A Reading List From Thomas Jefferson

Saturday marks the 225th anniversary of a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipwith. The 1771 missive, with a detailed list enclosed, prescribed all the books needed for the perfect “gentleman’s library.”

Jefferson had composed the list at the repeated request of Skipwith, who would marry one of Mrs. Jefferson’s sisters. Like the harried citizen of today, Skipwith wrote: “I would have them [the books] suited to the capacity of the modern reader . . . who has not leisure for any intricate or tedious study. Let them be improving and amusing.”

Jefferson had been asked for a brief list, the contents of which could be afforded for 30 pounds sterling. He didn’t deliver: His final compendium ranged over 148 titles and 379 volumes. Jefferson estimated it would cost 107 pounds, and recommended Thomas Waller, a bookseller in London’s Fleet Street. Titles ranged from Milton and Locke to “Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry” and included botany, the law, religion and the ancient classics. The library is assembled today for posterity at the Brush-Everard House in Colonial Williamsburg, Va.

Much of Jefferson’s collection we would take with us still: Homer, Shakespeare, Fielding, Sterne, Chaucer, Swift, Hume and Moliere. An innovative thinker, Jefferson put on his list novels, then a relatively new form of literary genre. In his letter, he explained: “A view of the second volume in this catalog would I suppose extort a smile from the face of gravity. Peace to its wisdom! Let me not awaken it. A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant.”

Jefferson’s choices come four years before the start of the American Revolution, issued from the pen of a 28-year-old. He was the same age as today’s Generation Xers or a character on the television show “Friends.” It has been pointed out that with little political experience and scattered over 13 disparate colonies, in rural settings away from the turnpikes of haute culture, the Jeffersonian generation managed to fight a war of principle and emerge with a not unsuccessful federal union, in large part because they were equipped for life with reading over a wide variety of subjects.

What literature would be added to Jefferson’s list were a new library being put together today? Two hundred and twenty-five years has seen Melville, Poe, Shaw and Wilde and Yeats, Evelyn Waugh, “Pride and Prejudice,” Dickens, Orwell, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” “War and Peace,” Maugham and Mann and Kafka, Steven Weinberg’s “Dreams of a Final Theory,” Steinbeck, Proust, John Keegan, “The Boys of Summer,” Taylor Branch, Lewis Thomas, V.S. Naipaul’s “India: A Million Mutinies Now.” Children have learned to read from Milne, Carroll and Dr. Seuss. Words have risen from the page and stepped into the steaming salons and bedrooms courtesy Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. Worth having as well for the mind’s eye to read is everything ever put on celluloid, film, laser disc or video tape by Ken Burns, James Burke and Steven Spielberg.

Jefferson’s era brought with it democracy and the rise of American literature. It also predates the great revolutions in Europe, the savagery of the American Civil War, Crimean War, Boer War, Spanish Civil War, two World Wars and the fratricidal conflicts--Vietnam included--that craze the painted portrait of civilization. Whereas in 1771 war was still waged by the professionals and the pressed, savagery and murderous technology have afforded the Western canon new terms such as smart bombs, blitzkrieg, collateral damage and concentration camp, the last-named shortly to mark its 100th birthday in our language and literature. Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu have been replaced by volumes the best of which are poignant and cynical at the same time. The new research and writings have come at the cost--a tithe--of generations of the best writers, fine young creators and their innocence.

Jefferson’s time was not halcyonic, just more exclusive. To the “total war” of the recent past has been added total sex. War and sex are more available in 1996 than in 1771 and customers more promiscuous in courting each. Multiple partners are sought to wage both, and lurid, technical accounts subsequently penned. The downside is that roughly the same general proportions of the enfranchised who think they are good at war or sex also think they can write. Books today aren’t very often art or even clever. Most aren’t memorable.

Books for Jefferson were a source of entertainment and lessons in virtue. In his Aug. 3 letter, he noted: “Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading “King Lear,” than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.” Jefferson the man was a paragon, pick your subject. If a politically correct view does not afford him the opportunity to be a paragon of virtue, then at least Jefferson the democrat, the libertarian, the politician, should be credited for allowing there to be libraries with good and bad in them in the first place and for his very own record and that of humanity to be debated.

What he forgot is that books are dangerous. Libraries are apocalyptic meeting places where you can borrow incendiary devices for two weeks at a time. They are worse than any gang-plundered urban neighborhood or secessionist ranch in Montana. Which of these titles makes you squirm or want to pick up a censor’s pen? Which one wouldn’t you want your mother or child to read? “The Diary of Anne Frank” or “Mein Kampf”? “Lady Chatterley” or “Ulysses,” “Huckleberry Finn” or Salman Rushdie, Mao’s “Little Red Book”? “The Power Elite” or “The Feminine Mystique”? “The Origin of Species,” the Bible, the Koran or Iris Murdoch’s “Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals”? Books by O.J. or Faye Resnick ? Anything about Hiroshima?