THAT ELEANOR WOULD BE A solitary child was perhaps, at least when considered with a literary sensibility, destined to be. As has been suggested, “Between her parents’ disappointment that she was not a boy and the death threat that her advent into the world represented to her mother, Eleanor, in a sense, came into the world guilty and had to reinstate herself.” It would be a long process, inevitably difficult, inevitably isolating. One thinks of the Roman Catholic notion of original sin, and how a lifetime must be devoted to eradicating its stain.
Or, to look at the matter in a secular fashion, one might think of what the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder would one day say. “Many do not want a life after death, but do want a loneliness mitigated in this.” Eleanor would never completely achieve such a life. Loneliness, if not always a curse, always threatened. And sometimes even comforted, for to be lonely is sometimes to be inured to pain.
THERE WOULD COME A TIME when Eleanor, still a little girl, would be sent away—not to live with her father, which they both so desperately desired—but instead, to live with her maternal grandmother. Other members of the opéra bouffe household in which Nell would find herself included two uncles, two aunts, and one of her two younger brothers, Hall. “Eleanor’s uncles were already alcoholics,” reports biographer Hazel Rowley. “Her aunts were beautiful, talented, unmarried, and frustrated. Eleanor was acutely aware of the tensions in the house.”
According to most accounts, Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall was not the best of guardians. She had, after all, joined with her late husband to raise a girl who would venerate the superficial, and, perhaps for that reason, had no choice but to become an inadequate mother to Eleanor. “Strict and adamant,” writes Blanche Wiesen Cook of Mary, or Grandmother Hall, as she came to be known, “she spent many hours alone in her darkened room with the windows closed and the shades drawn, emerging only to issue orders, and to conduct the prayer services that began and ended each day. Everyone in the household attended these services, including the entire staff.” It was Grandmother Hall who insisted that Eleanor dress in the way that humiliated her, wearing “short skirts, hideous black stockings, and outrageously unfashionable high-ankled shoes.”
But there also seem to have been qualities of the late Anna’s mother not easily perceived. It has been said, with some authority, that Grandmother Hall gave Eleanor “a new sense of belonging,” enabling her, for the first time in her life, to feel “secure and wanted.” Perhaps because the presence of a child under the roof was such a novelty, Eleanor’s grandmother and others in the Hall family made her “the center of attention.” They saw to it that she learned French and German, and took classes in dancing, ballet, and piano. She learned to play lawn tennis, to ride horses, and to shoot rifles. In other words, for no reason that history records, Grandmother Hall raised Eleanor in stark contrast to the way she raised her own daughter.
The only problem, other than her attire, was that, with the exception of Alice Roosevelt, who was being raised nearby after her own mother died during childbirth, Eleanor had no children her own age with whom to play. And Alice was seldom available to share her time. Was Eleanor sad about those circumstances? Art Unger asked for Datebook.
“No, not sad,” she told him. “Lonely, but not sorry. I was the oldest of the children and there was nobody else. So, I was alone most of the time and I was lonely. But I never wept. If I wept . . . yes, when I wept . . . it was over books. I can remember weeping over books.”
And so, as Eleanor became accomplished at languages, dance, and music, she also became even more withdrawn; as she became active in the life around her, she turned ever inward for sustenance. Her loneliness further contributed to her feelings of homeliness, shyness, and fearfulness, creating an unholy stew of emotions that plagued her even during her most courageous moments.
AFTER A WHILE, AND WITHOUT really knowing it, Grandmother Hall did Eleanor the greatest favor ever bestowed on her. She had begun to think that her charge might “benefit from a year or two away from her increasingly erratic uncles.” One of Eleanor’s aunts suggested that she be sent to a boarding school outside of London called Allenswood, the domain of Mlle. Marie Souvestre. Although reluctant at first, Eleanor eventually agreed to the plan. She could not have decided better.
The three years Eleanor spent there were the happiest of her life, she remembered. It was at Allenswood, a cousin recalled, “that [she] for the first time was deeply loved . . .” Eleanor was especially proud when she was elected captain of the field hockey team and eventually became the most admired girl in the school.
At Allenswood, she outgrew at least some of her ungainliness, and her appearance was not an issue with the other girls. Nor was her bookishness, her intelligence, except in a positive sense; the other girls at the school were also bookish and bright, meaning that Eleanor was no longer a square peg amid round-holed peers. She was, rather, a friend of others with whom she engaged both intellectually and emotionally. Never before, as far as she could remember, had she encountered circumstances into which she slipped so naturally.
But for that reason, she was beset with loneliness again when it came time to depart. “The summer [of my third year] was now approaching,” she wrote, “and I knew that I must go home for good. Mlle. Souvestre had become one of the people whom I cared for most in the world, and the thought of the long separation seemed hard to bear. I would have given a good deal to have spent another year on my education, but to my grandmother the age of eighteen was the time when you ‘came out,’ and not to ‘come out’ was unthinkable.”
And so Eleanor departed from what had been a home for her, stimulating and accepting, and returned to New York, to a house that had never been a home, to circumstances oppressively Swell.
BUT SHE RETURNED A YOUNG lady with an even greater depth of, and quest for, learning. She was quite a different person from the one who had departed. Elliott would have been proud. A few years earlier, he had written a charming letter to her, one that she never forgot. In it, he advised her to think of masons building a house, placing
one stone after another . . . and then think that there are a lot of funny little workmen running about in your small head called “Ideas” which are carrying a lot of stones like small bodies called “Facts,” and these little “Ideas” are being directed by your teachers in various ways, by “Persuasion,” “Instruction,” “Love” and “Truth” to place all these “Fact” Stones on top of and alongside each other in your dear Golden Head until they build a beautiful house called “Education”—then! Oh, my dear companionable little Daughter, you will come to Father and what jolly games we will have together.
I could not locate a response to this letter, but it is certain that Eleanor was captivated by the sentiments. Many years afterward, she wrote as follows:
Learning and living. But they are really the same thing aren’t they? There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. . . .And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself . . . which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.
ELEANOR’S LONGEST, MOST HEARTRENDING PERIOD of loneliness was not in 1902, when she returned home to formally enter society. Rather, it was as an adult, beginning in the late fall of 1909. That spring, her second son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., was born. He was, thought FDR Sr.’s mother, Sara, “A sweet sight, but my heart sank a little because Baby looks so delicate and exquisite.”
Too delicate, as it turned out. In October, young Franklin and some of his older siblings came down with influenza, but it was the former who was most severely stricken, and with more than just the flu. Different doctors offered different diagnoses. He might have had a murmur in his heart, might have had anemia, might have been breathing more rapidly than he should have been. The final diagnosis, however, was endocarditis, an infection of the inner lining of the heart. The disease was fatal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. passed away on November 1, 1909, having known life for a mere seven months and fourteen days.
That Eleanor was saddened is beyond doubt. But she was also beset with guilt. By her own admission she was not a good mother, neither warm nor playful, neither vigilant nor free with her time. Did she blame her mother for the example she had set? Nowhere does she explore the notion. “She had viewed motherhood as a duty rather than a joy,” according to biographer Jan Pottker, “and now blamed herself for her baby’s death.” She could see no other explanation. “I felt . . . in some way I must be to blame,” Eleanor said. “I even felt that I had not cared enough about him.”
Criticizing herself as she did after baby Franklin’s passing, she recoiled from the company of friends and relatives who sought to console her. She did not want consolation, did not want to surround herself with those who offered it. Instead, she sank into a loneliness that was familiar to her but at times seemed the blackest and most frigid of nights. “Although Eleanor saw no ‘alienist’* to diagnose her terrible sadness and hopelessness—in 1910, psychiatry was scorned by social New York—it would not take a medical specialist to determine that she was severely depressed.”
When Eleanor finally, and gradually, allowed people back into her life, they urged her to join them for parties, concerts, the theater, meals at the city’s finest restaurants or most elegant residences—the kind of life her parents had lived. At first she resisted. But perhaps, she thought, such frivolity would be helpful to her now, a series of mindless activities in which she could lose her doubts and sorrows. By the time she consented, however, she found herself pregnant with a son she would name Elliott, and unable to return to the social whirl. Pottker opines that “a pregnancy at this time was probably the worst thing for her emotional well-being.”
YEARS LATER, WITH HER SURVIVING children grown and most of them succeeding in one way or another, she was still blaming herself for not raising them properly. “It did not come naturally to me to understand little children or to enjoy them.” And so she was more likely to turn the children over to nurses and nannies and devote herself, often in solitary fashion, to her work.
In fact, Eleanor did not even take pleasure from the act responsible for bringing children into being. To her daughter, Sara, she admitted that she did not enjoy sex, had never enjoyed it. It was, rather, an “ordeal to be borne.” It is a troubling statement to read, this admission that she could not step out of her solitary state even long enough to share what is, at its best, one of the greatest joys of humanity.
ELEANOR EVEN FOUND HERSELF LONELY in March 1933, on the eve of her becoming the nation’s First Lady. She “worried that her talents would not be used; that she would become a shut-in, a congenial hostess in the political shadows politically sidelined.” Rather than demand a role in the nation’s governance, which she would later do insistently, she yielded to what she seemed certain the future would hold, and once again shut herself off from others. “Her great friend Lorena Hickok was so impressed by ER’s initial distress that she titled her subsequent biography Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady.”
It was, in fact, in a letter to Hickok that Eleanor made the following confession:
My zest in life is rather gone for the time being. If anyone looks at me, I want to weep. . . . I get like this sometimes. It makes me feel like a dead weight & my mind goes round & round like a squirrel in a cage. I want to run, & I can’t, & and I despise myself. I can’t get away from thinking about myself. Even though I know I’m a fool, I can’t help it.
By summer, Eleanor’s zest for life had returned, but she was not deceived. It would depart again, and then return, and then depart, return; it was the pattern of her life, cycles of inevitability. She might have been at her loneliest when Hickok, a journalist for whom Eleanor did step out of solitude, was away from her, on assignment.
The two women exchanged letters that took friendship to such an extreme that many people suspected they were lovers. Although there was such a thing at the time as a “Boston marriage,” in which two women lived together in a passionate but nonsexual relationship, it is probably true that Eleanor and Lorena were physically intimate. Friendship is seldom carried to such an extreme that it invokes desperately expressed longing on the one hand, or jealousy on the other. In Eleanor’s case, it invoked both. The latter was especially troublesome to her. And to Hickok. Eleanor was not only unhappy when Lorena was out of sight; she was vigilant. “Frequently flirtatious, Hick met women in her travels who found her attractive, who squired her about, took her home for dinner, and for weekends. . . . ER’s letters indicate that she was in no mood to entertain dalliances. When Hick confided that a new situation with yet another had emerged, ER wrote firmly: ‘How hard for you to have a lady who is in love in her mind with you. Well if she is in love you can tell her how to snap out of it!’”
And Hick did just that. Eleanor was as important to her as she was to Eleanor.
Ultimately, though, details of their physical relationship are as unknown as they are irrelevant to the present story. Lorena Hickok is best thought of as a woman to whom Eleanor allowed enough proximity to ease the pangs of her lifelong loneliness. Leave it at that.
* The word psychiatry was not in common usage at the time. One who practiced it was known as an alienist.