Ben Franklin, the ideal dinner guest

I read in the paper this morning about a new Ben Franklin exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. Who better to spend an hour or two with over Thanksgiving? (Remember it was Franklin who wanted the turkey to be our national emblem, rather than the ill-behaved bald eagle.)

As I was collecting anecdotes and episodes for A Book of Ages, Franklin was the hardest to keep under control: there were so many stories, and so many begged for elaboration. But B. of A. is an ensemble piece. Each story is told at the right length for retelling in one elevator ride. Franklin appears 13 times, the same number as Freud, three fewer than Einstein, one more than Nixon.

At a dinner table ringed with personalities (which is how the book reads) Franklin is the most surprising, the most voluble. The kite is there (did he actually fly it in a thunderstorm?), the illegitimate son, the meeting with Voltaire in Paris (which many consider the high moment of the Enlightenment), his comment about the first manned flight (asked what good it was, he answered "What good is a newborn baby?"), as well as everyday matters of life and age: his retirement fund, his gout. Also his inventions: bifocals, the fire department, etc. Does anyone remember that Franklin was America's first best-selling author? On that score alone he'd have been an interesting person to know.

One item I edited out of the book (I had to edit out some things): it was Ben Franklin who brought rhubarb to America, in 1772.

Mark Twain

On this day in 1865, Mark Twain made his first impression on the reading public with the publication of "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press. He was 29. The story was retitled "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and became the title story of his first book in 1867.

Twain was a Midwesterner transplanted to the California gold fields writing for a New York audience, but there was something universal, or at least All-American, in his colloquial humor and his mixture of high and low life. People felt they knew his characters; the lowlifes put on airs and the toffs were phonies, and only the reader and the author were wise.

Twain appears ten times in A Book of Ages. When he was 21 he was training to be a riverboat pilot. (An education as rigorous as becoming an airline pilot today, a process he describes in his book Life on the Mississippi). At age 27 he set aside Samuel Clemens and began writing under the famous pen name. He didn't write his masterpiece until he was 49.

At 60 he was a famous novelist––and bankrupt. To recoup his losses he embarked on a world lecture tour. He met Gandhi and Sigmund Freud, visited Rome and the Taj Mahal. He had dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. He owned a grand house in Connecticut. But his finances were always tenuous. Success was a fragile thing. This realization fed his cynicism and made him the greatest American writer of his time.

Moby Dick and the life around it

Moby Dick was published on this day in 1851. It was Herman Melville's sixth book and his most ambitious, but it didn't sell, and the experience nearly destroyed him. Readers wanted roistering sea tales more than deep dish metaphors. Melville's family life suffered. He drank. His wife's relatives urged her to have him put in an asylum. In 1852 the New York Day Book published an article titled "Herman Melville Crazy." Perhaps he was. He continued writing. He wrote an epic poem of 16,000 lines, which also failed. He eventually retired on legacies from dead relatives.

Herman Melville grew up in New York, the third child of a merchant and importer, descended from an old New England family––Melville's grandfather had participated in the Boston Tea Party. But the family fell into poverty when the import firm collapsed. Allan Melvill died bankrupt when Herman was 12, and his widow added an "e" to the end of the family name. Melville went to sea when he was 20. When he was 23 he jumped ship onto an island in the south Pacific, where he lived among the natives for several weeks. No clothes, free love and cannibalism provided material for a book which he called Typee. Despite the title, the manuscript was handwritten. He followed Typee with four other books about the sea, which found a ready audience. But this is the loop often followed by authors: repeated effort finds success and success creates a thirst for deeper significance, a masterpiece is written and published and the author learns that readers only wanted to be amused. They wanted sensation more than meaning. Herman Melville died at age 72, a forgotten author. Moby Dick had only sold a little over 3000 copies. Nobody read it in school. It wouldn't become the great nineteenth century novel until well into the twentieth.

Herman Melville appears three times in A Book of Ages. I have never read Moby Dick, though I admire people who have tried. I put it in a special category among books written to be written about, and maybe that is its problem. I remember reading Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" with a classroom of serious literary types––I could barely keep a straight face. When it comes to downbeat books about Man's Fate I prefer brisker, funnier, more ironic books, like Waugh's "A Handful of Dust", and Voltaire's "Candide". Among the hundreds of allusive fictions set upon the sea––Hemingway's, Jack London's, Joseph Conrad's, Waugh's, Homer's and Virginia Woolf's––I prize the short story by Stephen Crane most, perhaps because it is so brief and simply told. When he was 25 he was shipwrecked and set adrift in an open boat. The story begins "None of them knew the color of the sky." Now there is a description of man's helplessness.

The events of life gather their significance from what is occurring around them, the juxtapositions, tragedy alongside comedy, innocence beside grim experience, goodness prosecuted while villainy proceeds uninterrupted, seriousness (like Melville's) mocked and ignored while frivolousness sells and bad writing makes authors rich. Juxtapositions supply the irony. In A Book of Ages, the entry about Melville's Moby Dick is preceded by Clare Boothe finally letting Henry Luce go "all the way" on a trip to Florida. The next entry is about Carl Jung meeting Sigmund Freud for the first time; they spent thirteen hours talking about word association. Speaking of word association: the title Moby Dick always made adolescent boys laugh in the back of the classroom. I wonder what Melville was thinking. All of the authors cited here appear multiple times in my book. It's as if they are still conversing among themselves.

Paul Meets George

In September 1954, 12 year-old Paul McCartney met 11 year-old George Harrison on a Liverpool bus. A Book of Ages is full of crossed paths and lucky meetings. John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono at a gallery opening when he was 26; Elvis meeting the Beatles when he was 30 (he didn't know their names and couldn't tell them apart). Elvis meeting President Nixon. Che Guevara meeting Castro, Gertrude Stein meeting Alice B. Toklas, Lillian Hellman meeting Dashiell Hammett, J. D. Salinger meeting Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain meeting Sigmund Freud, Freud meeting Jung, Freud meeting Salvador Dali, Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, T. S. Eliot meeting Groucho Marx, Charles Lindbergh meeting Hitler. Sylvia Plath meeting Ted Hughes at a party in Cambridge; she bit his cheek till it bled. Rodgers meeting Hammerstein, Astaire meeting Rogers, Rolls meeting Royce. When partners meet there is an electric spark. It can happen anywhere, at any age.

Freud

The last entry in Freud's diary, for August 25, 1939, reads: “War Panic.” He died a month later, in London, a few weeks after war was declared with Germany. Freud appears 13 times in A Book of Ages, seeing his mother naked, getting a couch, meeting Jung, advising Mahler about his mother fixation, collecting knick-knacks (which may or may not have been a substitution for something else,) quitting smoking.

Freud, Eiffel, the Four Minute Mile

It was also on this day, in 1954 that a 25 year-old medical student from Oxford University ran the first mile in under four minutes. His name was Roger Bannister. His record lasted less than a month before it was broken by an Australian whose name nobody remembers. Bannister retired from running within the year, but he will always be the first to break this arbitrary barrier, just as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had been the first to climb Everest a year earlier.

It was on May 6, 1889 that Eiffel's amazing tower was opened to visitors. Eiffel was 56 and had designed and would design many far more useful structures around the world, but it is with this tower in Paris that his name will always be associated. When it opened most Parisians thought it was a terrible eyesore.

Eiffel and Bannister appear once each in A Book of Ages.

May 6th is also the birthday of Sigmund Freud, born in 1856 in Freiburg, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He appears 13 times in A Book of Ages, not just speculating about dreams, but collecting knick-knacks, being given a couch by a grateful patient, having his portrait sketched by Salvador Dali, meeting a rival psychoanalyst, giving up cigars, losing all his savings in an economic downturn, and, perhaps most memorably, seeing his mother naked when he was three years old.