ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: VOL. 2.

• Author: Lessard, Zuzannah
• Position: Review

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: Vol. 2 By Blanche Wiesen Cook Viking, $34.95

IN THE FIRST VOLUME OF WHAT will be at least a three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Blanche Wiesen Cook laid out the childhood of this remarkable woman, a painful one of abandonment by death and alcoholism in the midst of a famously complicated and un-nurturing clan. The political woman, the woman determined to be useful to others in the world, emerged in that story. But it was primarily a tale of struggle for emotional survival, first from the wounds of childhood and later from her husband's infidelity with Lucy Mercer. With that discovery, her life crashed, and, in a period of anorexia--she just couldn't keep food down--and depression, she sought ways to restore her never-sturdy sense of her own worth.

In this period of devastation, Eleanor made many visits to the statue that Henry Adams had commissioned Augustus St. Gaudens to erect in memory of his wife Clover, whose suicide may have been related to her own husband's involvement with another woman. The statue is of a hooded anonymous figure familiarly known as Grief. Somehow this ambiguous memorial gave her the strength to commit herself to a life of emotional and even political independence from Franklin while remaining loyal to him, although her loyalty was often that of the opposition.

Ms. Cook's work is that of a disciplined scholar with a lucid style that carries her thoroughness lightly. She gives us what we need to form our own pictures and draw our own conclusions. Most people would conclude from the evidence in the first volume that Eleanor became engaged in a passionate and almost certainly physical relationship with Lorena Hickock, a newspaperwoman, right in the White House. This was independent indeed. After the Lucy Mercer discovery Eleanor was also in the company of feminists, some of whom lived together in life partnerships. This raises a thought I have not seen addressed--Ms. Cooke does not venture into such speculation: If Eleanor was by nature a lesbian, if that was where her happiness and her fulfillment lay, then is it not probably true that there would have been something missing in her marriage to Franklin? If this was the case, Franklin's affair with Lucy Mercer is not quite the betrayal that it might seem to be in another light. Complexities of this kind should warn us off making judgments about any marriage: it is almost impossible to see into longstanding life partnerships from the outside...