TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 : On ‘Eleanor Roosevelt’

For more than a decade, Blanche Wiesen Cook has lived with Eleanor Roosevelt--an experience that might well have been disastrous, biographically speaking, given that two women could hardly differ more in background or personal style. The subject was an American aristocrat, a pragmatist, and a stately lady; the author is the daughter of German Jews, an intellectual street fighter, a radical, and a cut-up. The possibilities for mutual incomprehension would seem boundless.

Both by birth and marriage, E.R. descended from New York’s colonial elite and went to exclusive private schools, the foremost being Allenswood outside London, where a Frenchwoman, Marie Souvestre, educated the girls who’d marry the men who would rule their world. She filled virtually every traditional role for women in this country: dutiful daughter, loyal wife, founder of the Junior League, mother of five, First Lady of New York State and then the nation, and finally, peace emissary to the world.

Cook, on the other hand, is a product of the New York City public-school system and a lesbian who teaches history at John Jay College, which caters mainly to cops. Some of her earliest writing was on radical feminist Crystal Eastman and her bohemian Greenwich Village world of the 1920s, and in 1981, she published a highly acclaimed study of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s foreign policy.

But the improbable alliance between Eleanor Roosevelt and Blanche Cook has produced a biography of the first rank: an act of sustained imagination and a work of intellectual discovery that satisfies the most rigorous traditions of scholarship even as it takes us on a spiritual adventure. In fact, it thrillingly engages what a less skeptical age might have called our souls. And at a time when so much academic prose seems willfully designed to hide its subject from all but the cognoscenti, Cook writes for “the common reader” in a style that is lucid, supple, direct and, from time to time, downright passionate.

For subject and author, in the end, bear crucial affinities. Both have an abiding respect for plain people and a fondness for the occasional scoundrel. Both are ready to look through the eyes of the opposition and to discover the best in others, almost to the point where generosity of spirit blends indistinguishably into being suckered. Both believe that the world can be better and that it is their duty and their joy to help make it so. Both are committed to the belief that until women secure an equal role in American society, everyone is the loser. On the face of it, such attitudes would seem a good deal more alien to Eleanor Roosevelt than to Cook.

E.R.’s maternal ancestor, Chancellor Robert Livingston, presided over George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, and his descendants were at the top of Mrs. William Astor’s guest list for her famous “400” balls, which defined our native aristocracy. E.R.’s father Elliott was Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother, and so extensive and self-important was the clan that a wag commented that Roosevelts married Roosevelts because they never met anybody else. (When Eleanor married her cousin Franklin, who was her father’s godson, Uncle Teddy, who gave her away, said, “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.”)

But if E.R.’s world was grand and privileged, it also was peopled by those who betrayed, deserted or demeaned her. Her beloved father, several uncles and eventually her brother drank themselves to death, and her mother, before she died at 29 of prolonged despair, appraised her coolly and said, “You have no looks, so see to it that you have manners.”

An orphan before she was 10, she spent her early adolescence with her Grandmother Hall, an unhappy woman who emerged only sporadically from a shuttered bedroom. In a fit of unbridled petulance, her Aunt Pussie told her the whole spectacular story of her father’s decline, not omitting the mistresses, while her tart-tongued cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, spent a lifetime being spiteful. As she egged on Franklin in his affair with his wife’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer, Alice would remark to assembled company that he “deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor.”

Poor little rich girl, stoical wife, humorless do-gooder, shrill busybody, ugly nag, selfless leader--all these stereotypes and many others have been used to obscure Eleanor Roosevelt. But thanks to Cook, we can now discover how a sheltered woman with a history in which misery and exultation mixed inextricably evolved into a happy, independent, clear-minded, forceful political boss--in fact, the first woman boss in the Democratic Party.

There were many turning points in E.R.’s life, but perhaps the most crucial was her reaction to finding letters that revealed her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer. Devastated by the discovery, she offered Franklin a divorce--her own parents’ misalliance having left her with an abiding revulsion for marital misery. But her formidable mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, played an unexpected role. Hitherto a shameless rival not only for Franklin’s loyalty and affection but also for their children’s, Sara came down squarely on Eleanor’s side: She would cut her son off without a penny if he left his family. A man who ducked conflict and relished his pleasures, Franklin sacrificed Mercer.

Cook’s account of the key players in this watershed event is a model of subtle, imaginative and sympathetic engagement. Sara, whose rigid, class-bound loyalties Cook is bound to find distasteful, displayed the sure touch one associates with aristocracy at its best. Even F.D.R. Cook imagines to have been prompted not merely by self-indulgence but also by a belated adolescent rebellion against an overwhelming mother. As for Eleanor herself, we watch her moving slowly through a period where she was afflicted by anorexia and often responded in the passive-aggressive style she herself called her “patient Griselda” mode--marked, as it was, by the long-suffering so highly recommended to women in Western culture.

But E.R. learned at last to reach beyond betrayal and a dour response to create a binding, if unconventional partnership with her husband, and together they would leave a lasting impact on American institutions and women’s sense of the possible. With “the magnetism of her profound sincerity,” she forged close friendships with other women, some of them lesbians, and joined women’s organizations committed to the progressive struggle.

She became co-owner and vice principal of the Todhunter School for Girls, where she discovered her dazzling gifts as a teacher, and jointly founded a furniture factory at Val-Kill on the Hyde Park estate. She became a syndicated columnist, a ready speaker, a political organizer and tactician of real genius, and a woman at home and happy with people who would have scandalized her forebears. As a friend told Cook, “You could never invite her to dinner. You would never know quite who she would bring along--Blacks, Jews, Sapphists in slacks, rude communist youths. It was so unsettling.”

Among our greatest debts to Cook is that she’s relieved E.R. of the burden of being one of those asexual Victorian ladies so easy to patronize. Working from the assumption that “our culture has sought to deny the truths and complexities about women’s passion because it is one of the great keys to women’s power,” Cook argues persuasively that while her husband was governor and Missy LeHand, his “live-in secretary and companion,” filled the role of “second wife,” E.R. may have had an affair with her bodyguard, Earle Miller, who was 13 years her junior. After she became First Lady, she may have had another with prize-winning reporter Lorena Hickok.

Whether or not new evidence emerges to transform these speculations into established fact, Cook has given us, for the first time, an Eleanor Roosevelt who is a fully human woman--often brilliant, sometimes cold, from time to time inept, frequently baffled, on occasion deeply hurt, but always working her way toward greater clarity of mind and generosity of spirit. Seldom has a second volume been so eagerly awaited, because by asking bold questions and refusing the safe answers, Cook has made us understand how much courage and grace it takes to be a good woman.

BIOGRAPHY PRIZE

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: Volume One, 1884-1933, by Blanche Wiesen Cook (Viking)

FINALISTS

A PROPHET WITH HONOR: The Billy Graham Story, by William Martin (William Morrow)

SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Edwin Haviland Miller (University of Iowa Press)

FASCINATING RHYTHM: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin, by Deena Rosenberg (Dutton)

EDGAR A. POE: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, by Kenneth Silverman (HarperCollins)