January 24, 1862 – In New York City at 14 West 23rd Street, Edith Newbold Jones was born to a pair of socially prominent New Yorkers. The girl grew up to marry, take her husband’s name, and, as Edith Wharton, become the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence, an examination of the “Old New York” uppercrust into which she was born.
Where to start writing about Wharton? Should I discuss her graceful, clear-as-a-country-brook style? Her waxing and waning literary reputation over the years? Her Gilded Age “cottage” in the Berkshires, now restored to its former beauty? Hollywood’s heightened interest in her work over the last two decades? The comparatively little known but downright chilling ghost stories she wrote throughout her career, all the way up to her death?
Any of these would do—and, if this blog lasts long enough, maybe I’ll tackle all of these. But I thought I would share just one item: the portrait in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Temperamentally, the novelist and the politician would seem to possess little in common: one, a woman who depended on solitude and skeptical vision to etch her satires of her class; the other, a male who thrived on being “in the arena” of politics.
But the two, born within four years and four blocks of each other, sprang from the same time and socioeconomic background, wrote incessantly, and were deeply ambivalent about their class. Roosevelt lashed out against “malefactors of great wealth” while Wharton’s fiction continually returned to the conflict between sexual freedom and a highly stratified social hierarchy.
Wharton’s short reminiscence of the President is warm and revealing, reflecing this pair’s deep affinity for each other, even on the infrequent occasions they met.
Wharton, a distant cousin of TR’s second wife, Edith, had known him since her “first youth,” she noted, but they did not really click until Roosevelt, succeeding to the White House upon the assassination of William McKinley, asked her to lunch, where they could talk about a book of hers he admired, The Valley of Decision.
According to Wharton, except for small circles such as those revolving around John Hay, Henry Adams, and Roosevelt’s friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Washington was an inhospitable place for the intellect. Not surprisingly, the ardent bibliophile Roosevelt was delighted to find a kindred spirit when Wharton came to lunch. “Well, I am glad to welcome to the White House some one to whom I can quote “The Hunting of the Snark’ without being asked what I mean!” the President cried in relief upon seeing her.
On another occasion, at a reception surrounding commencement ceremonies at Williams College, the President encountered her again and, temporarily shaking off his academic hosts, he went off into a corner with her to speak about a new history he’d just read. “But that was the President’s way,” she wrote, “and as everybody knew him, everybody forgave him; and moreover they all knew that in another ten minutes he would be cornering someone else on some other equally absorbing subject.”
While much else about Roosevelt (including bellicosity and the celebration of Anglo-Saxon “manifest destiny” that lies at the heart of his two-volume pre-Presidential history, The Winning of the West) has not aged well in our more politically correct age, this almost childlike curiosity about anything and everything remains deeply appealing. Not for nothing was one of his many books entitled A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open. (Even that title evokes a chuckle, as if he were balancing a copy of Macaulay in one hand while bagging an elk in the other.)
A habitual coffee drinker reputed to have coined the future advertising slogan “good to the last drop!” while visiting Andrew Jackson’s Nashville home The Hermitage, Roosevelt might have been the most wired man in Washington, and you practically share his infectious enthusiasm in Wharton’s description. It’s easy to see how so many wanted to follow him in everything.
But TR probably transmitted his bibliophilia to nobody so much as his children, including his namesake, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. I have not yet started the first volume of Rick Atkinson’s “Liberation Trilogy” about the American destruction of the Third Reich, An Army at Dawn, but I just had to buy it as soon as I peaked at his vivid description of Theodore Jr.
Gassed in WWI and left with a permanent limp, Ted Jr. rose to become vice president of the Doubleday publishing house in the 1930s. With war looming again in Europe, he re-enlisted, brought copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress and a history of medieval England with him, and cheerfully endured challenges from the staff officers in his brigade by reciting long passages from Kipling.
If the general public remembers the younger Roosevelt at all these days, it’s likely because of reruns of The Longest Day, in which he was played by Henry Fonda. But that marvelous actor added much of his own taciturnity to a real-life brigadier general whose rumpled, intellectual nature became as noted as his valor in battle. (The only general in the first amphibious wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day, Ted Jr. waded ashore-- arthritic knees, faulty ticker and all -- then led several assaults along the beachhead under such constant enemy fire that his superior, Omar Bradley, described it as the single bravest act he witnessed during the war.)
All that restless intellectual energy, all that recklessness with one’s life that Wharton noted in Roosevelt and that Theodore Jr. displayed in military service, were also present in another President: John F. Kennedy.
Unlike TR, JFK did not really write the history that established his literary credibility, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, playing at best a supervisory role in its preparation. And unlike the Roosevelts, who displayed a Victorian sexual morality, Kennedy acted more like a Regency rake.
But like TR, JFK showed the world a surface exuberance that hid a thoughtful interior—in both cases, probably the consequence of sickly childhoods that left each man inner-directed, bookish, and absolutely certain that “the strenuous life” must be grasped in all its essentials because it will be lost all too soon.
“Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” Roosevelt observed. Numerous family tragedies growing up, as well as his own brushes with death, also made Kennedy all too familiar with “black care.”
JFK often asked his wife to recite his favorite poem, WWI poet-soldier Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Frequently with aides, he would bring to mind Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” exhortation to his troops—“We band of brothers, we happy few.” Underlying the famous Shakespeare speech was the possibility of death at Agincourt.
One of my uncles, who served on a PT boat in the South Pacific next to Kennedy, told me several years ago that ever since coming home from the war, he felt he had been living on borrowed time. The same realization fed the burning drive that everyone noticed in Kennedy.
Shrewdly, Wharton detected “something premonitory in this impatience” to know more and live more on the part of her fellow New Yorker. It’s impossible to shake the same feeling about Roosevelt’s son, or about the other Harvard grad who achieved the Presidency while still only in his early 40s, only to die all too young.
Where to start writing about Wharton? Should I discuss her graceful, clear-as-a-country-brook style? Her waxing and waning literary reputation over the years? Her Gilded Age “cottage” in the Berkshires, now restored to its former beauty? Hollywood’s heightened interest in her work over the last two decades? The comparatively little known but downright chilling ghost stories she wrote throughout her career, all the way up to her death?
Any of these would do—and, if this blog lasts long enough, maybe I’ll tackle all of these. But I thought I would share just one item: the portrait in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Temperamentally, the novelist and the politician would seem to possess little in common: one, a woman who depended on solitude and skeptical vision to etch her satires of her class; the other, a male who thrived on being “in the arena” of politics.
But the two, born within four years and four blocks of each other, sprang from the same time and socioeconomic background, wrote incessantly, and were deeply ambivalent about their class. Roosevelt lashed out against “malefactors of great wealth” while Wharton’s fiction continually returned to the conflict between sexual freedom and a highly stratified social hierarchy.
Wharton’s short reminiscence of the President is warm and revealing, reflecing this pair’s deep affinity for each other, even on the infrequent occasions they met.
Wharton, a distant cousin of TR’s second wife, Edith, had known him since her “first youth,” she noted, but they did not really click until Roosevelt, succeeding to the White House upon the assassination of William McKinley, asked her to lunch, where they could talk about a book of hers he admired, The Valley of Decision.
According to Wharton, except for small circles such as those revolving around John Hay, Henry Adams, and Roosevelt’s friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Washington was an inhospitable place for the intellect. Not surprisingly, the ardent bibliophile Roosevelt was delighted to find a kindred spirit when Wharton came to lunch. “Well, I am glad to welcome to the White House some one to whom I can quote “The Hunting of the Snark’ without being asked what I mean!” the President cried in relief upon seeing her.
On another occasion, at a reception surrounding commencement ceremonies at Williams College, the President encountered her again and, temporarily shaking off his academic hosts, he went off into a corner with her to speak about a new history he’d just read. “But that was the President’s way,” she wrote, “and as everybody knew him, everybody forgave him; and moreover they all knew that in another ten minutes he would be cornering someone else on some other equally absorbing subject.”
While much else about Roosevelt (including bellicosity and the celebration of Anglo-Saxon “manifest destiny” that lies at the heart of his two-volume pre-Presidential history, The Winning of the West) has not aged well in our more politically correct age, this almost childlike curiosity about anything and everything remains deeply appealing. Not for nothing was one of his many books entitled A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open. (Even that title evokes a chuckle, as if he were balancing a copy of Macaulay in one hand while bagging an elk in the other.)
A habitual coffee drinker reputed to have coined the future advertising slogan “good to the last drop!” while visiting Andrew Jackson’s Nashville home The Hermitage, Roosevelt might have been the most wired man in Washington, and you practically share his infectious enthusiasm in Wharton’s description. It’s easy to see how so many wanted to follow him in everything.
But TR probably transmitted his bibliophilia to nobody so much as his children, including his namesake, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. I have not yet started the first volume of Rick Atkinson’s “Liberation Trilogy” about the American destruction of the Third Reich, An Army at Dawn, but I just had to buy it as soon as I peaked at his vivid description of Theodore Jr.
Gassed in WWI and left with a permanent limp, Ted Jr. rose to become vice president of the Doubleday publishing house in the 1930s. With war looming again in Europe, he re-enlisted, brought copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress and a history of medieval England with him, and cheerfully endured challenges from the staff officers in his brigade by reciting long passages from Kipling.
If the general public remembers the younger Roosevelt at all these days, it’s likely because of reruns of The Longest Day, in which he was played by Henry Fonda. But that marvelous actor added much of his own taciturnity to a real-life brigadier general whose rumpled, intellectual nature became as noted as his valor in battle. (The only general in the first amphibious wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day, Ted Jr. waded ashore-- arthritic knees, faulty ticker and all -- then led several assaults along the beachhead under such constant enemy fire that his superior, Omar Bradley, described it as the single bravest act he witnessed during the war.)
All that restless intellectual energy, all that recklessness with one’s life that Wharton noted in Roosevelt and that Theodore Jr. displayed in military service, were also present in another President: John F. Kennedy.
Unlike TR, JFK did not really write the history that established his literary credibility, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, playing at best a supervisory role in its preparation. And unlike the Roosevelts, who displayed a Victorian sexual morality, Kennedy acted more like a Regency rake.
But like TR, JFK showed the world a surface exuberance that hid a thoughtful interior—in both cases, probably the consequence of sickly childhoods that left each man inner-directed, bookish, and absolutely certain that “the strenuous life” must be grasped in all its essentials because it will be lost all too soon.
“Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” Roosevelt observed. Numerous family tragedies growing up, as well as his own brushes with death, also made Kennedy all too familiar with “black care.”
JFK often asked his wife to recite his favorite poem, WWI poet-soldier Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Frequently with aides, he would bring to mind Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” exhortation to his troops—“We band of brothers, we happy few.” Underlying the famous Shakespeare speech was the possibility of death at Agincourt.
One of my uncles, who served on a PT boat in the South Pacific next to Kennedy, told me several years ago that ever since coming home from the war, he felt he had been living on borrowed time. The same realization fed the burning drive that everyone noticed in Kennedy.
Shrewdly, Wharton detected “something premonitory in this impatience” to know more and live more on the part of her fellow New Yorker. It’s impossible to shake the same feeling about Roosevelt’s son, or about the other Harvard grad who achieved the Presidency while still only in his early 40s, only to die all too young.
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