Great Man

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN--Carl Van Doren -Viking ($3.75).

Americans may think of Washington freezing at Valley Forge, of Patrick Henry demanding liberty or death, but they never catch Benjamin Franklin in such heroic poses. Instead, the old Philadelphian goes beaming and nodding through history, saying chuckling things to pretty girls, advising young men to save their money and get up early in the morning. Whether he is denouncing the King, flying his kites or delivering himself of his flawless platitudes, he is self-confident, unselfconscious, comfortable, good-natured insatiably curious.

But only Franklin himself, of all the people who have written about his life, seems to have realized just how droll a character he was. His latest biographer, Carl Van Doren, whose 845-page biography is published this week, makes it plain that Franklin was a great man, a notable scientist, a superb diplomat, an enterprising printer. But when Franklin as a human being, with his quirks and oddities, emerges from these close-packed pages, it is usually in the well-chosen quotations from Franklin's Autobiography.

Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin is not so much a biography as an encyclopedia--meaty, informative and valuable, but with few literary charms. It includes the whole story of Franklin's career (Author Van Doren lists 27 subjects or episodes treated for the first time) and readers who stay with it come back with a rich historical haul. They get a good idea of what it was like to be a 17-year-old penniless apprentice in Philadelphia in 1723; a fresh account of the state of science when Franklin began his electrical experiments; an essay on the more worldly of Poor Richard's maxims, such as "There's more old drunkards than old doctors," or "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards." Genuinely exciting is the 200-page record of the growing antagonism between England and the colonies, as Franklin witnessed it in London, where as a colonial agent he fought the Stamp Act, worked desperately for a reconciliation, appeared before Parliament to be baited by stupid and arrogant Tories, and was finally harried out of the country, cursing the "extreme corruption . . . in this rotten old state."

The Franklin who was involved in great affairs gets full treatment from Author Van Doren. The other Franklin--lying on his back in the water and letting a kite tow him across a pond--is unfortunately written of almost as soberly; and Author Van Doren is so intent on making Franklin a great scientist that he misses the comedy of such scenes as Franklin spilling oil out of a boat to study the effect on waves, building his outlandish "armonica" of 37 musical glasses which whirled like a spinning wheel, and playing his harp, guitar and violin between interviews with ministers and sessions of scientific societies. Franklin had a good time; it is difficult to think of a public figure who enjoyed himself more. The world was full of wonders for him, from the way little girls speculated about their future marriages to the clever way the paving stones of Paris were fitted together; and at 70, when he was in grave danger of being hanged for treason, he was still going strong, as inquisitive and observant as ever, noting the change of temperature when his ship entered the Gulf Stream on his way to France and speculating on the ways of flying fish, currency and French politics.

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