Laid Away in Wisteria

ROOSEVELT, THE STORY OF A FRIENDSHIP--Owen Wister--Macmillan ($4)- Theodore Roosevelt was not only a college man but a Harvard man, not only a Harvard man but a member of Porcellian Club. All these things, too, was Author Owen Wister. Friends from college days. Wister and Roosevelt saw each other frequently when grown up, often corresponded at length. In Roosevelt's presidency, Wister was a frequent guest at the White House. Once he and his wife stayed there four days. Says he: "It fills me with a certain pride to reflect that I was the fourth generation of my family that had stayed there. . . . None of us had ever been invited for political reasons, but merely because of personal friendship. . . ."

Roosevelt's Washington friends, whom Wister calls the Familiars, were a distinguished group: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ("altogether the most important figure"), William Howard Taft, Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, Jules Jusserand, Leonard Wood, Gifford Pinchot. Says Familiar Owen Wister: "Never in our own history ... at any other time has such a company as these Familiars gathered in the White House. To the society of the present day, they seem to bear the same relation that Gobelin tapestry bears to linoleum." They had fun, too, in those days. "I recall a dinner at the White House . . . where ... we all knew each other very well; in the midst of the excellent talk and laughter, the President in sheer joy suddenly put both his hands on the table, bowed over them, and exclaimed: 'Oh. aren't we having a good time!' ''

Familiar Wister admires Roosevelt this side idolatry, regards his shortcomings with a tolerant eye. He says: Roosevelt disliked pessimistic generalizations "because they made his will-to-optimism feel uncomfortable, and in this his instinct was perfectly sound. A man cannot be a leader unless he is an optimist." One side of Roosevelt, says Wister, was conventional, oldfashioned, easily shocked. He thought Tolstoy immoral, refused to receive Maxim Gorki at the White House.

Wister thinks that Roosevelt should have had his third term, that a majority of the Republican Party wanted him. but that the 1912 Convention was railroaded by Penrose. "Thirty-seven men, 29 of them repudiated as delegates, virtually nominated a President of the U. S. behind closed doors, in defiance of the expressed will of the large majority."

Author Wister disliked, distrusted, did not understand Woodrow Wilson. He thinks Roosevelt during the War played Hero to a weak-kneed Villain Wilson. "Roosevelt was the one man I have known who never cast a shadow, but only sunlight. Even his angers and his denunciations . . . were not thunder from black clouds, they were a tropic blaze of heat . . . Theodore Roosevelt offers us no riddle. The man is clear and accounted for. People may like or dislike that kind of man . . . but as to what manner of man he was, they are pretty well agreed. In truth, his character is not at all complicated: always impulsive, hearty, generous, vigorous in many intellectual directions . . . sometimes thinking better of his friends and worse of his enemies than they deserved. Roosevelt is always the outdoor man and the preacher militant; never old in soul; young to the end."

The Author. Owen Wister, 70. Philadelphia-born and bred (he now lives in Bryn Mawr), onetime (1912-25) member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, like his late great friend has a high voice, a mustache. Critics rate him as of the Kipling school, but not at the head of the class. His best-known book, The Virginian, is still going strong (between May 1, 1928 and May 1, 1929, 33,986 copies were sold). Other books: Red Men and White, Lin, McLean, U. S. Grant, Lady Baltimore, The Seven Ages of Washington, The Pentecost of Calamity.

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