BRENDA: Our guest today is Tom Fitzgerald, author of Poor Richard’s Lament: A Most Timely Tale. Welcome to the show, Tom.

TOM: Thank you for having me.

BRENDA: From the title—Poor Richard’s Lament—we gather your novel has something to do with Ben Franklin—and regret?

TOM: Regret is a big part of it, yes.

BRENDA: Regret over?

TOM: Several things, but one in particular. Something Ben left out of his Autobiography.

BRENDA: Intentionally?

TOM: Certainly not intentionally, but not entirely by accident either. There’s an old saying in the legal community: Ignorance is no excuse. Something similar applies here, I think.

BRENDA: Interesting. Tell me more.

TOM: Franklin was a moral philosopher—in addition to many other things—and so many of his writings touched upon moral issues—not the kind we associate with religion, but the kind that deal with the secular aspects of life. Ben used the term “virtue” instead of “morality” as a way of making the distinction.

Fairly early on in his Autobiography, Ben declares 13 virtues to be “necessary or desirable.” “Necessary or desirable” toward what he cleverly does not tell us. With Industry and Frugality leading the pack, however, and Order and Resolution in lockstep close behind, one can fairly infer what Franklin had in mind: If we want to be materially successful in this world, we had better comport ourselves in accordance with his 13 virtues. In other words, we’d better tend to business.

Which is not inherently a bad thing, of course. However, if we were to agree that any system—social, economic, religious, mechanical, biological, whatever—needs to be in a state of balance or equilibrium in order to function properly (picture an out-of-balance washing machine), then we can see how Ben’s moral counsel might go awry.

BRENDA: Too much emphasis on the material.

TOM: Exactly.

BRENDA: But didn’t people back in Franklin’s time generally live a lot closer to the edge than we do today? And might not this be the reason for Franklin’s emphasis on taking care of business?

TOM: No question. The problem, though, lies not with what Franklin said, but with what he didn’t say.

BRENDA: The balance part.

TOM: Exactly.

BRENDA: So what did Franklin leave out?

TOM: In Poor Richard’s Lament, Ben is presented with a phalanx of 13 boys representing the 13 virtues he advocates in his Autobiography as being “necessary or desirable.” Each boy is holding a compass arrow pointed inward, toward himself. Ben is then presented with a circle of 13 girls representing 13 virtues he did not include in his Autobiography but that are arguably no less important to human well-being and happiness than the ones he did include. These virtues include Compassion, Empathy, Sacrifice, Forgiveness, and the like. Each girl is holding a compass arrow pointed outward, away from herself. Tellingly, none of the girls has a face; hence, none has a voice by which to make herself known.

BRENDA: So Ben only got it half right.

TOM: Exactly.

BRENDA: And the consequence?

TOM: When we look around today, whether in the business sector, or on Wall Street, or in politics, or in education, or in religion, or on our highways, what do we see? Do we see spontaneous acts of Empathy, Compassion, Sacrifice, and Forgiveness, or do we see something else altogether?

BRENDA: I take your point. So Ben blew it.

TOM: Yes and no. The primary culprit, of course, as always, is human nature itself—our natural inclination toward pointing the arrow of our concern toward ourselves. That said, though, Franklin had a unique opportunity to instill into the American character a much stronger reflex toward pointing the arrow of concern outward. The Japanese character, culturally shaped over generations to be at least as oriented toward other as toward self, is a good example of what is possible in this regard. Franklin did, in fact, take some advantage of the opportunity availed to him to promote balance, but he failed, one can easily argue, to take any significant advantage. Had he done so, slavery might have ended 75 years earlier than it did, the robber barons might never have raised greed to new heights, the Civil War might never have been fought—and you and I might never have heard of Bernie Madoff. However . . . “though the hour is late, yet still there is time.”

BRENDA: Ah. Do I sense a little redemption afoot?

TOM: There’s always hope.

BRENDA: I notice that most of your novel is written in Ben’s 18th-century dialect. Was this an authenticity issue for you? When in Rome?

TOM: It was. As the central character, Ben had to be fully present in order for the novel to work, which meant he had to speak exactly as he did back in the 1700s—not just here and there, for token effect, but throughout the 640 pages of the novel. This requirement was obvious to me at the very beginning, so I had, at the very beginning, to make a fundamental decision: All or nothing. Sink or swim. Fortunately, like Ben, I was a good swimmer.

BRENDA: Competitive?

TOM: No, I was way too slow for that. I was a distance swimmer.

BRENDA: English Channel?

TOM: Comparable, but much closer to home—across the eastern end of Lake Ontario, for instance.

BRENDA: How far was that?

TOM: About twenty miles.

BRENDA: Isn’t that even farther than the Channel—and just as cold?

TOM: When I finished, after being in 67-degree water for 19 hours, I had acute hypothermia and subcutaneous emphysema. The latter was from a tear in one of my lungs. I spent the night in a hospital.

BRENDA: Why do that to yourself?

TOM: In hindsight, it was a homespun rite of passage. I’ve always had a tendency toward grandiosity, so my rite had to be something really out of the ordinary.

BRENDA: Life threatening in fact.

TOM: As it turned out. There’s a wonderful scene toward the end of Huckleberry Finn in which Tom Sawyer keeps cranking up his own homespun ordeal until he nearly gets Huck, Jim, and himself killed. There’s a bit of Tom Sawyer in me, it would appear. In the long run, though, it was all to the good, as it actually made PRL possible.

BRENDA: How so?

TOM: Every ordeal, I have come to believe, prepares you for the next. The following year, I swam 27 miles, also in cold water, and spent another night in the hospital. Then I made it through the UDT/SEAL training program and spent a few months in Vietnam. Then I went through jump school and survived a malfunction on my third jump. Then I went through grad school in just 18 months while supporting a wife and three babies. Then I ran the Boston Marathon three times. I’m not sure I could have finished PRL if I hadn’t tested myself in all these other ways first. I almost didn’t as it was.

BRENDA: How so?

TOM: PRL was way too big a project for me. In order for it to work, I had to be able to create a credible approximation of Ben Franklin and sustain this over 640 pages. In effect, I had to be Ben Franklin; but Ben Franklin, as you know, was no ordinary person. He was a complex, multifaceted genius, a true polymath, a larger-than-life presence if ever there was one. Was Tom Fitzgerald, who had flunked both the third and the fourth grades, up to the task? All I had going for me was that I had once swum across the eastern end of Lake Ontario and nearly died doing it. I’ll never forget the day, the moment, when the truth of this terrible reality came crashing in on me. I had just finished a draft of the odyssey-on-Earth part of the book; I was four years in at this point. I went back to the beginning of this section to take stock of how well I had done. The first couple of pages showed a little promise, but then I found myself staring at page after page of pure garbage. Nice try, Tom, but no cigar. My heart sank. I plunged into despair.

BRENDA: But you didn’t stop.

TOM: I was 62 years old. My father had died at 51; his father at 57. There was no going back. It was sink or swim.

BRENDA: Another ordeal.

TOM: The one that all the others had prepared me for.

BRENDA: Why Ben?

TOM: As the main character?

BRENDA: Yes.

TOM: Several reasons. The two major ones, I’d have to say, were (1) Ben was a life-long moralist, as I mentioned, which opened him up to hypocrisy, which is the stuff of good storytelling; and (2) we tend to see Ben as one of us, everybody’s uncle, instead of as a marbleized demigod perched atop a pedestal on the National Mall.

BRENDA: You claim you didn’t have the right stuff to pull this project off, yet there must have been something about you, in you, that allowed you to achieve what one of your reviewers calls—I’m reading from the dust jacket—a “grand and gorgeous book,” another calls “a tour de force,” and a third calls “an astonishing feat of imagination.”

TOM: You’re boxing me in.

BRENDA: I am.

TOM: Obviously there had to be something in me that felt I could make Ben Franklin come alive on paper in a credible way. I don’t know what that something was. At the same time, there was something in me that felt very much the opposite. The result—after nine years of yo-yoing back-and-forth between “Yes I can” and “No you can’t”—is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve always wanted to create something truly beautiful. I grew up in a double-alcoholic home. There was no beauty there. People tell me PRL is exactly that, a thing of beauty. I want to believe them.

BRENDA: You have Ben Franklin in the flesh over 640 pages. You have his entire family in the flesh over 640 pagers. You have countless other characters in the flesh over 640 pages—including John Adams, who is pitch perfect, in my estimation. You have scenes all over Boston. You have scenes all over New York, including at the Waldorf Astoria. You have scenes all over Philadelphia. You even have scenes in Purgatory! I can’t even begin to imagine how much research this has all entailed.

TOM: My middle son, Matt, also a writer, after reading PRL, said to me, “Pop, there’s no way you could have written this book. You don’t have the patience.” I howled. He was, of course, dead right. In truth, had I known just how much research this project would ultimately entail, I very much doubt I could have committed to it. I’m not a researchy kind of guy. I like to sit down at my keyboard in the morning and start drawing from what’s already in me. I don’t like so much going out and gathering information or experience before I can write that first word. In the case of PRL, not only did I have to do a lot of research up front—reading and rereading nine biographies, for example, and visiting scores of physical sites, many several times over—I also had to do a lot of additional research during the course of the writing, as the need arose, which was often. I also had to do such things as verify that particular words or artifacts were contemporaneous with Franklin’s time. We use a lot of words today, and a lot of artifacts, that did not exist 200 to 300 years ago.

BRENDA: Your novel is subtitled “A Most Timely Tale.” What do you mean by timely?”

TOM: PRL is a response to a world that looks and feels to me to be on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. I keep picturing that out-of-balance washing machine. I can’t get it out of my head, though I’m not sure I should. PRL is also, I hope readers will agree, a rollicking good yarn.

BRENDA: Did you really flunk the third and fourth grades?

TOM: I flunked arithmetic in both grades and had be tutored over the summer in each case in order to be allowed to advance to the next grade. Seven years later, after having aced both algebra and geometry in my freshman and sophomore years in high school, I took the New York State trigonometry regents exam a semester early (it was a two-semester course) and aced it.

BRENDA: How do you explain that?

TOM: Blanche Webster—my eighth grade teacher. I had been acting out a lot in her class (my parents had already written me off as a ‘problem child’), so one day she moved my desk closer to hers, and didn’t take her eye off me the rest of the year. I blossomed.

BRENDA: Indeed. The book is Poor Richard’s Lament: A Most Timely Tale. The author is Tom Fitzgerald.

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