ANNA HALL ROOSEVELT DIED TOO QUICKLY, TOO UNexpectedly, to resolve any of the bitter feelings that were left now forever unspoken. Whispers in the ether of her lost life remained a substantial part of Anna Hall Roosevelt’s lasting legacy.
Eleanor was only eight when her mother died. She had been abandoned by “the most beautiful woman” she had ever seen. She had never won her mother’s approval; and now had lost the chance to prove herself worthy. There would be no adolescent storms during which to work things out. If she had been more jolly, more attractive, more compatible, better behaved, would her mother have lived? Would there have been forgiveness? Whatever remorse she might have felt at her mother’s death, Eleanor could not answer those questions—not at eight, not ever. Always too painful, they haunted her life. Buried deep in the labyrinths of emotional memory, they remained untouched, forever available to tug at her confidence and cloud her sensibilities.
Her mother’s disapproval dominated Eleanor’s childhood, and permanently affected her self-image. With her mother’s death, she became an outsider, always expecting betrayal and abandonment. But even at eight she was fiercely proud, determined to prove herself courageous, caring, and worthy of love. For the rest of her life her actions were in part an answer to her mother. If she were really good, then perhaps nobody else would leave her, and people would see the love in her heart.
Eleanor never wrote much about her mother. She did not relate to her mother’s bitter situation, even in adulthood, after she knew the facts. And she never acknowledged the sacrifice her mother had made for her, an act of love that allowed Eleanor to maintain her romantic image of her father. Eleanor was never able to credit her mother for the fact that she had protected her sensitive daughter as much she could. Anna Hall Roosevelt had neither betrayed Elliott nor turned her daughter against him.
After her mother’s death, Eleanor turned to fantasies for the fulfillment of her emotional needs, and especially to her fantasy of her father, built upon a tapestry of letters and idealized moments of intense joy. About her father’s love she was sure: “With my father I was perfectly happy…. He was the center of my world and all around him loved him.” She cherished above all her memory of the future he described when they were reunited in Grandmother Hall’s West 37th Street library after her mother’s death. That dark day, Elliott brought light back into her life when, sitting in a big chair, dressed all in black, and looking very somber, he folded her into his arms and spoke so convincingly of their future. She would make a real home for him. They would travel together. “Somehow it was always he and I. I did not understand whether my brothers were to be our children or …they would be at school and college and later independent.” It was father and daughter, “a life of our own together,” with incomparable adventures forevermore.
In 1937, when she wrote her memoirs, ER looked back with affection upon the romantic visions she and her father had forged in their correspondence, out of the tears and longing they both shared. She dedicated her book, in part, “To the memory of my Father who fired a child’s imagination.”*
SOCIETY MOURNED ANNA REBECCA HALL ROOSEVELT. DEAD at twenty-nine, she was “one of the favorites of New York’s social set.” New York newspapers carried memorials of her death for days: “One of the gayest of the younger set, she and her husband before his misfortune were particularly intimate with the Astors…. Last September at Bar Harbor, she was regarded as the belle of the ‘beauty dinner’…”
But society carried on. The week after her death, on the occasion of the first Patriarchs’ Ball of the season—one of the lavish charity events that ushered in the height of New York’s pre-Christmas social whirl—the editor of The New York Times’ society page breathed a sigh of relief:
It had been thought that the sad death of young Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, who, had she lived, would have been one of the patronesses, would have greatly dimmed the brilliancy of the ball, but New York is a large town, and “we are soon forgot” so that the absence of the few who stayed away …was hardly noticed….
Only one obituary mentioned anything of Anna Hall’s concerned generosity. “Hers was a beautiful character. She was constantly thinking of others.” This New York Times reporter had recently seen her “instruct her coachman to stop when passing a woman …on crutches, an entire stranger to her, and urged her to get in her carriage and she would take her home…. How few of the fashionable women of the day would have done so….”
At the time of his wife’s death, there had been only two months remaining in the probation period that Elliott Roosevelt’s family had imposed on him. But with Anna gone, he had little reason to continue to prove himself, and all his efforts at rehabilitation went quickly to smash. As Eleanor noted in her memoirs, Anna’s death represented “a tragedy of utter defeat for him. No hope now of ever wiping out the sorrowful years he had brought upon my mother …He had no wife, no children, no hope!”
Mrs. Hall continued to write kindly to Elliott. She sent him letters about his children, details of their activities and accomplishments, and presents of fruit and delicacies she knew he liked. But she had custody of the children, and she did not want Elliott to see them alone. By Christmas, Elliott was drinking again, and by January 1893, there were letters from Abingdon that referred to his old sickness.
But even in the midst of his dissolution, Elliott wrote regularly to Mrs. Hall and his daughter. His stationery was bordered in black for a full inch around. He wrote entertaining letters to amuse Eleanor, and letters of earnest sobriety to impress Mrs. Hall. He made financial arrangements for his children’s security and wrote to Mrs. Hall on 26 January 1893 that the various trust funds already established assured an income of $7,500 a year, or $635 a month, and he would send whatever was needed over and above that, “so long as you have as much money as you need for the children’s support and they are no drain on you….”
On 20 January 1893, he wrote to Eleanor, “Father’s own little Nell,” a letter of apology that he had not written sooner, because he had “been very sick, dear, as Auntie Maude and Auntie Gracie will explain to you.” This letter, one of Elliott’s incomparable compositions, fueled his daughter’s fantasies for years to come: There had been, and would be again, wonderful long rides, saddle horses and carts, walks and sleds, “days through the Grand snow clad forests, over the white hills, under the blue skies as blue as those in Italy under which you and I and Little Ellie …used to sail over Naples Bay to beautiful Capri….”
Then there was the matter of Eleanor’s education. Elliott urged her to work hard at her lessons so that she might achieve that “curious thing they call ‘education.’” He suggested that she watch workmen build a house, place “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….”
Elliott hoped that in Eleanor’s “Education” house she would have “such a happy life.” But he warned her “those little fact stones are a queer lot,” and that to use them she needed patience with her teachers. Then there were difficult, rebellious, and “stupid, wearisome, trying fact stones….” There would be things she didn’t like to do, but ought, and so “discipline!” needed to be introduced.
Over time, Eleanor Roosevelt cited discipline as one of the primary forces in her own life; but love was always her motivating principle. And in this letter her father wrote: “Of all the forces your Teachers use, Father and you too, Little Witch, probably like Love best.”
Discipline and love became Eleanor’s magic charms. To invoke them was to bring back the world of happiness, security, and hope created by her father’s letters. And the letters themselves conjured up pictures of him at his writing desk, thinking of her late each night.
As she read and reread those letters, then and in future years, she found messages, teachings, and admonitions she could continue to learn from and take seriously as they changed in meaning to her with the passage of time. In one letter he had written: “I am glad you are taking such good care of those cunning wee hands that Father loves so to be petted by, all those little things will make my dear Girl so much more attractive if she attends them, not forgetting the big ones. Unselfishness, generosity, loving tenderness and cheerfulness.” Eleanor reread that letter when she was almost sixteen, and was able finally to stop biting her nails.
While Elliott was writing his daughter letters of encouragement and comfort, he was losing his own final battle. It had been a hard winter in Abingdon. He suffered several minor accidents, and endless anguish. After a March visit to New York, he returned feeling isolated and bitter: “I have not found one person in either my wife’s or my connection who encourages me …when I propose that the Children join their Father….” On the contrary, everyone agreed that his children belonged “with their Grandmother and surrounded by every thing in the way of luxury and all the advantages, both educational and otherwise to which they have been accustomed…. I have told my Mother-in-Law that she shall have the children until I feel I must have them and when that time comes she has promised to give them up to me—No matter if I am living alone on White Top [in Abingdon] or in Ceylon….” His favorite aunt, who might have championed him, Annie Bulloch Gracie, died unexpectedly after what had seemed nothing more than a routine operation intended to cure her growing deafness. And then came a tragedy that put an end to his hopes to reunite his family. In May, Elliott, Jr., almost four, died after a bout with scarlet fever and diphtheria. On 26 May 1893, Elliott wrote his daughter:
My own little Nell—We bury little Ellie tomorrow up at Tivoli by Mother’s side. He is happy in Heaven with her now so you must not grieve or sorrow. And you will have to be doubly a good Daughter to your Father and good sister to own little Brudie boy [Hall] who is left to us. I know you will my own little Heart. I cannot write more because I am not feeling very well and my heart is too full. But I wished you to know you were never out of my thoughts and prayers for one instant all the time. I put some flowers close by Ellie in your name as I knew you would like me to do. With abiding and most tender devotion and Love I am always,
Your affectionate Father
Eleanor believed that little Ellie would be “safe in heaven” with Mother and Aunt Gracie. She in turn wrote her father a letter of comfort: “Our Lord wants Ellie boy with him now, we must be happy….”
These new losses devastated Elliott. Heartsick and wretched, he broke down completely. In an undated fragment of a letter written during the summer of 1893, he promised Mrs. Hall that he would not try to visit his children in New York, or “come to Tivoli,” or “interfere with Little Nell’s stay at Newport,” or attempt to see them alone at any time. He only asked that, “some time during the summer, convenient to yourself, you bring them down either to the City or sea shore where I can see them and enjoy a little love which my heart craves and for lack of which it has broken. Oh—Mrs. Hall I have tried so hard and it has been so lonely and weary and the breakdown seems to me only natural in my strained condition. Above all believe me it was not drunkenness. Let me see you soon please Mother.”
The economic depression of the summer of 1893 threatened Elliott’s finances and further strained his equilibrium. On 20 August, he wrote to his “Darling little Daughter”:
I have had a very trying time of it down here and am now trying to quiet the poor miners in the Coal field who will listen to no one but me, and who are absolutely, for lack of employment, starving. There is great distress all through this country and I too have suffered much. I like to think of you as happy and would like to hear the same from your dear sweet lips or read the words from your pen.
Eager to prove what a good and loving father he would be, if only they could be together, he wrote his lonely daughter: “I wish you could be one of the jolly party of little children who ride with me every morning when I am in Abingdon.”
Miriam, Lillian and the four Trigg children all on their ponies and horses and the fox terriers Mr. Belmont gave me (to comfort me in my loneliness) go out about sunrise and gallop over these broad fields for one or two hours; we rarely fail to secure some kind of game, and never return without roses in the cheeks of those I call now, my children.
Do you continue to ride? Learn the right way so that I will not have to teach you all over again….
More and more, Eleanor lived almost exclusively in a dream world with her father. There were many other people about, her aunts and uncles, her grandmother and little Hall, there were governesses, French maids, German maids, and tutors. But they were merely interruptions: “They always tried to talk to me, and I wished to be left alone to live in a dream world in which I was the heroine and my father the hero. Into this world I retired as soon as I went to bed and as soon as I woke in the morning, and all the time I was walking or when any one bored me.”
Elliott did not see his daughter that summer, but as the autumn approached he considered her birthday. Eager that she, like the children of Abingdon, be able to ride with ease, he sent her a pony, and agreed to give her a cart also, as Mrs. Hall suggested. Elliott urged that Mrs. Hall allow her to keep the pony in town so that she might be able to ride two or three times a week. “It would please me greatly if she did. Do let her do so. It was very kind of you to give her the saddle.”
Sometime during that autumn, he returned to New York and moved into an apartment at 313 West 102d Street, near Riverside Park. There he lived with his mistress, Mrs. Evans, who cared for him and made every effort in his behalf. But he had embarked on a final self-destructive binge from which nobody could save him. Moreover, Theodore disavowed all interest in his brother and urged his sisters to do the same. Personally, Theodore wrote Bye, his own life in Washington was rhapsodic: “It is very pleasant here now, as most of my friends are back; I have been dining out almost every evening …,” most usually in the rarefied circle around Henry Adams, John Hay, and Nannie and Henry Cabot Lodge.
During the week of 11 October 1893 (Eleanor’s ninth birthday), Corinne, who was now closer to Elliott than anybody else, wrote Bye in dismay that he had returned without even telling her:
Eleanor saw him driving in a Hansom the other day and waved at him (this is what the governess says) & he stopped & took her with him to her sewing class. Mrs. Hall was naturally much worried. I told her she ought to tell the governess that when Eleanor is under her care she should not allow her to go with any one, not even her father. It is so strange & sad that he should not be able to see his children & yet there seems to be no other course. Poor, poor Elliott. If I don’t hear from him soon I shall take some means of seeing him….
Eleanor’s memory of the drives she took with her father at this time was both thrilling and terrifying, and entirely justified her aunt’s and grandmother’s apprehensions: Her father was a “fine horseman” who had a spirited hunter “which he decided to break and drive in New York City in a two-wheeled cart.” Perched high in the cart,
we would go on rather mad chases…. My father enjoyed every minute of the excitement as he tried to control the spirited horse.
I remember one day his telling me as we progressed around Central Park in a long line of carriages that if he just said “Hoopla” to Mohawk, he would try to jump over all the carts around us. I tried to hide my fears as I murmured, “I hope you won’t say it.”
Despite several near accidents, and her “abject terror,” ER considered “those drives” the “high points of my existence.”
In the winter of 1894, Elliott went back to Abingdon. Despite a return of his old “Indian fever,” and an accident during which he knocked over his reading lamp and burned himself severely, he resumed his spirited letters, complimenting his daughter on the progress of her studies—her spelling was now perfect—and commiserating with her on her dislike of fractions and long division. He warned her against impatience and urged her to devote herself to her studies, although he was “pleased to hear of the good times” she had “at the different parties.” He enclosed letters from two little children, Mary and Harold Sherman, he particularly wanted Eleanor to meet. They were “the children of my dear Friend, Mrs. F. B. Sherman of Detroit. These little children I saw a great deal of in Paris when we were there—I gave them my handsome old black poodle—‘Dick’ …You must know these two dear little friends of mine some day.”
Although he shared his New York City apartment with Mrs. Evans, Elliott had resumed his relationship with Florence Bagley Sherman. During the summer of 1894, he went to her country home in Annisquam, Massachusetts. But he was restless, refused to stay in any one place—and continued to disintegrate.
Eleanor spent much of that summer riding her pony around Tivoli. Uncle Vallie taught her to jump, but she longed for her father and wrote him that she wished he “were up here to ride with me.” “Give my love to the puppies and every one else that you know.”
On 5 July, the family left Tivoli for Bar Harbor, and Eleanor noted: “Brudie wears pants now.” Eleanor wrote more regularly that summer. She “had great fun” fishing, and “caught six fish don’t you think I did well for the first time. I am having lessons with Grandma every day and go to a French class.”
On 13 August, Eleanor received her last letter from her father: “What must you think of your Father who has not written in so long…. I have after all been very busy, quite ill, at intervals not able to move from my bed for days…. Give my love to Grandma and Brudie and all…. I hope my little girl is well…. Kiss Baby Brudie for me and never forget I love you….”
During the night of 14 August, only hours after he sent this letter to Eleanor, Elliott Roosevelt died. On 15 August, Corinne wrote to Bye (then in London serving as hostess to her distant cousin James Roosevelt Roosevelt, who had been recently widowed and was first secretary of the U.S. Embassy) that she had left for New York as soon as she received the telegram from Corinne’s husband, Douglas Robinson: “Elliott died suddenly last night.”
“It was a fearful shock to me though I was not unprepared for some catastrophe, for yesterday I received a letter from William [Elliott’s valet] telling me that Elliott had been using stimulants again, and consequently …was having delusions….” At first, the delusions “were gentle,” and involved his children. He thought he was showing his dogs to his dead son, Ellie. He knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked “if Miss Eleanor Roosevelt were at home.” When he was told she was not, he said “‘tell her her father is so sorry not to see her’ and soon became excited and ran violently up and down stairs.” At some point he jumped out of a parlor window. Uncle Jimmie Gracie, a policeman, Douglas Robinson, and Mrs. Evans all tried to calm him. Then he had “one of those convulsive attacks,” after which he slept quietly, had a moment of sanity during which he spoke rationally, and died. “The terrible bloated swelled look was gone & the sweet expression around his forehead and eyes made me weep very bitter tears.”
“I know it is best,” Corinne wrote. “I know it had to come sooner or later. I know it makes his memory possible to his children. I know all, and yet my heart feels desperately sad for the brother I knew, the Elliott I have loved and known, which all that has passed cannot efface.”
The next day, Theodore arrived and “was more overcome than I have ever seen him—cried like a little child for a long time….” On 18 August, Theodore wrote his sister Bye to describe the “frightful drinking” of Elliott’s last weeks: He “had been drinking whole bottles of anisette and green mint,—besides whole bottles of raw brandy and of champagne, sometimes half a dozen a morning. But when dead the poor fellow looked very peaceful, and so like his old, generous, gallant self of fifteen years ago. The horror, and the terrible mixture of madness and grotesque, grim evil continued to the very end; and the dreadful flashes of his old sweetness, which made it all even more hopeless. I suppose he has been doomed from the beginning; the absolute contradiction of all his actions, and of all his moral even more than his mental qualities, is utterly impossible to explain.”
TR wrote with incredulity that Elliott’s “house was so neat, and well kept, with his Bible and religious books, and Anna’s pictures everywhere, even in the room of himself and his mistress. Poor woman, she had taken the utmost care of him, and was broken down at his death. Her relations with him have been just as strange as everything else.”
As sympathetic as he was, TR was nonetheless appalled that plans had been made to have Elliott buried at Tivoli alongside Anna: “I promptly vetoed this hideous plan, Corinne, who has acted better than I can possibly say throughout, cordially backing me up.” TR arranged to have Elliott buried instead in Greenwood Cemetery, close to “those who are associated with only his sweet innocent youth, when no more loyal, generous, disinterested fellow lived.”
The Halls were virtually overlooked when Theodore arranged Elliott’s burial. Only Anna’s brother Vallie was able to attend. Mrs. Hall received the telegram announcing the services too late, and the telegram she sent to Uncle Gracie “asking him to order flowers for the children and myself” also arrived too late, which she particularly regretted: “Elliott loved flowers and always brought them to us, and to think not one from us or his dear ones went to the grave with him grieves me deeply.” Eleanor recalled that her grandmother did not want her to attend her father’s funeral, and so she was denied even that moment with him.
It seemed to TR that Elliott’s funeral followed the pattern of his life, with “the usual touch of the grotesque and terrible, for in one of the four carriages that followed to the grave, went the woman, Mrs. Evans and two of her and his friends, the host and hostess of the Woodbrine Inn. They behaved perfectly well, and their grief seemed entirely sincere….”
Like TR, Elliott’s sister Corinne deplored his “incongruous” life, “its beautiful & its evil impulses.” But over time she dealt with those incongruities with greater acceptance and deeper understanding. She valued Florence Bagley Sherman’s letters to her, written immediately after Elliott’s death, and a year later; “I’ve been sadly wondering about his children,” wrote Mrs. Sherman, “if they are well and strong—and inherit anything of his charms….”
In 1914, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson published a book of poetry in which the title poem was dedicated to Elliott’s New York mistress, Mrs. Evans. A tender exchange had evidently occurred between the two women, and Corinne wrote One Woman to Another in Mrs. Evans’s voice:
Often he told me that you never failed,
And that when others, with averted gaze,
Would have him know his own unworthiness,
Your eyes held only memories of the past….
Mrs. Evans had confided to Corinne:
I was of that strange world you cannot know,
The “half-world” with its glamour and its glare,
Its sin and shame….
But Elliott had saved her “vagrant and despairing soul,” and in turn she had comforted and protected him, and “soon a great and mighty passion grew,” and he was “so very good to me.”
You, who have never known the fierce, hot fumes…
How can you judge of him, and how could she
Whose fair white bosom was a thought too chaste
To pillow a repentant weary head?
But I who knew the evil of the world
Could never shrink before so sad a thing;…
Only, when in his eyes I read the look
That longed for her, my swift resentment rose;…
Then, sometimes, friends of his would come and speak
Of that fair world of yours, unknown to me,
And afterward he would be lost in gloom….
At the end of their visit, Corinne embraced Mrs. Evans:
What! you would kiss me? Yes, I take your kiss;
We are both women, and we both have loved!
Eleanor Roosevelt grew up to cherish that poem, as she cherished every positive memory of her father.
Immediately after Elliott’s death, Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall wrote to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson from Bar Harbor: “No one can feel more deeply for you than I do…. You certainly did everything a sister could do, and it must be a great consolation to you now….” Mrs. Hall wanted it understood that she bore no “ill feelings” for Elliott, and thought only of the time before “this trouble came [when] he was the dearest man I ever knew, so gentle, and kind-hearted.” She believed that he was not “accountable for his words, or deeds,” during his last years, and “it was with deep regret that I tried to keep him from his children, but truly I was afraid of him, for I never knew what he would do.”
Mrs. Hall was particularly interested in undoing Theodore Roosevelt’s precipitous decision to bury Elliott at Greenwood. She had promised Elliott more than a year before his death that he could be buried at Tivoli with his wife and son. He “took such interest in the vault we were going to build, and I planned the vault so that he and his family should be all together. In October we are going to move Anna, Ellie and my immediate family from the present vault to the new one, and I wish you would then allow Elliott to be taken there. Will you please consult Bamie and Theodore, and if possible comply with Elliott’s wish and ours.” Penned atop this letter, evidently written at a later date and in a different hand, were the words “Elliott was laid by Anna.”
Mrs. Hall also wrote Corinne: “I hope you and Bamie will always advise me about the children, for I want them influenced by their Father’s family as well as by their dear Mother’s.” She wrote with concern that Eleanor seemed rather abstracted much of the time. “The poor child has had so much sorrow crowded into her short life she now takes everything very quietly.” When she was told of Elliott’s death, “the only remark she made was, ‘I did want to see father once more.’ I think since last winter she felt there was something not right, but I don’t believe she realized what it was.”
Although Eleanor would later spend considerable time with her Aunts Bamie and Corinne, for several years she was largely isolated from the bustling Roosevelt world of Oyster Bay, spending most of her time at Tivoli. TR was always delighted to see his niece whenever she visited Sagamore, and was so demonstrative that one of his more enthusiastic bear-hugs popped all the buttons off her shirt. But Edith Carow Roosevelt made no particular effort toward Eleanor, inviting her once a year, if that. Though she had been a childhood friend of both Elliott and TR, Edith was herself the daughter of an alcoholic and seemed particularly bitter about Elliott. The week of Elliott’s death, Edith wrote her sister, Emily Carow, that, as much as she missed Aunt Annie Gracie, whose recent passing had also been very painful to Elliott, she felt that she “was taken from evil to come. Elliott has sunk to the lowest depths. Consorts with the vilest women, and Theodore, Bamie and Douglas receive horrid anonymous letters about his life. I live in constant dread of some scandal of his attaching itself to Theodore.”
Good blood and bad blood was a big issue among Victorian blue bloods. Social Darwinism, that theory of biological determinism that for generations ruined lives and manners, and utterly distorted sensibilities, was then at its peak and may have caused Edith to extend her “dread” to Eleanor. She wrote her mother, “As you know I never wished Alice to associate with Eleanor so shall not try to keep up any friendship between them.”
For her part, Mrs. Hall did not approve of the rambunctious Roosevelts of Oyster Bay. She was as eager to protect her grandchildren from the Roosevelt influence as Aunt Edith was to keep Alice (her stepdaughter) away from Eleanor. Except for very irregular visits to Oyster Bay, and an annual Christmas party at Aunt Corinne’s, contact between the two families subsided for several years.
Nothing, however, could keep Eleanor away from her father, whom she visited daily in her fantasies—where, for the first time, she was able to end the cycle of broken promises, guilt, and remorse that her parents had been locked into. In the world she created, she was heroic and loved. People paid attention to her, and noticed the good deeds she performed across the fields of the centuries.
Young Eleanor poured herself into her fantasies the first thing every morning. They dominated her waking hours and were continually fueled by the many books she read with such pleasure—novels, history, biography, poetry especially. Many considered Eleanor’s life, in the years following her parents’ death, somber and spartan—positively Dickensian. But Eleanor was not Oliver Twist (hero of one of her favorite books), and despite the regimentation of Grandmother Hall’s way of life, neither Tivoli nor the dark narrow brownstone on 37th Street was quite Bleak House. The countryside around Tivoli, which ER loved in all seasons, was a constant joy to her, providing wide-ranging spaces in which she was free to hide, to read, and to be alone inside her own world. Although the use of the library was unrestricted, her reading was monitored and several books, including Bleak House, did disappear while she was reading them. For all the rules, in the space she most wanted to roam, largely within the confines of her imagination, she had the freest rein.
Eleanor was actually quite content during these outwardly dreary years. Her only serious complaint concerned the continued presence in her life of the nurse Madeleine, who bullied her unmercifully, pulled her hair, and cut large holes in the socks Eleanor had darned imperfectly. Evidently Eleanor endured her cruelty in silence for years. Finally, when she was almost fourteen, she confided some unnamed horror to her grandmother, who immediately dismissed Madeleine. The only other servant Eleanor mentioned during this time was Mrs. Overhalse, the laundress, “a cheerful, healthy soul” who taught ER to wash and iron, and seemed a generous confidante: “I loved the hours spent with this cheerful woman.”
In 1894, Grandmother Hall was a relatively young woman, still in her early fifties. But she assumed a posture that made her seem quite ancient to Eleanor. Strict and adamant, 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.
Lenient and indulgent with her own six children, who had grown up too fast and too wild, Mrs. Hall now vowed to keep her grandchildren as young, disciplined, and dependent as possible. Eleanor, for example, was made to wear short skirts, hideous black stockings, and outrageously unfashionable high-ankled shoes. Tall for her age and very thin, Eleanor looked ridiculous in these old-fashioned costumes. But her grandmother insisted, and Eleanor never howled in protest. Eleanor’s friends were always amazed that she wore the clothes her grandmother insisted upon. But when they complained on her behalf, she silenced them and always defended her grandmother.
In contrast, Eleanor’s young aunts and uncles were free spirits who devoted themselves to the happiness of their orphaned niece and nephew. At Tivoli especially, they encouraged Eleanor to ride her pony, play or not play as long as she liked. Tennis champions and superb athletes, her uncles taught her to jump horses and spent hours trying to teach her to play on one of the first lawn tennis courts in the county. They insisted that she learn to shoot their rifles, and they taught her to ride her new bicycle, which gave her even greater freedom. She liked especially the rowboat that she and Aunt Pussie used throughout the warm months to row down the Hudson for the mail and morning papers. While in New York, they encouraged her activities on the playing fields at Central Park. She reveled in each sport, enjoyed competition, and occasionally rendered herself a filthy mess. The Halls did everything possible to ease her pain and influence her life positively.
ER’s studies had been erratic; now they were more rigorously pursued. Her posture had also been neglected. Like her mother and her aunts before her, she was made to walk up and down the River Road for hours at a time, with a stick behind her shoulders, hooked at her elbows. Her grandmother and her aunts believed, moreover, that she suffered from a spinal curvature, and she was put into a corrective steel brace for almost a year.
If her grandmother seemed to her contemporaries harsh or capricious, Eleanor wrote of Grandmother Hall with only the deepest warmth and gratitude. The six years that Eleanor spent with her grandmother were a time of welcome constraint, and healing. Although she felt profoundly the lack of a home of her own, she was no longer treated as an unwanted interruption in the day’s real business. To Grandmother Hall she was the day’s real business, the primary focus of attention. Her grandmother gave Eleanor a new sense of belonging, place, purpose. Her needs were no longer neglected; her presence was demanded; punctuality was expected. Out of the chaos and distress of her parental home, Eleanor felt for the first time secure and wanted.
Eleanor especially esteemed her Aunts Maude and Pussie. They always “called out my deepest admiration and devotion. Pussie read with me both prose and poetry, and her reading of poetry gave me my first conception that poetry was sound and rhythm in addition to whatever meaning it might contain. Prose could convey an idea but rarely had the additional quality of music.” Whereas Pussie excelled in the arts, ER wrote, Maude had that rare gift, “the art of association with other people. She can appreciate their ability and bring them out.” Eleanor considered Maude “one of the truly unselfish souls of this world.” “These two aunts were my early loves and few women since have seemed to me to surpass them in beauty and charm.”
At Tivoli, she enjoyed a female world dominated by her aunts and their friends, who were solicitous of the little girl’s sensibilities. Lonely and romantic, with no friends or neighbors her own age, she turned her attention to the older women who came into her home. In her memoirs, ER described Alice Kidd, later Mrs. George Huntington, who was a “great influence on me in these early years.” She spoke with Eleanor for hours on long walks through the woods, seemed genuinely interested in her thoughts and feelings, and evoked in her a new sense of love and trust:
I thought her one of the most beautiful and certainly one of the kindest people I knew as a child, and if she was expected I would walk half a mile or more to our entrance for the pleasure of driving in with her and seeing her before she was swallowed up by the older people. I was a little self-conscious about this devotion and I doubt if she ever knew or if any of the others knew…, how much I admired her and how grateful I was for her rather careless kindness. But, I learned something then which has served me in good stead many times—that the most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give. It does not hurt to worship at a shrine which is quite unconscious, for out of it may grow an inner development in yourself and sometimes a relationship of real value. In any case the giving of love is an education in itself.
After Anna Roosevelt’s death and the sale of her house, the Roser schoolroom attended by Eleanor and her friends was moved to the homes of Eleanor’s classmates, who were the daughters of her mother’s closest friends: Gwendolyn Burden, Helen Cutting, Margaret Dix, Valerie Hadden, Sophie Langdon, Jessie Sloane, and Ruth Twombly. Eleanor was closest to Gwendolyn Burden, Helen Cutting, and Jessie Sloane, with whom she remained lifelong friends, but all her Roser classmates seem to have felt protective toward Eleanor, and to have fully appreciated her finest qualities, regardless of her odd clothes or introspective manner. They seem, moreover, to have been the first friends to notice her leadership qualities.
Eleanor loved language, and the sound of language, winning medals for the poetry she memorized and the dramatic readings she gave, and impressing her classmates with the intensity of her essays and stories.
Eleanor’s adolescent writings ranged from sentimental and moralistic to romantic and fanciful. In one story, she described a dispute between all the most exquisite blossoms in the conservatory as to which flower is “the most beautiful.” An elderly woman declares: “As a young girl I loved the violet for it is the flower you picked for me when you told me of your love. Yes I loved it best then. I love it best now….” At which point all the flowers go into a frenzy, and squabble until the violet says: “Why none of us excell. We are all beautiful in our own way. Some are beautifully colored. Others smell sweetly…. We were all made well. From this day we are all equal.” Eleanor concluded: “The other flowers listened and to some it seemed strange that the flower which had been chosen to excel should say this but they all agreed and from that day they were equal.”
“But I always have [loved] and always will love the violet best.”
In another story Eleanor portrays “Gilded Butterflies.” One is discontented: “Pooh! I’m not going to sit on a daisy always…. I am going to know a great deal and to see everything. I won’t stay here to waste my life….” Another, “portly old butterfly,” comments: “Dear, dear, dear how dreadful it is to be discontented. For my part I’d rather stay where I am. I’ve seen life. I’ve met great men and been to large dinners in the crowded cities….” A young beautiful butterfly says: “Dear me I am so tired. I’ve been to at least six dinners and about as many dances in the last week but then it is such fun.” Still another malcontent arrives, bored and bothered with life. “I wish I was dead. There are nothing but daisies and buttercups, never any change. Now if I were only a genius, or rich then I could buy genius!” “Then I heard a soft, lovely voice near my ear so low it was like a whisper. The voice said, ‘Child, learn a lesson from the gilded butterflies and be contented in this world and you will find happiness.’”
Eleanor at fourteen eroticized beauty in nature. She sought to capture the essence of a sunset, which she saw as a “siren of the sea who unrolled the glory of her hair.” As she sat alone on a dock watching the “fiery red ball” descend, she “saw a beautiful woman rise out of the sea to meet it.” The woman held out her arms for that red ball, “as though begging it to come nearer. Then she shook out her golden hair, till the whole sky became golden and as she drew nearer the red light grew softer and softer and blended itself onto her hair as she sank lower and lower…, and just as they kissed the water her mass of golden hair fell over her and hid her from my sight and all that was left of the beautiful vision was a fiery ripple of gold on the water….”
Both at Roser’s and later, ER celebrated “Ambition”: “Some people consider ambition a sin, but well-trained it seems to be a great good for it leads one to do, and to be things which without it one could never have been.” Without ambition, Caesar would never have attempted to conquer the world. Without ambition, “would painters ever paint wonderful portraits or writers ever write books.”
Of course it is easier to have no ambition and just keep on the same way every day and never try to do grand and great things, for it is only those who have ambition and who try to do who meet with difficulties and they alone face the disappointments that come when one does not succeed in what one has meant to do….
But those with ambition try again, and try until they at last succeed….
Eleanor was concerned that ambition might make one “selfish and careless”; the ambitious might push against others, or “tread” on them. But, she asked, was it “better never to be known, and to leave the world a blank as if one had never come”? “It seems to me that we should leave some mark upon the world and not just pass away for what good can that do?” Without ambition, people “would never do anything good.”
However hard-working or ambitious Eleanor’s school friends may have considered her, she seemed to herself rather wanting in virtue. One night she wrote in her journal:
To be the thing we seem
To do the thing we deem enjoined by duty
To walk in faith nor dream
Of questioning God’s scheme of truth and beauty.
It is very hard to do what this verse says, so hard I never succeed…. I am always questioning, questioning because I cannot understand & never succeed in doing what I mean to do, never, never. I suppose I don’t really try. I can feel it in me sometimes that I can do much more…. I mean to try till I do succeed.
On another occasion, Eleanor wrote in her “headache journal”: “I am feeling cross. Poor Aunti Pussie she is so worried. I am going to try and see if I can’t do something for her tonight. I have studied hard…. I’ve tried to be good and sweet and quiet but have not succeeded. Oh my…”
Eleanor’s days were not all devoted to ambition, study, or the pursuit of virtue, however: She spent endless hours on her back in the green rolling fields around Tivoli reading and dreaming. She was especially fond of a particular cherry tree that not only shaded her summer days but provided a comfortable perch where she could not be seen, as she recalled in a 1941 article on the importance of reading: “I have to this day an insatiable interest in every kind of romance and story which grew I think from the first forbidden tales and novels which I purloined as a child and read as far from the house as possible, perched in a cherry tree where I could eat cherries and watch the approach of any grown up who might disapprove of the type of literature I had chosen.”
Eleanor’s capacity to lose herself in her reading caused her to miss many meals. Nothing ordinary could be relied upon to “bring me out of the world between the pages.” To the young ER all of Longfellow and such poems as “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in Armor,” “Evangeline,” and “The Building of a Ship” were favorites—as were Tennyson and Scott: “What young person can read the ‘Revenge’ or ‘Marmion’ or parts of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ and ‘The Idylls of the King’ without being stimulated to dreams of a different age.” The adult ER encouraged every child to share her joy in reading, and to learn French and German as well. At the very least, to “read the Chanson de Roland, Le Cid, some of Dumas, some of Victor Hugo, some of German poetry, Heine, Goethe and some of the more modern German novelists and dramatists…. Every child should read the translations of Indian and Chinese poetry. We know too little of the thought of these far distant races and the beauty of imagery in which they hide their precious kernels of thought and philosophy.”
Eleanor’s grandmother had her tutored in French, German, and music. She studied the piano dutifully until she was eighteen—although, she complained, nobody had bothered to train her ear. But because Aunt Pussie played the piano with “great feeling,” ER developed an “emotional appreciation of music” that lasted throughout her life. “Her playing was one of the unforgettable joys of my childhood. I would lie on the sofa in the 37th Street house and listen to her for hours.” Her Aunts Tissie, Pussie, and Maude also introduced Eleanor to opera, theatre, and the dance.
During these years, Eleanor attended Mr. Dodsworth’s famous dance classes for little ladies and gentlemen. To learn to waltz, and to polka, and to know how to behave in formal fashion in mixed company was essential to her future in society. But she was also given ballet lessons, which she considered a most extraordinary treat. No other girl of her set received such lessons. But her grandmother decided that, because she was so tall “and probably very awkward,” she should have them weekly. ER “learned toe dancing with four or five other girls who were going on the stage …and talked of little else, and made me very envious.” ER loved the ballet, was fascinated by the idea of the stage, and was enraptured by all their stories: “I loved it and practiced assiduously, and can still appreciate how much work lies behind some of the dances which look so easy on the stage.”
Eleanor loved the theatre above all. One of her keenest memories during this time was the evening Aunt Pussie took her to see Eleanora Duse. It was the great Italian actress’s first trip to the United States, and Aunt Pussie brought Eleanor backstage. It was “a thrill which I have never forgotten. Her charm and beauty were all that I had imagined.”
During her early adolescence, ER “would have given anything to be a singer, partly because my father loved to sing, and when he came to the 37th Street house he would sing with Maude and Pussie, and partly because I admired some of their friends who were professional singers. I felt that one could give a great deal of pleasure and, yes, receive attention and admiration! Attention and admiration were the things throughout all my childhood which I wanted, because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration!”
During the five years between her parents’ deaths and her voyage to school in England, her grandmother and her aunts gave Eleanor her first real opportunities to be noticed and appreciated, as she had not been by her mother.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s desire to shine, to perform with excellence, and to be admired was to be even more fully realized following an announcement her grandmother made one day: “Your mother wanted you to go to boarding school in Europe. And I have decided to send you, child.” Elliott and Anna had met Marie Souvestre, Bye’s former teacher, when they were in Paris with Bye in 1891, and Anna was vastly impressed by the woman whom Bye always named, after her father, as one of the most profound influences in her life. Eleanor’s Roosevelt aunts had also encouraged Mrs. Hall to send her to Allenswood immediately after Anna’s death.
Despite Bye’s conviction that Eleanor would be happiest at Allenswood, Mrs. Hall had at first refused to send Eleanor away to school, and preferred to keep her under closer supervision at Tivoli. By 1899, however, Tivoli no longer seemed a calm, pastoral retreat. ER’s young Uncles Eddie and Valentine (Vallie) were ever more unpredictable—and alcoholic. Mrs. Hall decided that Tivoli had become too wild and frivolous for her granddaughter. That summer, when she invited Eleanor into her sitting room to announce her decision, she had already written to Marie Souvestre, who replied: “Believe me as long as Eleanor will stay with me I shall bear her an almost maternal feeling. First because I am devoted to her Aunt [Bye] Mrs. Cowles, and also because I have known both the parents she was unfortunate to lose.”*
Eleanor embarked on this new phase of her life with great anticipation and excitement. She left for Allenswood in 1899, when she was fifteen.
*The other part of ER’s dedication was anonymous: “And to the few other people who have meant the same inspiration throughout my life.”
*ER’s Aunt Bye (Anna Roosevelt Cowles) married Commander Sheffield (Will) Cowles in London in 1895. She surprised the family by her sudden marriage at the age of forty to her forty-nine-year-old “Mr. Bearo,” a naval attaché to the United States embassy. Members of her family were put out by her unexpected marriage, most notably Rosy Roosevelt, who lost his diplomatic hostess.