By Steven Jay Griffel
Queens, NY, USA
Nothing
says American quite like the cowboy.
In fact, the word cowboy still has
currency in our lingo, suggesting a particularly American kind of rugged and
independent spirit.
The
cowboy of yesteryear came in all shapes and sizes. Billy the Kid was young and
diminutive. Wild Bill Hickock was likely certifiable. Buffalo Bill was a dandy
showman and genocidal marksman. But according to master novelist Jerome Charyn,
the greatest cowboy, the king of cowboys, was Teddy Roosevelt, who went West
“furnished with silver stirrups, a tailored buckskin suit, and a Bowie knife
from Tiffany’s.”
To
get the lowdown on the hero of his new book, The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King (a novel of Teddy Roosevelt
and His Times), I sat down with Jerome Charyn to get his side of the story.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Let’s start
with the cover story. I love the Superhero sweep of type and TR’s booted,
Beast-Master pose.
JEROME CHARYN: The
cover is spectacular, because my editor, Robert Weil, willed it to be. He
sensed the superhero nature of Theodore Roosevelt’s pursuits in the novel and
wanted to capture it as an image. I suggested the mountain lion on the leash,
and the magic of it came together.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: In your
wonderfully dramatic story of the boy who became the manly reformer, you
explore TR’s formative influences, especially those of his father.
JEROME CHARYN: We
wouldn’t have Theodore Roosevelt, the man and the future president, without the
example that his father set for him. What drew me to TR was not only his
relationship with his father, but his father’s absolute generosity. Theodore
Roosevelt Sr. was Brave Heart, a king among men. Took his Sunday dinners with
newsboys instead of industrialists and relished every moment. And would never
pass a stray kitten without picking it up and bringing it to two cat ladies on
Second Avenue.
I
was particularly moved because of my own troubled relationship with my father.
I had to unlearn the ways of the world and discover my own path, while TR had
the absolute generosity and example of his father.
TR
never lived anywhere without an image of his father on the wall—including the
White House.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Early on, you
show young TR’s physical challenges, emphasizing his weak constitution,
especially his eyes. Wonderful irony, considering he became one of America’s great
visionaries.
JEROME CHARYN: Theodore
Roosevelt didn’t see the spectacular world of color until he wore his first
pair of glasses, and when he went to battle in Cuba, he kept spare pairs of
spectacles in every single one of his ten pockets. I wouldn’t connect his
vision to his weak eyes, but to his powerful mind and his belief in absolute
fairness.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Though he grew
up in a relatively wealthy home, with “six generations of Roosevelt at his
rear,” you make it clear that TR was forever proud of his family’s farmer past
and the “smell of manure that clung to the family name.”
JEROME CHARYN: We
cannot whitewash the man. He was a hunter, and proud of it. You can find
antlers everywhere in Sagamore Hill, but he believed that the animals he hunted
should have their own environment and kingdoms and he did his best to deliver
such kingdoms to them. We should not extract him from his own time; he was
filled with contradictions, but he believed that the land belonged to people
and to wildlife and not to a carnival of hucksters and corporations.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Knowing you and
your novels as I do, I’m guessing that the opportunity to write about New York
(1862-1901) was almost as big a draw as writing about TR himself.
JEROME CHARYN: I’m
a lazy guy. I know New York City. I could invent with my eyes closed and feel
the music of the place. Manhattan sang in my dreams.
 |
| Jerome Charyn |
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: You do a great
job dramatizing TR’s independent spirit, showing how he was distrustful of both
the Democratic and Republican parties.
JEROME CHARYN: TR
had to enter politics in order to be able to change the world around him, but
he never trusted politicians, and he suffered because of that. His own party
banished him to the Vice Presidency, and started to moan when Roosevelt was
sworn in as president after McKinley’s assassination.
Because
Roosevelt trusted Taft to continue his policies [and Taft betrayed him], he had
to run for a third term and create his own progressive—or Bull Moose—party. He
might have beaten back the Democrats if he hadn’t been shot while making a
speech one month before the election. Even with a bullet in him, the Bull Moose
finished his speech.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Like so many
strong public figures, TR showed his weakest self as a family man. After the
death of his first wife, he willingly left his young daughter in his older
sister’s charge so he could head for the Dakotas to play cowboy. Later in life,
he remarries and has more children, but rarely mentions them, beyond referring
to them as his “bunnies.”
JEROME CHARYN: You
may be seeing more Charyn, than TR there. Instead of my naming all of his
children every single time, it was easier for me to call them “bunnies,”
although TR himself used that term. He was a great father and a devoted
husband, but somehow he had to blot out the image of his first wife (who died
giving birth to his first child). Theodore Roosevelt wasn’t a man who allowed
himself to live in the past.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: This is your
latest novel written in the first-person, from the point of a view of a famous
American—what some critics are calling “literary ventriloquism.” How did the
experience of discovering the mind and voice of TR differ from your experiences
with Emily Dickinson and Abraham Lincoln?
JEROME CHARYN: Discovering
the voice of a particular subject is almost impossible. And only an idiot would
attempt to do so. I’m not a ventriloquist, I’m a singer of songs, and I had to
work very hard to find TR’s slightly stilted music and bring out the poetry
that was within him. Lincoln and Emily Dickinson were a bit easier to do,
because they had such distinctive voices. TR was more of a task. But you have
to remember that ultimately I am always writing about myself. I am playing TR.
He’s never my puppet. He owns me and I am his mischievous child.
STEVEN JAY GRIFFEL:
TR was a very special environmentalist, not only championing our national
resources, but also respecting our nation’s indigenous peoples.
JEROME CHARYN: He
wasn’t as perfect as you make him out to be. Sometimes he could have been a bit
kinder to Native Americans, but as I said, he was a man of his time, and he
learned to outgrow many of his limitations. He was – he still is – our first
superhero.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Your writing
throughout the novel is, I believe, some of your best work. The chapters about
the Rough Riders are especially memorable. In the scene that describes the
taking of San Juan Hill, you humanized TR and, to my mind, made him seem even
more heroic.
JEROME CHARYN: His
relationship with the Rough Riders helped define him. They were like his
father’s newsboys, almost children he had protect. They became famous on
account of him but held onto their flaws, and TR protected them for the rest of
his life. He never failed a single one of his Rough Riders.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: I assume you
are already working on a new book. What can you tell me?
JEROME CHARYN: I’m
finishing a novel on J.D. Salinger. I wasn’t interested in his later life as a
hermit in New Hampshire. But Salinger was a secret agent during WWII. He worked
with the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). Salinger went through the war from
Normandy to the freeing of the death camps, partly as a soldier and partly as a
counter-intelligence man on a mission to erase every one of his steps.
Links:
_________________________________
Steven Jay Griffel is the author of
the Amazon #1 Bestseller Forty Years
Later.