"A man's castle is his home" if you can judge from Mr. Cavalier's thirty-three descriptions of castellated buildings, of which the last twelve are quite perfunctory. And if you are not put off by the guidebook gush-"excellent" this, "handsome" that, "beautiful" everywhere.
The author is oblivious to the historical or architectural significance of his topic but, on the other hand, the book is a trove of amusing anecdotes on the life-styles of American nouveaux riches. We find it bizarre that Mrs. Potter Palmer's appointments (even "to her closest friends") went through twenty-seven hands, or that at Vikingsholm there were exact replicas of the Queen's bed from the Oslo Viking ship except that the dinky dimensions of four feet six had to be lengthened. We also read of the latest stainless steel kitchens in these simulated mediaeval mansions.
Mr. Cavalier's book can be read as a document of the higher American nostalgia. There has yawned such a gap between the promises of American ideology and what the culture offers in daily fact that we have become masters at finding substitutes for the real history we are making-outside of time, like Disneyland and Colonial Williamsburg. Castles are a part of this mechanism, one so expensive that it can only be indulged in by the rich (or as in Exhibit 24, by an order of nuns).
The book reeks with Miniver Cheevyism. The author sheds tears over a scruffy thing called Bodine Castle: "Prior to the castle's demolition, which began May 3, 1966, the forlorn structure, whose original owners had known its spacious countryside location, was centered amidst a lumber yard, a forsaken end indeed for this once gracious American castellated structure." Prose like this makes me want to hire a bulldozer myself.
Still, there is some fun here: glimpses of the actor William Hooker Gillette driving a toy train at breakneck speed and collecting over seventy works of cat art around his estate. And I will long be grateful to Mr. Cavalier for showing me at least one building, Chateau Laroche in Loveland, Ohio. It is a kind of Watts Tower of mediaevalism, abuilding since 1929 by a Mr. Harry D. Andrews. Mr. Cavalier has made it his frontispiece.
"Why?" one mentally asks the benignly obsessed builder. "Because it wasn't there" must be his reply. Most of these buildings are mediocre; Hammond Castle, Staunton Hill, Lyndhurst, and Grey Towers are exceptions. Having worked for a dozen years in or around Horace Trumbauer's Grey Towers, I sense the shallowness of the author's response to architecture.
For a fifteen-dollar book the illustrations raise questions of equity. Credit lines to small newspapers and obscure historical societies account for their tackiness. If one aspires to create a coffee table book, one should learn to take pictures or make friends with a professional photographer.
Source: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Oct., 1974), p.262
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