American Abroad

They were correct. What followed, during Jefferson’s five years on the European continent, was more than a period of commendable public service. It was also a time of great importance to Jefferson’s intellectual development and his aesthetic refinement–which Michael Knox Beran explores in some depth in “Jefferson’s Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind.” Jefferson’s experience of European culture, Beran believes, also provided a sensitive man of fragile psychological equipment with inner resources on which he could draw in times of stress. These resources, brought home, enabled him to act on the political stage with an assurance that before had been denied him.

Among the philosophes of Paris, Beran writes, Jefferson “fell victim to strange languors, dull states of mind, intellectual flaccidity.” This seems a stretch for the American who not only tended to his official duties but also found the energy to read, write, study, and socialize. This is not to say that the sensitive Jefferson did not suffer from occasional spells of moodiness.

He probably did. These moods seemed to coincide with his great love affair of this period, which was not, alas, with “dusky Sally,” as Jefferson’s critics would call his daughter’s babysitter and playmate. Whether he ever looked twice at the slave girl is impossible to know, but the paper trail that documents the feelings the widower had for an English portrait painter’s wife was never secret. Jefferson’s “head and heart” quarreled over the comely Maria Cosway, although, for reasons that are still murky, things did not work out.

Eager to take his mind off his troubles, Jefferson headed south in February 1787 and, for three months, passing through Nîmes, Lyons, Milan, and Genoa, he was “nourished with the remains of Roman grandeur.” At Nîmes, he sat spellbound before the Maison Carrée, which he would propose as the model for the Virginia state capitol back in Richmond. “It is sometimes said that savants like Jefferson turned to the art of the Greeks and Romans because they found in the classical civilizations an aesthetic vocabulary commensurate with the severe and rational geometry of their enlightened ideals,” Beran writes. “In fact, Jefferson turned to the classical peoples precisely when his enlightened oracles failed him, and left him unreconciled to the terrors of life. He found, in the archaic poetry of the Mediterranean, conceits that could touch aspects of his existence beyond the reach of reason and common sense.”

This may be true, though much of it must be inferred–from the friezes at Monticello, for example–rather than established. Jefferson, who was not averse to philosophizing, said little about it in his own writings or in his letters.

That he came home feeling refreshed seems indisputable. He did go on to accomplish important things, although the connection between his time in Europe and those accomplishments remains a matter of supposition and conjecture. Beran is no stranger to either. And the Jefferson he gives us–an aesthete who is as comfortable discussing ladies’ underwear with Abigail Adams as he is discussing political economy with John Adams–must be reckoned an original, though one by whom some readers may be put off.

In his eagerness to evoke this aspect of the man and his times, Beran far too often strikes a tone overly self-serious and affected. The lonely Jefferson is not widowed but “unwifed.” Mrs. Cosway, accused by less sensitive souls of “strumpetry,” perceives her gloomy paramour’s “Nullifidian cast of mind.” The lovesick swain finds his lady’s London, with its “dark wet eaves-drip days,” to be “dark and gray like dead men’s guts.” When Jefferson tears himself away from her clutches, he finds he prefers–as who would not?–the “thick-pleached vineyards” of Provence, where “startled goats leap from concupiscent vineyards” and wines exude “the soft vapors of half a thousand years.” Older but wiser, our hero must in time return with his children and servants to the “sogland of the Potomac,” where the soil is “malmy and slack” and his Federalist adversaries’ every move is “freaked with vice.”

He goes on with his life, rising to the presidency itself, and never sees the long-suffering Mrs. Cosway again, although their heartfelt letters murmur to us through the intervening centuries. The lack of equally compelling documents establishing an amorous relationship with a certain handsome black woman, now all grown up and living within arm’s reach at Monticello, may be proof only that their “transactions” were “unlanguaged.” This absence of incriminating documentary evidence may strike some readers as most unusual or even suspicious, involving as it does a “soft, mammering man,” more given to loquacity than, say, taciturn George Washington, but facts is facts.

The Jefferson that Beran gives us is quite unlike Washington or any other Founder. If the author somewhat overdoes it in his attempt to portray Jefferson the aesthete, he may perhaps be forgiven because, until now, no one has done it at all. Jefferson was, “in his innermost vocation, an artist,” Beran writes. His greatest contributions to his country’s development were not operational or administrative but poetic. His “most successful political acts nearly always involved the imposition of literary form on the messiness of public life.”

This puts the matter quite well, and Beran presents a plausible account of how Jefferson managed to pull these conflicting elements of his complicated personality together in such a way as to make such unique contributions possible at all. For that alone, Beran’s “Jefferson’s Demons” deserves a fair and respectful hearing.

The author of “Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America,” Alan Pell Crawford is at work on a book on Thomas Jefferson.