America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Read Online Free PDF Page A

Renaissance man of numbers also encouraged architects to make “an exact calculation” of their costs before building in order to avoid leaving their creations unfinished.) Jefferson was, a French visitor noted in 1782, “the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” One factor contributing to his decade of “unchequered happiness” with his wife, Martha, who died at the age of thirty-three in 1782, was her skillful administration of Monticello. “Nothing,” Dumas Malone, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning six volume Jefferson and His Time , completed in 1981, “he ever did was more characteristic of him as a person or as a mind.” Jefferson himself calculated the mathematical measurements and did the drawings for the three-story, twenty-one-room mansion, which he didn’t finish until 1809. He also selected all the furnishings and accoutrements, down to the drapery and upholstery.
    Jefferson liked mathematical precision everywhere, even in poetry. In the mid-1780s, in his daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne, America’s minister to France began formulating how to put English literature in order. Jefferson’s essay “Thoughts on English Prosody,” completed in the fall of 1786, sought to explain “the rules” that should govern poetic composition. Mining passages from his literary commonplace book, which he began keeping as an adolescent, he presented numerous examples of different types of meter and rhyme interspersed with his commentary. The inveterate classicist came down hard on lyric poems such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) for intermingling different line lengths in the same verse and thus departing from “that simplicity and regularity of which the ear is most sensible.” Though he didn’t quite recommend kicking such poems out of the canon, he came close, concluding that “these pieces are seldom read twice.”
    Despite the overwhelming evidence of Jefferson’s obsessionality, most biographers have looked the other way. Dumas Malone, whose work still remains definitive, characterized his subject as “thoughtful and observant” as he whipped out his thermometer in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. The preeminent Jefferson scholar said nothing else about this curious incident. (Perhaps it takes one not to know one; Malone, who spent nearly forty years combing through Jeffersoniana, once described himself as “properly fastidious.”) But such has not always been the case. The first writer to get his hands on the bulk of Jefferson’s papers, Henry Stephens Randall, could not help but fixate on this central characterological tic. Like a giddy teenager, Randall, the author of a three-volume, two-thousand-page life published in 1858, used italics and exclamation points to express his initial surprise:
    All the manuscripts of Thomas Jefferson present a striking and persistent coincidence in one particular—and it is one of the first ones which the examiner notices, partly from its own prominence, and partly because few out of the circle of his immediate friends are prepared for the fact it discloses. It is his remarkable precision down to minute details—his apparent fondness for details . Never was there a more methodical man from great matters down to the merest seeming trifles—never so diligent a recorder of them!…The pocket account books include the minutest items of his daily expenditure, down to two or three pennies paid for a shoe string, or tossed into a beggar’s hat in Paris—and we think we remember one or two entries of a single penny, to make the inexorable cash book balance exactly !
    As Randall aptly notes, to point out Jefferson’s immersion in the trivial is not to diminish his greatness. “The master mind, that comes but once in a century,” the biographer adds, “is stamped with universality.… It has vigor to collect all, without becoming over-wearied or frittered