The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilder ...

world, but he also campaigned against willful obscurity and opaqueness in zoological and naturalist texts. “Darwin and Huxley are classics,” he reminds, “and they would not have been if they had not written good English. The thought is essential, but ability to give it clear expression is only less essential.”⁶³ Elsewhere in Through the Brazilian Wilderness, in critiquing the work of zoologist John D. Haseman, Roosevelt suggests that an effective writer of the natural world could and should “take as much pains with his writing as he has with the far more difficult business of exploring and collecting,” while hastening to add, “the greatest thought is robbed of an immense proportion of its value if expressed in a mean or obscure manner.”⁶⁴ The writer-naturalist, if mindful of his reader, must “go over his sentences until he is reasonably sure that they can be parsed” as well as “take pains to see that his whole thought is expressed, instead of leaving vacancies which must be filled by the puzzled and groping reader.”⁶⁵

As with most writers, TR wrote best about the places he knew, whether near or far. At his home at Oyster Bay, the familiar and the foreign, the domestic and the wild, coalesced, producing some of his most charming and accessible nature writing. In his introduction to A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open, William Beebe suggests that Roosevelt's writing achieved its “richest literary moments” when it was “most relaxed.”⁶⁶ And Roosevelt, despite his reputation for rugged restlessness, could be surprisingly at ease, at home, on the page. In “Small Country Neighbors,” he describes his son's mistaking of a mother flying squirrel for a tree-bound “guinea pig,” and recounts life at Sagamore Hill as a romantic bestiary of creatures great and small, where “kangaroo rats and flying squirrels slept in…pockets and blouses, went to school with them [the children], and sometimes unexpectedly appeared at breakfast or dinner.”⁶⁷ At various times, the Roosevelts provided temporary refuge for what the Bull Moose describes as “a fairly appalling number of animals, from known and unknown friends; in one year the list included—besides a lion, a hyena, and a zebra from the Emperor of Ethiopia—five bears, a wildcat, a coyote, two macaws, an eagle, a barn owl, and several snakes and lizards.”⁶⁸ And as the Roosevelt children delighted in these marvels