Colonel Roosevelt (61 page)

He was shy about mentioning any members of his family except the Roosevelts and Bullochs who had preceded him, expressing awe of his father (“the only man of whom I was ever really afraid”), and tolerant affection for his “entirely unreconstructed” Georgian mother, with her stories of antebellum life on Roswell Plantation and “queer goings-on in the Negro quarters.” As far as any reader could tell, the woman who bore his first child had never existed. The mother of his later children was referred to only in passing as “Mrs. Roosevelt,” and the children themselves were neither numbered nor named. He wrote tersely about his juvenile battles with asthma, then dismissed the subject of health altogether.
Adult traumas, whether physical or psychological, went unrecorded. Autobiographically speaking, he had not squandered half his patrimony in the Badlands. He had not run for mayor of New York, let alone finished last in a three-way race. His younger brother, Elliott, had not impregnated a servant girl, the family had not paid her off, and Elliott had not died a hopeless alcoholic. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had been obstructed, rather than outwitted, by a Machiavellian colleague. Somebody else could take credit for comparing President McKinley’s backbone to a chocolate éclair. And the Colonel of the Rough Riders had not lobbied for a Medal of Honor on the ground of personal heroism.

A few of these lacunae were self-serving, but most were self-aware, to be expected in the reminiscences of a former president. He knew that every word that he wrote on personal matters would be pored over. (Hundreds of newspapers, including
The New York Times
, were quoting each chapter as soon as it appeared in
The Outlook
.) His moral instinct, moreover, prevented him from recording material that did not trumpet his beliefs. Owen Wister saw clearly in characterizing him as “
an optimist who saw things as they ought to be, wrestling with a realist who knew things as they were.”

The optimist forged ahead with his text, cutting down on anecdotes and applying political experience to future ideals. Yet it was the realist, persuaded to reminisce by fellow editors at the magazine, who here and there set down
stretches of beguiling autobiography, faithful to his own precept that vividness was a necessary part of historical truth. He wrote an elegiac chapter, “In Cowboy Land,” about his years as a rancher and deputy sheriff in North Dakota:

ON TUESDAY, 4 MARCH
, the present and the future simultaneously intruded themselves on literary recall. Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as President of the United States, calling upon “all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men” to come to his side. “God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”

Doubting, somehow, that Wilson wanted
his
advice,
the Colonel went that morning to the huge new “Futurists Exhibition” at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. Since its opening two weeks before, the show, officially entitled “International Exhibition of Modern Art” and displaying well over a thousand paintings and sculptures, had drawn record crowds, setting off reactionaries against sophisticates, critic against critic, and the avant-garde against the merely curious, in
a bedlam of aesthetic debate. It seemed worthy of an
Outlook
review.

Roosevelt had never written art criticism before. His references to painting, mostly in letters, were conventional and uninvolved, although Arthur Lee had managed to thrill him with the gift of
some Valhallan landscapes by Pinckney Marcius-Simons, a New Yorker transplanted to Bayreuth.
As for sculpture, Alice had once been convulsed by her father’s admiration for a “particularly fine Diana,” despite three-dimensional evidence that the figure was Apollo.

Monocular vision was part of his problem, but he also had a tin ear for music, and no sense of interior design beyond the hunter’s desire to surround himself with
disjecta membra
. “
Art,” Roosevelt admitted, “is about the only subject of which I feel some uncertainty.” That had not stopped him, as President,
from being strongly supportive of the creative classes.
His executive dining room had vied with Henry Adams’s breakfast parlor as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. He had put the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the novelist James B. Connolly, and the cartoonist Thomas Nash on the federal payroll, on the understanding that they would do as little governmental work as possible. He had sponsored a classical restoration of the White House by the architects McKim, Mead & White, teamed up with the planners of the City Beautiful movement against the yahoos of Capitol Hill, posed for John Singer Sargent, and chosen Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design the most elegant coins in modern circulation. “I’d like to be remembered in that way—a patron of art,” he told Hamlin Garland.

Nevertheless, something earthy in him mistrusted what was most fine in the fine arts. He had trouble reading Jane Austen, and thought Henry James effeminate. He disliked poetry that dwelt on intuitions or sensation, preferring border ballads and Longfellow’s
Saga of King Olaf
to Keats and Baudelaire. Yet his own writings demonstrated a lyrical receptivity to the sights and sounds of the natural world, plus a willingness to be surprised. He rejected nothing new until he understood it well enough to form an opinion of it—usually on moral or utilitarian grounds. Even then, he was amenable to changing his mind, if an expert could improve his perception.
Unlike most of the sixty thousand traditionally minded viewers who had preceded him to the Armory, he came without prejudice.
He felt that the organizers of the show were doing a public service in displaying “art forces which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which cannot be ignored.”

An electricity never given off before by an art event in New York was palpable around the huge building. Double-parked automobiles crowded the streets to north, east, and south. Porters tried to control the jostle of ticket holders, and hollered through megaphones at cabs blocking the entrance. Of the two side exits, the most animated—mainly by people laughing and improvising “Cubist” jokes—was that adjoining Gallery I, notorious for its concentration of works by Matisse and other Parisian
enfants terribles
.

Roosevelt was in no hurry to bypass the American rooms, which outnumbered those of France, Britain, Ireland, and Germany almost three to one. The first area he entered, a luminous, tented space full of sculptures and decorative pieces, at once seized his attention.
He was predisposed to like the lacquered oak screens of Robert Chanler, not just because the artist was the brother of one of his former Rough Riders, but because the exquisite designs that covered them fulfilled his long-held dream of a new aesthetic arising out of the paradox of American identity. Here was the work of a man like himself, a wealthy Knickerbocker who had lived in the West and served as a sheriff, yet who was at home in European salons. Chanler, too, loved nature, finding zoomorphic beauty even in the rule of tooth and claw. His Asiatic-looking
black wolves, their tails flowing like serpents, bit soundlessly into the writhing bodies of white stags. Attenuated giraffes, splotched as delicately as orchids, grazed the tops of impossibly tall trees. Moonlight irradiated the needles of porcupines slinking through a forest of blue and silver. Perhaps most thrilling, to a tired man of letters planning to take his youngest sons to Arizona in July, was a representation of the Hopi Snake Dance in the “sky city” of Walpi. By transfiguring primitive movement into an ethereal choreography, Chanler was doing the reverse of what the Ballets Russes had done in Paris—where his panels were apparently admired.

Moving on through five more galleries of contemporary American art, Roosevelt saw nothing by Saint-Gaudens, Frederick MacMonnies, William Merritt Chase, and other favorites of his presidency. He did not miss them. They had had too long a reign, with their effete laurel wreaths and Grecian profiles.
It was clear that the show’s organizers, headed by the symbolist painter Arthur B. Davies, intended to eradicate the beaux arts style from the national memory. Even Sargent was shunned, in favor of young American artists of powerful, if not yet radical originality: George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and dozens of women willing to portray their sex without prettification.
Roosevelt was taken with Ethel Myers’s plastilene group, “Fifth Avenue Gossips,” whose perambulatory togetherness reminded him of the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. He liked the social realism of John Sloan’s “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair” and George Luks’s camera-quick sketches of animal activity at the Bronx Zoo. Leon Kroll’s “Terminal Yards” impressed him, although it represented the kind of desecration of the Hudson Palisades that he and George Perkins had worked to curtail. From a vertiginous, snowcapped height, the artist’s eagle eye looked down on railroad sidings and heaps of slag. Drifting vapor softened the ugliness and made it mysteriously poetic.

What pleased Roosevelt about the work of these “Ashcan” painters, and indeed the entire American showing as he wandered on, was the lack of “simpering, self-satisfied conventionality.” All his life he had deplored the deference his countrymen tended to extend toward the art and aristocracy of the Old World. Sloan was a social realist as unsentimental as Daumier, but bigger of heart. Walt Kuhn’s joyful “Morning” had the explosive energy of a Van Gogh landscape, minus the neurosis. Hartley’s foreflattened “Still Life No. 1” was the work of a stateside Cézanne, its Indian rug and tapestries projecting a geometry unseen in Provence.

Davies modestly exhibited only three oil paintings. He eschewed realism in favor of a dreamlike classicism that was at once as serene yet more mysterious than the masterworks of Puvis de Chavannes. Roosevelt, like virtually every American critic or connoisseur, revered Puvis, but Davies’s “Moral Law—A Line of Mountains” was perhaps the most cosmopolitan picture in the show,
with its unmistakably Western chain of peaks shimmering across a prairielike emptiness, and pale vague nudes that could have been doodled by Puvis, or traced from the walls of the Roman catacombs, floating in the foreground. Roosevelt took pleasure in it even if the title was bafflingly cryptic.

His enjoyment did not diminish when he found himself among the works of
European moderns loosely cataloged as “post-impressionist.” He was blind to a piece of pure abstraction by Wassily Kandinsky, but responded happily to the dreamy fantasies of Odilon Redon and the virtuoso draftsmanship of Augustus John, as well as to Whistler, Monet, Cézanne, and other acknowledged revolutionaries.

Then came the slap in the face that was Matisse. More vituperation had been directed at this painter, in reviews of the show so far, than at any other “Cubist”—a term that actually did not apply to him, but nevertheless was used as an epithet. Roosevelt gazed at his “Joaquina” and found its cartoony angularity simply absurd. Beyond loomed a kneeling nude by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Although
obviously mammalian, it was not especially human; the “lyric grace” that had made it the sensation of a recent exhibition in Cologne reminded him more of a praying mantis.

A phrase he had recently tried out on Henry Cabot Lodge, in a letter complaining about political extremists, came to mind:
lunatic fringe
. It seemed even more applicable to the French radicals who now proceeded to insult his intelligence, as if he and not they were insane: Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Maillol. He boggled at Marcel Duchamp’s
Nu descendant un escalier
, a shuttery flutter of cinematic movement propelled by the kind of arcs that American comic artists drew to telegraph punches, or baseball swings. If this was Cubism, or Futurism, or Near-Impressionism, or whatever jargon-term the theorists of modern art wanted to apply to it, he believed he had seen it before, in a Navajo rug.

At least Duchamp had had the decency not to flaunt sexual organs. Roosevelt noted no
e
on the end of
Nu
in the painting’s title (helpfully lettered onto the canvas), and decided in the face of general opinion to translate it as “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.”
Nakedness seemed to be a motif of the show’s remaining galleries, so much so that he elected to ignore a walking nude by Robert Henri that verged on the anatomical, and a frankly lesbian study by Jules Pascin that had three girls preparing to have sex on a bed, limbs intertwined, lips caressing a proffered nipple.