The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (17 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
In addition to boxing, wrestling, body-building, and his daily hours of recitation, the young freshman attended weekly dancing-classes, hunted in the woods around Cambridge, taught in Sunday school, stuffed and dissected his specimens, organized a whist club, took part in poetry-reading sessions, followed the Harvard football team to Yale (“The fellows … seem to be a much more scrubby set than ours”), and, in time-honored undergraduate fashion, caroused with his friends, making the night hideous with his harsh, unmusical singing.
21
He developed a sudden, and ardent, interest in the girls of Boston, and, thanks to his excellent local connections, was soon seeing many of them. Hardly a week went by, in those early months of 1877, without its round of matinees, theater parties, and balls. Theodore reported them all enthusiastically to his family, along with assurances that he was not neglecting his studies, and at least one guilty protestation that he remained faithful to Edith Carow.
22
Although he had not lacked for female company hitherto in his
life, it had been confined mostly to the Roosevelt family circle. Even his intimacy with Edith had the quality of a brother-sister relationship. Sickly and reclusive as a child, preoccupied with travel and self-improvement in his teens, he had had little opportunity to knock on strange doors. Now, doors were opening of their own accord, disclosing scores of fresh faces and alluring young figures. Understandably Theodore was dazzled. Almost every girl he met is described in his letters as “sweet,” “bright,” or “pretty.”
What the girls thought of him, with his crooked spectacles, grinning teeth, and alarmingly frank conversation, was another matter. The evidence is that they tolerated him (to one debutante, he was “studious, ambitious, eccentric—not the sort to appeal at first”) until they found they had grown fond of him.
23
It might be mentioned here that neither during his student years, nor indeed at any time in his life, did Theodore show the slightest tolerance for women (or for that matter men) who were anything but “rigidly virtuous.” His judgments of people lower down the moral or social scale could be particularly prudish. “Have just received a letter telling me that [cousin] Cornelius has distinguished himself by marrying a French actress!” he wrote in his diary one day. “He is a disgrace to the family—the vulgar brute.”
24
Sex, to him, was part of the mystical union of marriage, and, however pleasurable as an act of love, its function was to procreate. Outside marriage, as far as he was concerned, it simply did not exist.
25
Of the inclinations that naturally beset a young man when he returns, hot from the intimacies of a sleigh-ride, to his private room, it is perhaps unnecessary to speak. There are erasures and pages torn out of Theodore’s diaries, yet also the ecstatic declaration, when he finally fell in love, “Thank Heaven, I am … perfectly pure.”
26
At the same time that he became a ladies’ man, he developed into something of a fashion plate, or, as he preferred to describe himself, “very swell.” Invited away for the weekend, he was suddenly ashamed of his hat, and sent home for a beaver. Selecting a new wardrobe, he agonized for days over his afternoon coat, “being undecided whether to have it a frock or a cutaway.” He complained that his washerwoman did not act squarely “on the
subject of white cravats.”
27
He sported one necktie so brilliant it cast a glow upon his cheeks, and combed his whiskers until they swayed in the breeze. Sniggers could be heard in the Yard, as he marched dazzlingly by. But Theodore, in the manner of all dandies, pretended not to notice he was being noticed.
28
W
HEN HE ASSURED
his parents that he was not neglecting his studies, he was telling the truth. Indeed, he got through prodigious quantities of work. Iron self-discipline had become a habit with him, and he plotted every day with the methodism of a Wesleyan minister. The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small—rarely more than a quarter of the day—but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off than most. Even these “free” periods were packed with mental, physical, or social activity. “He was forever at it,” said one classmate. Another marveled: “Never have I seen or read of a man with such an amazing array of interests.”
29
Tumbling into bed at midnight or in the small hours, Theodore could luxuriate in healthy tiredness, satisfied that he had wasted not one minute of his waking hours.
His regimen was flexible, but balanced. Any overindulgence in sport or flirtation would be immediately compensated for by extra study. When an attack of measles laid him low in February 1877, he made up for lost time by canceling his Easter vacation in New York, secluding himself on a friend’s farm, and finishing in five days “the first book of Horace, the sixth book of Homer, and the
Apology
of Socrates.”
30
It must not be assumed that Theodore struck any of the Harvard faculty as intellectually remarkable during this stage of his academic career. On the contrary, he was regarded as “an average B man … not in any way distinguished.”
31
He paled in comparison with the scintillating, sixteen-year-old Bob Bacon, and at least half a dozen of his classmates surpassed him in composing themes. “Roosevelt’s writing was to the point,” said one instructor, “but did not have their air of cultivation.”
32
Like many voluble men, he was a slow writer, painfully hammering out sentences which achieved force and clarity at the expense of polite style.
Neither this nor the pessimism of professors prevented him from scoring an average of 75 at the end of his freshman year, with honor grades in five out of seven subjects.
33
If it could not be counted a “distinguished” performance, for a boy who had largely educated himself, then it would do for the time being.
B
EFORE LEAVING
H
ARVARD
for the summer of 1877, Theodore played host to several guests from New York, including Edith Carow. The latter, perhaps aware that she had local rivals, flirted with him and his classmates so successfully that he exclaimed afterward, “I don’t think I ever saw Edith looking prettier; everyone … admired her little Ladyship intensely, and she behaved as sweetly as she looked.” He begged Corinne to pass on the word that “I enjoyed
her
visit
very
much indeed.”
34
But within a day or two he was praising other girls again. When college broke up on 21 June, he hurried, not to the parlors of New York City, but to the lonely forests of the Adirondacks, “so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible.”
35
Possibly Edith, hearing this, heaved a quiet sigh. She could compete with the belles of Boston, but what were her charms compared with those of the orange-throated warbler, red-bellied nuthatch, and hairy woodpecker?
I
N MID
-J
ULY
, T
HEODORE
joined his family at Tranquillity, and soon afterward published his first printed work,
The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks
. This scientific catalog was the fruit of three expeditions dating back to August 1874, on the last of which he had been briefly joined by Harry Minot, his best friend from Harvard. Minot contributed a few observations and was listed as co-author, but the title-page typography left no doubt as to who took full credit. Ninety-seven species—some unknown even to longtime residents of the area—were described in precise thumbnail sketches, remarkable for their emphasis on song as well as plumage. Theodore’s acute ear had been ravished, in the Adirondacks, by a wealth of melody such as he had never heard before. His notebooks, upon which
Birds
was based, are so full of auditory observations
that visual ones are sometimes forgotten. Spectacles or no spectacles, sound always meant more to him than color. One rhapsodic passage shows how sensuously he reacted to it:
Perhaps the sweetest bird music I have ever listened to was uttered by a hermit thrush. It was while hunting deer on a small lake, in the heart of the wilderness; the night was dark, for the moon had not yet risen, but there were clouds, and as we moved over the surface of the water with the perfect silence so strange and almost oppressive to the novice in this sport, I could distinguish dimly the outlines of the gloomy and impenetrable pine forests by which we were surrounded. We had been out for two or three hours but had seen nothing; once we heard a tree fall with a dull, heavy crash, and two or three times the harsh hooting of an owl had been answered by the unholy laughter of a loon from the bosom of the lake, but otherwise nothing had occurred to break the death-like stillness of the night; not even a breath of air stirred among the tops of the tall pine trees. Wearied by our unsuccess we at last turned homeward when suddenly the quiet was broken by the song of a hermit thrush; louder and clearer it sang from the depths of the grim and rugged woods, until the sweet, sad music seemed to fill the very air and to conquer for the moment the gloom of the night; then it died away and ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Perhaps the song would have seemed less sweet in the daytime, but uttered as it was, with such surroundings, sounding so strange and so beautiful amid these grand but desolate wilds, I shall never forget it.
This Keatsian passage, composed when Theodore was only eighteen, foreshadows the best of his mature writing in its simplicity and atmospheric effects. Yet he kept it and other such effusions strictly private: in his published works he seemed determined to be scholarly.
Summer Birds
was followed in due course by a similar study,
Notes on Some of the Birds of Oyster Bay
. Thirty-five years later, when the ex-President was writing his memoirs, he would look
back fondly on these “obscure ornithological publications,” which formally launched him on his career as a professional natural historian.
36
That career was the subject of a solemn discussion between father and son during the late summer of 1877. Theodore’s courses in his freshman year had all been prescribed; now, as his sophomore year loomed, he could choose some of his own—and begin to follow his future course in life.
Summer Birds
, which was favorably reviewed, must have convinced Theodore Senior that his son was already one of the most knowledgeable young naturalists in the United States.
37
The boy’s collection of birds and skins, now numbering well into the hundreds, was probably unequaled in variety and quality by any American of his age. He was regarded as “a very promising taxidermist, appeared in a national directory of biologists, and very likely had no peer, as a teenage ornithologist, in his knowledge of bird coloration, courtship, flight, and song.
38
His future as a scientist would therefore seem to be assured. Yet Theodore Senior gave him surprisingly little encouragement.