At Home - Bill Bryson [160]
Monticello became famous for its novelties—a dumbwaiter built into a fireplace, indoor privies, a device called a polygraph that used two pens to make a copy of any letter written on it. One feature, a pair of doors in which both opened when only one—either one—was pushed, charmed and mystified experts for a century and a half. It wasn’t until the inner mechanisms were exposed during remodeling in the 1950s that renovators discovered that the doors were invisibly linked by a rod and pulleys under the floor—a fairly straightforward arrangement, as it turned out, but astounding because it represented a lot of cost and enterprise for very little effort saved.
Jefferson, amazingly energetic, scarcely wasted a moment of his eighty-three years. His boast was that in fifty years the sun had never caught him in bed. He was an obsessive record keeper. He had seven notebooks on the go at any one time, and into each of these he recorded the most microscopic details of daily life. He fully noted each day’s weather, the migratory patterns of birds, the dates on which flowers blossomed. He not only kept copies of eighteen thousand letters he wrote, and saved the five thousand he was sent, but also diligently logged them all in an “Epistolary Record” that itself ran to more than 650 pages. He kept a record of every cent earned and spent. He recorded how many peas it took to fill a pint pot. He kept full, individual inventories for his slaves, giving an unusually complete record of how they were treated and what they owned.
Yet, strangely, he didn’t keep a diary or an inventory of Monticello itself. “We know more about Jefferson’s house in Paris than this one, oddly enough,” Susan Stein, the senior curator, told me when I visited Monticello. “We don’t know what kind of floor coverings he had in most rooms and can’t always be sure about a lot of the furnishings. We know the house had two indoor privies, but we don’t know who got to use them or what they used for toilet paper. These things don’t get recorded.” So we are in the strange position with Jefferson that we know everything about the 250 types of edible plants he grew (he organized them by whether they were eaten for their roots, fruits, or leaves) but surprisingly little about many aspects of his life indoors.
The house was always terribly self-indulgent. When Jefferson brought his young bride, Martha, to Monticello in 1772, it was already three years into its building and clear at a glance that this was his house. His private study, for instance, was almost twice the size of both the dining room and marital bedroom. The things that featured in the house were designed to meet his needs and whims. He could, for instance, check the wind direction and speed from any of five locations in the house—not something that Mrs. Jefferson was crying out for.
After Martha’s early death, just ten years into their marriage, Monticello became even more decidedly his. Guests were not permitted into any of the private parts of the house—which is to say most of it—except under escort. Those who wished to browse in the library had to wait for Mr. Jefferson to take them in personally.
Of all the puzzling lapses in Jefferson’s record keeping, the most surprising perhaps is that he didn’t keep a record of his books and had no idea how many he actually had. Jefferson loved books and was very lucky to live in a generation when books were becoming commonplace. Until comparatively recently books had been really quite rare. When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books—the number that John Harvard left at his death—was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after