Author of “Dear George, Dear Mary: A Novel of George Washington’s First Love,” Mary Calvi offers readers another fascinating fictional novel crafted from primary source material.
“If a Poem Could Live and Breathe,” which was released earlier this year, is at once a historical novel and a romance novel centered on young Theodore Roosevelt and his first love, Alice Hathaway Lee.
For Calvi, discovering original love letters between Roosevelt and Lee stored primarily at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, was illuminating and transforming. It was an opportunity to share their voices—voices, for Calvi that needed to be heard for their poignancy, beauty, and perhaps pivotal design in molding the mind and heart of the nation’s 26th president of the United States.
Roosevelt’s 1884
It’s New York in 1884, Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day. The weather is horrible, cold, and blustery. A law student at Columbia University and newly elected to the New York State Assembly, 26-year-old Theodore Roosevelt is called back to Manhattan from Albany to attend to two loves of his life: his mother Martha and his wife Alice.Roosevelt is devastated and heads west to the Badlands in North Dakota to herd cattle, ride horses, and spend many months in isolation mourning the passing of his first love. Her memory haunts him at every turn and his emotional pain is acute but ultimately restorative.
I debated whether to start this review with such tragic sorrow, a searing sorrow that befalls this young man, a future president, in the early decades of his life. However, we find him during a harsh winter of that same year, 1884, roaming “Cowboy Land” in North Dakota, in the first chapter of the book.
Readers learn early on that this man is tormented by an unspeakable and tragic loss. It is not hard to assume that such suffering is the result of the loss of much happiness and contentment.
A Love Story Worth Sharing
The author then takes readers back in time some six years, to 1878, on the first day that Theodore Roosevelt meets Alice Hathaway Lee at a mutual friend’s estate in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. For this Harvard student, it is love at first sight. For this young woman, not quite 18, it is an immediate meeting of the minds.This is a time of intense joy for both as they navigate the pleasantries of early courtship and the growing love that binds their souls and creative imaginations.
Calvi no doubt takes a lot of liberties in crafting their love story; there are parts that do read like a romance novel. But she draws her inventiveness from original love letters between the two, many letters never published before. In these, readers get an intimate look at these two young romantics, who mutually quoted Shakespeare, were always open to adventure and, clearly, were hopelessly in love with one another.
Calvi also captures the ambiance of the Gilded Age with detailed descriptions of what they are wearing, where they are dining or dancing, and the interplay with family and friends as their relationship blooms and becomes firmly cemented.
Roosevelt, who suffers from asthma, prefers the outdoors. He can breathe better. The couple spends many absorbing hours together sharing their mutual love of nature. He’s a birder, not only versatile in their Latin names, but vocalizes their birdsongs as well. Alice is enchanted.
He’s also an accomplished student-athlete. There are moments when not only his pugilistic skills shine but his knowledge of poetry dazzles her adoring heart and mind.
Calvi encapsulates in Alice the temperament of independent young women of that era, as many were eager to expand their intellectual abilities as well as their fashion sense and dance steps. This is a time when Harvard officials were entertaining the idea of the admission of women to their hallowed classrooms.
Roosevelt is all for equality of the sexes and champions his newfound friend and eventual soulmate and wife. He loves her unconditionally for who she is and may become. For Alice, his undying support and transparency is enthrallingly refreshing.
Ultimately, his time in the western wastelands is restorative and renewing. He returns to a political life and an eventual second wife and more children. He requests that the name of his first wife not be spoken.
Calvi makes the case that his first love, this young Alice, was a pivotal player in his life. Perhaps through her inspiration he went on to reform labor laws, fight against racial segregation, take on corrupt politicians and advance park and forestry programs. He was a writer, naturalist, soldier, and politician.
Roosevelt certainly overcame many obstacles, and went on to do great things. He is one of America’s most popular presidents. Perhaps his first love, Alice Hathaway Lee, was the living poem that breathed life into him.
