, on the institution of gentleman's clubs in New York, for example; and there are plenty of glimpses of famous people not the subject of portraits: among them foul-mouthed Tallulah Bankhead, genial Charles Addams and egotistical Frank Lloyd Wright. The whole is a diverting read, an elegant, often very funny, personal glimpse of a world that's generally hidden behind a wall of dignity or journalese.

Beautifully written and just plain mesmerizing as a story.

Brendan Gill writes a tell-all, that actually is fairly discrete, about the New Yorker magazine and several of the literary giants who have been associated with it over the decades. Editor Harold Ross figures prominently, as do Dorothy Parker, Roberty Benchley, James Thurber, et al. This book is well written and full of fun.½

FLW's life as an architect.