Brian Wilson, Ben Franklin and some completely unsuitable Father's Day reflections

Not to begrudge anyone his gifts, but some dads just don't deserve to be celebrated as such.

Brian Wilson's death reminded me first of the wide-eyed beauty of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" and "Sloop John B" and the weird majesty of "Smile,” recovered from the wreckage decades later to deliver on Wilson’s promise of a “teenage symphony to God” — as well as, to an extent, the less sanguine assessment of his bandmate turned nemesis, Mike Love: “a whole album of Brian’s madness.” But it also made me think of a more than sufficient reason for such madness: the physical and emotional abuse Wilson suffered at the hands of a father he described as “violent” and “cruel.” Wilson’s accounts of his childhood suggest a darker reading of the opening lyric of “Pet Sounds”: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?”

The approach of Father’s Day already had me thinking about another great American and terrible father who happened to be one and the same: Benjamin Franklin.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Franklin confirms the widespread impression that he was America’s most relatable and remarkable Founding Father. Franklin had good enough taste to leave Boston for Philadelphia in his adolescence; went on to eschew the era’s silly wigs for his trademark skullet, sometimes adorned with a deliberately rustic fur cap; and despite all the “early to bed”-style homilies associated with him, came to unabashedly enjoy such earthly pleasures as sleeping in, eating a lot and flirting with foreign women. At the same time, he made an almost superhuman mark in an improbable array of fields, from journalism and science to politics and diplomacy.

But Franklin’s monumental stature in history is nearly matched by his inadequacy as a husband. He spent astonishing stretches of his marriage far from his common-law wife, Deborah, including its last decade. Granted, some of this time was dedicated to such pressing matters as attempting to avert the Revolutionary War, but Franklin also neglected his family out of personal preference for more entertaining pursuits. As Deborah neared death, five years after she had suffered a stroke and despite numerous fruitless entreaties for Franklin’s return, Franklin was, Isaacson writes, “enjoying a flirtatious series of chess matches with a fashionable woman he had just met in London.”

Franklin learned of her death through a letter from his illegitimate son, William, who endured an even more painful estrangement from him. Franklin had a habit of frowning on his son’s triumphs, including his appointment as royal governor of New Jersey, which ultimately put them on opposite sides of a world-altering conflict. In the same letter, William pleaded for the return not only of his father but also of his own son, Temple, whom Franklin had taken abroad with him. Their troubled relationship would conclude with Franklin wresting control of William’s son and his remaining American property, partly as repayment of his son’s financial debts to him, which he had meticulously recorded and hassled him over for years.

None of this is particularly suitable reading for Father’s Day, and I certainly wouldn’t deny any dad — myself included — what’s coming to him. But amid a celebration premised on glorifying fatherhood in and of itself, it’s worth keeping in mind how many fathers deserve no such thing. Some of these terrible fathers were great Americans; others raised great Americans despite themselves.

Wilson had hinted at a disturbing connection between his musical genius and the depredations of his father, a failed songwriter, which were succeeded by the “jealous,” “negative” internal voices he hallucinated for most of his life. “When I’m on stage, I try to combat the voices by singing really loud,” he told the magazine Ability. “When I’m not on stage, I play my instruments all day, making music for people.” The music, at least, has outlived the torment.