Inventing America
Remini, Robert V.
I I III I I Books: JEFFERSON'S LOST LANGUAGE I I M AKE no mistake, this is an important book, perhaps one of the most important books published in American history in the last ten years. Its...
...What kind of teacher was he once he began...
...But nothing was lost...
...And in explaining Jefferson's commitment to the moral-sense theory of pub- lic as well as private actions, other am-biguities in...
...This was in the winter of 1958-1959...
...I The end of the Age of Auden I I I I I II I A REVOLUTION IN TASTE: STUBIES OF BYLAN THOMAS, ALLEN GINSBERG, SYLVIA PLATH, AND ROBERT LOWELL Louis Simpson Macmillan, $12.95 ~198 pp.] Robert Pbi!!ips CANNOT help but wonder who Simpson intends the readers of this book to be...
...But Chesterton got it all wrong, as do most of us today...
...This latter segment Congress deleted...
...We know that Jefferson was sorely grieved by these changes and it has always been assumed that his pique was the understandable an-noyance of an author who cannot abide any tampering with his creation...
...The Declaration in its original form renounced their brethren across the seas...
...How can Lowell's con- version, which so affected and informed his poetry, be dismissed so briefly...
...What was Vague be- comes precise...
...Why did they chose Boston as destination...
...That is what Wills calls "inventing America...
...With the exception of Julian Boy~, the editor of the Thomas Jefferson Papers, no one has bothered to add to the seemingly definitive findings of Carl Becker whose The Declara- tion of Independence published in 1922 pre- sumably told us everything we needed to know about the document...
...In both books Simpson subscribes to the statement by Proust which appears as epig- raph to A Revolution in Taste: "There can be no interpreting the masterpieces of the past unless one judges them from the standpdint of those who wrote them, and not from the out- side, from a respectful distance, and with all academic deference...
...I mean reading it...
...It also was cited by The New York Times as one of the most important books published in 1975...
...At the very end of the document, after the catalogue of grie- vances, the paragraph begins "We therefore the representatives of the United States of America" etc...
...It is also agreed that the changes improved the document...
...Perhaps of Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, in the future Wills will help provide it...
...One example will suffice...
...He has presumed to look afresh at a well known subject and report back that we misunderstand it...
...recognized and named that new thing we are...
...Actually, as Wills explains, Jefferson had good reason to resent the changes because they struck at the very heart of his intention...
...Yet Simpson too often remains on the outside of his subjects...
...While he leans heavily upon John Malcolm Brinnin's account of Thomas in America, he goes directly to Sylvia Plath's own letters home in his chapter on her...
...Not all ref- erences are to other biographies, interviews, critical studies and book jacket blurbs...
...I do not mean seeing it...
...The Declaration drew a new plan of the world, with a presence theretofore un- suspected...
...Or that the young Robert Lowell pitched a tent on Allen Tate's lawn and stayed for two months...
...Indeed, rather than attempting to provide new facts (as did Donald Hall in his surprisingly fresh new book, Remembering Poets), Simpson contents himself with repeating what already is in print...
...Jefferson never intended the De- claration for a "spiritual Covenant," says Wills, but that is what it has become and the more it was distorted the more it became re- vered...
...Simpson gives us a sketch, but no portrait...
...That Ginsberg's use of the word "beat" meant exhausted, out of it, and therefore "bles- sed...
...And this is not sur- prising since the Scottish universities of the mid-eighteenth century far surpassed Oxford or Cambridge in science, philosophy, and law...
...691 son's social thought on account of this expla ~-nation since he was just as.firmly grounded in the moral sense as was the Declaration...
...It is almost quantifiably un- derstandable...
...One of the important ways Wills ap- proaches the task of reading the Declaration within the context of eighteenth century meaning, not its later interpretation, is to examine the deletions and additions Congress insisted upon before adopting the document...
...And the political sys- tem came mostly from the works of Francis Hutcheson, as Wills so clearly demonstrates, By studying Hutcheson's ideas, Wills un- covers new meaning in the Declaration and he tells us things about Jeffersgn that are reveal- ing and important...
...The influence comes from Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, not London or Philadelphia...
...The phrase "pursuit of happiness" is one example...
...Do we really need to be told once again that "Dylan" means "seal" and that Thomas once lifted Katherine Anne Porter up to the ceiling at a party...
...Three on a Tower, in which Simpson looked at the lives and works of Pound, Eliot, and Williams, also seemed to me very generalized--popularized biography...
...They enjoyed the presence of such minds as Adam Smith Thomas Reid, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, Dugald Steward, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume...
...His methOd varies...
...Inventing America II I III I ing with the subject...
...1167!17 ) So many questions are left unanswered-- even unraised--by such writing...
...The teachings of these men were transmit- ted to Jefferson by William Small, a mathematics professor at the College of Wil- liam and Mary...
...It contained a whop- ping 1,232 footnotes to primary and secon- dary sources...
...Chosen to pen the Declaration because of his "felicitous" writing style and conscious of the propaganda value of his pronouncement, Jefferson engrafted Lockean principles to his Declaration because of their m iversal appeal and acceptance...
...Because Wills is a scholar, classicist, and journalist, he perceived the need to examine the document in the context of the world that actually produced it, not as "invented" by the nineteenth century, and in so doing he has produced a radicallyaltered reading of the Declaration, one so profound as to necessitate sharp revisions in all history textbooks dealAmericans have feh for some time that Jefferson invented America-the coun-try, not the continent...
...It has always been a problem for historians because of its vagueness...
...He demonstrates that for men of the Enlightenment it was a scientific and secu- lar term, as self-evident a truth as to rank with life and liberty...
...What once seemed like rhetor- ical flourishes assume the kind of meaning that they had for Jefferson and other men of the Enlightenment who appreciated them...
...The received wis- dom of the historical profession, provided by Becker and since taught to many generations of students, contends that Jefferson's political INVENTINS AMERICA: JEFFERSON'S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE Garry Wills Doubleday, $10 [398 pp.] Robert V. Remini and social philosophy came straight from John Locke's The Second Treatise of Gov- ernment published in the seventeenth century...
...Sylvia had a job at the Massachusetts General Hospital, writ- ing up case histories...
...etc.--and then Jefferson goes on to say that they reject and renounce all allegiance and subjection to the kings of Great Britain and dissolve all political connections which "have subsisted between us& the people or parliament of Great Britain...
...the document are dispelled...
...Given the reception of his last critical-biographical I II study, not everyone will agree...
...Later in the book he writes, "In 1940 Lowell underwent a reli- gious conversion and entered the Roman Catholic Church" in the same paragraph that deals with Lowell's marriage to Jean Staf- ford, his graduation from Kenyon and his teaching at Kenyon...
...Phrases in the document come into clearer focus...
...Why did Ted object to teaching...
...How did Sylvia react to hospital work...
...In either case, I feel a need for more Simpson and fewer secondary references...
...First off he presents convincing evidence that it was not Lockean principles that formed the philosophic under- pinning of the Declaration but rather the col- lected works of a number of eighteenth cen- tury writers in Scotland: The Scottish En- lightenment provided the intellectual content of the document...
...We are like the person who rents a machine at an art museum to listen to a description of every painting he confronts and then standg glassy-eyed before each master- piece and listens but sees nothing...
...I I III I I Books: JEFFERSON'S LOST LANGUAGE I I M AKE no mistake, this is an important book, perhaps one of the most important books published in American history in the last ten years...
...Incidentally, the opening paragraphs of the Declaration, the parts so dearly loved today, were not nearly so important to the men who signed it...
...Under Wills's analysis--he writes one chapter on the meaning of' 'pursuit" and still another for "of happiness"--the phrase assumes sharp definition...
...They lived in a rented apartment in Beacon Hill and did their writing...
...Why bother to fuss with it...
...Then they both gave up teaching and moved into Boston...
...Everybody knows what the pursuit of happiness really means...
...That Sylvia Hath, Anne Sexton, and G~orge Starbuck used to drink together at the Ritz...
...But it is an important statement of Jefferson's political faith, for he believed that the primary political connection between England and America was the tie between the American colonists and the British people...
...After all, the business about' equality and rights were self-evident...
...He put it on our conceptual map, as it were...
...Was their moving an act to please Ted, or a joint decision...
...We also receive a better appreciation of JefferCommonweal...
...Did Ted have no job at all thereafter...
...It is dark with unexamined lights...
...That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theologi- cal lucidity in the Declaration of Indepen- dence, perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature...
...The notions of the inaliena- ble rights of life, liberty, and property were only slightly altered when the euphemistic phrase "pursuit of happiness" was substi-tuted for the word "property...
...Why did they both suddenly give up teaching...
...This penetrating, original and exciting book, written at times with a Jeffersonian felicity, only begins to uncover the lost world Much more remains to be revealed...
...In spite of his dislike of the whole idea Ted accepted a teaching job at the University of Massachusetts...
...De- spite its title and brief 4-.89 Foreword, in which he attempts to posit a thesis for the book (the advent of Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg brought an end to passionless poems which were exercises in reason...
...This is familiar material, already discussed in full-length biographies of the four poets...
...America is the only nation in the world," he wrote,"that is founded on a creed...
...This is not to say the entire book is cursory...
...One of the key documents in our past is almost totally distorted in our perception of it...
...Jefferson completed his in- doctrination on his own, but later acknowl- edged his debt by citing Small as the man who opened up for him "the system of things in which we are placed...
...Here the Idea precedes a reality that only partly measures up to it...
...Few study the Declaration any more...
...his 179 pages of text bear the weight of 448 footnotes...
...In part our ignorance comes from seeing it through the romantic glow of the nineteenth century which virtually converted it into sacred scripture...
...Yet Jeffer- son is credited with a vision of that gov- ernment before it took actual shape...
...Ches- terton, no mean skeptic, gave his blessing...
...27 October 1978:692...
...The nation is not, in this view, simply around object, but a con- trived thing, a product of the mind...
...This tie Jefferson se- Vered...
...The signers concerned themselves with the list of grievances-- that was the important part-- the very sections we normally skip when we read the instrument today...
...Take this paragraph from his Plath chapter: Sylvia's teaching went well--too well, for she found that she had not time to write...
...But because of Congress's deletions the intention and thrust of these words are not as sharp as in the original...
...Before Independence-indeed for some time after it-there was no unifying idea or machinery of government...
...In part our ignorance arises from the fact that the Decla- ration was "written in the lost language of the Enlightenment...
...Nevertheless, traces of Jefferson's intent remained in the document, especially in the preamble when he talked about the politi- cal bands that connect one people with another...
...taste shifted to poetry which expresses the individual), Simpson's book largely is a rehash of biog- raphical fact and quotations from letters al- ready well-known to those who would pay over thirteen dollars (with tax) for a small book on modern poets...
...Its subject is the Declaration of Independence and the author has approached it with such originality and high scholarship that the results of his research and thinking are little less than breathtaking...
...Even G.K...
...Wills instructs us to begin reading the Declaration...
...And that is saying something a whole lot different than simply rejecting the monarch or the par- liament...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 21
