Amy Bloom’s new novel uses the power of gossip to get inside the Roosevelt White House through the character of Lorena Hickok, real-life aide and close companion to Eleanor Roosevelt. What she finds there is rank corruption and plenty of paradoxes, some of which resonate with the world we live in now and some of which do not.
Bloom’s novel is short, but dense and affecting. Hickok, known as “Hick”, is a smart, self-made newspaper reporter raised by a cruel and sexually abusive father in Nebraska. She is also deeply in love with Eleanor Roosevelt, who reciprocates her love when she can, though she is beset by many distractions, including her unpleasant children, her faithless husband and her predilection for always doing the moral and generous thing. Hick is a compelling narrator; she tells the reader a few things that she doesn’t tell Eleanor, including that her sexual awakening came when she was working for a travelling circus. There she met Gerry, “Brother and Sister in One Body”, who may be truly intersex and may be faking it, and who notices that Hick is more attracted to his female side. Eleanor, from a wealthy and sheltered background, is attracted to Hick’s tales. The implication is that her humanitarianism arises from not only her generous nature, but also her sense of her own circumscribed life.
Bloom gives Hick a plausible and compelling voice as the reader’s own inside reporter, letting us know what life in the White House felt like. The real shocker, at least for me, is Bloom’s portrayal of FDR, who is shown as a serial womaniser. I never knew this, nor did I expect him to be so ruthless. About halfway through the novel, Hick observes, “If Eleanor had been Franklin, I would have worried about infidelity. I would have known that I was married to a charming liar. I wouldn’t have been able to stand how easily she would tell me one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday, without a blush.”
One of the most poignant characters in White Houses is FDR’S assistant, Missy LeHand, who has a stroke early in the novel, when she is only 44 years old. Although she has been steadfast in her love of him, he practically ignores her and it falls to Hick to maintain what contact remains between the White House and Missy’s family.
Hick is perennially aware of her good luck in escaping her childhood circumstances, and also in attracting Eleanor’s love and occasional passion. She knows she is plain, she knows she is overweight, and she has been told more than once that she is no one’s ideal lover, but she is good at doing the best she can with the materials at hand.
But what’s the point of this novel? Franklin and Eleanor were hugely famous and much has been written about them. My guess is that Bloom is after the sort of effects she achieved so beautifully in Lucky Us, her peripatetic novel about Hollywood in the second world war. Her gay characters are always more in danger than they would like to be, but also extremely observant, because of potential dangers as well as potential passions. She wants us to sense how their observations cast a new light on history we thought we knew. In White Houses, one of the most interesting characters is Parker Fiske, a gay relative of Eleanor’s who seems to be Bloom’s invention; Hick both connects with him and mistrusts him, because he is daring and stylish and in some ways acts out her own temptations.
There are, of course, blatant resemblances to today’s political situation, notably secrets that the White House would like to keep but can’t. Bloom knows this, and she also knows what is important. Towards the end of the book, Hick runs into Franklin late at night. When they are alone, she wants to confront him:
He puffed on a cigarette and his eyes wandered from my face to my bosom and back, assessing out of habit, just letting me know. I sat back down and pretended to read. Franklin called for another round. I couldn’t scold the President of the United States, and I didn’t have it in me to fight with the cripple I was cuckolding every night.
When Roosevelt (who was thought to have contracted polio when he was 39 but may have had Guillain-Barré syndrome) is taken away to his bedroom by his aide, to be carried up the stairs, stripped and dressed, she cannot overlook the fact that he is great not in spite of his contradictions, but because of them. Both Eleanor and Franklin understand that their public roles, as necessary saviours because of the economic depression and the war, transcend their private flaws. Hick is there to witness both, and to do it eloquently, surely, and in the context of her own dramatic experiences.
White Houses reflects on what it means to at least try to take up the responsibilities politicians are given. I know of someone who should read it.
Jane Smiley’s Golden Age is published by Picador. To order White Houses for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com.
