Six for Dr. Franklin!

Our books today all star that most inimitable of American Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin! During one of my bookshelf-reorganizations back in 2015, I had one of those awkward realizations so common to book-people: I noticed for the first time that I had something like seven different biographies of Franklin. This was embarrassing, of course (there’s almost no tenable argument that can be made in favor of owning seven different biographies of the same person, and yet, on my shelves, there’s Byron … and Erasmus … and Hamilton … and Taft …), but when one owns lots and lots of books, such embarrassments are practically a part of getting out of bed in the morning. Virtually every day will bring you in contact with the evidence of some long-forgotten book-acquiring extravagance of the type that makes our non-bookish friends look upon us with wonder and pity. That filthy, taped and rubber-banded old paperback of Around the World in 80 Days? That sexually-explicit manga version of Frankenstein? That elaborate pop-up book of Moby-Dick? We learn to take such things in stride when we stumble upon them in our periodic forays into our own bookshelves.

So it hardly fazed me at all when I was making one of those forays just the other day and once again encountered half a dozen Ben Franklin biographies … but a different half-dozen. Gone were the H. W. Brands, the Thomas Fleming, the Edmund Morgan, even the Carl Van Doren … all gone to I know not where, and all replaced by alternates from the endless number of such books that have appeared in English in the last century.

Even a little more than a century, in the case of Sydney George Fisher’s quintessentially Victorian The True Benjamin Franklin from 1898 that strikes early on the slightly admonitory tone it will maintain throughout:

It is curious that American myth-making is so unlike the ancient myth-making which as time when on made its gods and goddesses more and more human with mortal loves and passions. Our process is just the reverse. Out of a man who actually lived among us and of whose life we have many truthful details, we make an impossible abstraction of idealized virtues.

Refreshingly uninterested in myth-making of any kind is The Private Franklin by Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia Herbert from 1975, a book solely concerned with Franklin the family man – or man of many families, as our authors make clear throughout this fantastic book:

He was a nest builder par excellence, at home and abroad. He needed a family every bit as much as he needed “ingenious acquaintance.” A great deal has been made of his alleged sexual promiscuity; far more evidence exists for a kind of emotional promiscuity in creating familial surroundings wherever he happened to be.

That “wherever he happened to be” hints at the wide traveling Franklin did in his lifetime, despite the fact that travel was arduous back then and especially so for him, since from the age of forty on, he was quite often tormented by poor health, including blindingly painful gout and kidney stones. Franklin lived long enough to put down extensive roots in several far-flung places, including the Paris of young America’s peace negotiations, the subject of David Schoenbaum’s wonderful 1976 book Triumph in Paris, where the evocative scene-setting more than compensates for a greater-than-normal degree of hagiography:

If many had contributed to the great moment of victory and independence, no one man had done as much as Benjamin Franklin. He had been the architect and mechanic of the alliance that had provided, with infinite pains and complexities, the supplies and monies that had made Washington’s final triumph possible. He had been the very heart and soul of the peace talks, the one man to whom all turned. It was not to Adams or to Jay that Shelburne had written. Nor had they drafted the four points on which peace was built. It was Franklin, old, ill, but steady and wise.

Another location that lays claim to the good doctor is of course the city of his birth, Boston, which nurtured the young genius for just as long as it took him to devise a way to leave town forever. Those Boston years are the subject of Arthur Bernon Tourtellot’s dense and incredibly good 1977 book Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius: The Boston Years, and that term “genius” gives our author occasion for some elaboration:

Did Benjamin Franklin qualify? John Adams, who was not among his warmest personal admirers and was sorely tried, when he was one of the American peace commissioners in Paris, by the sage’s easy way with women, his love of comfort, and his reluctance to offend, thought so, and may have been, in the Boston Patriot, May 15, 1811, the first to apply the word genius to Franklin – and with a sweeping totality, albeit in a grudging context: “Franklin had a great genius, original, sagacious, and inventive, capable of discoveries in science no less than of improvements in the fine arts and the mechanic arts. He had a vast imagination, equal to the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and cool comprehension of them.”

Geniuses have a tendency to attract overpraise almost as much as imbeciles do, and lord knows, Franklin has had his share of overpraise – a particularly gushing case-in-point appearing in Walter Isaacson’s otherwise-solid (though egregiously mistitled) 2003 book Benjamin Franklin: An American Life:

He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.

When Isaacson’s Franklin wasn’t walking on water, however, he was busy dabbling in science and hob-nobbing with grandees – two things that very much occupied his time during the years he spent in London, for instance. Those years are the focal point of a very readable new book by George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London, which intermittently tries to keep its subject in a proportioned framework:

Franklin had an international prestige among natural philosophers, with Immanuel Kant hailing him in 1755 as ‘the Prometheus of modern times,’ but he had also achieved a wider celebrity through the reading public’s learned interest in the natural world, supported, of course, by a sensationalistic fascination for ‘magic shows’ that sizzled with special effects. Franklin’s knowledge and fame had won him access to the tables of the aristocratic, influential and powerful.

As Isaacson points out, the foremost invention of Benjamin Franklin was Benjamin Franklin, and that observation is certainly borne out by the wily old character who shape-shifts his way through these six books and hundreds more just like them. Those hundreds more will almost certainly show up on my bookshelves in future impromptu re-arrangements. I’ll try not to be embarrassed when that happens.