Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [158]
Then came a virtual wail for sympathy. “What was the political disease of which I died? I am hopeful that when historians conduct their post-mortems it may be found that my demise was due to circumstances over which I had no great control, and to a political cataclysm, which I could hardly have anticipated or avoided.”
FOR THE REST OF the winter, Roosevelt was absorbed in literary work. He continued to grind out what The Outlook obediently advertised as “Chapters of a Possible Autobiography,” as well as editorials and book reviews, and wrote his African life histories at such a rate that he had to urge Edmund Heller to keep up. In addition, he prepared “History as Literature” for publication in the April 1913 issue of American Historical Review and collected ten other pieces to appear with it in the essay volume he had promised Scribners. They included his three European university lectures, a paper on the ancient Irish sagas, “Dante in the Bowery,” and “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” his analysis of the conflict between faith and reason.
Edith worried about the pace at which he drove himself, and the struggle he seemed to be having with his memoir. “It is very difficult to strike just the happy medium between being too reticent and not reticent enough!” he wrote her sister. “I find it difficult both as regards my life when I was a child and my political experiences.” His solution in the former case was simply to omit whatever was not pleasant, and in the latter to adopt what Abbott regretfully called his “argumentative” style.
He was shy about mentioning any members of his family except the Roosevelts and Bullochs who had preceded him, expressing awe of his father (“the only man of whom I was ever really afraid”), and tolerant affection for his “entirely unreconstructed” Georgian mother, with her stories of antebellum life on Roswell Plantation and “queer goings-on in the Negro quarters.” As far as any reader could tell, the woman who bore his first child had never existed. The mother of his later children was referred to only in passing as “Mrs. Roosevelt,” and the children themselves were neither numbered nor named. He wrote tersely about his juvenile battles with asthma, then dismissed the subject of health altogether. Adult traumas, whether physical or psychological, went unrecorded. Autobiographically speaking, he had not squandered half his patrimony in the Badlands. He had not run for mayor of New York, let alone finished last in a three-way race. His younger brother, Elliott, had not impregnated a servant girl, the family had not paid her off, and Elliott had not died a hopeless alcoholic. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had been obstructed, rather than outwitted, by a Machiavellian colleague. Somebody else could take credit for comparing President McKinley’s backbone to a chocolate éclair. And the Colonel of the Rough Riders had not lobbied for a Medal of Honor on the ground of personal heroism.
A few of these lacunae were self-serving, but most were self-aware, to be expected in the reminiscences of a former president. He knew that every word that he wrote on personal matters would be pored over. (Hundreds of newspapers, including The New York Times, were quoting each chapter as soon as it appeared in The Outlook.) His moral instinct, moreover, prevented him from recording material that did not trumpet his beliefs. Owen Wister saw clearly in characterizing him as “an optimist who saw things as they ought to be, wrestling with a realist who knew things as they were.”
The optimist forged ahead with his text, cutting down on anecdotes and applying political experience to future ideals. Yet it was the realist, persuaded to reminisce by fellow editors at the magazine, who here and there set down stretches of beguiling autobiography, faithful to his own precept that vividness was a necessary part of historical truth. He wrote an elegiac chapter, “In Cowboy Land,” about his years as a rancher and deputy sheriff in North Dakota:
That land of the West has gone now, “gone, gone with