Plagued By Fire by Paul Hendrickson – Frank Lloyd Wright, a life of disaster and disarray

Frank Lloyd Wright is revered as the father of an indigenous US architecture; the man who gave his country the houses, offices, galleries and churches that reflected its landscape and values. But what is hard to credit is not his gift for redefining traditional architectural forms but his sheer fecundity. Born in 1867, he died in 1959 after a career of some 72 years. During those seven decades he conceived 1,000 buildings, of which more than 400 were built. Indeed, he built in three different centuries: a handful of his designs have been constructed since the millennium. Earlier this year, a selection of eight of his buildings were jointly declared a Unesco world heritage site.

For all the adulation, Wright never let his work speak for itself, but was determined to make sure everyone else was as convinced of his genius as he was. As an egotist of the first water he admitted no influences: “My work is original not only in fact but in spiritual fibre,” he declared. Discussing his bottomless creativity, he humblebragged of his own home, Taliesin, that: “The thing had simply shaken itself out of my sleeve.” His sleeves were to prove extraordinarily capacious.

Buildings such as Fallingwater and the Guggenheim museum in New York were not the only things to be shaken out: there was also scandal, impecuniousness and copious amounts of tragedy – including one of the most sensational murder cases of the early 20th century. In 1909, most of his compatriots knew Wright not for his buildings, the bulk of which were in Wisconsin, but for abandoning his wife, Kitty, and six children to take off for Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client. Wright’s justification in the face of the salacious tutting and disapproval was that family life throttled his ability to become the artist he felt destined to be. Fatherhood, he claimed, had been a mystery to him: “I never looked the part. Nor ever acted it. I didn’t feel it. And I didn’t know how.” Irrespective of the hurt he caused: “I wanted to live true as I would build true.”

Living true with Cheney was not to last long. In 1914, a manservant named Julian Carlton ran amok at Taliesin while Wright was working in Chicago, killing seven people with a shingling axe. The violence was particularly brutal: Cheney was one of those hacked to death, her “head cleft in twain”, as one newspaper described it, alongside her two children. Carlton then razed the house. He was later found hiding in a boiler having drunk strychnine; he began to starve himself and was dead seven weeks later.

The horrors at the “love bungalow” were seen by some of the more moralistic midwesterners as divine retribution for the way the couple had violated the sanctity of matrimony. “Violent and lawless loves have violent and lawless ends,” ran one newspaper report. When Wright reached the scene and saw the bodies laid out at his sister’s house nearby, he sat at her piano and played Bach over and over again. He later rebuilt Taliesin but that house burned down, too (due to an electrical fault), taking with it $300,000 worth of Japanese art. A second marriage also went up in flames.

Paul Hendrickson, whose previous book was a study of another oversize American figure, Ernest Hemingway, is riveted by what he calls Wright’s “life of Old Testament disaster and disarray”, and has written not a biography but a “biographical portrait”. While Wright extolled the “definitely decorative value of the plain surface”, Hendrickson’s proclivities are for the baroque. This is the most mannered book you are likely to read: self-referential, full of what-a-clever-boy-am-I writing, spattered with show-off phrase-making, and achingly self-aware.

He has a weakness for cod psychology, conjuring a gay liaison between Wright a fellow architect, Cecil Corwin, on the strength of a few purple phases in Wright’s letters; he makes an extended and daft link between Carlton’s atrocity and the Tulsa race riot of 1921; and his main addition to Wright scholarship is discovering that the architect’s father left his mother, suing her for unreasonable behaviour and violence, rather than the other way round, as Wright had always insisted.

Hendrickson’s curlicues are, however, really an act of homage. He sees each event in Wright’s life as momentous, even though every existence, however exalted, has its longueurs and banalities. What his overheated treatment does press home is just how remarkable the architect was. His “prairie houses”, long and flat to echo the horizon, would be enough on their own for fame. Wright, however, also pioneered the Usonian house, low-cost dwellings that let the outside in and showed that good architecture could be available for all. His belief in “organic architecture” – buildings that are appropriate to both their inhabitants and their landscape – remains a mantra in contemporary practice.

Wright is not an easy man to warm to but at least he had some self-knowledge. “Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility,” he wrote. “I chose honest arrogance, and have seen no occasion to change.” A humble Wright could not have built those buildings.

• Michael Prodger is art critic for the New Statesman. Plagued By Fire: the Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright by Paul Hendrickson is published by Bodley Head (RRP £25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.