‘The Count of Concord’ by Nicholas Delbanco

The Count of Concord

A Novel

Nicholas Delbanco

Dalkey Archive Press: 478 pp., $15.95 paper

Students of the American Revolution know Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, as an American royalist spy. Historians of science will tell you he co-founded the Royal Institution and gave the great chemist Humphry Davy his start. Most Americans have never heard of Rumford, though they may own cans of baking powder bearing his name and profile.

Nicholas Delbanco’s novel “The Count of Concord” is, among other things, an act of reclamation. Franklin Roosevelt cited Thompson -- along with Jefferson and Franklin -- as one of “the three greatest intellects America ever brought forth,” but he has failed to make an impression on most of us. Delbanco, a professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of many novels, offers this “fact-fraught invention” in an effort to spread the word about a man who was “famous, infamous, and is forgotten today.”

The facts: Born the son of farmers in Woburn, Mass., in 1753, Thompson took up school teaching, married a widow (“ample both in waist and fortune”), fathered a daughter, spied for the Redcoats, fled to London, secured posts as private secretary to Lord George Germain, undersecretary of state for the Colonies and colonel in the King’s American Dragoons, battled American patriots in South Carolina, earned a knighthood, joined the court in Munich, swept that city’s beggars into workhouses, reorganized the Bavarian army, introduced the potato to Central Europe, created Munich’s English Garden, co-founded the Royal Institution in London, married the widow of chemist Antoine Lavoisier and spent his waning days as a cranky, drooling old fool, suffering from syphilis or stroke, with a housemaid/mistress who suckled him and their bastard son, as Delbanco tells it, dying in 1814.

Thompson also experimented and invented. He studied gunpowder, the insulating properties of clothing, nutrition, coffee makers, stoves, lamps, photometers and steam-heating systems. In his day, he was most noted as the designer of an innovative fireplace and as promoter of a certain recipe of hearty stew -- known as “Rumford’s soup” -- as a dietary staple. His most famous scientific observation focused on the heat produced during the boring of cannons, which led him to reject the prevailing “caloric” theory, which held that heat was a fluid, in favor of a “vibratory” model.

Amid his war-making, politicking and experimenting, Delbanco’s Thompson finds time for a great deal of sex, managing to sustain, despite two marriages, a “life-long state of . . . non-nuptial bliss.” As the conquests mount, the reader may feel he has entered into a tale of Harry Paget Flashman, the randy fictional antihero who stars in the novels of George MacDonald Fraser.

Like Flashman, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire is catholic in his sexual tastes, sleeping with both the Lord and Lady George and helping their two grown daughters sate themselves upon a rocking horse equipped with a “prodigious penis.” A Bavarian countess eats marzipan from Thompson’s member; another mistress, in Paris, opts for sorbet. A Swiss milkmaid “received him on her knees”; he met the duke of Burgundy’s young sister and “took her standing up”; Madame Lavoisier agrees, in a contract, to let Thompson “use me on all fours.” In London and Paris he buys boys: “Their downcast eyes and slim-hipped frames were sweet to him.”

Delbanco’s prose is impeccable, and not infrequently poetic. This is how he describes Thompson’s affair with the radical Boston printer Isaiah Thomas’ wife, who supplied intelligence about revolutionary activities: “While Thomas printed, Thompson pressed, and she answered in her transports everything he asked.” In an author’s note, Delbanco explains that the project lay half-finished for a decade because of the central character’s lack of character. “[F]ew men have written so extensively about their own achievements and with so little awareness of the human cost entailed . . . ,” Delbanco writes, whereas “the protagonist of a long novel fairly requires some self-awareness.”

Like Edmund Morris writing about Ronald Reagan, Delbanco had to shape a story around a man who lacked an interior life, and the two authors chose the same solution: inventing a narrator. Morris concocted a time-traveling version of himself, whereas Delbanco creates Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson, a clever but slightly dotty widow who purports to be a modern descendant of Thompson. In the midst of recounting her ancestor’s biography, Sally takes breaks to devote chapters to herself, sketching out the story of her own life and giving “authorial commentary” on Thompson’s.

Sally shows flashes of humor and insight, noting, for instance, that Thompson was self-invented and self-made, a “true American in this regard, even if a traitor.” But her dominant tone is a hectoring pedantry: She addresses the reader as “class” and offers the moral of the story she’s telling. One turns these pages impatiently, anxious to move on to the enthralling accounts of Thompson’s adventures. The author might have done better to dismiss this intrusive narrator in favor of what the novel does well: offer readers a picaresque retelling of an astonishing American life. *

Mark Essig is the author of “Edison and the Electric Chair.”