Jefferson's Demons

Rating:
Summary: More Than One Man at Monticello
Review: As a pet subject for publishers, it seems that nothing can rival America's founding fathers, aside from, perhaps, Dr. Phil and the latest political screed. But even the most devoted student of history must ask himself: What more can be written about, say, Thomas Jefferson?

Plenty, in fact, as Michael Knox Beran reveals in "Jefferson's Demons," his profound and exquisitely written meditation on the mind of America's most enigmatic Founder.

We typically see Jefferson as the sunny champion of reason, tolerance and liberty. But this is an incomplete portrait. At several points in his life, Jefferson suffered bouts of severe depression -- "ennui," as he called it -- that crippled his ability to act. For a man already disposed to prefer wine, books and the tranquility of his mountaintop home to bold action, such episodes could have been disastrous.

The most intense of them occurred in the 1780s, when Jefferson was beset by personal tragedy and political irrelevance. After his mostly embarrassing stint as governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War -- he fled Monticello ignominiously when Lord Cornwallis sent a raiding party after him -- he watched his beloved wife, Martha, suffer an agonizing death in 1782. Congress sent him to Paris in 1784 as a diplomat; less than a year later his youngest daughter died.

Back home, the new republic's troubles under the Articles of Confederation led to the drafting of a new constitution. At that moment the country could have used what Mr. Beran calls Jefferson's "benign wizardry" for reducing "a complicated tangle of fact and theory to a few readily comprehensible truths." But he wrote little of political interest during his appointment in France, leaving his friend James Madison "to do what he himself could not."

Mr. Beran reminds us of such periods of apathy and despair not to make his subject more palatable to today's readers but rather to show us that even Jefferson needed "a philosophy that did more than reason and common sense could to facilitate the expedition of the will."

It is Mr. Beran's argument that Jefferson managed to rouse himself to action by listening to his own "demons." By this term Mr. Beran is not referring to the man's secret vices or mental problems but echoing the ancients' concept of genii or manes -- inner spirits that "either cripple a man's productive power or enable him to channel it more effectively."

Jefferson, a man steeped in classical learning, knew this concept well. Renaissance thinkers like Machiavelli and Montaigne, also classically minded, had adapted it, Mr. Beran notes, as "a metaphor to explain the complicated processes of human inspiration." From them, Jefferson learned to carry on an interior conversation with his demons, his varied interior personas. By freely manipulating these roles, he tapped into newfound wellsprings of creativity.

In Paris, he played the chaste squire-lover (found in the sentimental novels of the day) in his unconsummated romance with the married artist Maria Cosway. During his 1787 tour of southern France and the Mediterranean coast, he drew inspiration from his firsthand study of the ancients' architecture and from the "primitive rituals and blood-soaked imagery" of their cults -- imagery that Jefferson later incorporated into the friezes and moldings inside Monticello.

When Jefferson returned to America, he assumed the role of "persecuted prophet of democracy," which led to his most fertile period yet. During his battles with the Federalists, Jefferson drew deeply from another ancient source: the language of biblical prophecy. He denounced men who had been, during the Revolution, admirable "Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council" but who now seemed to have "had their head shorn by the harlot England." These "apostates" had succumbed to "heresies" (such as Alexander Hamilton's national bank) that Jefferson believed would plunge the young republic back into monarchy. The political effect of this powerful prophetic voice was to elevate Jefferson to the presidency and eventually destroy the Federalists.

Mr. Beran places the personal struggles of Jefferson within the context of his age, a decisive moment in the timeless quarrel between the Whig and Tory temperaments -- "between the realist and the mystic, between the matter-of-fact man and the artist, between the man of prose and the man of poetry." Jefferson, though the architect of a Whig revolution of liberty, "was always happiest contriving patterns of order that had about them a Tory enchantment of spirit." He admitted -- if not to others, at least to himself -- that the modern world of liberty and commerce cannot satisfy man's deepest longings for meaning, coherence and love.

In his role as a Greek poet-statesman, Jefferson believed these qualities could be cultivated in the family, local community and school. In his later years, he devoted himself "to constructing little pavilions of order strong enough to withstand the gales of the Whig world he had helped to build." These included Monticello and the family life it sheltered, as well as the University of Virginia -- where future generations could learn to master their own demons.

Rating:
Summary: Jefferson's Psyche
Review: Demon - n. Greek Mythology 2. An attendant spirit; a genius.

This book investigates the classical influences on Jefferson and follows them through to his motivations in Government and his personal life. The "demons" are the classical inspirations for Jefferson. This is a great book which delves deeper into a person's psyche than any other biography I've read. The language is exquisite (nearly over-the-top), but in the end it is a highly rewarding investigation into one of our founding fathers.

Rating:
Summary: Stripped Bare: TJ's Heart of Darkness
Review: I bought this book after reading the review in "The Wall Street Journal," which praised it as a "profound and exquisitely written meditation on the mind of America's most enigmatic Founder." I was skeptical at first; I did not want to read another study in what is sometimes called "pathography." But the book overcame my skepticism. The writing style is, I think, very fine, and owes something to the mandarin tradition exemplified by Lytton Strachey and Sir Thomas Browne. But what impressed me most about "Jefferson's Demons" was the complexity of the personality the author reveals in his protagonist. When I was in graduate school I read F.O. Matthiessen's classic study, "American Renaissance," in which Matthiessen argued that "notwithstanding the humaneness and toleration that made Franklin and Jefferson among the strongest bulwarks in our social heritage, it is forced inescapably upon us that their rationalism was too shallow to encompass the full complexity of man's nature." "Jefferson's Demons" makes a strong case that historians have misread Jefferson's "rationalism," and in especial have failed to do justice to the daemonic qualities in his neo-classical architecture. Jefferson was not as "shallow" as Matthiessen and others have supposed. He is interesting precisely because, as this book demonstrates, he is not a caricature of an Enlightened sage, a plaster-work Voltaire. Whether the Conradian nightmare described on page 250 of the book -- the accusation that Jefferson was once seen "FLOGGING IN THE MOST BRUTAL MANNER A NEGRO WOMAN" -- is true or not I can't pretend to say; but certainly Jefferson was more familiar with human nature's dark side than we've been led to believe. In any event "Jefferson's Demons" is a profound and brilliant book, and I am grateful for it; it is, I think, a classic of its kind.

Rating:
Summary: Stripped Bare: TJ's Heart of Darkness
Review: I bought this book after reading the review in "The Wall Street Journal," which praised it as a "profound and exquisitely written meditation on the mind of America's most enigmatic Founder." I was skeptical at first; I did not want to read another study in what is sometimes called "pathography." But the book overcame my skepticism. The writing style is, I think, very fine, and owes something to the mandarin tradition exemplified by Lytton Strachey and Sir Thomas Browne. But what impressed me most about "Jefferson's Demons" was the complexity of the personality the author reveals in his protagonist. When I was in graduate school I read F.O. Matthiessen's classic study, "American Renaissance," in which Matthiessen argued that "notwithstanding the humaneness and toleration that made Franklin and Jefferson among the strongest bulwarks in our social heritage, it is forced inescapably upon us that their rationalism was too shallow to encompass the full complexity of man's nature." "Jefferson's Demons" makes a strong case that historians have misread Jefferson's "rationalism," and in especial have failed to do justice to the daemonic qualities in his neo-classical architecture. Jefferson was not as "shallow" as Matthiessen and others have supposed. He is interesting precisely because, as this book demonstrates, he is not a caricature of an Enlightened sage, a plaster-work Voltaire. Whether the Conradian nightmare described on page 250 of the book -- the accusation that Jefferson was once seen "FLOGGING IN THE MOST BRUTAL MANNER A NEGRO WOMAN" -- is true or not I can't pretend to say; but certainly Jefferson was more familiar with human nature's dark side than we've been led to believe. In any event "Jefferson's Demons" is a profound and brilliant book, and I am grateful for it; it is, I think, a classic of its kind.

Rating:
Summary: Occult Side of Jefferson
Review: I found this book fascinating. If it not always completely convincing, is is utterly thought provoking. Why have conventional historians missed the stuff this author has discovered in Jefferson? They must be blind. Did the third president "go out of doors each December and burn Adonis in effigy before the pillars of Monticello"? This book left me wondering just how far this supposedly Enlightened man went with his secret studies into the ancient mystery cults, weird fertility rites, the bacchanalia of antiquity. Jefferson even put implements of the primitive sacrifices -- knives and bulls' skulls and bloody dishes -- into his living room at Monticello. Sarastro had taken over here, and Master Adamo and Michael Scott! Yet Jefferson, the book shows us, did not stop with the mumming plays of the ancient fertility cults and the old pagan demonology; towards the end of his life he was as deeply immersed in the Bible and the Greeks, and he ends up playing the part of a democratic fisher king, a redeemer president. Going beyond his demons and sprites Jefferson turns to Socrates and Jesus. Like any intelligent man, he wanted to know why he was here, and like Solon, whose life he studied so carefully, his spiritual pilgrimage is a revelation. The book is in itself an education, showing as it does how closely Jefferson sympathized with the deepest spiritual currents of his civilization: with Solon and Socrates; with the 18th century sentimentalists who revived the love-poetry of Dante; with the black vesper-pageants of the Renaissance sages, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Shakespeare; with Goethe's walpugris-night dances and the myths which T.S. Eliot later used in creating his fertility tree in "The Waste Land" (cf. Jefferson's "tree of liberty"); with the early Greek theories of paideia (education) that underlie the University of Virginia and their relation to St. Jude's and Tertullian's theories of agape (love); with Aeneas' descent to the underworld in book six of Virgil's Aeneid and the "rival poet" of Shakespeare's sonnets; with Diotima's theory of Eros in Plato's Symposium, the witch of Endor, Simon Magus, the Jannes and Jambres and other wizards of the ancient Jews, and Machiavelli's theory that "the lust captain achieves greatness by raping Fortune, who by his seed is got with world-historic child." A truly exciting book, to my mind, one that shows how Jefferson used the spiritual resources of the West to invent himself -- and invent America.

Rating:
Summary: Occult Side of Jefferson
Review: I found this book fascinating. If it not always completely convincing, is is utterly thought provoking. Why have conventional historians missed the stuff this author has discovered in Jefferson? They must be blind. Did the third president "go out of doors each December and burn Adonis in effigy before the pillars of Monticello"? This book left me wondering just how far this supposedly Enlightened man went with his secret studies into the ancient mystery cults, weird fertility rites, the bacchanalia of antiquity. Jefferson even put implements of the primitive sacrifices -- knives and bulls' skulls and bloody dishes -- into his living room at Monticello. Sarastro had taken over here, and Master Adamo and Michael Scott! Yet Jefferson, the book shows us, did not stop with the mumming plays of the ancient fertility cults and the old pagan demonology; towards the end of his life he was as deeply immersed in the Bible and the Greeks, and he ends up playing the part of a democratic fisher king, a redeemer president. Going beyond his demons and sprites Jefferson turns to Socrates and Jesus. Like any intelligent man, he wanted to know why he was here, and like Solon, whose life he studied so carefully, his spiritual pilgrimage is a revelation. The book is in itself an education, showing as it does how closely Jefferson sympathized with the deepest spiritual currents of his civilization: with Solon and Socrates; with the 18th century sentimentalists who revived the love-poetry of Dante; with the black vesper-pageants of the Renaissance sages, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Shakespeare; with Goethe's walpugris-night dances and the myths which T.S. Eliot later used in creating his fertility tree in "The Waste Land" (cf. Jefferson's "tree of liberty"); with the early Greek theories of paideia (education) that underlie the University of Virginia and their relation to St. Jude's and Tertullian's theories of agape (love); with Aeneas' descent to the underworld in book six of Virgil's Aeneid and the "rival poet" of Shakespeare's sonnets; with Diotima's theory of Eros in Plato's Symposium, the witch of Endor, Simon Magus, the Jannes and Jambres and other wizards of the ancient Jews, and Machiavelli's theory that "the lust captain achieves greatness by raping Fortune, who by his seed is got with world-historic child." A truly exciting book, to my mind, one that shows how Jefferson used the spiritual resources of the West to invent himself -- and invent America.

Rating:
Summary: Jefferson As Human Being
Review: In this wonderfully readable and fascinating look at Jefferson's (for lack of a better word) "interior life", Mr. Beran renders our third President less of a mysterious Sphynx and more of a man with both a head AND a heart. We are so accustomed to thinking of Mr. Jefferson (when we think of him at all in our history-shunning American society) as merely the writer of the Declaration of Independence (as if such an achievement could ever be marginalized by the word "merely") or, worse still, as only a remote, two-dimensional figure whose head appears on our nickel. We forget (if we have indeed ever been taught to begin with) his many other sides, dimensions, aspects.

Michael Beran gifts us with a Founding Father just as subject to anxiety, joy, depression, optimism and grief as the rest of us mortals. His doomed romance with Mrs. Cosway, his trials with Alexander Hamilton, his love of family and, of course, his controversial relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, all combine to present a human, flawed yet ultimately triumphant example of the human spirit.

Upon reading this book, one feels he knows Mr. Jefferson a bit better, even though some mysteries remain. As Mr. Beran writes in his thoughts on Jefferson's relationship wht Ms. Hemings, "Yet even if the fact of his paternity could be established beyond all doubt, we would still know almost nothing about the nature of the master's relationship with his slave. The quality of those intimacies, their tenderness or their brutality, is lost to history. Jefferson's love of Mrs. Cosway is eternally preserved in the words he wrote to her and she to him, but unless lost documents come to light, his unlanguaged transactions with Sally Hemings must forever remain dumb to the curious inquirer." One wonders if, one hundred or so years from now, there will be an historian who will look upon Bill Clinton's indiscretions with as much wisdom and candor and as little sensationalization.

With graceful prose that sypathetically reveals Thomas Jefferson's inner being without avoiding the frailties which puncture his character - as perhaps judged by us today in a different time and place - along with his incongruities of character - and, of course, his own brilliance, "Jefferson's Demons" is a thoughtful study of a man whose essence often eludes us in this fast-paced, modern world, where men of his intellectual calibre seem very few and far between.

Rating:
Summary: How Thomas Jefferson Can Change Your Life
Review: This book is a Bildungsroman: the Education of Thomas Jefferson. It's the story of how Jefferson struggled to form himself into a man capable of action--the story of his "paideia," as the author would have it, in a bow to his subject's lifelong love of the Greeks. JEFFERSON'S DEMONS describes the mysterious ways the Sage of Monticello educated himself and learned to tap his most profound creative instincts.

Like so many great men, Jefferson was engaged in an ongoing conversation with the great men of the past, with Montaigne, Homer, Solon, Tacitus, Milton, Isaiah, Socrates, Jesus. Beran lets the reader overhear these conversations, and he shows us how Jefferson drew on them both in his private life and his public work.

The author's richly allusive style is itself an instrument in the communication of his vision of Jefferson: there are passages in the book in which the prose has less affinity with the rhytmically and spiritually flat prose of the present than with that of the Caroline and late Elizabethan prose-stylists. This startling use of language and metaphor prepares the reader for the book's major reassessments of whole tracts of Jefferson's thought. The book provides a nuanced reading of Jefferson's "Whig" and "Tory" qualities, shows how deeply immersed Jefferson was in a Virginia culture of decadent feudalism, and contains an ingenious reading of the connection between Jefferson's "sentimentalism" and the mediaeval romance of the rose. Jefferson's architecture emerges as something more deeply felt than the pasteboard classicism it is often taken to be; and Beran ties his analysis of Monticello and the University of Virginia to his discussion of how Jefferson tried to reconcile his civic republican ideals (the communitarianism of the classical city-state, the Greek polis) with his commitment to Whig liberalism, with its emphasis on liberty of trade, liberty of the press, and liberty of conscience.

I loved this book. It's a splendid account of Jefferson's self-culture and his attempts to apply the lessons he learned in the young American Republic, and it enlarges the number of intellectual debates in which Jefferson participated and through which he must examined.

But the book's most important message is an intensely personal one. Jefferson spoke hopefully of the "progress to be made under our democratic stimulants until every American is potentially an athlete in body and an Aristotle in mind." Beran shows the reader how Jefferson, in trying to realize this potentiality in himself and in others, aspired to the Greek ideal of the statesman who is also an educator, one who can help people to know themslves and do their work.

Rating:
Summary: How Thomas Jefferson Can Change Your Life
Review: This book is a Bildungsroman: the Education of Thomas Jefferson. It's the story of how Jefferson struggled to form himself into a man capable of action--the story of his "paideia," as the author would have it, in a bow to his subject's lifelong love of the Greeks. JEFFERSON'S DEMONS describes the mysterious ways the Sage of Monticello educated himself and learned to tap his most profound creative instincts.

Like so many great men, Jefferson was engaged in an ongoing conversation with the great men of the past, with Montaigne, Homer, Solon, Tacitus, Milton, Isaiah, Socrates, Jesus. Beran lets the reader overhear these conversations, and he shows us how Jefferson drew on them both in his private life and his public work.

The author's richly allusive style is itself an instrument in the communication of his vision of Jefferson: there are passages in the book in which the prose has less affinity with the rhytmically and spiritually flat prose of the present than with that of the Caroline and late Elizabethan prose-stylists. This startling use of language and metaphor prepares the reader for the book's major reassessments of whole tracts of Jefferson's thought. The book provides a nuanced reading of Jefferson's "Whig" and "Tory" qualities, shows how deeply immersed Jefferson was in a Virginia culture of decadent feudalism, and contains an ingenious reading of the connection between Jefferson's "sentimentalism" and the mediaeval romance of the rose. Jefferson's architecture emerges as something more deeply felt than the pasteboard classicism it is often taken to be; and Beran ties his analysis of Monticello and the University of Virginia to his discussion of how Jefferson tried to reconcile his civic republican ideals (the communitarianism of the classical city-state, the Greek polis) with his commitment to Whig liberalism, with its emphasis on liberty of trade, liberty of the press, and liberty of conscience.

I loved this book. It's a splendid account of Jefferson's self-culture and his attempts to apply the lessons he learned in the young American Republic, and it enlarges the number of intellectual debates in which Jefferson participated and through which he must examined.

But the book's most important message is an intensely personal one. Jefferson spoke hopefully of the "progress to be made under our democratic stimulants until every American is potentially an athlete in body and an Aristotle in mind." Beran shows the reader how Jefferson, in trying to realize this potentiality in himself and in others, aspired to the Greek ideal of the statesman who is also an educator, one who can help people to know themslves and do their work.

Rating:
Summary: A SOMEWHAT LIMITED, BUT TOTALLY UNIQUE BIOGRAPHY . . .
Review: _____________________________________________________________________________

I really enjoyed this biography of Thomas Jefferson - the book itself. My overall impression is altered somewhat by the added dimension of having listened rather than read . . . I bought the CD version because of the many hours I spend on the road. Dan Cashman, the narrator, has a splendid voice, but I felt his reading was too slow and with too many poignant pauses for my taste. I would have liked the audio version more if he'd been more straight-forward in its reading with less tendency to pontificate. Be that as it may, the substance of the book itself opened up the world of it's protagonist in a way few books do.

Although the book meanders a bit at certain points, the reader feels he is in Jefferson's mind at times. I would have liked the author to have told us about more of Jefferson's close acquaintances and their relationships. Few of the other founding fathers are mentioned, Benjamin Franklin a case in point. Attention given to Washington and Adams is quite sparse. I felt too many pages were devoted to Jefferson's lopsided relationship with Maria Cosway whom he met after the premature death of his wife. Maria was a married woman he was romantically attracted to, but who would have nothing to do with him except as a friend. He couldn't let go of her over the years, however, and she was too polite to totally cut all communications (even though she lived in Europe and ended up becoming a nun).

One thing I liked about this book was the way Beran shed light on Jefferson's intimate interests, his way of looking at the world around him and the place he felt he occupied in it. Some of those interests and notions, or ways, of looking at people, places, his own personal psyche and health (among other things) seem alien to us today. But that is what's wonderful about how Beran puts it all together - in a way you can almost taste Jefferson's time, what was important to people and what they found motivating (people, at least, who were of the station and caliber of Jefferson - a rarity to be sure). Many of Jefferson's fears, shortcomings and idiosyncrasies are also covered, but in an affectionate way which makes him seem more human and less aloof.

I was pleasantly surprised and gratified to find that Jefferson appeared to become more disposed to the teachings of Christ later in his life, considering him the greatest teacher of the virtues of pure love who ever lived. Beran indicates that Jefferson came to believe Christ's teachings transcended those of the Greek philosophers in that Christ applied them across the board to all peoples. Jefferson even wrote a singular treatise on the subject, this after having held a largely hellenistic view of the world for most of his life.

I finished the book feeling I would have liked to have known Jefferson personally and been able to have conversed and debated with him as a friend. My reason for awarding the book only 4 stars rather than 5 is largely due to my disappointment in the audio version - If I were you I'd opt for paper.