Twenty-five Books That Shaped America

Thomas C. Foster

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062092076
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire Histoire et théorie

From the author of the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes a highly entertaining and informative book on the twenty-five works of literature that have most shaped the American character.

Thomas C. Foster applies his much-loved combination of wit, know-how, and analysis to explain how each work has shaped our very existence as readers, students, teachers, and Americans. Heilluminates how books such as The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, My Ántonia, The Great Gatsby, The Maltese Falcon, Their Eyes Were Watching God, On the Road, The Crying of Lot 49, and others captured an American moment, how they influenced our perception of nationhood and citizenship, and what about them endures in the American character. Twenty-five Books That Shaped America is a fun and enriching guide to America through its literature.

Chapter One
Maybe Just a Little Made-Up

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

A Field Guide to the American Character (from the inside):

• We Americans are an earnest bunch. Forthright. Honest. Fair. Decent. Truthful. Above all, truthful. Gary Cooper could be our national bird.

• We Americans are a duplicitous lot. Sneaky. Low-down. Willing to say anything. Completely untrustworthy. Untruthful, especially in writing. We should take the presidents off our money and replace them with Truman Capote.

Both statements are true. Except maybe for the bird thing.

What we know for sure is that we can’t trust one another when it comes to nonfiction in general, autobiographies and memoirs in particular. Periodically we get reminders of this. Someone’s Pulitzer Prize–winning series of newspaper articles is revealed as a fraud, the homeless child living on his own or the eighty-seven-year-old granny cooking meth a total fabrication. Or Clifford Irving comes along with a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes. Or James Frey sets the gold standard with his “memoir” of addiction, A Million Little Pieces, whose chief crime was fooling Oprah Winfrey into believing it. Or Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, ostensibly a Native American first-person tale, is actually written by Asa Carter, a former Klansman and thoroughgoing racist. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

Okay, then, we get the idea that sometimes factual accounts may be fictive. But what about autobiographies and memoirs that are considered legitimate? Surely they’re true, aren’t they? Depends on what we mean by true. Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night is somewhat less fictive than The Naked and the Dead, which is a novel, but Armies is very artfully shaped and only loosely attached to fact. Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, which was the basis of the movie Julia, is quite freely adapted from life. Twain’s nonfiction, from Life on the Mississippi to A Tramp Abroad, would have been seriously inconvenienced by a fact-checker. Same with Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. And none of them would have been improved by the endeavors of that personage. The problem with the truth is that it’s often not very interesting. We’re far better being guided in our nonfiction by the pronouncement of Twain’s most famous creation, who said of his master that “he told the truth, mainly.” A certain amount of verisimilitude is nice in an autobiography, but not so much as to get in the way of a good story.

You probably think I’m kidding.

Naturally, we’re conflicted. We want a good story, a certain amount of dash and thrill, entertainment with our instruction. The pulp vats are full of books that were too dutiful to the truth, that subscribed too much to Sgt. Joe Friday’s just-the-facts-ma’am school of reporting. At the same time, we’re outraged by transgressions of the Word. How dare he make things up? How dare she take liberties? I think it’s a Protestant thing. No, it doesn’t just afflict Protestants, but that’s where this particular mind-set originates. The energies of the Reformation, from the moment Martin Luther nailed his ninety-nine theses to the door of the cathedral, moved us toward a direct, personal encounter with Holy Writ, which in turn led us to seek to embrace all writing with a determined adherence to the literal truth of the written word. This may explain why so many Americans call themselves “strict constructionists,” even when they can’t remember which parts of their Constitution are actually in the Declaration of Independence. Whatever the Framers said, by golly, is an immutable truth for all people in all ages. When they went from being farmers and planters and shopkeepers and nasty in-fighters and slave-owners and petty squabblers and slavery opponents and tavern habitués to Framers of the Sacred Document, they became infallible. Nice work if you can get it. And we want to treat all writing as some subspecies of the Word, even when it’s written by a lowlife pretending he was an even lower life in a genre where one has to limbo all the way down to get attention.

Clearly, however, people who have inherited this set of values will have some difficulties with autobiography or even with general nonfiction. Because almost everyone is going to pretty things up—or maybe ugly them up, if that’s what the market demands—from time to time. At least, almost everyone has so far. Our earliest documents are highly suspect. Did the colony at Roanoke really look as good as Thomas Harriot portrayed it in 1588 in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia? Were the natives really as beautiful, as virtuous, as kindly as he portrayed them? Did they really become that much more warlike by the time Captain John Smith arrived? That much less attractive and civilized? Somebody here is not telling the truth, the whole truth, et cetera. Probably two somebodies. We know that it took Smith nine years to get around to thinking the Pocahontas story was important enough to publish, and that each time he returned to it, the tale got more colorful. So how can we explain this? Harriot was writing a travelogue, an enticement to others to come to this newfoundland. Smith was doing the same, but with a difference; his economic model included moving the natives out to make way for new colonists and larger profits. The process of dehumanizing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn’t think Satan was involved.

All of this is by way of saying that we shouldn’t expect too much reality in our autobiographies. Not even in our most famous. Especially not in our most famous. I should start by admitting that there was, indeed, a Benjamin Franklin. You can look it up. And that Franklin makes an appearance in The Autobiography. We just can’t tell how much of him is there, which parts are made up, or how to tell the difference. The star of this show is a character by the name of “Benjamin Franklin,” an invention, a literary device, a mechanism for imparting moral instruction. He shares with the historical personage many experiences and acquaintances, a positive outlook and can-do spirit, and a general good humor. He diverges in having the rough edges knocked off, the inconvenient portions ignored.

Actually, there are two creations named Benjamin Franklin at work here. One, as we have discussed, is the character. The other is the narrative presence. He, too, is a fiction, and a most handy one at that. Like every author, Franklin must decide what sort of presence will narrate his tale, and the fact that this particular tale is his own life matters not a whit. Throughout his writing life, Franklin adopted personae, characters who could speak for their author in the tone and manner appropriate to the piece. Of these numerous creations, his favorite was what the late University of Delaware English professor J. A. Leo Lemay called the “ingénu narrator”: less worldly than Franklin really was, slightly surprised at his own actions, perhaps not quite up to speed. This stance, literally speaking, is patent nonsense. No one was speedier than Franklin. Besides, by the time he writes The Autobiography, he is past sixty-five and very worldly, having traveled widely and become what Professor Lemay calls “the most famous and the most politically powerful American in the world.” Yet that bit of nonsense works splendidly for his purposes. It allows him to share in the surprise of his character’s discoveries. It helps him avoid bombast and sentimentality, the bedeviling elements in old men’s memoirs. And it makes him companionable to readers. See, he says, we’re all in this together. Most importantly, it allows him to undertake the central mission of the work, the creation of the myth of Franklin, without seeming to become “mythic.” That strategy is aided by the device of the letter to his son, with which he frames the first sections.

How does this narrative miracle occur? Here’s the beginning. Having just reminded his son that he, Franklin père, has taken pleasure in knowing his own ancestors’ activities, he declares:

Imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with, and expecting the enjoyment of a week’s uninterrupted leisure in my present country retirement, I sit down to write them for you. To which I have besides some other inducements. Having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of felicity, the conducing means I made use of, which with the blessing of God so well succeeded, my posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own situations, and therefore fit to be imitated.

It’s all at work here. The elements of the myth—obscure birth, rise to prominence, success and happiness, blessings of heaven (used here as elsewhere chiefly as a means of deflecting charges of boasting or egotism), possibility of instructive lessons to be drawn—are all present and accounted for. There’s the indirect approach to instruction as he comes sidling up, almost indecisive: “my posterity may like to know,” “it may be equally agreeable to you.” I don’t want to force anything on you young people, but if you think it would be worth your while to hear, I’ll say a few words. Would that be okay? Franklin wouldn’t say “okay,” having died about the time of the first recorded use, but you get the idea. But the real beauty of this passage, and of the book as a whole, is the tone. He is familiar, digressive, self-deprecating, avuncular rather than paternal, slightly doting or even foolish, a sort of Polonius minus the insistence. It is an artful performance. There is nothing meandering or doddering about the old man here; he knows exactly where he’s going and how he wants to get there. And it works. We take the companionable old man’s hand as he leads us through the life—or selected highlights, since any modern “life” would come in at six or seven times the length—and take in the lessons he offers.

Including one lesson he hadn’t counted on. I firmly believe Franklin intends us to live as he lived, or at least as he said he lived—frugally, simply, honestly, seizing advantages where they arise but treating others equitably. I’m less sure he foresees us writing as he writes. Does he know that he will become not merely the model for American lives but for American autobiography? Doubtful. But he is. For at least the next century, and perhaps right up to today, no public figure could write his life without the Philadelphia Everyman looking over his shoulder. A hundred years later Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams, employs the ironic, self-deprecating tone, even if he does so in a third-person narrative. He’s less optimistic, more concerned with how he didn’t take up the family business of being president, but in a couple of ways he’s still following the same template.

And what is this story Franklin is telling in such a genial manner? Oh, on some level it’s his story. He’s there in all the scenes. But it’s not “Ben Franklin, individual,” or even “Ben Franklin, future public servant and all-around man.” Rather, it’s “Ben Franklin, representative American.” Or perhaps, “exemplary American.” What Old Ben is really interested in is shaping a version of the American master-story, what we can call the “American myth” if we don’t get hung up on the idea that “myth” means “untruth.” It doesn’t. A myth is simply a body of story that matters. He hoped that this particular story would matter to his future countrymen, that they would organize their lives around the lessons found in it.

Those lessons would have to come from the first two-thirds of his life, since the four parts he managed to complete take him only to 1758 and his failed attempt to petition English authorities for redress of colonial grievances. Their refusal would come back to haunt them, but not in this book. He had outlined a fifth section taking him up to the Treaty of Paris, but death intervened. Strangely, that loss may have strengthened the book thematically. True, we are poorer for not having his account of the momentous events surrounding the Revolution, for not hearing his version of drafting the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, though, that larger political narrative might have swamped the personal tale he does relate. In any event, this one works fine for his purposes and ours. It’s our favorite, the story of an individual’s rise from poverty to affluence and from obscurity to prominence by means of what Saul Bellow will have Augie March call “luck and pluck,” mostly the latter, although he invokes the blessings of Providence often enough for balance. See, he says, you can make a go of it if you try. It’s easy. Be like me.

Perhaps the greatest strategy of The Autobiography is the use of his craft as the conceit or controlling metaphor. The mistakes he wishes us to note particularly he calls his “errata.” Now an erratum is a mistake in editing or printing a document, historically amended by an errata sheet, which, depending on the number of such gaffes, was a single slip of paper with a correction on it or an entire sheet of corrections, added loose-leaf to the book. The practice, alas, has largely vanished from modern publishing. Do not take that as a sign that modern books are inevitably better edited. His errata are a cute device, very tied into his life’s work and interests, from printing to lending libraries to vast reading. They are so much better, however, when considered etymologically. “Erratum” comes from the Latin errare, “to stray.” His follies, then, take the form of straying from his set path. Another writer of the day, I dare say almost any other writer of the day, would emphasize the Latin root. But Franklin is not any other writer. Instead, he goes with the homey, the familiar term of trade to stress his drifting from the marked trail. And he gets it both ways, a word that is both slightly alien and entirely personal. His errata, too, often cut two ways, reflecting poorly on him but not being completely his fault. The first of them occurs when he lends part of Mr. Vernon’s money, which had been entrusted to him for safekeeping, to his friend Collins, who decamped without repayment and was never heard from again. Franklin learns a valuable lesson about borrowing and lending (recalling the advice of Polonius), yet any criminality resides with another; the most he can accuse himself of, or is willing to, would be poor judgment in the matter of friends. And learn he does.

The early portions of the book especially are taken up with lessons in practical morality and right conduct. Franklin, though at the time of writing he had been an intimate of David Hume and other notable philosophers of the day, does not concern himself with the abstract issues of ethics. Instead, rising burgher that he fashions his earlier self to be, he focuses on the sensible and immediate aspects of morality. More than one commentator has noted that he is a pragmatist nearly a century ahead of William James, and he shows that tendency in his famous thirteen virtues:

1. Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. Moderation. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

11. Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

This may be the funniest list anyone ever composed. And he knows it. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” Really? Under “Humility”? How arrogant is that? My favorite, however, is “Chastity”: rarely use venery but for health or offspring. Define “health,” please. Is mental health included? Which elements of physical well-being are implicated? And that “rarely” is the perfect out: okay, you can cut loose for no reason every once in a while, just so long as you can apply the word “rare” to the occasion. Nearly every item has an out built into it: mostly do this, try not to do that too often, except for these reasons or unless the moon is new. But the best part is the implementation phase. Franklin knows that he can’t achieve goodness all at once, and the effort would ...