Authors: Thomas Mallon
He lectures Scottie on self-confidence; cautions her against whining (in a letter where he whines a bit about the loneliness of writing); and tells her he “never believe[s] much in happiness.” He urges the tragic view of life instead, though the stratagems he recommends for achieving it are often the eternal tricks of comedy: “A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.” Such maxims read like the sayings in his notebooks, where he stored observations and overheard remarks for eventual use in his fiction. His view of Scottie’s life is actually more aesthetic than tragic. In the fall of ‘38, he goes so far as to
offer, in a long, cruel paragraph, a sort of predictive plotline: “Knowing your character, here’s about the way things will go in the next month …”
He presents himself and her mother as negative examples (“Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe”) and regulates the letters through which Zelda now must relate to them both. He urges Scottie to write her but not to spend much vacation time in her presence: “I think the pull of an afflicted person upon a normal one is at all times downward, depressing and eventually somewhat paralyzing.” Zelda’s letters are “tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance,” while his own, he knows, reveal too much of the latter. A postscript to Scottie just months before his death in 1940 tells her to “Be careful about showing my letters—I mean to your mother for instance. I write very freely.”
It seems that Scottie will survive only with constant dire warnings. Fitzgerald speaks of “dreamy people like you and me,” whose “danger is imagining that we have resources—material and moral—which we haven’t got.” Incessant red flags against early drinking and early sex and failure to study read less like advice from a father to a daughter than loud slaps to the face of a drunk one is walking to keep awake. Fitzgerald claims to dislike the role of scolding parent, but he plays it to the girl’s most vulnerable spots, splashing contempt upon her first love and declaring that Vassar shouldn’t even admit her. “Don’t answer this, justifying yourself,” he shouts: “of
course
I know you’re doing the best you ‘can.’” He can only “wish to God I wasn’t so right usually about you.”
In a postscript whose sarcasm was surely lost on a teenager, Fitzgerald reminds her that “At the
Saturday Evening Post
rate this letter is worth $4000. Since it is for you only and there are so many points, won’t you read it twice?” He is, in fact, constantly setting his advice against his own published work and vanished world (“The Bachelors’ Cotillion simply doesn’t mean what it did twenty years ago—or even ten”) and, above all, his own killing mistakes: “This is the most completely experienced advice I’ve ever given you.” Scottie Fitzgerald points out how Malcolm Cowley went so far as
to say that her father “wasn’t writing those letters to his daughter at Vassar; he was writing them to himself at Princeton.” Fitzgerald himself knew, in one of the letters’ most shrewdly loving moments, that Scottie’s world wouldn’t bother to distinguish between the two: “people will be quick to deck you out with my sins … would like to be able to say, and would say on the slightest provocation: ‘There she goes—just like her papa and mama.’”
Actually, he’s sending many of these letters neither to Princeton nor to Vassar, but to the Hollywood hotel room in which they’re being written. Fitzgerald is trying to keep himself, one final time, on the straight and narrow—“You don’t realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better”—and if he can’t keep doing it, he will be finished for good. “If I hear of you taking a drink before you’re twenty,” he writes Scottie, “I shall feel entitled to begin my last and greatest non-stop binge.”
Scottie later recalled being too rebellious and self-protective to bear this onslaught, with its clear evidence of her father’s pain. When “these gorgeous letters, these absolute pearls of wisdom and literary style” arrived in her mailbox, she’d “simply examine them for checks and news, then stick them in [her] lower right-hand drawer.” In at least one of them, her father mentioned that he was keeping a carbon, so he’d be able to check whether or not her reply touches “on
every point”
he has made. But the copy’s real job was to keep those points, especially the last one—“Please work—work with your best hours”—faceup and available to the man still struggling in the Garden of Allah Hotel.
ON THE MORNING
of his resignation, during a rambling and sometimes mawkish farewell to White House staffers, Richard Nixon quoted the young Theodore Roosevelt’s grief-shattered reflection upon the death of his first wife: “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.” This portion of Nixon’s remarks is usually regarded as downright dissociative—equating the loss of a wife with the end of a mere presidency. Actually, the comparison
had the sort of raw sincerity that Nixon-haters always judged the man incapable of demonstrating; he used the quotation as evidence of things being never as dark as they seem. Nixon was already plotting his comeback, a reputational one this time, and his model only happened to be a politician. In the twenty-five-year-old Roosevelt, he had a spectacular model of personal renewal, a man whose painfully restarted pursuit of happiness turned into a gaudy shower of familial joy.
The whole TR story—asthmatic childhood; gym regimen; widowing; flight to the Dakota; big second family and Sagamore Hill; all of this before Rough-Riding and trust-busting—used to be better known to children than it is now. Perhaps it’s just too remote, or maybe polio and PT boats make for better legends. But once it really gets going, nothing rivals Teddy Roosevelt’s story for speed. In the space of three years he went from San Juan Hill to the White House, with time enough to be governor of New York and vice president of the United States in between.
When he moved his six children into the Executive Mansion, they ranged in age from three to seventeen. His fatherly letter writing was made necessary by the boys’ absences at school or his own presidential progresses. For all that he dismisses his traveling routine (“I had the usual experience in such cases, made the usual speech, held the usual reception, went to the usual lunch, etc., etc.”), it doesn’t seem that he resisted it much. In her long and admiring introduction to
A Bully Father
, her selection of the paterfamilas’s correspondence, Joan Paterson Kerr quotes Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice: “Father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.”
He was also the most popular attraction in a self-assembled zoo. Throughout his letters he is either pampering animals (“I am acting as nurse to two wee guinea pigs”) or slaughtering them (“P.S.—I have just killed a bear”). The children’s pets—terriers, macaws, flying squirrels, kangaroo rats—seem to have outnumbered the live humans and mounted taxidermy around them, and their father proved a sharp and entertaining observer of the creatures’ ways. He
observes that a guinea pig (another one, not the two above) is “squirming and kicking and looking exactly like Admiral Dewey,” and solemnly reports to Archie on a new dog: “The kitchen cat and he have strained relations but have not yet come to open hostility.”
“Cunning” is a favorite word of Roosevelt’s for pets and children alike; in fact, any line between the human species and the rest of them is barely detectable. Roosevelt calls his offspring “bunnies,” and plays “bear” to them with such terrifying gusto that his wife demands the activity no longer be conducted after supper. There are pillow fights and “scrambles,” all part of a need to be treated by his children “as a friend and playmate.” Mrs. Kerr points out the observation of Cecil Spring Rice, a British diplomat: “You must always remember that the President is about six.”
Modern theorists of “parenting” would applaud the way in which the roughhousing paternal grizzly could so easily metamorphose into something distinctly feminine. Quentin is “Quenty-Quee,” and Archibald, in the year he turns ten, “Blessed Archie-kins.” Their father likes a good game of “tickley,” and adopts the title “vice-mother” when the First Lady is away. On occasion he seems more like auntie: “Doctor Riley is along, and is a perfect dear, as always.”
Parental instruction of the epistolary kind is often a starchy, backfiring affair. There are those famous, awful letters from the earl of Chesterfield to his son, excruciating in their self-regard and sheer obviousness: “Do you use yourself to carve
ADROITLY
and genteelly, without hacking half an hour across a bone; without bespattering the company with the sauce; and without overturning the glasses into your neighbor’s pockets?” Chesterfield complains about his boy’s “exceedingly laconic” communications, recommends the letters of Madame de Sévigné as models and urges that he write as if “conversing freely with me by the fireside.” Ah, what a relaxed hearth
that
must have been, considering how the previous summer the lord had written his Grand-Touring boy with “fair warning, that at Leipsig I shall have an hundred invisible spies about you; and shall be exactly informed of everything that you do, and of almost everything that you say.”
By contrast, Roosevelt proceeds via gentle indirection, telling
one of the boys how he’s had to discipline another. To Kermit: “I have just had to descend with severity upon Quentin because he put the unfortunate Tom [a kitten] into the bathtub and then turned on the water. He didn’t really mean harm.” To Archie: “I have just had to give [Quentin] and three of his associates a dressing down—one of the three being Charlie Taft.” (They’d put spitballs on some White House portraits.) He raises the children with the same cheerful definiteness he used in steering those “turbulent little half-caste civilizations.” The sea bores him; the past is overrated; discouragement is the enemy: “Don’t worry about the lessons, old boy. I know you are studying hard. Don’t get cast down. Sometimes in life, both at school and afterwards, fortune will go against any one, but if he just keeps pegging away and doesn’t lose his courage things always take a turn for the better in the end.”
Character must trump intellect and athletics. Roosevelt’s limited enthusiasm for school sports is a frequent theme, though one has to remember that an apostle of the strenuous life is bound to have an exceptional notion of what
not
overdoing it means. To Ted at Groton: “To have you play football as well as you do, and make a good name in boxing and wrestling, and be cox of your second crew, and stand second or third in your class in the studies, is all right.”
He seems to have viewed the presidency as an opportunity for personal development, a chance to mix it up with Japanese wrestlers and contemporary poets. He enjoys the job (“I like to do the work and have my hand on the lever”) but appears to work no harder at it than Ronald Reagan did:
We almost always take our breakfast on the south portico now, Mother looking very pretty and dainty in her summer dresses. Then we stroll about the garden for fifteen or twenty minutes, looking at the flowers and the fountain and admiring the trees. Then I work until between four and five, usually having some official people to lunch—now a couple of Senators, now a couple of Ambassadors, now a literary man, now a capitalist or a labor leader, or a scientist, or a big-game hunter. If Mother wants to ride, we then spend a couple of hours on horseback.
He can worry over “attack and misrepresentation,” and seek comfort in Lincoln’s letters, but by and large there is no awesome burden; no malaise; no funk. He may not have liked “kodak creatures” or the press, but he took pleasure in the White House (its usher had the prescient name Ike Hoover), and he enjoyed Washington itself. He succeeded by making people adapt to his manner, instead of the other way around. There was no reason he couldn’t meet with legislators while watching the boys in their sandbox, and none that the Speaker couldn’t deal with the leg-grabbing of a kitten: “Mr. Cannon … eyed him with iron calm and not one particle of surprise.”
Roosevelt’s human preoccupations almost certainly made him a better president. Probably no one who’s held the job before or since has left behind a more spontaneous bundle of correspondence—with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, who for months on end would neglect his job to type besotted love notes (we’ll get to them in Chapter 5) to a woman across town. Both men lived in the last hours of a civilization that used letter writing not just to record the private life, but to conduct it. There are 126 letters in Joan Paterson Kerr’s selection; Theodore Roosevelt died at the age of sixty after having written 150,000 others.
JUST AS THE
private life began losing letters to the telephone, letters began losing a bit of their own privacy. Great numbers of early-twentieth-century magazines and newspapers started featuring advice columnists who would offer mass-circulation responses to the intimate, if pseudonymous, woes of their correspondents.
The phenomenon of the “agony” column is mordantly dramatized by Nathanael West’s
Miss Lonelyhearts
, in which the despairing son of a Baptist preacher—assured by his editor that advice columnists are “the priests of twentieth-century America”—must answer harrowing mail from such correspondents as the woman afraid she’ll die if her husband forces her to have another child; the sister of a deaf-and-dumb girl who has been raped; and the lovelorn girl born without a nose, who ends her communication with the
straightforward query: “Ought I commit suicide?” “Miss Lonely-hearts” will wind up recommending just that course to another letter writer, in the hope that it will get him fired. But his editor is only moderately upset: “Remember, please, that your job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose.”
By the 1950s, advice columns began moving, along with much else in journalism, in a professional direction. The admirable Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer) started her half-century syndicated run in a voice that was equal parts Midwestern clubwoman, Jewish mother and Rosalind Russell-style dame: “I think when a boy is old enough to ask for a redheaded baby-sitter, he is old enough to stay home alone.” All three parts were her real-life components, not just personae. Briskly certain of her chance to do good, Lederer played things down the middle, loosening up the country when it came to divorce and homosexuality, keeping it on the straight and narrow over drugs and drink. She employed scads of assistants; sought information from a mighty Rolodex of doctors, clergy and lawyers; and received much abuse along with requests for help: “I’ve been told to drop dead, get lost, stop playing God, and quit making up crazy letters,” she reminisced in the introduction to one collection of her columns. “I’ve been called a crummy broad, a square from Iowa, and a broken-down museum piece. The cocktail set insists I am a reformed drunk who is determined to dry up the world. I’ve been accused of being a public relations agent for the American Medical Association and a mouthpiece for the American Psychiatric Association.” She owed her long success to sustained seriousness and a natural American literary style (as recognizable on the page as Will Rogers’s), and also to the framework of the letter. Its illusion of intimacy, and the you-asked-for-it nature of epistolary response, always kept her columns free from the sermonizing sound of the editorials going unread a few pages away.