On My Bookshelf: “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life”

A simple Google search will quickly bring up multiple reviews of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Franklin, and certainly in more informative and insightful prose than I could offer.  But this book touched me, and because of that, I think I’d rather speak to how it made me feel as an American. 

And yes, that sounds a bit corny, which is, if the internet is to be believed, a word with its origins in America, like me.

Benjamin Franklin has been given the title “The First American,” but in fact, he was born to an American mother and a father whose roots were in Northamptonshire, England.  This duality would follow Franklin throughout his eighty-four years, as he traveled the Atlantic between the two, asking for peace, supporting one and then the other, and finally falling on the side of the Colonies in their desire for independence.

His ability to see all sides of an argument was often called “waffling,” and was cited as a sign that he had no convictions.  In truth, Franklin knew that if you had a room full of men who were unwilling to compromise -- those men would walk out of that room with little or nothing accomplished.  And Franklin was a man who liked to get things done.

Over 230 years later, it’s no secret that Americans aren’t the most popular people on the planet.  The internet has given me a much more international life than many of the neighbors, friends and co-workers in my town of 45,000 in Northern Idaho.  Among some here, there can be an insular nature to patriotism, in the vein of “Love It, Or Leave It.”

With friends in England, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada – and the many other countries represented on Twitter by people that I don’t know well but read often – I get a good cross-section of the world’s view of Americans.  Some of the harsher critics see us as arrogant, fat and irresponsible at the same time we have the hubris to call ourselves the leaders of the free world.  I can’t fully disagree with them.

Seeing my own country as I do, from two perspectives -- not only from inside it, but also through the eyes of my international friends – I can also hear, and believe, that we’re an adventurous and pioneering sort of people: innovative and bright, exploring the vast, wide open spaces this country has to offer.

My great-grandmother came across the plains of America in a covered wagon, and I’ve been told all my life that the women in our family are of strong, opinionated, hardy “pioneer stock.”  I’ve been proud of that label, and the philosophy behind it has helped me to steer my own sometimes rickety wagon through the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s in California; the early 1980s in New York City; the financial downturn that started in the late 1990s and continues still; and the monumental social sea-change that allowed us, finally, miraculously, to elect a black President.

Benjamin Franklin was a man who saw serious issues, and dealt with them with humor.  He was highly intelligent, but wanted to speak and write in a manner that allowed everyone to be able to hear him and understand.  He was very much loved as a “man of the people” of the Colonies, at the same time he was celebrated as one of the higher echelon of the New World, and was present at the signing of every critically important document that shaped the United States of America.

So the theme emerges – duality.  And as a textbook Libra, I can relate.

Like Franklin, I love the spirit of the people of this country.   But as he did, I dislike a lot of its politics.  For him, that was typified by people who so refused to move off of their positions that they essentially threatened to freeze the government.  I worry, in 2012, about the same thing.

I’ve loved the culture, literature and rich history of Britain for as long as I can remember, even back to the age of eleven, reading Jane Eyre in the attic, out loud in what I hoped was Julie Andrews’ voice.

So I suppose in addition to helping me feel an affinity with someone who lived so long ago, Isaacson’s book left me asking questions about my own duality: with my love for foreign lands, people and sensibilities; and my pride and connection to America.

Which is something Benjamin Franklin, I suspect, would appreciate.

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On My Bookshelf: “One Man’s Meat” by E.B. White

One of my earliest and most enduring literary influences was E.B. White, who contributed regularly to The New Yorker Magazine and Harper’s Magazine in beautifully concise and elegantly simple writing.  Most will know him best for the beloved books, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little,” and students of language may know him as one-half of the team of Strunk & White, who crafted the small Bible of writing, “The Elements of Style.”

White wrote magazine columns, which were the blogs of their day, I suppose.  Virtually “something about nothing very momentous,” but with a point.  If we’re lucky as writers, that point stays with people – they wonder about it, they apply it to their own lives, and they come out a little different for having read it. 

 “One Man’s Meat” is a collection of columns and essays set from the years 1938 through 1943, when White lived in Maine on a salt water farm, raising hens, sheep, blueberries and mackerel.  It’s the kind of book you can pick up anytime: on a plane or a subway, on vacation or a break at work, and read a little gem of a story in its entirety that will make you smile and sometimes cry, but always, think.

One example: White attended the World’s Fair in 1939, grandly titled “The World of Tomorrow,” but he did it with a head cold.  In his lovely understated style he wrote: “When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday,” but he bravely set forth to see it all.

The World of Tomorrow had a ride, set in the far future of 1960, full of purple light, fast cars, and trees enclosed in glass bubbles.  White watched a small boy named David as he traversed the magical future, and then listened to him describe the ride afterwards.

David, in his excitement, chose the one thing that he would always remember.  At the end of the ride, David said, “the car gave a great—big—BUMP!”

And White wrote:  “…mostly the Fair has vanished, leaving only the voice of little David Wagstaff and the rambling ecstasy of his first big trip away from home; so many millions of dollars spent on the idea that our trains and our motorcars should go fast and smoothly, and the child remembering, not the smoothness, but the great—big—BUMP.”

I realized then, and have felt it true since, that we always remember the bump.  When we talk about our weddings, we recall the words transposed, the trip up or down the stairs, the wind, the rain, the cake never delivered.  They make for good stories afterwards, and we laugh, and feel stronger for having moved through them with grace and good humor.

White saw that, right away.  He celebrated the bump as a thing to learn by, a way to connect to each other, and a reason to smile.

This is a book I loved when I first read it thirty years ago.   The real test is that I love it even more today.

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On My Bookshelf: Stephen King's "11/22/63"

I should start by saying that this is the first Stephen King novel I’ve ever tackled.  Considering how prolific an author he is, and that he is, in his own words, “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” you’d think I would have picked one up at some time or other, at least for a good beach read. 

But the closest I’ve come to the man is watching the film versions of “The Green Mile” and “The Dead Zone” in their entirety -- and parts of “Carrie,” “Christine” and “Cujo” through my fingers. 

I don’t do well with horror films or books.  They become too real for me and refuse to leave my side even long after I’ve finished with them.  Not helpful for sleep.  But his latest, “11/22/63,” sounded too interesting to pass by.

I was ten years old when that day came and went in America.  It was the beginning of a long stretch of the painful reality of violence.  First John Kennedy, then Martin Luther King, and then Robert Kennedy -– the three of them linked forever in tragedy.  It seemed that no one could stand up and speak their mind without finding a bullet at the end of the proposition.  It was a frightening, disillusioning time, and it changed American history -– politically, psychologically, culturally, and in every other way possible.

It won’t ruin the book for you if I share what it’s about, since every piece of publicity tells us:  “On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed.  If you had the chance to change history, would you? Would the consequences be worth it?”  The teaser goes on to say that in a small diner in Lisbon Falls, Maine, a portal is discovered that can take you from the top of the stairs in 2011, to the last step, which lands you in 1958.

Going back to the Big Mac and fries analogy –- I know I’ve never ordered at McDonald’s without knowing that it’s not good for me, and also that ultimately, I’ll enjoy it.  I suppose that’s the spirit in which I began reading.

King’s dialogue can jangle, his metaphors may seem tired, his characters appear to be stereotypical -– but after leaving it, I couldn’t wait to pick up the story, and I had a very hard time putting it down again.  We know what’s  going to happen, but not how it will happen.   The story combines the simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic feel of time travel with the talent of a man who knows how to “spin a yarn.” 

King may not be an expert technician, but he’s a master storyteller.  He writes in the same way that the elders of the tribes have sat crosslegged around fires and recounted tales –- not always in a linear fashion or with exquisite grammar, but in a way that puts a knot in your stomach and makes your eye speed to the next word, and the next.

I loved it.  Every minute of it.  And as far as how the man writes?  The snobbish English Literature major in me cringes just a bit.  But the rest of me thinks:  I should be so lucky to write like that.

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On My Bookshelf: Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"

I’m  listening now to Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road,” and although the phrasing seems foreign, it also seems brilliantly to recollect what little I remember of the late ‘50s Beat Generation-speak. To me, the language, and especially the dialogue, is as much an artifact as the speeches of Bronte’s Jane Eyre. And to both, that language was modern and true when their works were written. As a writer, I often read and listen to books as if I were wandering through a museum with the great masters.

And yet, as I listen to Kerouac, I have a memory of a day spent in my uncle’s print shop in downtown Los Angeles. I must have been about nine. I was dropped off by my mother early in the afternoon, and waited until six p.m. or so to get the ride to San Juan Capistrano for the weekend at my aunt and uncle’s house on the beach. 

With no entertainment but a set of colored pens and a very thick pad of paper, I chose not to draw, but to write. I can still see the pages in my mind, and would give much to have them to read again. But Kerouac brings back the cadence of the writing I did that day, in his “this happened, then that happened”  descriptions of his life on the road. 

I remember my running monologue of people passing by, what they were wearing, onomatopoeic references to the clunk-clunk-thwap of the printing presses in the next room, musings about the thoughts of the workers, revelations about my nine-year-old self, peppered with the self-conscious vocabulary of a child that loved to read the dictionary looking for new words with which to paint the world around her.

 I seem to recall that I filled over fifty pages of paper during that four or so hours, and that the time flew by. And I’ve read that Kerouac kept small notebooks into which he wrote his thoughts as he travelled, despite the legend of the “scroll,” the 120-foot piece of teletype paper that he supposedly filled with “On The Road” at one go.

But just the fact that a novel written in 1951 could bring my 1962 self into focus, here in 2011, reinforces my belief in the power of writing. Jack had no idea or care for the result, I imagine. He only knew he had to write it.

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