Books in Brief

Gentlemen of Virginia, by Marshall W. Fishwick (Dodd, Mead, $5.00). “So what’s with this creep?” would about sum up mid-twentieth-century America’s reaction to a “gentleman” if it ever saw one. At least, one like those who once comprised the American noblesse. Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps) the encounter is an improbable one. The gentleman is decidedly passe—quite as much so as the priest-king of Egyptian antiquity —and like him, scarcely “democratic.” The Virginia gentleman: he stood for everything the great lights of our age have consigned to damnation—the land before the town, community before aggregation, grace before efficiency, personal dignity before the unfeeling informality of togetherness. “Men in gray flannel suits can learn a lot from the man in the white marble toga,” writes Marshall Fishwick of General Washington. Can they though, indeed? Which of Washington’s qualities would serve the “adjusted” and “integrated” atomic blob of the New Society? Which of General Lee’s? Their courage? Their dignity? Their honor? Their (sometime) decorum? Their conception of duty? Their disdain for self-indulgence and self-seeking? Well, new times, new men. Professor Fishwick all unwittingly says as much: the last essay of this volume chronicles the life of General George C. Marshall. J. d. futch

Frank Lloyd Wright, a biography, by Finis Farr (Scribner’s, $5.95). At the age of eighteen, Frank Lloyd Wright pawned a piece of fur and some books from his father’s library for seven dollars, bought a train ticket, and without going home to say goodbye took the next train to Chicago. He resolved to be an architect. That action foreshadowed the qualities of his life and work—confidence, courage, directness, extravagance —qualities which, immensely magnified by prodigious energy and longevity and sustained by an unconquerably heroic will, brought Frank Lloyd Wright to a life of extremes: blasted marriages, splendor and insolvency, grandiose estates and a stay in jail, critical neglect and uncritical adulation, writings compounded of equal parts wisdom and claptrap, an architectural style conceived in the grandest terms of individuality but easily degraded into the most inhuman expressions of “machinery.” Finis Farr confronts this mountain of contradictions with poise, clarity and sympathy adorned now and then with gentle humor. Farr’s balance of attitude and narrative style extends to his general plan, which, with extraordinary grace, intertwines the major themes of Frank Lloyd Wright as a person, the style and content of his architecture, the general background of architectural thought and practice, and the place of Frank Lloyd Wright in the development of the art (his place in the history of marital relations has been secure for a half-century). Illustrated with almost half a hundred photographs of some of the 700 buildings Wright designed, and supplied with a good bibliography and index, this biography will stand for a long time as a major approach to the question, Was Frank Lloyd Wright or Wrong? W. F. RICKENBACKER

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Gentlemen of Virginia, by Marshall W. Fishwick (Dodd, Mead, $5.00). “So what’s with this creep?” would about sum up mid-twentieth-century America’s reaction to a “gentleman” if it ever saw one. At least, one like those who once comprised the American noblesse. Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps) the encounter is an improbable one. The gentleman is decidedly passe—quite as much so as the priest-king of Egyptian antiquity —and like him, scarcely “democratic.” The Virginia gentleman: he stood for everything the great lights of our age have consigned to damnation—the land before the town, community before aggregation, grace before efficiency, personal dignity before the unfeeling informality of togetherness. “Men in gray flannel suits can learn a lot from the man in the white marble toga,” writes Marshall Fishwick of General Washington. Can they though, indeed? Which of Washington’s qualities would serve the “adjusted” and “integrated” atomic blob of the New Society? Which of General Lee’s? Their courage? Their dignity? Their honor? Their (sometime) decorum? Their conception of duty? Their disdain for self-indulgence and self-seeking? Well, new times, new men. Professor Fishwick all unwittingly says as much: the last essay of this volume chronicles the life of General George C. Marshall. J. d. futch

Frank Lloyd Wright, a biography, by Finis Farr (Scribner’s, $5.95). At the age of eighteen, Frank Lloyd Wright pawned a piece of fur and some books from his father’s library for seven dollars, bought a train ticket, and without going home to say goodbye took the next train to Chicago. He resolved to be an architect. That action foreshadowed the qualities of his life and work—confidence, courage, directness, extravagance —qualities which, immensely magnified by prodigious energy and longevity and sustained by an unconquerably heroic will, brought Frank Lloyd Wright to a life of extremes: blasted marriages, splendor and insolvency, grandiose estates and a stay in jail, critical neglect and uncritical adulation, writings compounded of equal parts wisdom and claptrap, an architectural style conceived in the grandest terms of individuality but easily degraded into the most inhuman expressions of “machinery.” Finis Farr confronts this mountain of contradictions with poise, clarity and sympathy adorned now and then with gentle humor. Farr’s balance of attitude and narrative style extends to his general plan, which, with extraordinary grace, intertwines the major themes of Frank Lloyd Wright as a person, the style and content of his architecture, the general background of architectural thought and practice, and the place of Frank Lloyd Wright in the development of the art (his place in the history of marital relations has been secure for a half-century). Illustrated with almost half a hundred photographs of some of the 700 buildings Wright designed, and supplied with a good bibliography and index, this biography will stand for a long time as a major approach to the question, Was Frank Lloyd Wright or Wrong? W. F. RICKENBACKER