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“I used a very bad detail at the edge of the roof,

which in that famous rain, during the trial, ruined

the curtains...Ithought I knew quite a bit about

construction, but I probably didn’t know as much

as I thought I knew or we thought I knew.” The

lapses in professional judgment on the part of the

architects seemed, at least to this reader, defini-

tive, but in the end the judgment went against

Farnsworth. Both sides were happy to be out of

it and the final settlement was for a relatively

small sum; since there had never been any writ-

ten contract, it did not include an architect’s fee.

One feels for the good doctor. Despite the

purposeful appearance of his architecture,

Mies was not particularly interested in practical

matters. The travertine on the terrace weathered

badly, and a poorly designed heating system left

sooty stains on the windows. The glass walls

resulted in spectacular heating bills in the winter

and hothouse temperatures in the summer—there

were only two small openable windows. Then

there was the problem of condensation on the

glass in cold weather. “You feel as though you are

in a car in the rain with a windshield wiper that

doesn’t work,” Farnsworth complained. A film

about the genesis of her house, starring Elizabeth

Debicki and Ralph Fiennes, is currently in the

works. It will be interesting to see if it shows the

doctor squeegeeing her foggy windows.

“The fight over a modern masterpiece” in

Beam’s subtitle refers to not only the trial but

also the final public chapter in the volatile

Farnsworth-Mies story. In 1953 (a year after the

trial), Elizabeth Gordon, the influential editor of

House Beautiful, published a series of articles

that included photos of Farnsworth’s house and

recounted her travails in excruciating detail. The

series was titled “The Threat to the Next America,”

the threat being the European International Style

or “bad modern” as opposed to the “good

modern” of American architects such as Frank

Lloyd Wright, of whom Gordon was a champion.

As Mr. Beam points out, there was a McCarthyite

tone to some of the articles, although the critique

of the European modernists’ “Cult of Austerity”

was sound. Wright, of course, loved it, and later

wrote in the magazine: “Old man BOX merely

looks different when glassified, that’s all. But the

more the box is glassed the more it is evident as

a box. No new ideas whatever are involved.”

Wright was exaggerating. Mies’s glass box did

incorporate new ideas, but what is one to make

of a “masterpiece” that is so dysfunctional?

Mr. Beam clearly admires the Farnsworth House,

although he does not minimize its shortcomings.

Buildings have historically lasted hundreds of

years; the Farnsworth House will do so only

with uncommon help. Almost immediately after it

was built, the low-lying house has been regularly

inundated by the rising Fox River, and the

National Trust is considering a hydraulic system

to elevate the entire building during spring

floods. Mr. Beam quotes the eminent Swiss

architect Jacques Herzog: “You cannot use this

house except as a museum. It’s so expensive

to maintain; it’s like a patient in the hospital, in

the emergency clinic.” Harsh, but not inaccurate.

Mr. Rybczynski’s latest book is “Charleston Fancy:

Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City.”

ContinuedfrompageC7

Edith and Mies

Build Their

Dream House

MONEY

MAN

Thomas

Gresham in

the 1540s,

by an

unknown

artist.

photographed wearing a Berber gown
at a fancy-dress party given in 1924 by
the hard-drinking, men-only Oxford
University Hypocrites’ Club. (Its motto,
taken from Pindar, blazoned in Greek,
was “Water Is Best.”) Founded by a
bunch of rowdy aesthetes in 1921, the
club was shut down in 1925 by the
dean of Balliol College following a
party at which the members dressed
up as monks and nuns and danced the
night away. Powell recalled that on his
first visit to the club he was introduced
to another future novelist, Evelyn
Waugh, “one of the rowdiest mem-
bers,” who was sitting on the lap of
Christopher Hollis, later a Conservative
member of Parliament. Christopher’s
younger brother Roger was also a
member. (Their father was the bishop
of Taunton.) Another member, Tom
Driberg, later a Labour Party member
of Parliament and a famous hell-raiser,
was a school friend of Waugh and
Roger. Tom’s bother Jack, who would
become a district officer in the Sudan,
studied anthropology under Bronisław
Malinowski and became a bosom
friend of Evans-Pritchard.
These men all belonged to the bohe-
mian fringe of that cohort of boarding-
school-educated, upper-middle-class
Englishmen who came up to Oxford
and Cambridge in the aftermath of
World War I. Their wildness, a reaction
to the pointless slaughter in the
trenches, was prolonged into the party
world of the Bright Young Things,

ContinuedfrompageC7

chronicled in the early novels of

Waugh and Powell. Waugh’s friend

Graham Greene was another Oxford

contemporary. He “looked down on us

(and perhaps all undergraduates) as

childish and ostentatious,” according

to Waugh. “He certainly shared in

none of our revelry.” But Greene and

Waugh later became friends, and

moved for a while in the same cynical,

boozy, depressive circles. As they

reached middle age, a number of these

men turned to religion. Evans-

Pritchard, Waugh and Greene con-

verted to Catholicism. Tom Driberg

became an Anglo-Catholic; his brother

Jack converted to Islam. A few found

a new faith in communism.

And they were travelers and adven-

turers. When Hitler’s war broke out,

Evans-Pritchard led his band of Anuak

irregulars against Italian forces. “In the

Victorian age I should have been an

explorer,” he wrote to a friend. “In ear-

lier times a Crusader or buccaneer. I

am just beginning to enjoy myself.”

Greene worked for MI6 in West Africa

under the direction of Evans-Pritchard’s

friend and colleague Meyer Fortes.

Roger Hollis also became a spy and

ended up as director-general of MI5.

(He was later accused of having been a

Soviet agent, as was Tom Driberg.)

Evans-Pritchard’s two most in-

tensive field studies were made in

the Sudan. The first was among the

Azande, a hierarchical agricultural

society firmly under British control.

The second was among the Nuer, an

egalitarian and warlike pastoral

people. A few years before Evans-

Pritchard’s arrival, a British expedi-

tionary force had hanged Nuer proph-

ets and bombed their cattle herds.

“When I entered a cattle camp it was

not only as a stranger but as an en-

emy,” Evans-Pritchard wrote in “The

Nuer” (1940), “and they seldom tried

TheWorld of

E.E. Evans-

Pritchard

to conceal their disgust at my pres-

ence, refusing to answer my greetings

and even turning away when I ad-

dressed them.” At first, as Mr. Morton

remarks, he was not even permitted to

take photographs of the cattle.

Among the Azande, Evans-Pritchard

focused on witchcraft. The locals be-

lieved there were no accidents.

“Every misfortune supposes

witchcraft,” Evans-Pritchard

wrote in “Witchcraft, Oracles

and Magic Among the Azande”

(1937), “and every enmity

suggests its author.” But this

was all illusion. “Witches, as

Azande conceive them, cannot

exist.” Their oracles “tell them

nothing.” Why then did sensi-

ble Azande sometimes believe

in all that stuff? Evans-Prit-

chard pointed out that the

Azande’s beliefs about witches,

oracles and magic were inter-

locked and mutually reinforc-

ing: “death evokes the notion

of witchcraft; oracles are con-

sulted to determine the course

of vengeance; magic is made to

attain it; oracles decide when

magic has executed vengeance;

and its magical task being

ended, the medicine is de-

stroyed.” Given the premise that ill

luck takes the form of a person—a jeal-

ous, malicious neighbor or relative—

the rest of the package follows logically

and seems no more than common

sense. “I had no difficulty in using

Zande notions as Azande themselves

use them,” Evans-Pritchard affirmed.

“Once the idiom is learnt the rest is

easy, for in Zandeland one mystical

idea follows on another as reasonably

as one common-sense idea follows on

another in our own society.”

“The Nuer,” his best-known mono-

graph, described the political system of

pastoralists in the Nile valley in South

Sudan—an “ordered anarchy” resting

on a precarious balance of power

between counterpoised clans, always

liable to break down into feuding. Dur-

ing World War II, following the expul-

sion of the Italians from Libya, Evans-

Pritchard served as a political officer

among the Bedouin of Cyrenaica, a re-

gion in the eastern part of the country.

His monograph “The Sanusi of Cyrena-

ica” (1949) described another political

organization without rulers, also featur-

ing clans, feuds and prophets. Is it pure

chance that the Southern Sudan and

Libya are mired in civil wars today?

While serving in Libya, Evans-

Pritchard was formally received into

the Catholic fold in a ceremony at the

Benghazi cathedral. This was followed

by a change in his anthropological ap-

proach. In his final important book,

“Nuer Religion” (1956), Evans-Pritchard

claimed that the way of life of these

African pastoralists recalled the an-

cient Israelites, while their theology

was remarkably similar to Catholic

doctrine. He had regarded Azande

magic as a fantasy, but now he wrote

that Nuer ritual “depends finally on an

awareness of God and that men are

dependent on him and must be

resigned to his will.” At this

point the theologian takes over

from the anthropologist. For

the rest of his life, Evans-

Pritchard would denounce his

anthropological colleagues as

dogmatic unbelievers, obsessed

with showing that religious be-

lief was a bundle of illusions,

its hold on the faithful to be

explained with reference to

sociological and psychological

theories.

Evans-Pritchard’s most pro-

ductive years began with the

publication of “Witchcraft,

Oracles and Magic Among the

Azande” and concluded with

“Nuer Religion.” He held the

chair of social anthropology at

Oxford until 1970, three years

before his death, but his later

years, like those of Waugh and

Greene, were unproductive,

clouded by depression, fueled by whis-

key and scarred by bitter feuds. He

would wake up screaming from night-

mares about his time as a guerrilla. In

1959 his wife committed suicide. But at

his peak, as a field anthropologist, he

was the equal of that other demonic

master, his teacher and rival Bronisław

Malinowski. Mr. Morton offers a fresh

perspective on an extraordinary career.

Mr. Kuper, a specialist on the

ethnography of Southern Africa,

has written widely on the history

and theory of anthropology.

EMBEDDEDEvans-Pritchard with a group of

Zande boys, ca. 1927-30.

PITTS RIVER MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

The brilliant,

corner-cutting,

high-living titan

who built

London’s first

Royal Exchange

also manipulated

foreign exchange

rates, conducted

espionage and dealt

in armaments.

PROFILE

BOOKS

S

IRThomas Gresham,

it turns out, didn’t say:

“Bad money drives out

good money.” But he

did live by those wise

words. What the adage, so often

credited to him, means is this: If

you have two coins of equal legal

value, one of them worn and de-

based and the other mint-fresh,

you’ll save the new one and spend

the old one. Bad money drives good

money out of circulation and into

safe-deposit boxes, a fundamental

truth worth remembering even if

your bank account consists of noth-

ing but digital ones and zeros.

Gresham, by rehabilitating the

English coinage of the 1550s and

preaching fiscal probity to sover-

eigns who didn’t want to hear it,

was a kind of Elizabethan Paul

Volcker, though he was a

councilor just as interested in

his own net worth as he was

in that of his royal patrons.

John Guy’s fine and learned

biography, “Gresham’s

Law,” reminds us how

much has changed

about finance

in 500 years.

For instance,

nowadays,

rather than

raising funds

by pillaging

monasteries or

shaking down

defenseless mer-

chants, govern-

ments sell bonds.

Then again,

much remains the

same in the very

human business

of lending and

borrowing.

The brilliant,

corner-cut-

ting, high-

living, cold-

blooded

titan who

lives and breathes between the

covers of this concise volume would

not be out of place in a sit-down

interview on CNBC.

Gresham’s story, in Mr. Guy’s

expert hands (the author is a his-

torian of Tudor England at the

University of Cambridge), is the

chronicle of the stirrings of modern

finance in a time of religious and

political upheaval. As Catholics

faced off against Protestants and

contending descendants of Henry

VIII fought for the English crown,

Gresham effected a quiet revolu-

tion of his own. Not until he began

to keep his ledger in the format of

debits and credits had any Briton

known to Mr. Guy employed the

Italian innovation of double-entry

bookkeeping.

The son of Richard Gresham, a

textile merchant and “one of the

most hated men in London” (a rep-

utation burnished by the eviction

of a widow from a house on which

Gresham held a mortgage), Thomas

was apprenticed to the family busi-

ness and proceeded to make an

independent career as banker to a

succession of English sovereigns.

For Elizabeth I, whom he served

longest, he floated loans, manipu-

lated foreign exchange rates, con-

ducted espionage, dealt in arma-

ments and acted as a kind of

personal shopper. He served the

queen well enough so that, by 1574,

he could proudly announce the full

repayment of England’s once out-

size foreign debt.

“The first high priest of market

economics,” as Mr. Guy calls him,

Gresham built London’s first indoor

bourse, the Royal Exchange (a

successor building still stands

today near the Bank of England),

and left provisions in his heatedly

contested will for Gresham College,

which survives to sponsor more

than 140 free lectures a year.

Sometimes the fruits of Mr.

Guy’s archival research (more than

10,000 documents fell under his

gaze) are overwhelming. We don’t

have to know, for instance, the

names of the personnel of the

Gresham family firm on the occa-

sion of the death of Thomas’s uncle.

Nor are we likely to regret the

omission (which the author paren-

thetically calls to our attention) of

the exact address of the house in

Antwerp for which Thomas paid the

annual rent of 26 pounds sterling.

Not that Gresham, the man,

lacks interest—far from it. He mar-

ried for money and refused his wife

so much as an allowance. He com-

missioned a wedding portrait of

himself alone, sans bride. He took

back a portion of the wedding gift

that he made to his illegitimate

daughter. He never delivered the

money he promised to Cambridge

University and, as Mr. Guy records,

“secured a prized burial spot at his

local parish church, St Helen’s

Bishopgate, by offering an endow-

ment to build a steeple on which

he never made good.” You get the

sense that the rotter wouldn’t mind

going down in history as the author

of the law that others propounded

before him, including, Mr. Guy

relates, the ancient Greek dramatist

Aristophanes.

But Gresham didn’t rise to the

lofty station of merchant prince

through neglect of the arts of

personal ingratiation. After resign-

ing his post as Queen Elizabeth I’s

banker, he was obliged to submit

his accounts to a routine royal

audit. But when the audit revealed

that he’d falsified his expenses to

an extent that threatened his very

solvency, the distraught banker

managed to inveigle Elizabeth into

overturning her auditors’ verdict.

“Straightforward cronyism” is how

the author explains this bit of slick

personal diplomacy.

Maybe the queen had a soft spot

for the man who, while conducting

her business in sometimes hazard-

ous conditions on the Continent,

would find the time and means

with which to buy her an iron chest

from Antwerp or a Turkish horse

from Germany or silk stockings

from Spain. Nor was she unaware

of Gresham’s contributions to the

growth of a domestic English

money market. In the time of her

immediate predecessor, Queen

Mary I, whom Gresham had also

advised, wealthy English merchants

lent to the crown on command,

interest-free, under pain of retribu-

tion. Now, under an older and wiser

Gresham, they lent because they

liked the rate of interest on offer.

Gresham’s career, Mr. Guy con-

tends, made him, “a harbinger of

a world to come: one in which

national sovereignty is answerable

to the machinations of the market

to whose imperatives crowned and

elected heads alike would eventu-

ally have to bow.”

At this writing, though, rock-

bottom interest rates constrain few

governments from borrowing and

spending in the grand Tudor style.

And as to the distinction between

“good” money and “bad,” it’s all

paper, or digital scrip, which a mod-

ern central bank can print by the

trillions with a tap or two on a key-

board. What would the ever adapt-

able Gresham make of our current

financial arrangements? Dollars to

donuts, he’d turn them to profit.

Mr. Grant, the editor of Grant’s

Interest Rate Observer, is the

author, most recently, of

“Bagehot: The Life and Times of

the Greatest Victorian.”

Queen Elizabeth’s Banker

BOOKS

‘If money go before, all ways do lie open.’—FORD, IN SHAKESPEARE’S ‘MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR’

Gresham’s Law

By John Guy

Profile Books,

302 pages, $26.62

BYJAMESGRANT