Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life by Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin (review)

As a speechwriter to George H. W. Bush, I often met the forty-first president in what was Theodore Roosevelt’s first West Wing office, the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Bush admired TR for living “the strenuous life”—and preserving what he called our “cathedral of the outdoors.” Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy involves forever acting. Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life accents his forever writing.

Unlike our frequently specialized reading and writing age, Roosevelt found putting pencil or pen to paper generally as natural as breath. He read Longfellow and Louisa May Alcott, Bret Harte and Jack London, and wrote novels and poems and histories for books and magazines. Writing commercially to his death at sixty, he somehow never missed a deadline, even as president.

Until age thirteen, Roosevelt was nearsighted, not knowing it. Theodore Roosevelt bares how he used myopia to forge “two strengths, crucial to good writing.” Nonstop reading be-got no-fault memory. Second, sense of sound soared above other senses, evinced in Through the Brazilian Wilderness and Roosevelt’s look at the 1898 Spanish-American War, The Rough Riders, in which TR melded military history, ornithology, nature, and hunting—each a boy-hood love.

Teddy Roosevelt’s best stories were redolent of a novel, since “his writing was at its most vivid and witty when he was talking directly to someone he knew” (3), note authors Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin. Roosevelt’s genius was that readers thought they already had been introduced. To typeset The Rough Riders, his publisher, Scribner’s, allegedly “had to order more of the letter ‘I’ to complete the typeset for the book.”

Awash in today’s identity politics, it is striking how Roosevelt hoped to be called an “American-American” writer, absorbing frontiersmen of different nationalities into “Americans, one in speech, thought, and character”—strong, clear, and honest—“clutching firm the land.” In 1910 he detailed that vision at the Sorbonne: “It is not the critic that counts. . . . The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

Ironically, Roosevelt was “the critic,” an inveterate writer who now would be computerized: instant, dispersible. At the same time, he is famed for charging up San Juan Hill, hunting big game, and exploring the Amazon. Each niche—writer and actor—remains, as Roosevelt wrote of his summer White House, Sagamore Hill, “the offspring of the years as surely as is a reef of coral.”

Roosevelt wrote that “a real writer has the power to embody ghosts, put flesh and blood on dry bones, and to make dead men live before your eyes.” He had it. On January 6, 1919, son Archie wrote of TR, “The old lion is dead.” In this bully of a book, the literary Falstaff on Mount Rushmore lives.