Books: Daring Rectitude

LOVE, ELEANOR: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND HER FRIENDS

by Joseph P. Lash

Doubleday; 534 pages; $19.95

MOTHER & DAUGHTER: THE LETTERS OF ELEANOR AND ANNA ROOSEVELT

Edited by Bernard Asbell

Coward, McCann & Geoghegan;

366 pages; $17.95

She was stiff and prudish and homely and a do-gooder. She signed innumerable petitions and promoted countless social causes without questioning their country of origin or their ultimate goal. But she could also be brainy, fearless and tough, and just hammy enough at times to take the curse off her indomitable goodness. After all, when impressionists mimicked Eleanor Roosevelt's buck-toothed smile, they were also repeating her messages on tolerance and humanity.

The most important reassessment of E.R. began in 1979, 17 years after her death. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., unsealed a mass of 3,500 letters exchanged between the President's wife and Lorena Hickok, a stocky onetime A.P. reporter nine years her junior. An entirely typical letter written by Eleanor on March 7,1933, begins, "Hick darling, All day I've thought of you . . . Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it!"

When the Hickok letters were released, Biographer Joseph Lash had already written three books about Eleanor—a memoir of their long friendship, which began in the late 1930s when he was a leftist youth leader in Washington, and the bestselling two-volume study, Eleanor and Franklin and Eleanor: The Years Alone. Lash has set out to balance his work with two more volumes, of which Love, Eleanor is the first.

Did Eleanor have a physical relationship with "Hick"? Lash's cautious but firm conclusion is that she did not (though Hickok's sexual orientation was more clearly lesbian), and it seems likely that he is right. To cover the situation, he resurrects the archaic term "Boston marriage," meaning a close and longstanding, but not necessarily sexual, relationship between two women. The fact is—and this is the main subject of Lash's new book—that throughout her life E.R. carried on a series of intense and rather schoolgirlish friendships with a variety of women and men, none of whom, almost certainly, was a lover.

Indeed, the First Lady was never on familiar terms with love. Her mother, who seems not to have cared much for the child, died when Eleanor was eight, and her beloved father, Teddy Roosevelt's charming, doomed younger brother Elliott, died when she was ten, after two years during which he was exiled from his family for drunkenness and other sins. She was an awkward, serious girl, nicknamed "Granny" by her mother. She did arouse at least the admiration of her cousin Franklin, whom she married when she was 20, but her attitude toward sex, which she recommended to her daughter Anna, was the proper one for upper-class women of her time: it was an ordeal to be borne. In 1918. as a young mother of five children, she was crushed, but not quite destroyed, to learn that her dashing husband, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was having an affair with her own pretty social secretary, Lucy Mercer.