Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [268]
Roosevelt had seen Hughes’s candidacy coming for a long time. Typically, the justice would neither confirm nor deny a desire to be nominated. But he had much to recommend him. Hughes was progressive without being Progressive, a man of icy brilliance, enrobed now with all the majesty of a seat on the Supreme Court. The only virtue he lacked, in abundance, was charm. But Grover Cleveland had managed to do without it and serve two distinguished terms in the White House, to say nothing of George Washington.
What, though, would a President Hughes do about such recent provocations as Britain’s rejection of Secretary Lansing’s proposal to classify armed merchantmen as warships? And Pancho Villa’s cross-border raid on Columbus, New Mexico, killing eight civilians and seven U.S. troopers? And Germany’s torpedoing of the Channel ferry Sussex, with four Americans aboard? Roosevelt had no evidence to go on, but suspected that the justice would prove to be “another Wilson with whiskers.”
JOVIAL AND RED-BROWN from the Caribbean sun, Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill and found a book of poems in the mass of mail awaiting his attention. It was entitled The Man Against the Sky, and had been sent to him by Edwin Arlington Robinson, strangest of all the literary figures he had patronized. Robinson had done little over the past twenty-seven years but write austere, elliptical poetry and try to keep from starving. When inspiration failed, he would try without success to drink himself to death. There was too much blood in his sunsets and aching regret in his love lyrics for most magazine editors to read, let alone print anything by him. What books he had managed to publish were either self-financed or commercial failures. In 1905, Roosevelt had had to exercise the power of the presidency to persuade Scribners to reissue The Children of the Night, simultaneously awarding Robinson a no-show government job. As the poet, forever grateful, wrote Kermit: “I don’t know where I would be without your astonishing father. He fished me out of hell by the hair of the head, and so enabled me to get my last book together and in all probability to get it published.”
That had been The Town Down the River, which came out in 1910 and ended in an enigmatic ode entitled “The Revealer—Roosevelt.” Except for some haunting verses here and there, it showed an attrition of his gifts, indicating that Robinson would have been better off left in hell. He seemed to write best when he was nearest to suicide.
The Roosevelts had seen him only once or twice since then: a mousy, half-deaf little man who had come to Sagamore Hill in 1913 and remained almost mute—not that any of the Colonel’s guests ever had much opportunity to speak. Now Robinson repaid their hospitality with a book of such original power as to justify the belief, among a few cognoscenti, that he was the finest poet in America. He confessed in an accompanying note that he had recently emerged from one of his depressive slumps.
“Your letter deeply touches me,” Roosevelt wrote on 27 March. “There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us.… It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.”
He was referring to a terrifying poem in the book, describing Robinson’s Döppelganger-like experience of having witnessed his own death in a house full of demonic shadows. Roosevelt responded more to the poet’s feeling of rebirth—After that, from everywhere, / Singing life will find him—than to whatever agonies Robinson