Disembodied Brain

JAMES MADISON: THE NATIONALIST (484 pp.) -- Irving Brant -- Bobbs-Merrill ($6).

In March 1780, small, shy James Madison Jr. rode from Virginia to Philadelphia in a two-wheeled chaise to take his seat in the Continental Congress. In the next six months he ran up a boardinghouse bill of $21,373.66, spent $2,459 for liquor, sugar, and fruit and gave his barber $1,020. Madison was neither rich nor extravagant. Like others of his poor but patriotic colleagues, he hardly knew where his next bale of inflationary paper money was coming from. In terms of hard coin, figures Biographer Irving Brant, Madison was living at the modest rate of $2 a day.

James Madison: The Nationalist is Volume II of a massive biography that dwarfs all other studies of the fourth U.S. President. When Volume I appeared in 1941, Historian Henry Steele Commager predicted that Brant's work might become "one of the really important biographies in our literature." Pegging away (in Kissimmee, Fla.) at his 2,000,000 notes and his 12,000-card index of Madisonia, Author Brant hopes to finish the third and last volume by 1951.

What he promises but doesn't deliver (in either volume) is a "human" Madison. Perhaps no biographer could. The Father of the Constitution was once described as a man who never said or did an indiscreet thing. And though Brant is scornful of those who have established his hero as a "disembodied brain," he has exhumed nothing that resembles flesh & blood. Madison was a prodigious worker, a great student of government and one of the best-read men of his time. But most readers will find him a pretty cold fish who swam best in muddy political waters. Brant insists that "outside of Congress ... he was known for his racy conversational skill, ribald wit and zest for salacious stories." Nothing will seem more unlikely to readers of James Madison.

Ex-newspaperman Brant has plunged into source materials that professional historians have so far made little use of. His richest pickings were longhand copies of French diplomatic correspondence in the Library of Congress. To read them, Brant had to brush up on his French, went so far as to ask former French Ambassador Bonnet to check a point for him in the French archives (Bonnet obliged). Brant's new researches haven't helped him to prove the "human qualities of mind and emotion" he claims for Madison, but they have made possible a solid job of history in an era once handsomely covered by Historian Henry Adams but neglected since.

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