Doubtless it would be both reckless and premature to say that the long age of door-stopper biographies is over but there has been a welcome reaction against it. The notion that it is possible to deal with a large life in a relatively small space has been advanced with impressive success by the Penguin Lives series and, more recently, the American Presidents. Now, quite on his own, comes the distinguished historian Edmund S. Morgan to distill the singularly eventful life of Benjamin Franklin down to barely 300 pages of text, yet to give the great man, in every important sense, his due.
To call Franklin's life singular is if anything an understatement. He was an intuitive and brilliant scientist who had "the same curiosity about the world that drives today's scientists"; his famous experiments with electricity "not only gave the world a new understanding of electricity but also furnished the way to protect buildings and ships from it: lightning rods." He was a master printer, a prominent journalist, a pamphleteer and a writer whose Autobiography is one of the first classics of American literature. He was a diplomat, a statesman and a visionary who as early as the mid-18th century "saw America, with its growing strength and population, as the future seat of the greatest political structure human beings would ever erect," and he played an essential role in assembling it.
He was gregarious and charming, yet a mystery: "Franklin is not so easy to know as he sometimes seems to be. He has an insatiable curiosity and applies himself seriously and successfully to scientific discovery, but he discounts its importance. He rejects his Christian upbringing and develops a religion of practical virtue that says nothing about the golden rule of loving one's fellow men, but he dedicates his life to serving them . . . His public service was not simply a duty he imposed on himself. It was deliberate, conscious, contrived, but at the same time natural. He sought it as he sought company, sought friendship. He is so hard to know because it is so hard to distinguish his natural impulses from his principles."
Franklin's place in American mythology vastly oversimplifies and misrepresents his actual life and work. Thanks largely to the Autobiography, in which he studiously (if most engagingly) reshaped his own story in order to present it as a form of instruction in the virtues, and to Poor Richard's Almanack, he comes to us as an aphorist, a fount of avuncular, homespun wisdom, a one-man Bartlett's: "Eat to live, and not live to eat," "Necessity never made a good bargain," "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other," et cetera. Thanks to the legendary kite with which he drew electricity from a thunderhead, he comes to us as the archetypal Yankee tinkerer, a slightly eccentric if not outright dotty amateur inventor.
The truth is something quite different, as Morgan carefully documents and elucidates with scarcely a wasted word. Franklin was a self-created and self-willed man who moved through life at a calculated pace toward calculated ends. He had strong principles and ideals, but he did not seek to impose his convictions on others. He sought to influence public opinion by persuasion and example rather than grandstand plays. He was a realist whose "recipe for power" was "to keep himself inconspicuous" while employing "his charm, his genuine interest in other people and his way of dealing with them" to advance their interests and, should it work out that way, his own.
The role Franklin played in the emergence of the American nation - the prologue to revolution, the Revolution itself, and the aftermath - gives Morgan a rich opportunity to describe and illustrate the many complexities of this man whom time and legend have tended to reduce to amiable cliché. In fact the chronicle of Franklin's progress from loyal subject of the king to rebel against his rule is an instructive reminder that, contrary to what textbooks tend to tell us, neither the Revolution nor the American nation came into being in a linear way. There was more dispute than unanimity among residents of the colonies as British rule became ever more intolerable; what we think of as a dramatic leap to self-government punctuated by a few historic battles was in fact a labored process that easily could have gone in any number of different directions.
Certainly it did not go in the direction Franklin preferred. He was a passionate friend of England. The vision in which he believed most urgently was "an Anglo-American empire of equals"; indeed, after five years as colonial agent in London "he was preparing, probably without quite admitting it to himself, to become the architect of that empire."
Franklin's years in Paris form the last chapter of his legend. There he "encountered something new: a public adulation unlike anything he had ever before experienced or expected," to the extent that, as he told his sister, "my Face is now almost as well known as that of the Moon." He was surrounded by lovely women and fawning courtiers for almost the whole of his eighth decade, a jolly, fun-loving old man whose impish behavior belied the serious business he was accomplishing.
When he returned home in 1785, aged 79, he remained almost as active as ever in his scientific inquiries, and when the Constitutional Convention met in 1787 in his beloved Philadelphia, he attended "faithfully, five hours a day for four months." His contributions to the great document the convention wrote were relatively small, but his presence, there as always, was larger than life.
The Washington Post
