The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

ELEANOR: The Years Alone
by Joseph P. Lash
Norton, $9.95

This is the sequel to Mr. Lash’s monumental account of a unique partnership in the White House and it is well that it should stand apart. During the seventeen years of Eleanor Roosevelt’s widowhood she never ceased growing: no other First Lady has ever so gained in the affection of people at home and abroad and certainly no other has ever exerted such personal influence in her writing, and most importantly, in her speaking and her statesmanship as a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations. At Mrs. Roosevelt’s burial service in Hyde Park, attended by the three Presidents who had succeeded FDR, Mr. Lash reports that a friend of hers, David Gurewitsch, went up to General Eisenhower and asked: “How could it happen that you did not make use of this lady? We had no better ambassador.” The general shrugged and moved away. “I made use of her,” said Truman, who had overheard. “I told her she was the First Lady of the World.”

After Franklin’s death Mrs. Roosevelt’s first job was to vacate the White House and then empty the Big House at Hyde Park of everything—linen, china, silver, jewelry, furs, furniture, books, ship models, painting, and mountains of keepsakes including “[Pa’s] baby clothes in a box and some of his early essays.” These she divided among the children, keeping her share at Val-Kill, which with 825 acres of farmlands she had bought from the estate with all of her own money, a decision predicated on her son Elliott’s willingness to live there with her. Elliott, who needed help, became the manager of her radio and television programs, and throughout this physical toil, which would have killed a horse, she continued to write her daily column, then syndicated in ninety papers. She declined the pension of $85,000 which Congress was ready to bestow and drew the line then and ever after at running for political office. Her name topped the list of delegates to attend the first meeting of the United Nations Assembly, and when she protested that she had no experience in foreign affairs, President Truman refused to be put off. With her acceptance she entered a new world.

The chapters describing her performance at the United Nations are among the finest in the book and will long stand as an example of one woman’s influence in that sensitive forum. Her first clash (over the forced repatriation of refugees) came with Vishinsky, and in this the Soviet’s grand inquisitor was routed by her extemporaneous rebuttal, “the most important speech ever given by an American delegate without a prepared text,” as “Sandy” Sandifer, her State Department aide, later said. She shone like a beacon in the 1948 session leading up to the Declaration of Human Rights and when at 3 A.M. the final vote was forty-eight countries in favor, two absent, eight abstentions (including the USSR), the Assembly gave her a rare standing ovation in recognition of her leadership. This was not fortuitous: her comments on the Russian tactics and the necessity of facing them with confidence are revealing: “We will have to crawl together, running will be out of the question until all of us have gained far more confidence in each other than we have now. . . .” Her patience was inexhaustible.

Her letters and her comments, so well set in Mr. Lash’s matrix, show how closely she held her family despite the extraneous demands: her politically ambitious, impulsive sons she aided discreetly; she helped pay Anna’s debts in the television show they did together over two hundred stations; her most successful book and the most difficult to write, This I Remember, was, as the author says, “her final service of love to her husband’s work.” Of course she invited criticism. The scurrilities of Westbrook Pegler she did not heed, but when Cardinal Spellman in an illjudged broadside denounced her opposition to federal aid for the parochial schools as “documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother,” she was wounded, and her calm, reasoned reply with its devastating conclusion put the politically minded prelate in his place.

In her age she encouraged and advised the young leaders of promise: Adlai Stevenson, and, after hesitation, JFK. Wise, fearless, and modest, she went to the Middle East, Russia, and to the Orient to see the truth and to answer the questions about the United States. As the plane approached Karachi, a companion pointed to the huge crowd at the airport. “That’s not for us,” she said. “That’s for someone of importance who is arriving.” But they were there for her and when they knelt in the street as she passed, her comment was, “I hadn’t realized how they cared about Franklin.”

I COME AS A THIEF
by Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, $6.95

This story of Mr. Auchincloss’s is different and I like it: it is a novel of principle, which is rare in any season. While the background is the New York and Long Island of wealth and sophistication which the author has satirized before, the foreground is monopolized by an “outsider,” the confident, self-made Tony Lowder, whose ability and charm have carried him to the point where he seems poised for a successful assault on Washington. Tony’s grandfather was an Irish immigrant who made money as a contractor, but now in the third generation the family has gone to seed and at forty-three Tony is the white-haired boy: he has married into the Dutch-proud Pieter Bogardus clan and he has a law partner, Max Leonard, who idolizes him and is wily enough to steer the firm and raise the money Tony needs. Running for the State Senate as a Democrat in a traditionally Republican district he attracted statewide attention, and after his narrow defeat the party found a place for him on the Securities and Exchange Commission, keeping him in the public eye until he can make it to Congress or the Treasury. So much as the curtain goes up.

Only once has Tony been troubled by scruple. As a boy he was light-fingered, pilfering from his friends and shops until detected by Grandpa Daly. The old man’s rage reduced Tony’s father to tears and in retribution the boy, one by one, returned what he had stolen. Tony, mature, had no scruple in borrowing funds for his campaign from Joan, his wealthy mistress, but as the recession squeezes him into realizing how deeply he and Max are in debt, a quirk—a principle?—stops him from appealing to Joan again and he wangles the money the hard way, from the head of a firm he is supposed to be investigating. This masterful scene is followed by a second, a Sunday luncheon on Long Island when he is seized with remorse.

From the moment of Tony’s recrimination the narrative gathers force. “I’ve done a wicked criminal thing,” he tells Joan, “and I disgust myself.” What makes it so ironic is that he has all the cards to play it safe: he was bribed to do nothing; he did nothing, and when Menzies Lippard found the four million they needed to cover, suspicion drifted away. But Tony’s obsession will not permit him to be silent and in his determination to confess to the U.S. District Attorney, whatever the consequences, he ranges against him the inner circle of Lee, his wife, fearful for herself and the children, of Max, who runs for protection, and of Pieter Bogardus, his father-in-law. the tax lawyer, so bitter and so mean in his castigation. The scene between them at the club when Tony breaks the news is one of the best in the book. Of the women close to him only Tony’s mother and Joan, who has been living in a hell of her own, are unshaken in their sympathy.

THE HUDSON RIVER & ITS PAINTERS
by John K. Howat
Viking, $25.00

The Hudson River School of painting began more or less by accident in 1825. A young man named Thomas Cole, recently turned artist and not particularly interested in making portraits of provincial bigwigs, did a few views of the Hudson River which he displayed in a framemaker’s shop in New York City. There they caught the eye of Colonel John Trumbull, a painter whose local reputation rather exceeded his talent. Since Trumbull had done enough poor landscapes himself to know a good one when he saw it, his enthusiasm was immediate and generous. Cole became the fashion and the fashion attracted a number of other painters who preferred the light, the water, the ramparts, and the trees of the Hudson in their infinite variety to the relative monotony of painting well-dressed sitters posed and on their best behavior.

The Hudson River School coalesced rapidly and flourished for fifty years. It was truly a school, the first of its kind in the United States, in that the painters knew each other’s work and shared aesthetic theory as well as subject matter. They were not, of course, all permanently anchored in the Hudson. Albert Bierstadt, one of the best, is probably better known for his paintings of the Western frontier than for his New York scenes, and Winslow Homer, coming at the end of the line, is included only because he did some brilliant watercolors of loggers on the upper reaches. After Cole the two who most appeal to me are Frederic E. Church and Jasper Cropsey, who, following his apprenticeship with Cole, painted in London and there exhibited his finest canvas, Autumn on the Hudson River.

There were many in the school, some known today only anonymously, and what they produced was new and different in Occidental art. They saw man and nature as the Chinese did, although there is small reason to suppose that any of them were consciously aware of the fact. What stirred them was their preoccupation with wide scenic panoramas against which buildings, shipping, or human figures were reduced to trivialities. Their inspiration seems to have developed spontaneously in response to the vast emptiness of the unsettled continent and to the majesty of Storm King, the Palisades, the secluded cove, and the white waterfall.

The 102 reproductions, most of them in color, have been arranged not chronologically but as one would traverse the river from the Narrows in the harbor to the source. There is, of course, some influence from Claude Lorraine in the painting, a touch from the Barbizon School, and more than a touch from Turner, but the great canvases, such as Church’s Winter Landscape from Olana, or that brooding, dramatic oil sketch looking toward the Catskills, which he painted in 1870, and the incomparable Sunny Morning on the Hudson by Thomas Cole, are the work of native genius too long unheeded by curators.

The reproductions are of high quality and the preface by James Biddle, like the foreword by Carl Carmer, pleads for the preservation of the Hudson River so long abused and polluted by industry.