Home > Culture > Books

Ben e-mails, George does business?

By James Srodes | Sunday, June 1, 2008

Article
Comments ()

Take it from me it is extremely hard to write biography that is both accessible to young readers and substantial enough for older ones. To try to put historical characters in a modern context borders on the impossible.

The case of Hendrik Van Loon, the Dutch-American historian is instructive. He won the first Newberry Medal for children's literature in 1922 for his History of Mankind which made no reference to Biblical creationism whatsoever. But my own favorite came 20 years later when, in "Van Loon's Lives," he hosts a series of fictional dinners with such diverse guests (and fitting menus) as Queen Elizabeth I and the Empress Theodora of Byzantium, or Napoleon and Van Loon's grandfather who had fought in Russia in 1812 for the Emperor, and Ludwig van Beethoven, whose overture captured the enormity of that disaster. I was especially charmed by his Christmas party where Benjamin Franklin joined the Lost Children of History - Virginia Dare, the Dauphin, the Two Princes in the Tower, the Children from the Crusade - in a bittersweet frolic.

(Diane Publishing Co., $24.95, 320 pages), by California physician and educator Stuart Green, fits the bill nicely. It is an excellent way to introduce first-time serious readers to the kaleidoscopic life of Benjamin Franklin, but it also goes beyond the dates and events and puts Franklin into the context of both his time and ours. This gives older readers who already know the basic outline a broader framework for this fascinating Founding Father.

As with Van Loon, Dr. Green starts us off with a nicely imaginative conceit that is, in fact, based on some truth. Among Franklin's many life-long enquiries was the preservation of life, indeed, the nature of life itself. Particularly toward the end of his quite long 84 years he wistfully wished for a longer life just so he could see how the great American Experiment turned out.

In a letter to one of his closest friends, the French philosopher and scientist Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, Franklin reported, "I have seen an instance of common flies . . . drown'd in Madeira wine . . . Having heard it remark'd that drowned flies were capable of being reviv'd by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment upon these; they were therefore expos'd to the sun . . . in less than three hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life . . . and soon after began to fly . . . ."

He added," I wish it were possible to invent a method of embalming drown'd persons, in such a manner that they may be recall'd to life at any period, however distant. For having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer any ordinary death, being immers'd in a cask of Madeira wine"to be later recall'd to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!"

So the fiction Dr. Green concocts is that Franklin did exactly that. As he perceived death approaching he prevailed on his doctor and Benjamin Franklin Bache, his grandson, to inter him in a cask of Madeira and bury him in a hidden location. For the public funeral, which drew an enormous crowd of 20,000 mourners, the conspirators stole an unidentified corpse from the Pennsylvania Hospital for the burial in the Christ Church graveyard. Franklin's cask went into an unmarked grave known only to the plotters.

What with all the construction going on in modern downtown Philadelphia, it was just a manner of time before Franklin's cask was discovered and modern medicine brought to bear to revive the 300-plus-year-old Founding Father. While Franklin is recuperating, Dr. Green begins a correspondence via--what else? --email which the old printer quickly becomes adept at downloading.

The theme of what follows is to select each of the singular accomplishments or discoveries Franklin made during his first life and bring him up to date on what modern science and technology has made in the way of improvements, expansions, and corrections.

For those of us who think this modern age is too obsessed with matters of health and personal fitness, Dr. Green's updating to Franklin remind us that those topics were of even more vital interest 300 years ago because disease, pain and death were omnipresent. Franklin well into mature adulthood was a fearsomely strong, vital man who was a champion swimmer, perhaps second only to Washington as a horseman, and no man to mess with in the periodic brawls that printers enjoyed. Yet he was plagued with urinary tract stones, debilitating bouts of gout, chronic episodes of malaria fevers, and various dermatological itches, scabs and flaking that sent him after the same remedies, baths, and unguents that humankind experimented with in that century--all with indifferent results. His fondness for Madeira did not help matters.