The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (106 page)

Some have wondered that this man who invented so many other things did not invent a new form of literature. But they have underestimated Franklin. For his
Autobiography
—probably the most widely read work by an American, after the Declaration of Independence—did create a new and decisively modern form of literature, the success saga. It is a chronicle, a credo, and a scenario for self-made men. It is a tale hard to imagine taking place in any but an urban capitalist society with a rising middle class. Benvenuto Cellini two centuries earlier had written his boastful memoirs of an artist-picaro. But his account, unlike Franklin’s, could not be a model for the lives of modern readers. And unlike Franklin’s “Art of Virtue,” Loyola’s
Spiritual Exercises
is hardly a handbook for the urban citizen.

Franklin’s life, a parable of New World possibilities, abounded in novelties. “The first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies, which confines the Attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over,” Franklin wrote in 1743 proposing an American Philosophical Society, “and there are
many in every Province that set them at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common stock of Knowledge.” His own life would document his open-ended list of “new discoveries” and inventions. The bare facts of his career needed no embellishment to become the success saga of a self-made man. Born in Boston in 1706, he attended grammar school and a school for writing and arithmetic. At ten he helped in his father’s business making tallow candles and boiling soap. From twelve to seventeen he served as apprentice in his brother’s printing shop, till they quarreled and he ran away to Philadelphia in 1723. There the affable young Franklin found work as a printer and attracted the attention of the governor, Sir William Keith, who promised to set him up in a printing business with assurance of government contracts. When Franklin went to London to secure the equipment, Keith never delivered on his promise and a disappointed Franklin returned to Philadelphia.

By 1730, with thrift and the aid of influential citizens, he set up his own printing establishment and began publishing the
Pennsylvania Gazette
. “The Business of Printer being generally thought a poor one, I was not to expect Money with a Wife unless with such a one, as I should not otherwise think agreeable. In the mean time, that hard-to-be-governed Passion of Youth had hurried me frequently into Intrigues with low Women that fell in my Way, which were attended with some Expense & great Inconvenience, beside a continual Risk to my Health by a Distemper which of all Things I dreaded, tho’ by great good Luck I escaped it.” He prudently married Deborah Read, the daughter of the respectable family with whom he had been lodging.

Franklin prospered in business and became a leading citizen by promoting every imaginable kind of improvement. He proposed to make the streets safer by a police force, to make them more passable by paving and cleaning and lighting. He organized a volunteer fire department, promoted a city hospital and a circulating library, an academy for youth and a university for the promotion of learning. The Junto, the debating club he founded in 1727, flourished anew in the American Philosophical Society, which became the forum for botanists, physicians, natural historians, and philosophers from all the colonies. He made his own basic discoveries in electricity, speculated on earthquakes, and devised practical inventions like his lightning rod and his Franklin stove, which have not been much improved since.

His public services—first in trying to make the separation unnecessary, then in winning Independence, and finally in creating the new nation and shaping its government—led some to call him, even before Washington, the father of his country, later emended to grandfather of his country. His last public act was a petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery. He seems not a mere individual but, as his biographer Carl Van Doren says, a whole committee.

Although an American ambassador and a versatile high priest of the European Enlightenment he was somehow not a literary man. Unlike his younger friend Thomas Jefferson, he was notoriously uninterested in the beauties of nature or of literature, and not stirred by poetry, architecture, or the romance of history. “Many people are fond of accounts of old Buildings and Monuments, but for me I confess that if I could find in my travels a receipt for making Parmesan cheese, it would give me more satisfaction than a transcript from any inscription from any Stone whatever.” He generally made his own writing, as he prescribed, “smooth, clear, and short,” and he always persuaded his readers to a practical (and often benevolent) purpose. Franklin’s “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress” was simply: “Prefer old Women to young ones!” His reasons concluded “8th and Lastly. They are
so grateful
! (1745).” His “Rules by which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One” (1773) exposed the follies of George III. His writings, like his American Philosophical Society, aimed at “promoting useful Knowledge.”

It is surprising that Franklin’s famous literary creation, his
Autobiography
, the record of so well-organized and forethoughtful a life, would be so fragmentary, so incomplete, and so accidentally composed. It was not divided into chapters, nor even into a clear chronology. Yet the inchoate work survived and became popular through the centuries and across the world, a model for a whole genus of modern writing.

The incentive for Franklin came not in Philadelphia but when he was in England in August 1771 during his mission of reconciliation for the colonies. While enjoying the convivial family life of the pro-American bishop of St. Asaph, Jonathan Shipley, and his wife and five small daughters at their country house in Twyford near Winchester, Franklin entertained them with anecdotes of his early life in Boston and Philadelphia. The bishop’s wife, learning it was the birthday of Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, celebrated the occasion with a dinner where “among other nice things, we had a floating island,” and all toasted the grandson and the grandfather. In such amiable circumstances, “expecting the enjoyment of a week’s uninterrupted leisure,” Franklin was stirred to begin his autobiography (he always called them his Memoirs) in the form of a letter to his son.

During these thirteen days in “the sweet retirement of Twyford where my only business was a little scribbling in the garden study,” he wrote the whole first part, in a room that the Shipley family later called Franklin’s Room. He probably read parts of the book to the family of assembled daughters nightly as he wrote them. He was at home and still fluent as a letter-writer, as he had been some twenty-five years before in describing to Peter Collinson his “Experiments and Observations on Electricity.” This first part of the
Autobiography
, which finally was nearly half the whole manuscript of
his unfinished work, brought the story down to 1730, when he was only twenty-four. He recounted his youth in Boston and Philadelphia, his trip to England under the misleading auspices of Governor Keith of Pennsylvania, his return to Philadelphia, his marriage to Deborah and the launching of his own printing business, and the first of his Philadelphia projects, “the Mother of all the North American Subscription Libraries, now so numerous.”

His autobiography must not have been Franklin’s passion, for he allowed thirteen years to pass before he turned to the work again, and under less happy family circumstances. In 1776, after helping to draft and then signing the Declaration of Independence, he had been home only a year when he sailed again for France as American commissioner. The next years would be busy and fruitful in negotiating the crucial alliance with France and then finally settling the treaty of peace with Britain, which brought the war to an end on September 3, 1783. Franklin asked to be recalled, but Congress kept him on, seeking treaties of commerce with the European nations, till he returned to Philadelphia in 1785, after nine years’ service abroad.

On arrival in Paris in 1776, Franklin had become an instant celebrity. Parisians fancied him to be a backwoods Voltaire and he did nothing to discourage them. They admired him as a Quaker, which he was not, but he preferred to let them think so. To keep his head warm on the November transatlantic crossing he had worn a fur cap, which the Parisians took for the badge of a frontiersman. Franklin cooperated by wearing it on special occasions, and in his French portraits he made it his trademark.

Franklin’s legendary frontier charm enchanted the most elegant drawing rooms and most desirable bedrooms. The rumors of his liaisons were countless. One of the most appealing concerned his relationship with the beautiful Mme. Helvetius, widow of the famous philosopher, and herself known for her Tuesday philosophical salons. Her caresses and familiarities with Franklin shocked the proper Abigail Adams, in Paris with her husband John. When Mme. Helvetius was sixty and the French writer Fontenelle was nearly one hundred, he paid her the proverbial compliment of an aging wit, “Ah, Madame, if I were only eighty again!” Which the witty Franklin, himself now nearly eighty, managed to improve when she once accused him of putting off a visit to her that she had expected. “Madame,” he said, “I am waiting till the nights are longer.”

After two months in a room in a hotel on the Rue de l’Université, he retreated to Passy, on the road to Versailles, “a neat village on a high ground, half a mile from Paris, with a large garden to walk in.” There, in the intervals of his diplomacy for the new nation, Franklin held a quite original philosophical court. Though constantly warned of the danger of spies, he boasted that he need have no fear of them because surely he would
“be concerned in no affairs that I should blush to have made public.” But after his death it would be revealed that Edward Bancroft, his confidential aide, was a British spy, regularly reporting to London the American deliberations.

In 1784, after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, and while at Passy awaiting recall, Franklin received a letter from a Philadelphia friend, Abel James, who had seen the copy of the manuscript of the first part of the
Autobiography
that Franklin had left years before with his fellow Philadelphian Joseph Galloway. In England, Galloway had led the Loyalist cause, and helped General Howe plan his American maneuvers. But the manuscript that James described as “about twenty-three sheets in thy own handwriting, containing an account of the parentage and life of thyself, directed to thy son, ending in the year 1730” remained in the hands of Galloway’s wife after Galloway died, leaving Abel James an executor of his estate. James urged Franklin to carry on. “What will the world say if kind, humane and benevolent Ben. Franklin, should leave his friends and the world deprived of so pleasing and profitable a work; a work which would be useful and entertaining not only to a few, but to millions.” About the same time he received a letter from Benjamin Vaughan (1751–1835), the English firebrand and friend of revolutionary causes, who had dared publish a selection of Franklin’s papers in London in 1779. In a lengthy letter praising Franklin and “a rising people” Vaughan begged him to “let the world into the traits of your genuine character, as civil broils may otherwise tend to disguise or traduce it.”

Franklin incorporated both these letters in his manuscript as a kind of apologia or advertisement at the outset of the Paris continuation of his
Autobiography
. Since he had no copy of the earlier manuscript with him he could not remember precisely where he had stopped. He wrote only a few pages at Passy, but these included some of the most characteristic sections detailing his program for self-perfection. On the long sea voyage home in 1785, instead of pursuing his memoirs he preferred to write his reflections on science. Franklin did not return to the
Autobiography
until after the Constitutional Convention when he was back home in Philadelphia in August 1788. This third part, about half the whole manuscript, recounted his rise to prosperity and prominence in Philadelphia, his improvement projects, his efforts to engage the Quakers in defense of the colony, his electrical experiments, and his work raising supplies for General Braddock’s ill-starred American expedition of 1754, carrying his story down to 1757. In November 1789 Franklin sent off manuscript copies of all three parts of his memoirs to friends in France and England asking whether they should be published at all, and whether he should bother “to finish them.” “I shall rely upon your opinions, for I am now grown so old and feeble in
mind, as well as body, that I cannot place any confidence in my own judgment.” Without waiting for these replies, ailing and near death, in the early months of 1790 he added a few pages in a manuscript that ends with crooked lines, suggesting they may have been written in bed. The work was not only unfinished but the manuscript appropriately ends in midsentence.

In more ways than one, Franklin’s
Autobiography
was an appropriate literary creation to come from America and has often been called the first American addition to world literature. But of the works that have lived it is one of the most incoherent and incomplete. The work breaks off before even the rumblings of the coming American Revolution, and tells us nothing of Franklin’s part in the Revolution, the framing of the Constitution, and the peacemaking, in all of which he played a leading role.

The first part of
the Autobiography
, which opened, “Dear Son,” as a letter to William Franklin (1731–1813), was enlivened by “several little family Anecdotes of no Importance to others.” But the second part, written at the prodding of James and Vaughan was “intended for the public. The Affairs of the Revolution occasion’d the Interruption.” The Revolution, too, had explained the unhappy rupture with his son that made it impossible now for him to continue his memoirs as a family letter. William Franklin had accompanied his father to England in 1757 and had become an effective governor of New Jersey in 1763. But he remained a Loyalist and sided with Britain in the Stamp Act controversy. In 1776 he was arrested by the Jersey Provincial Assembly and the Continental Congress and spent two years in a Connecticut prison before moving to England in 1778. When Franklin was at Passy in 1784, William wrote offering to visit him for a reunion. But Franklin, with uncharacteristic coldness, refused the offer. “Deserted in my old Age by my only Son,” he explained that he might have excused William remaining “Neuter” in the late war, but not for “taking up Arms against me, in a Cause wherein my good Fame, Fortune, and Life were all at Stake.” Though never reconciled to his Loyalist son, en route home Franklin did stop at Southampton in 1785 for a last formal meeting. He recorded his bitter intransigence when he willed William a conspicuously small bequest. “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”