The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [71]
Theodore’s pertinacity in raising such subjects vastly irritated a fellow student, Poultney Bigelow. “Roosevelt was then what he was in the White House—an excellent example of the genus Americanus egotisticus.” Bigelow may have been a prejudiced witness—those who hated Theodore did so with passion—yet he early detected the future President’s lifelong compulsion for center stage. “He was predestined for politics … he could not escape the fate of being persistently in the public eye.”16
Professor Dwight, on the other hand, did not seem to mind Theodore’s interruptions. Most of the other students were impressed by the newcomer. He quickly became a favorite, and was accepted as a man with a future, although it was plain to all but himself that he had no future in law. As one classmate dryly put it, “The intricacies of the rule in Shelley’s case, the study of feudal tenures as exemplified in the great work of Blackstone, were not the things upon which that avid mind must feed.”17
All through the winter and spring of 1880–81 Theodore continued to march down Fifth Avenue, Blackstone’s Commentaries under his arm and a determined expression on his face. “I like the law school work very much,” he told himself.18
THE SECOND ROUTE that Theodore followed, at the close of his morning classes, led west from the Law School to the Astor Library, on the other side of Lafayette Place. Here he proceeded mysteriously to bury himself in speckled tomes and ancient periodicals. He remained closemouthed about this scholarly activity, not even mentioning it to his diary until March 1881, and then with deliberate vagueness: “Am still working on … one or two unsuccessful literary projects.”19
Just when Theodore became aware of his potential as a writer is unclear. His juvenile letters and diaries had been no more remarkable than those of any intelligent boy; his adolescent notebooks and ornithological pamphlets were strictly scientific; his Harvard themes were laborious, unimaginative, and lacking in “style.” Even his eulogies for Theodore Senior and effusions over Alice Lee, while undoubtedly passionate, were expressed in Victorian clichés. Only rarely, as in the stories he used to improvise as a bedridden boy, the humorous letters from Dresden, and the descriptions of birdsong in the Adirondacks, had he shown any flashes of originality. These somehow seem to have convinced him that the name Theodore Roosevelt might one day ornament the spine of this or that leather-bound volume.
From his late teens on he had begun to write, consciously or unconsciously, to an audience. Even the diaries he ostensibly marked “Private” show signs of this urge to communicate. It is impossible to read them at any length without feeling that one is being addressed. Many entries are deliberately prosy and tell Theodore’s imagined readers things he does not need to tell himself. Even when he wishes to be genuinely private, he feels the stare of the public, and is obliged to erase paragraphs, tear out whole pages, and curtly announce that some things are “too sacred to be written about.”
That other instinct of the born author—the compulsion to write—was also strong in him. Theodore’s habit, in moments of joy or sorrow, had always been to reach for a pen, as others might reach for a rosary or a bottle. During the winter of 1879–80, when Alice was driving him to despair, he had begun to write a book, the most technically challenging one he could think of. Now, in the happy winter of 1880–81, he turned again to The Naval War of 1812.20
Although Theodore protested that the two introductory chapters he had already completed at Harvard “were so dry they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison,” he was entitled to be proud of them, for they were a formidable achievement.21 Before starting the book he had known little about academic research, and less about marine warfare. Merely to master the technicalities of naval strategy and tactics, along with