Books: High Diddle-Diddling

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The procedure amounts to an elaborate game. One of the great players was Benjamin Franklin, whom Lindberg hails as America's classic "do-it-yourself Self." Popular history tells a rags-to-riches tale that parallels the birth of the nation. History is not incorrect, though Franklin's Autobiography and his how-to text The Way to Wealth reveal a great practitioner of situation ethics. His affable description of "one of the first errata of my life" cannot disguise that he employed a highhanded scheme to break his legal obligation to complete an apprenticeship at his brother's print shop in Boston.

Lindberg's self-made men, boosters, gadgeteers, jacks of all trades and "shape shifters" share a love of the game that often exceeds their lust for profits. Even such desperate survivors as the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn threw themselves wholeheartedly into their roles. Their shenanigans tended to cloud the fact that Huck relished his own duplicities, and nearly everyone in the book was tricking someone else.

With the publication of P.T. Barnum's autobiography in 1855, says Lindberg, the con man in America went public. The rush to grab land, swindle immigrants and kite stock gathered momentum. As a great showman, Barnum hoodwinked the suckers and made them like it. Who could hate a man able to move crowds by changing the exit sign to one that read, "This way to the Grand Egress." His book ratified cynicism as entertainment, if not instruction.

Lindberg still detects the trend in society and fiction. Packaging is frequently given more attention than the product; politicians unashamedly talk about their image and how to sell it. In movies and books, notes the author, "con men now not only appear in a zany mix of styles, but they simultaneously carry on criminal activities and redemptive ones." In short, we no longer clearly distinguish between the good confidence man and the bad one.

Lindberg is a good con man. Contemporary literary critics can be lifeless and dutifully impenetrable. As Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher put it in Humboldt's Gift, "Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse." Lindberg takes care of more business than most readers may care to handle. But his new readings of old books demonstrate how ingeniously some of our best writers juggled the subject of high ideals and low practices. It is an act that requires more than grace under pressure. In Lindberg's felicitous and confident phrase, it takes "poise in ambivalence."

—ByR.Z. Sheppard

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