January 2021
Favorites of the month: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times and Eleanor
When I first spotted Wintering, Katherine May’s poignant examination of our real and metaphorical “season[s] in the cold,” I found myself captivated and eager to learn more about what is, admittedly, my favorite time of year. Like most people, I love the circular dependability of all the seasons – how spring’s flowers predictably prelude the summer sun, which then ushers in the changing leaves and scented air of fall. But for me, there has always been something so uniquely, even magically, restorative about winter: The way the ground frosts over and the sky turns completely white; the way the whole world becomes gentle and hushed like the snow; the way we are finally permitted to rest – to build warm, cozy sanctuaries around the fire, with a cup of hot cocoa in one hand and a good book in the other.
In Wintering, May speaks to the inner “winterite” in all of us, offering not only an instructive and replicable model for embracing winter, but also a language for articulating its wonder. Employing a style that is both clear and well-researched and yet thoughtful and poetic, May describes how “the cold renders everything exquisite” – from the “purplish clouds” that loom above snow and the frozen ground that “crunches underfoot” to the “quiet house in lamplight” and “the roar of the wood-burning stove.” In capturing the season’s strange yet enchanting alchemy, she evokes the long-lost feel of a snowy fairytale or perhaps even a memory from our youth. “Our knowledge of winter,” she writes, “is a fragment of our childhood, almost innate.”
Yet for as magical as winter can be, we so often try to push it away. We blind out its natural rhythms as we invent ways to outmaneuver its cold temperatures and shorter days, thus immunizing ourselves from its slower, more inconvenient pace. In similar ways, we block out those “seasons” of our lives that are cold and fallow – those seasons when we’re “cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” “We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored,” and in doing so we forget how essential wintering is.
In making this connection between our seasonal and allegorical “winters,” May offers us a book tailormade for the strange and painful time in which we find ourselves. In many ways, COVID has been a winter in and of itself. It has required complete isolation, cutting us off from each other and at times making us feel like outsiders. Perhaps during no other season has this isolation been more difficult than the one we are currently in – this season of our superimposed and intersecting “winters,” one social and the other seasonal, each one reinforcing the other’s demands for slowness, separation, seclusion, and solitude.
But in May’s Wintering, there are signs of hope. In learning how to peacefully accept and even lean into the hardships and setbacks of winter, May tells us that we can begin to see it not as “the death of the life cycle,” but as its “crucible” – as its central and restorative preamble, which repeats, again and again, to help us welcome a renewed and more beautiful life. “Life meanders like a path through the woods,” she writes. “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
In Eleanor, author David Michaelis delivers a wonderful single-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt – the first such biography to be published in more than fifty years. Despite the seeming impossibility of Michaelis’s task in Eleanor – to capture all seventy-eight years of Eleanor Roosevelt’s incredible life in a single book – he does so marvelously. In a style that is both nuanced and clear-sighted, he manages to intimately acquaint us with the person Eleanor was, unveiling the truths that are so often camouflaged behind the quixotic curtain of public life.
Beginning with her childhood, Michaelis helps us understand what made Eleanor Roosevelt tick. Known as “Granny” (the derisive nickname bestowed upon her when she was just a toddler), the young Eleanor was perceived as an ugly duckling by her mother, Anna Hall Roosevelt — “one of the most beautiful and socially ambitious women of Gilded Age New York.” With her mother uninterested and often abroad, Eleanor was carted off to an endless line of surrogate caretakers, with whom she developed “a fundamental capacity to oblige…by making herself more or less invisible.” Reinforcing this need to please was the close relationship Eleanor shared with her father, Elliott. Though often interrupted and ultimately cut short by alcoholism, Elliott’s sincere devotion to his daughter granted her critical deliverance from a childhood described as “one long battle against fear,” creating in her a deep-seated need for attention – as well as a deep-seated need to be needed.
As she got older and reached marriageable age, Eleanor’s awareness of her own supposed “inadequacy” only deepened. Born in 1884 (just four years after Bessie), Eleanor belonged to a generation of Victorian women who, in the words of Edith Wharton, “expect[ed] to be talked to collectively and to have their questions unanswered.” Per the sexist parameters of the “separate spheres,” college and a career were both out of the question for Eleanor, meaning her only duty in life was to marry and have children, though that too was perceived as a lost cause. “You’re so homely…that no man will ever want to marry you,” Eleanor’s Aunt Edith told her when she was seventeen.
Of course, Eleanor did marry, landing in her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, something of an improbable catch. Framing their union as a pivotal watershed, Michaelis goes on to chart Eleanor’s forty-year evolution from a delicate wallflower into a magnetic political and cultural force. Though Eleanor would never possess her mother’s beauty, she gradually found her footing, cultivating strength in her personal mantra: You must do the thing you think you cannot do. Time, indeed, seemed to have a Benjamin Button-like effect on her, with each year finding her more confident, more youthful, and more dynamic than the one before. “Even if her teeth were not right and the set of her face a little off,” wrote one woman of Eleanor in 1968, “there was an extraordinary radiant quality about her.” At nearly six-feet tall and with strikingly blue eyes, she exuded an unmatchable blend of “strength, drive, and curiosity.” Almost everyone who met her felt the need to defend her “real-life” beauty, maintaining that she was much “better looking than the pictures showed.”
Mirroring this personal transformation, Michaelis sketches Eleanor’s political evolution, powerfully underscoring what may have been her greatest strength – her “capacity for growth.” As a young woman, Eleanor vehemently opposed female suffrage and embraced the racist standards of her upbringing, wearing “bigotry,” Michaelis tells us, “as if it were a coat slipped on to suit an occasion.” Yet after the First World War (and with the help of key mentors who recognized and nurtured her special “gift for action”), Eleanor became, in her words, “a much more ardent citizen and feminist” than anyone could “have dreamed possible.” Grasping the inefficacy of local government and the enduring pain of institutional racism, sexism, and classicism, she became a tireless advocate for women, African Americans, refugees, homesteaders, and veterans, effectively defying the prevailing assumption that the wives of presidents, “like little girls at home, should be seen not heard.” As first lady, Eleanor acted as a veritable “antenna” for a paralyzed FDR, challenging his penchant for political appeasement and inaction while deepening his understanding of the people as people. Certainly, Eleanor had an instinct for “reducing the general to the particular.” As Michaelis writes, “She felt individual pain, and it energized her. She saw the world dissolving back into individual lives, the individual welfare of people, their connectedness to one another.”
Even so, Eleanor Roosevelt was far from perfect. Though Michaelis unquestionably admires his subject, his book is by no means a panegyric; sometimes, it can be downright troubling. While Eleanor was often regarded as a “living saint” during her lifetime, she could be cold, indifferent, and sometimes even cruel to her children and romantic partners. She withheld her affections and accused loved ones of over-sensitivity, even as she remained insatiably in need of attention herself: “She had to have people to whom she was the first in the world,” wrote her daughter Anna.
In praising Eleanor’s political advocacy and courage, Michaelis is also sure to shed light on how much she struggled to jettison all of the prejudices of her youth. As I read Eleanor, I found I was not always able to decipher Eleanor’s true motives, often wondering if there wasn’t a bit of self-interested sanctimony wrapped up in her lifelong pursuit to be “good, strong and brave for others.” At times, Michaelis’s portrayal made her seem more like a puzzling and paradoxical enigma than someone I felt like I knew.
And yet, aren’t we all puzzling and paradoxical enigmas? And isn’t that the job of the biographer – to tell the story of a person’s whole life as it truly was, all personal, social, and historical forces considered?
In Eleanor, Michaelis does this job and does it well. In the words of Jackie Kennedy, writing to Eleanor six months before she died, “You are something so rare.” A person so rare – a person so unique, so beautiful, and so impactful – deserves to be portrayed with the lights left on so that she may show us the way, warts and all.