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This paper tries to pick up a fresh scent and blaze a slightly new track up to and round or through a well-known tale; to tell the story, or rather a story, of a story-increasing its range and complexity of reference, I hope, and not proposing a "solution." In harking back to make up I will have to cut some corners.
They only met on four occasions, yet the greatest American statesman and the greatest American writer of their age, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry James, were intensely conscious of each other. Each one's sense of the other, which certainly involves some misreading of that other's aims and achievements, is formative and representative. Both were New Yorkers, born within a few blocks of each other, and both had a Harvard association and a young manhood affected by ill health. But James came East to Europe for his cure, whereas Roosevelt worked out with weights and went West: a divergence that can usefully stand for the great distance between their respective understandings of American identity.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr., twenty-four, former student of William James at Harvard, now a liberal (reformist) Republican Assemblyman in the New York State Assembly in Albany, and Henry James, thirty-nine, of Bolton Street, London, no longer Jr., first met in Boston in January 1883. The following passage from an undated letter by Roosevelt to his sister is the sole published record:
P.S. The Bostonians were awfully kind to us. I was put up at the Somerset; Percy Lowell gave me a dinner there, and Harry Burnett a lunch; and Bob Grant also had me to dine and took me round afterwards to the St. Botolph's club, a kind of Boston "Century" where I was introduced to James, the novelist, and had a most pleasant time, meeting Cabot Lodge, General Wilson, General MacDowell, Edward Everett Hale, and several others. (Letters 1: 59-60)
Bland enough.
1884 was a remarkable year for James, but even more so for Roosevelt. In February 1884 Roosevelt's mother and wife both died within eleven hours (from typhoid and Bright's disease, respectively). There was a joint funeral. Roosevelt refused to speak of his feelings and flung himself into political activity. In May 1884, at the Republican Party convention in Chicago, Roosevelt's...