Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.