The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  Years later I asked him why he had supported Bryan, a man who had never, in my grandfather’s own words, “developed. He was too famous too young. He just stopped in his thirties.” So why had he nominated Bryan for president? Well, at the time there were reasons: he was vague. Then, suddenly, the pale face grew mischievous and the thin, straight Roman mouth broke into a crooked grin. “After I nominated him at Denver, we rode back to the hotel in the same carriage and he turned to me and said, ‘You know, I base my political success on just three things.’” The old man paused for dramatic effect. What were they? I asked. “I’ve completely forgotten,” he said. “But I do remember wondering why he thought he was a success.”

  In 1936, Theodore Roosevelt’s sinuous cousin Franklin brought an end to my grandfather’s career in the Senate. But the old man stayed on in Rock Creek Park and lived to a Nestorian age, convinced that FDR, as he was always known, was our republic’s Caesar while his wife, Eleanor, Theodore’s niece, was a revolutionary. The old man despised the whole family except Theodore’s daughter Alice Longworth.

  Alice gave pleasure to three generations of our family. She was as witty—and as reactionary—as Senator Gore; she was also deeply resentful of her distant cousin Franklin’s success while the canonization of her own first cousin Eleanor filled her with horror. “Isn’t Eleanor no-ble,” she would say, breaking the word into two syllables, each hummed reverently. “So very, very good!” Then she would imitate Eleanor’s buck teeth which were not so very unlike her own quite prominent choppers. But Alice did have occasional, rare fits of fairness. She realized that what she felt for her cousins was “Simply envy. We were the President Roosevelt family. But then along came the Feather Duster,” as she habitually referred to Franklin, “and we were forgotten.” But she was exaggerating, as a number of new books attest, not to mention that once beautiful Dakota cliff defaced by the somber Gutzon Borglum with the faces of dead pols.

  It is hard for Americans today to realize what a power the Roosevelts exerted not only in our politics but in the public’s imagination. There had been nothing like them since the entirely different Adamses and there has been nothing like them since—the sad story of the Kennedys bears about as much resemblance to the Roosevelts as the admittedly entertaining and cautionary television series Dallas does to Shakespeare’s chronicle plays.

  From the moment in 1898 when TR raced up Kettle Hill (incorrectly known as San Juan) to April 12, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died, the Roosevelts were at the republic’s center stage. Also, for nearly half that fifty-year period, a Roosevelt had been president. Then, as poignant coda, Eleanor Roosevelt, now quite alone, acted for seventeen years as conscience to a world very different from that of her uncle TR or even of FDR, her cousin-husband.

  In the age of the condominium and fast foods, the family has declined not only as a fact but as a concept. Although there are, presumably, just as many Roosevelts alive today as there were a century ago, they are now like everyone else, scattered about, no longer tribal or even all of the same class. Americans can now change class almost as fast—downward, at least—as they shift from city to city or job to job. A century ago, a member of the patriciate was not allowed to drop out of his class no matter how little money he had. He might be allowed to retire from the world, like TR’s alcoholic brother Elliott, in order to cultivate his vices, but even Elliott remained very much a part of the family until death—not his own kind—declassed him.

  As a descendant of Theodore Roosevelt said to David McCullough, author of Mornings on Horseback, “No writer seems to have understood the degree to which [TR] was part of a clan.” A clan that was on the rise, socially and financially, in nineteenth-century New York City. In three generations the Roosevelts had gone from hardware to plate glass to land development and banking (Chemical). By and large, the Roosevelts of that era were a solemn, hard-working, uninspired lot who, according to the New York World, had a tendency “to cling to the fixed and the venerable.” Then, suddenly, out of this clan of solid burghers erupted the restless Theodore and his interesting siblings. How did this happen? Cherchez la mère is the usual key to the unexpected—for good or ill—in a family’s history.

  During Winston Churchill’s last government, a minister found him in the Cabinet room, staring at a newspaper headline: one of his daughters had been arrested, yet again, for drunkenness. The minister said something consoling. Churchill grunted. The minister was then inspired to ask: “How is it possible that a Churchill could end up like this?” To which the old man replied: “Do you realize just what there was between the first Duke of Marlborough and me?” Plainly, a genetic disaster area had been altered, in Winston’s case, by an American mother, Jennie Jerome, and in Theodore Roosevelt’s case by a southern mother, named Mittie Bulloch, a beautiful, somewhat eccentric woman whom everyone delighted in even though she was not, to say the least, old New York. Rather, she was proudly southern and told her sons exciting stories of what their swash-buckling southern kin had done on land and sea. In later life, everyone agreed that Theodore was more Bulloch than Roosevelt just as his cousin Franklin was more Delano—or at least Sara Delano—than Roosevelt.

  Mr. McCullough’s book belongs to a new and welcome genre: the biographical sketch. Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore and Richard Hofstadter in The American Political Tradition were somewhat specialized practitioners of this art but, by and large, from Plutarch to Strachey, it has been more of a European than an American genre. Lately, American biography has fallen more and more into the hands not of writers but of academics. That some academics write very well indeed is, of course, perfectly true and, of course, perfectly rare. When it comes to any one of the glorious founders of our imperial republic, the ten-volume hagiography is now the rule. Under the direction of a tenured Capo, squads of graduate students spend years assembling every known fact, legend, statistic. The Capo then factors everything into the text, like sand into a cement mixer. The result is, literally, monumental, and unreadable. Even such minor figures as Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis have been accorded huge volumes in which every letter, telegram, drunken quarrel is memorialized at random. “Would you read this sort of book?” I asked Mark Schorer, holding up his thick life of Sinclair Lewis. He blinked, slightly startled by my bad manners. “Well,” he said mildly, politely, “I must say I never really liked Lewis’s work all that much.”

  Now, as bright footnotes to the academic texts, we are offered such books as Otto Friedrich’s Clover and Jean Strouse’s Alice James. These sketches seem to me to belong to literature in a way that Schorer’s Sinclair Lewis or Dumas Malone’s Jefferson and His Time do not—the first simply a journeyman compilation, the second a banal hagiography (with, admittedly, extremely valuable footnotes). In a sense, the reader of Malone et al. is obliged to make his own text out of the unshaped raw material while the reader of Strouse or Friedrich is given a finished work of literature that supplies the reader with an idiosyncratic view of the subject. To this genre Mornings on Horseback belongs: a sketch of Theodore Roosevelt’s parents, brothers and sisters, wife, and self until the age of twenty-eight. Mr. McCullough has done a good swift job of sketching this family group.

  Unfortunately, he follows in the wake not of the usual dull, ten-volume academic biography of the twenty-sixth president but of the first volume of Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. This is bad luck for Mr. McCullough. Morris’s work is not only splendid but covers the same period as Mr. McCullough, ending some years later with the death of McKinley. Where Mr. McCullough scores is in the portrait of the family, particularly during Theodore’s youth. Fortunately, there can never be too much of a good thing. Since Morris’s work has a different, longer rhythm, he does not examine at all closely those lesser lives which shaped—and explain, somewhat—the principal character.

  Theodore Roosevelt, Senior, was a man of good works; unlike his wife Mittie. “She played no part in his good works, and those speculations on life in the hereafter or the
status of one’s soul, speculations that appear in Theodore’s correspondence…are not to be found in what she wrote. She was not an agnostic exactly,” writes McCullough, but at a time when the church was central to organized society she seems more than slightly indifferent or, as her own mother wrote, “If she was only a Christian, I think I could feel more satisfied.”

  Mittie’s lack of religion was to have a lasting effect on her grand-daughter Eleanor, the future Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1870 Mittie placed her eldest child, Anna—known as Bamie—in Les Ruches, a girls’ school at Fountainebleau. The school’s creator was Mlle. Marie Souvestre, “a woman of singular poise and great culture, but also an outspoken agnostic…as brief as Bamie’s time there would be, Mlle. Souvestre’s influence would carry far.” Indeed it did. In the next generation Bamie’s niece Eleanor was also sent to school with Mlle. Souvestre, now removed to Allenwood in England. One of Mlle. Souvestre’s teachers was Dorothy Bussy, a sister of Lytton Strachey and the pseudonymous as well as eponymous author of Olivia by Olivia, a story of amitiés particulières in a girls’ school.

  Bamie was not to marry until she was forty, while Eleanor’s dislike of heterosexuality was lifelong (“They think of nothing else,” she once said to me, grimly—and somewhat vaguely, for she never really said exactly who “they” were); it would seem that Mlle. Souvestre and her school deserve a proper study—before M. Roger Peyrefitte gets to it. Certainly, Eleanor had learned Mlle. Souvestre’s lesson well: this world is the one that we must deal with and, if possible, improve. Eleanor had no patience with the other-worldly. Neither had her uncle TR. In a letter to Bamie, the future president says that he is marrying for a second time—the first wife had died. As a highly moral man, he is disgusted with himself. So much so that “were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead.”

  A recurrent theme in this family chronicle is ill health. Bamie had a disfiguring curvature of the spine. Elliott had what sounds like epileptic fits. Then, at thirty-four, he was dead of alcoholism, in West 102nd Street, looked after by a mistress. Theodore, Junior’s general physical fragility was made intolerable by asthma. Mr. McCullough has done a good deal of research into asthma, that most debilitating and frightening of nervous afflictions. “Asthma is repeatedly described as a ‘suppressed cry for the mother’—a cry of rage as well as a cry for help.” Asthmatics live in constant terror of the next attack, which will always seem to be—if indeed it is not—terminal.

  Parenthetically, I ran into the Wise Hack not long ago—in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Where else? He is now very old, very rich: he owns a lot of Encino. Although he will no longer watch a movie made after 1945, he still keeps an eye on “the product.” He knows all the deals. “One funny thing,” he said, wheezing from emphysema—not asthma. “You know, all these hotshot young directors they got now? Well, every last one of them is a fat sissy who likes guns. And every last one of them has those thick glasses and the asthma.” But before I could get him to give me the essential data, as Mrs. Wharton used to say, he had been swept into the Polo Lounge by the former managing editor of Liberty.

  I must say that I thought of the Wise Hack’s gnomic words as I read Mr. McCullough’s account of TR’s asthma attacks, which usually took place on a Sunday “which in the Victorian era was still the Lord’s day…the one day of the week when the head of the household was home from work….” Sunday also involved getting dressed up and going to church, something TR did not like. On the other hand, he enjoyed everyone’s attention once the attacks had ended. Eventually, father and son came under the spell of a Dr. Salter, who had written that “organs are made for action, not existence; they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well, they can be well.” You must change your life, said Rilke’s Apollo. And that is what the young TR did: he went to a gymnasium, became an outdoorsman, built up his fragile body. At Harvard he was five foot eight inches tall and weighed one hundred twenty-five pounds. In later life, he was no taller but he came to weigh more than two hundred pounds; he was definitely a butterball type, though a vigorous one. He also wore thick glasses; liked guns.

  Unlike the sissies who now make violent movies celebrating those who kill others, Theodore was a sissy who did not know that he was one until he was able to do something about it. For one thing, none of the Roosevelt children was sent to school. They were tutored at home. The boys seemed not to have had a great deal to do with other boys outside their own tribe. When Theodore went to Harvard, he was on his own for the first time in his life. But even at Harvard, Mittie would not allow him to room with other boys. He had an apartment in a private house; and a manservant. At first, he was probably surprised to find that he was unpopular with the other students; but then he was not used to dealing with those he did not know. He was very much a prig. “I had a headache,” he writes in his diary, aged eleven, “and Conie and Ellie made a tremendous noise playing at my expense and rather laughed when I remonstrated.”

  At Harvard, he was very conscious of who was and who was not a gentleman. “I stand 19th in the class…. Only one gentleman stands ahead of me.” He did not smoke; he got drunk on only one occasion—when he joined the Porcellian Club; he remained “pure” sexually. He was a lively, energetic youth who spoke rapidly, biting off his words as if afraid there would not be enough breath for him to say what he wanted to say. Properly bespectacled and gunned since the age of thirteen, he shot and killed every bird and animal that he could; he was also a fair taxidermist. Toward the end of his Harvard career, he was accepted as what he was, a not unattractive New York noble who was also rich; his income was $8,000 a year, about $80,000 in today’s money. In his last two years at Harvard “clothes and club dues…added up to $2,400, a sum the average American family could have lived on for six years.”

  In later years, Theodore was remembered by a classmate as “a joke…active and enthusiastic and that was all,” while a girl of his generation said “he was not the sort to appeal at first.” Harvard’s President Eliot, who prided himself on knowing no one, remembered Theodore as “feeble” and rather shallow. According to Mr. McCullough, he made “no lasting male friendships” at Harvard, but then, like so many men of power, he had few attachments outside his own family. During the early part of his life he had only one friend—Henry Cabot (known as La-dedah) Lodge, a Boston aristo-sissy much like himself.

  The death of his father was a shattering experience; and the family grew even closer to one another than before. Then Theodore fell in love and added a new member to the clan. When TR met Alice Lee, she was seventeen and he was nineteen. “See that girl,” he said to Mrs. Robert Bacon at a party. “I am going to marry her. She won’t have me, but I am going to have her.” Have her he did. “Alice,” said Mrs. Bacon years later, “did not want to marry him, but she did.” They were married October 27, 1880, on Theodore’s twenty-second birthday. They lived happily ever after—for four years. Alice died of Bright’s disease, shortly after giving birth to their daughter; a few hours earlier, in the same house, Mittie had died of typhoid fever. The double blow entirely changed Theodore’s life. He went west to become a rancher, leaving little Alice with his sister Bamie. That same year Elliott also became a father when his wife, Anna Hall, gave birth to Eleanor.

  In 1876, as General Grant’s second administration fell apart in a storm of scandal and the winds of reform gathered force, New York State’s great lord of corruption, Senator Roscoe Conkling, observed with characteristic sour wit: “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word reform.” Since good Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt, Senior, could not endure what was happening to their party and country, they joined together to cleanse party, country.

  As a member of the New York delegation to the Republican convention at Cincinnati, Theodore, Senior, helped deny both Conkling and James G. Blaine, another lord of corru
ption, the nomination for president. After a good deal of confusion the dim but blameless Rutherford B. Hayes was nominated. Although Hayes was not exactly elected president, he became the president as a result of the Republican Party’s continued mastery of corruption at every level of the republic.

  The new president then offered Theodore, Senior, the Collectorship of the Port of New York, a powerhouse of patronage and loot that had been for some years within Conkling’s gift. And so it remained: thanks to Conkling’s efforts in the Senate, Theodore, Senior, was denied the Collectorship. A week after this rejection, he wrote his son at Harvard to say that, all in all, he was relieved that he was not to be obliged to “purify our Customhouse.” Nevertheless, he was glad that he had fought the good fight against the “machine politicians” who “think of nothing higher than their own interests. I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.” This was the last letter from father to son. Two months later Theodore, Senior, was dead of cancer, at the age of forty-six.

  Although TR worshiped his father, he does not seem to have been particularly interested in the politics of reform. During the Collectorship battle, he had wanted to be a naturalist; later he thought of writing, and began to compose what proved to be, or so one is told, a magisterial study of the early years of the American navy, The Naval War of 1812. He also attended Columbia Law School until 1881, when he got himself elected to the New York State Assembly. He was twenty-three years old; as lively and bumptious as ever.