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Sale 3
Lot 196
Wright, Frank Lloyd. Wright and his wife exchanged a number of letters during their torturous estrangement. This harrowing account of the end of their relationship must be one of the finest Frank Lloyd Wright letters ever to appear on the market. Other than the first page, which is slightly torn at the centerfold, and some minor wear at the folds of several other pages, the letter is in fine condition. The two letters of Wright's wife, Miriam, totalling twenty-nine pages, are of equal substance and interest. American architect. Known for dwellings and structures designed in powerful conformity with the natural features of the surrounding landscape. Though overshadowed by controversy in his own time, Wright is now considered one of the greatest architects of modern times.
Autograph Letter Signed. Seven full pages, Quarto, Tokyo, [Summer, 1919]. On imprinted stationery of The Imperial Hotel, which Wright designed. To his estranged wife Miriam. With the original envelope, addressed "Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, Iako Hotel, Iako, Japan", and with two lengthy Autograph Letters Signed by Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright to Wright, written from the Iako Hotel, Japan, one fifteen pages, the other fourteen pages, both Quarto, July 1919, laying bare the overwhelming difficulties in their dissolving relationship.
A breathtaking, confessional letter from Wright to his wife Miriam, describing the painful internal conflicts that have worn away at their relationship. The architect searches his own nature, and his wife's, for a place to lay blame, exposing the neurotic complexities of their warring personalities. Wright writes in part:
"You are quite right. I have no true personal culture. My talent has come between me and the things that bring it usually -- by personal sacrifice. Instead of making the sacrifices myself I have been taking them from others as my right. And I see how it has hardened and roughened the points of contact -- how I even handle my prints as though they were waste paper -- and have hardly patience enough to hear a voice, any voice, beside my own. Why pride in my work has served to give me the self-respect that enabled me to keep on when it were best that I should fail -- for my own souls good… I am a creature of warm animal instincts with something born of heaven thrown in, to sink or swim and but for you it would have sunk. My struggle has been terrible -- in some moments great, but my confusion has been complete and I lose my grip and resourcefulness at last when I see myself face to face -- unequivocally as I do now.
"Let me tell you Miriam dear -- the truth. I have not loved you much until I began to understand. My hungry need at first and your gifts came to me in the dark like a ray of hope. I was -- like you -- in love with love -- or the quest for it and as I know now I had never found it. I took you as I take everything I want and then came reaction. So awful it was under those circumstances because conscience still had me in toils and, I could not escape. But then came the self-deception I have practiced always with myself to slip and slide and cheat and what I did to escape is past belief -- but it is a matter of record… I did not love you then enough. I wanted to -- but my weakness and my pet vanities and special pretensions were all antagonized by you -- no matter what they were. You have explained them all. And I had never realized what terrible depths of despair, and to what extremity a sensitive, neurotic woman, highly developed and nervously disorganized by internal change could be…
"I watched you for the cause. I was told that after effects of morphine left one subject to depression and hate. That violent hatred and special antipathies were the result, and for life, doctors prescriptions to kill pain -- and even when no longer practiced the previous use of it to any considerable extent in illness often left the patient at the mercy of hatred too violent and bitter for words… Your very look in those days -- the unnatural pallor, all served to make me suspect. And I am quick to suspect as quick as I am to forgive and both so facile because I have been so ignorant of the consequences to others of the use of words, which I have learned now are deeds. …
"… I saw the inconstancies of you own thought -- how you turned about and the inconsistencies of your practices in Science. Ordinarily I would have thought nothing of them but when you were holding yourself up so high and so faultless with one hand, tearing me down with the other and nullifying everything I had -- naturally I grudged it, was skeptical and sarcastic and thought I saw hypocrisy. I am skilled in the arts of hypocrisy. I see and can detect it in others quickly, having the tests all well within myself. But then I began to see. On the boat coming across the Pacific something compelled me to see. I had the vision of my own unworthiness and wretchedness and how it had all poisoned you.…"
Fine.
Estimated Value $6,000 - 8,000.
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| Realized $5,520 |
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