Suzannah Lessard - The Architect of Desire

Few writers have ever captured the exquisite, delicate balance of architecture and memory as eloquently and as movingly as Suzannah Lessard.

The New York Times Book Review

BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN MESMERIZING.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

FASCINATING LESSARD WRITES WITH AN ALMOST INTIMIDATING HONESTY.

Vogue

In the capable hands of former New Yorker writer Suzannah Lessard, this is a story of growing up amid sexual violence that is hidden beneath an exquisite environment, aristocratic isolation, and artistic brilliance. Lessard draws the reader with poetic intensity.

San Francisco Chronicle

PAGES SO CRUSHINGLY ELEGANT THAT THE ACT OF READING WAS LIKE RUNNING YOUR CHEEK ACROSS A VELVET NAP. There was no preparing for the books beauty or the suppressed violence that emerges in [Lessards] unflinching prose.

Mirabella

Gifted writer Lessard makes her debut with a candid, perceptive, and wrenchingly affecting history of her family.

Variety

An extraordinary memoir. The emotional force of [Lessards] final revelation is so powerful that to describe it here would be like giving away the ending of a mystery thriller.

The New York Times

In the beauty and terror of her prose, [Lessard] gives form to a century of hidden experience, puts words to a century of silence. Language, too, has an architectural dimension. In the right hands, it can span vast, uncharted regions of time and place. And this edifice is Lessards gift to her readers.

The Boston Sunday Globe

CAPTIVATING A POWERFUL STORY both well-paced and deftly written [Lessard] has a true gift for capturing the power of architecture and the meanings that lie behind it.

Portland Oregonian

When a writer as gifted as Lessard makes her debut with a memoir as candid, perceptive, and wrenchingly affecting as this history of her family, it is a signal event. The Architect of Desire is both a triumph for her and a resonating experience for her readers.

Publishers Weekly

MOVING. LESSARD WRITES BEAUTIFULLY, COMPASSIONATELY, with the soft precision of a poet, but her story is a harsh one, and she doesnt shield herself from difficult scrutiny, either.

Entertainment Weekly

Stanford Whites physical monuments are everywhere todayand they are worthy of celebration. But it has taken the efforts of a brave great-granddaughter to tell the rest of the tale. The Architect of Desire is a splendid memoir and family history, an austerely beautiful, one-of-a-kind exorcism.

Newsday

A THOUGHTFUL AND CANDID MEMOIR AT ONCE POETIC AND POWERFUL A stunning examination of her familys calamitous past.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

THIS IS A MAGNIFICENT BOOK. Cathedral-like in form, heroic as to emotional content, it will stand as one of the great spiritual autobiographies of a generation.

Kennedy Fraser

POWERFUL SEDUCTIVE Lessards The Architect of Desire is a turbulent, highly textured memoir.

Elle

DIZZYING LITERARY BRILLIANCE a literate, cerebral memoir.

Harford Courant

A Delta Book
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036

The lines from Diving into the Wreck, from DIVING INTO THE WRECK: Poems 19711972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Excerpts from STANNY: The Gilded Life of Stanford White by Paul R. Baker are reprinted with permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Copyright 1989 by Paul R. Baker.

Quotations by Charles McKim are from The Life and Times of Charles Folien McKim by Charles Moore; Houghton Mifflin, 1929.

Quotations by Edward Simmons are from From Seven to Seventy by Edward Simmons. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1922.

Quotations by H. Van Buren Magonigle are from A Half-Century of Architecture: A Biographical Review, by H. Van Buren Magonigle: Pencil Points, 15 (March 1934).

Quotations by Evelyn Nesbit are from Prodigal Days: The Untold Story by Evelyn Nesbit; Julian Messner, Inc., New York, 1934.

The quotation by Brendan Gill is reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright 1990 by Brendan Gill. Originally in The New Yorker. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from the personal memoirs and correspondence of Bessie Smith White, Lawrence Grant White and Laura Chanler White appear courtesy of Guy G. Rutherfurd, Morris & McVeigh.

Excerpts from Family Vista by Margaret Chanler Aldrich and the correspondence of Margaret Chanler Aldrich and J. Armstrong Aldrich appear courtesy of the Rokeby Archives.

Excerpts from poems by Claire Nicolas White appear courtesy of the author.

Photo editor: Vincent Virga

Copyright 1996 by Suzannah Lessard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: The Dial Press, New York, New York.

The trademark Delta is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

eISBN: 978-0-307-83048-7

Reprinted by arrangement with The Dial Press

v3.1_r1

The names of some of the individuals in this
book have been changed to protect their privacy
or the privacy of their families.

I came to see the damage that was done
And the treasures that prevail.

ADRIENNE RICH ,

DIVING INTO THE WRECK

Collection of The New-York Historical Society

W hen I was a little girl, I liked to go into a formal garden of box bushes that lay just to the west of my grandparents house. The box garden, as it was called, was on a terrace that was significantly lower than the house and thus apart, in a zone of its own. The hedges that lined the paths had grown high and billowy, so that they were over my head, and in some places had grown so close together that I had to push my way through. The bushes would then spray me with their gritty dust, and Id smell the sharp-smelling box-bush decay rising from the damp ground where no sun reached, and see up close the way the leaves were bunched in kernels like tiny loose cabbages. It seems to me now that my family story was all there always, everywhere, layered away, as in the kernels of box, and that I absorbed it somaticallytook it in through my pores with the gritty box dust.