Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [353]
79 he has already read TR to ERD, 24 June 1909 (ERDP); TR, Works, 14.465, 5.158. TR knew Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in several versions, and complained that the Edward Fitzgerald edition was more realization than translation. He constantly quoted Lewis Carroll, remarking on safari, for example, that he felt “the way Alice did in Looking-Glass country, when the elephants ‘did bother so.’ ” TR, Works, 5.295.
Biographical Note: At the end of his safari TR wrote an essay about his compulsion to read in the wilderness. He cited, from memory, a classical canon including the Bible and Apocrypha, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, Theocritus, Euripides, Polybius, Arrian, and Dante’s Divine Comedy (all in translation). In German, he read the Nibelungenlied, plus the poetry of Schiller, Koerner, and Heine. In French, he read the essays of Montaigne, Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Le chevalier des Touches, the elder Dumas’s Les louves de Machecoul and Tartarin de Tarascon, Flaubert’s Salammbô, and Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. It is unclear whether he read Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi in Italian, although as President, he did manage Michaelis’s L’Origine degli Indo-Europei. (TR, Letters, 4.795.) He listed the poems of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Kipling, Browning, Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, and George Cabot Lodge. He did not detail his academic reading, apart from Alexander Sutherland’s The Origin and the Growth of the Moral Instinct, “because as yet scientific books rarely have literary value.” He confessed to an enjoyment of popular fiction, ranging from Harris’s Tales of Uncle Remus to Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Emily Eden’s The Semi-Attached Couple, but also cited the Finnish historical novels of Zacharias Topelius, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, reread “because I wished to get the Cossack view of what was described by Sienkiewicz from the Polish side.” See TR, “The Pigskin Library,” Works, 14.463–74. See also the much longer reading list, compiled for Nicholas Murray Butler in 1903. (TR, Letters, 3.641–44.) For an extensive survey of TR the reader, see chap. 2, “The World of Thought,” in Edward Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1958, Guilford, Conn., 2008).
80 His ear for sounds TR, Works, 5.37, 387, 353, 96, 121. TR was amused to hear some Kenyan settlers referring to tree hyraxes as “Teddy bears.” Ibid., 352.
81 One sound falls TR to ERD, 24 June 1919; TR to ABR, 21 Jan. 1910, privately held.
82 He is proud TR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 21 June 1909 (TRC); TR, Letters, 7.30. See also TR’s admiring portrait of KR on safari in TR, Works, 4.120–21.
83 Possibly the image See Putnam, TR, 157ff, or Morris, The Rise of TR, 75–77.
84 He has grown used TR’s desire to escape public attention while on safari was periodically frustrated by social invitations, which he felt he had to accept, from government authorities in Nairobi and from prominent settlers in the “White Highlands.” On 3 Aug., for example, he was guest of honor at a banquet in Nairobi’s Railway Institute, attended by the Protectorate’s elite, in various stages of inebriation. He was presented with a rhinoceros foot, and sat through a flattering address printed on silk and read by the public recorder. An extract from his speech in response, “Education in Africa,” is quoted on page 22. (The Leader of British East Africa, 7 Aug. 1909.) As a result of his stays on local ranches, he formed lasting friendships with such colonial notables as Governor Sir Percy Girouard, Lord Delamere, Lord Cranworth, Sir Alfred Pease, and Sir William Northrup McMillan—into whose family his granddaughter Grace would one day marry.