“NO LOVE like old love.” So begins the critically acclaimed novel White Houses, by Amy Bloom, author of Awayand LuckyUs … A work of historical fiction, White Houses is narrated from the perspective of Lorena Alice Hickok, the AP reporter whose close relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt was so intimate that the First Lady wore a sapphire ring—a gift from Lorena, or “Hick,” as she was known—at her husband’s inauguration in 1933.
Bloom doesn’t just wade into a hotly debated issue among historians—the two were certainly more than “just friends,” though to what extent may never be uncovered—but inhabits the mind and heart of Hick, the Wisconsin-born journalist with whom the upper-class Eleanor road-tripped alone (without the U.S. Secret Service) soon after Franklin’s swearing-in. White Housesbegins there, in the blue Buick roadster that was the First Lady’s closet-on-wheels. Bloom’s novel is a moving and psychologically insightful story on two levels: it treats the nature of their lesbianism as self-evident, and it also embraces the fact that Eleanor and Hick were no spring chickens by the time of the Great Depression but two middle-aged women with their own complicated life histories.
A former lecturer at Yale, Bloom is currently the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University. The interview was conducted by phone last July, with an e-mail follow-up.
Colin Carman: First, what attracted you to this love story, this “old love” story, as you put it in the prologue to White Houses?
Amy Bloom: I was attracted to the Eleanor-Lorena love affair because of the brilliant multi-volume biography by Blanche Wiesen Cook and its romantic nature. I read over three thousand letters exchanged between the pair, which made me think of two things: first, what a fascinating time in American history this was, and second, what it would be like to have this tremendous love affair totally erased from the histories of Eleanor, Lorena, and the country at large—I mean, actively rubbed out. I am not a kid anymore and I have an interest in romance in the long run, which can be every bit as glorious as the period in which two people first fall in love.
CC: What kind of research was involved in writing White Houses? Eleanor’s life story—the public life, at least—is extremely well-known. I know you did your homework inside the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
AB: The research involved a library of books about Eleanor, good and bad. Over the past few years, there have been numerous books about her relationship with Hickok, but those came out after I’d finished the novel. One of my influences was an early book by Doris Faber called The Life of Lorena Hickok: Eleanor’s Roosevelt’s Friend. In 1978, this was Faber’s effort to look at the letters after they were publicized. She went to a lot of trouble by pointing out that they do not mean what they seem to mean. There was definitely no shortage of interesting books or debate.
CC: Whenever a writer today wants to describe the sexualities of people in the past, they have to confront the issue of language that is specific to a given time and place, and usually not very positive toward LGBT people. In the book, Hick refers to “French lesbians” but didn’t have the language for sexual identity that we have now. How did you deal with this problem?
AB: Well, 20th-century Washington, D.C., is not 16th-century Venice. After Freud, people knew the word “lesbian” with all of its variations. There’s always innuendo, you know. I’m thinking of a great line of Tallulah Bankhead’s: “My father warned me about men and booze but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.”
CC: Meaning, there have always been different ways to describe same-sex romance?
AB: Certainly.
CC: How did you decide to narrate from Lorena Hickok’s perspective as opposed to a third-person perspective?
AB: As a novelist, I could see that very little was known about [Hick], which gave me the greatest latitude. Little was known aside from her reputation as a tough broad and a straight talker. She was an outsider and a working-class girl. There was also evidence of her great sense of humor. My version of Hickok came together—true to form—as a tough, tell-it-like-it is, working-class woman navigating in a very privileged milieu. That’s the girl for me.
CC: With all of this artistic license, were you apprehensive about “queering,” or at least sexualizing, an American icon? Eleanor Roosevelt is the stuff of eighth-grade book reports, after all. I’m pretty sure I wrote one, knowing nothing, of course, about her “romantic friendship.”
AB: The fact that White Housesis narrated from Lorena’s point-of-view created the parameters for me as a storyteller. It’s not my cold eye looking at their bodies; it’s their loving, loyal bond, which was not without ambivalence. Once I was in Lorena, the language shaped it. Plus, I felt as if Eleanor was in good hands already.
CC: I’m certainly not of the (old) school that straight-identified artists cannot write, or even narrate, the lives of gay people. Still, was that a consideration, or even a worry, for you?
AB: I’m a writer. I’ve yet to meet a writer who isn’t thrilled to have a new audience. My own view is that it’s a big, variegated, complex world out there, and that’s the world that I write about. I hope people love this love story and that it breaks their hearts, whether they are drawn to it for the history, or for Eleanor, or a high jinx in the White House, or a love story between two middle-aged lesbians. This is the modern world.
CC: In 2010, you told The Guardian: “Being surprised that there are people in the world who are genuinely attracted to men and women is to me a little bit like being surprised that there are people who like chicken and salad.” Can you elaborate on this?
AB: I think the word “and” should be underlined in this quote. I realize that not everybody likes chicken and salad, or even steak and salad, but I do. I don’t know why it should be surprising that some people are attracted to men and to women. I was lucky enough to grow up thinking that all smart Jewish girls liked girls as well as boys, and it was somehow just understood that one didn’t discuss it. Imagine my surprise.
CC: What kind of story, do you think, involving the current First Lady and her secret love life cannot be told in the present but may interest readers fifty years from now?
AB: I don’t know why somebody wouldn’t wish to write about it today. And I’m sure if Flaubert or Oscar Wilde or Henry James were still around, they could really go to town on the sharp-eyed, shrewd, and bitterly disappointed Mrs. Trump.
CC: It seems to me that many of your books—not just White Houses but an earlier work of non-fiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude—explore human sexuality as a spectrum: the “wide bouquet of sexuality,” as you put it once. Is this something you set out specifically to do?
AB: It’s certainly something I set out to write about in Normal, which was a look at a wide range of gender identifies. It’s also the case that in my fiction the wideness of and variety within our world is always interesting to me. I think that in our wish to embrace all possibilities, it’s important not to forget that each possibility, even the hetero and the cisgender, has range, fluidity, and surprise.
CC: Would you say there is one thread that connects all of your books at this point?
AB: I think my only subject is love. As Richard Rhodes once said, “Writers don’t choose their subject, the subject chooses them.”
Colin Carman, who teaches English and LGBTQ studies at Colorado Mesa University, is the author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment.
