Good morning. Frank Lloyd Wright was “an architectural genius possessed of an appalling character,” Paul Hendrickson in writes in his biography of Wright. Hendrickson’s prose and general approach are nearly as appalling. Joyce Carol Oates: “It is rare that a biographer so insists on a special connection between himself and his subject, the sort of romantic rapport we expect in prose fiction, and, as in romance, the connection is presented here in the passive tense, as fate . . . Like a male friend taking sides in a contentious divorce as a way of ingratiating himself with the husband, Hendrickson refers to Wright’s second, mentally unstable wife Maude Miriam Hicks Noel (whom he married in 1923) as ‘Mad Miriam’. Yet more offensive is the biographer’s protracted, pruriently detailed account of the murders at Spring Green, even as he chides the tabloids for their salaciousness . . . Equally jarring is Hendrickson’s aggressive intimacy with the reader: ‘If you were paying any kind of half-attention to all that confusing genealogy in the chapter on [Julian Carlton’s] roots, you’ll recall that …’ At other times he is confiding, confessional: ‘But I can’t tell about that improbable season just yet . . . It seems crucial for you to have some basic feeling for this period, if only as a context for further appreciating Wright in 1936. So again, I’ll work somewhat in the pluperfect and stand on the shoulders of many predecessors (but with a few slants and discoveries and small detours of my own to offer)’. Unfortunately, Hendrickson’s ‘small detours’ can be as long as forty pages: ‘We are speaking now of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Yes, something that sounds absurdly far afield. And isn’t’. (Actually, it turns out to be absurdly far afield.) Other detours explore at exasperating length minor characters in Wright’s life as well as individuals not connected with Wright at all, like the far-flung siblings of Julian Carlton, and, most outlandishly, a woman friend of Mamah with no ties to Wright who happens to die shortly after Wright and Mamah elope: ‘How could Mattie have died? She was only thirty-eight. Made no sense. It was almost as if her sudden dying (on October 14, 1909) was some sort of proxy sorrow for someone else’s moral selfishness’. At one point, in his indefatigable pursuit of ‘the gothic, the tragic, the darkly improbable’ accruing, however peripherally, to Wright’s life, Hendrickson travels to Virginia to interview the despondent father of a three-year-old boy who’d drowned in a pond, in 1941, near a house designed by Wright years before. One half-expects Hendrickson to solemnly note that everyone who came into contact with Frank Lloyd Wright eventually died.”

In other news: The recently “restored” lamb in the Ghent Altarpiece has gone viral. Why? It looks like Zoolander.

Paul Gottfried reviews the letters of Neil McCaffrey: “For those of us who remember the American conservative movement in its earlier manifestation, the recently published articles and correspondence of Neil McCaffrey make for stimulating reading. For those who don’t recall McCaffrey (1925-1994), it might be mentioned that he was the founder of the Conservative Book Club, the owner of the conservative press Arlington House between 1964 and 1988, and a longtime friend and correspondent of Bill Buckley’s. A native New Yorker who worked as an editor at Doubleday, McCaffrey left behind a promising career at a leading commercial press to devote himself to his two lifetime passions, popularizing conservative ideas and fighting for traditional Catholic beliefs.”

Axios reports that several digital-only publications have done what they never have before: make money.

Alex Christofi cuts books in half. Is that so wrong? “The thing is, I used to think I didn’t like long books. But then I realised that I just didn’t like carrying them around or holding them open with one tired thumb, squashed into someone’s armpit on the tube in rush hour. I did have a Kindle, and I sometimes listened to audiobooks, but whenever I had a big paperback I would leave it at home unread, or struggle through eight pages a night before falling asleep. So a few years ago, I started seeking out beautiful old two-volume editions of books such as The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace, which fit neatly in my pocket. I found that I actually read the books that way. I started chopping big paperbacks by modern authors in half and shoddily patching them up. I assumed the authors wouldn’t mind selling a new paperback to someone else, and I really only wanted to get the words into my skull.”

James Booth reviews Clive James’s essays on Philip Larkin: “One remarkable feature of these essays is their developing narrative. James is constantly revising his judgments. In 1974 he concluded that ‘Show Saturday’ offers ‘an extended, sumptuous evocation of country life’. Forty years later he conceded that the poem is ‘listless’.”

Timothy Crimmins reviews Michael Lind’s The New Class War: “For a brief period after World War II, working-class and rural constituencies enjoyed real bargaining power in all three realms. Since then, the West has seen a “technocratic neoliberal revolution from above” that has systematically destroyed the working class’s ability to participate in national life. The result has been the rise of working-class populism, culminating in Brexit and the election of President Trump. Lind’s diagnosis draws heavily on two sources: James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution and John Kenneth Galbraith’s economic sociology.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New Statesman, Rowan Williams writes about the lessons of Oliver Cromwell’s failed Protectorate:

“Cromwell’s problem was that while he could not govern without the army (and thus without guaranteeing finance for the army – a huge and growing challenge), he also could not do away with the parliament for which his supporters had fought in the Civil War. He had repeatedly tried to manage without the House of Commons and it had not been a success; the major-generals had not been able to secure the large-scale national funding that only parliament could produce and approve, and the circle resisted squaring. At a more theoretical level, there remained an issue about legitimacy – in the absence of the monarchy, where exactly did legal sovereignty ultimately lie? This was where the unhelpful ambiguity of the role of protector became an issue and is why so many pressed Cromwell to simply accept the title of king, if only because the legal institutions of the country understood its meaning.

“The end of the story is familiar: the collapse of the republic and the return of the Stuarts, who were a good deal more vengeful towards their predecessors than the Commonwealth had been. Plus the eventual triumph (no thanks to the Stuarts) of something vaguely like the agenda of the ‘civilian’ parliamentarians in the shape of the Whig ascendancy, though still shot through with the ecclesiastical and hierarchical notions that had been embedded in the ancient constitution.

“Lay is quite properly sparing with contemporary lessons to be learned, but reading this at the beginning of 2020 does give one a few things to think about. Representative parliamentary government may be a thorough nuisance to a hyperactive executive, but it is one way of securing the voice of minorities somewhere in the national decision-making process and is a necessary source of legitimacy for allocating national resources. At its simplest – as the Commonwealth experience rather shows – it is a check to the politics of mere force, whether military or populist.

“And there is another thought that might be worth pondering in the light of Cromwell’s career. In the end, he proved inflexible about a small number of things and evasive or undecided about a much larger range of policies. He may have been right about the matters on which he refused to compromise but on other issues he failed to craft a clear shared ‘platform’ with a reliable group of colleagues, which could have been a clearly and commonly owned programme capable of intelligent scrutiny and defence. This was partly due to his profound anxieties about Providence – a personal form of political destiny, cut off from the more resourceful general schemes of political theology that both Catholics and Calvinists had to offer. But it is also an index of what can happen to a skilled local tactician suddenly obliged to shape a sustainable political culture and a prolonged and complex conversation about shared goods.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Katskhi pillar

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