In Jefferson’s letters, a man, not a myth

THE name by which we call the men who made the American Revolution -- “Founding Fathers” -- suggests just how fraught our relationship with them can become.

In many minds, time has attenuated the Founders into vague demigods, participants in a gauzy national creation myth. Among those Americans willing to seek for the men who made our nation, most seem frozen in adolescent conflict -- oscillating between adulation of an impossibly idealized father and disillusion with the fallible, flesh-and-blood man who actually had sex with their mother.

None of the Founders has suffered more from this than Thomas Jefferson, who has become in some strange way a kind of mirror of Americans’ anxieties about themselves. Nineteenth century historians tended to value the Sage of Monticello for the universality of his political doctrine and his standing as a gentleman revolutionary, out to overthrow tyranny but not the established social order. All this view required was a studied indifference to the implications of Jefferson’s real political thought.

Philosophically, he surely was the most radical man ever to attain the presidency. In the aftermath of World War II, commentators, living through a turbulent period in which rights were extended to all sorts of Americans and egalitarian notions became increasingly common currency, asserted the comforting vision that all this was as Jefferson intended. A careful silence prevailed, however, concerning the aristocratic character of his actual life and the elitism of his tastes. This, after all, was the man who made neoclassicism in all its manifestations our national style.

More recently, Jefferson has fallen deeply out of fashion, suspect as the slave-holding country squire and sexual exploiter of the much younger Sally Hemings, the bondswoman and mistress who bore him children. This is the view of Jefferson as Bill Clinton and demands that one agree that the contradictions of his life bring all the force of his thought and influence to naught.

The best response to this notion was delivered years ago by the late I.F. Stone, who was asked -- as a radically egalitarian man of the left -- how he could so admire Jefferson. He replied: “It’s because history is a tragedy and not a melodrama.”

Readers open to that sort of adult thinking about history will find these two splendidly selected volumes essential reading. Anthony Brandt is an authority of adventure and travel writing, but in “Thomas Jefferson Travels: Selected Writings 1784-1789” he has shrewdly edited Jefferson’s astonishing correspondence during his five years as American emissary to France into a compelling encounter with the mind of a great man.

It’s a daunting task. Though he wrote only one book, Jefferson was -- even by 18th century standards -- a prolific letter writer. In fact, over the course of his life, he wrote more than 19,000 letters. The five Parisian years alone have required nine volumes in the still incomplete “Papers of Thomas Jefferson,” which Princeton has been publishing since 1950. The time Jefferson spent in Paris may well have been the happiest of his life. For once, he was in an environment in which he could engage the full range of his voracious interests and sophisticated tastes in everything from political philosophy and architecture to theater and natural science. And Paris took to him; he was a popular figure in nearly every influential circle that glittering city had to offer.

In his incomplete autobiography, Jefferson wrote: “So, ask the traveled inhabitant of any nation, in what country on earth would you rather live? -- Certainly, in my own, where are all my friends, my relations and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? France.”

Brandt has done a particularly good job arranging Jefferson’s correspondence; each section is crisply introduced with the editor’s invariably helpful and convincing thoughts on the letters that follow. Brandt chose a lighthearted title for the chapter containing Jefferson’s correspondence with women, and his introduction to this section is particularly good, especially about the future president’s romantic relationship with the Englishwoman Maria Cosway, concerning which there has been a great deal of censorious comment recently.

The editor points out that Cosway’s husband was a homosexual, who had married her to obtain her fortune and settle his debts. Jefferson was recently a widower. Moreover, by the standards of the 18th century, their relationship was hardly untoward. Best of all, it produced some of the English language’s greatest love letters, which Brandt has carefully selected, including the famed “Head and Heart Letter” in which Jefferson places reason and romance in dramatic dialogue. One of the pleasures of this book is reading it in full and recalling what a brilliant observer of actual events Jefferson was. Even this note begins with a stunningly concrete evocation of time and place:

“Having performed the last sad office of handing you into your carriage at the Pavilion de St. Denis, and seeing the wheels get actually into motion, I turned on my heel and walked, more dead than alive, to the opposite door, where my own was awaiting me.... “

Jonathan Gross, a professor of English had DePaul University, has accomplished an admirable act of recovery with “Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family & Romantic Love Collected by America’s Third President.” Poetry was an important part in the cultivated Virginia aristocrat’s inner life. He once remarked:

“I was bred to the law; that gave me a view of the dark side of humanity. Then I read poetry to qualify it with a gaze upon its bright side; and between the two extremes I have contrived through life to draw the due medium.”

Since 1999, it has been known that four fat scrapbooks containing poetry cut from newspapers and other sources and thought to be the work of Jefferson’s granddaughters were, in fact, the great man’s work. Sitting alone at night during his unhappy second term in office, the president clipped poems that caught his eye and pasted them into scrapbooks for his beloved granddaughters. As Gross points out in his excellent, rather exciting introduction, Jefferson’s selections reveal a far more capacious, sophisticated and engagingly human taste than ever has been imagined.

This also was the period in which Jefferson produced his personal revision of the Bible with all the miraculous stuff excised. There is something touching about him -- and about the people and nation we have become -- that occurs when you picture the president of United States, sitting up alone late at night, with scissors and paste pot, making these little collections for himself and his family.

Gross has nicely arranged them into coherent categories, and those who think they know Jefferson will be surprised to discover poems of abolition and of praise for Alexander Hamilton, as well as a fondness for Irish verse. The editor has supplemented the poems with a series of helpful appendices that make for entertaining reading on their own.

Encountering the real Founders -- and particularly Jefferson, who surely was the greatest and most compelling among them -- is always worth the effort. That’s what makes both these marvelously selected and annotated volumes so rewarding and so subversive of cheap civic piety.

Troublesome and contradictory though they may be, real saints always are more interesting than their icons.

*

Thomas Jefferson Travels

Selected Writings 1784-1789

Edited by Anthony Brandt

National Geographic: 416 pp., $23

*

Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks

Poems of Nation, Family & Romantic Love Collected by America’s Third President

Edited and introduced by Jonathan Gross

Steerforth Press: 570 pp., $32.95