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.”
During these years in France, Franklin sought to meet writers he admired, but more than once he suffered their distrust of the American cause. One day in 1781 Franklin found himself staying at the same French inn with Edward Gibbon, whom we have met as the famous historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He sent a friendly message to Gibbon expressing admiration for his work and asking for the pleasure of his company. Gibbon, an unrepentant Tory, answered that, much as he admired Franklin as a man and philosopher, being a loyal subject of his king he could not have conversation with a rebel. Franklin, unfazed, is reputed to have replied to Gibbon that he still had great respect for Gibbon the historian. And, he added, he would be glad to provide all t
he materials in his own possession when Gibbon came to write his history of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.
Franklin’s miscellaneous Autobiography had an appropriately disorderly publishing history. None of the work was ever published in Franklin’s lifetime or by him. Its first known publication was an unauthorized version in French in 1791, the year after Franklin’s death, which was then translated back into English by an unidentified London journalist. And it was only through retranslations from the French that the work was known in English until 1818, when Franklin’s grandson printed an authorized version from a manuscript that Franklin himself had revised in 1789. Franklin’s original manuscript was finally found in France in 1868, the fourth part was now included, and the whole work at last appeared in Franklin’s own words.
America offered a new stage for European man. And what Franklin euphemistically called the “Art of Virtue,” his “arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” was really a prescription for success in this modern world. His thirteen virtues were all self-regarding: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility. None of them pertained to God or Salvation. His was an eminently practical scheme, for which he gave detailed instructions. He prepared a ruled notebook, then devoted one week to each of his virtues, making a black mark in the appropriate box every time he committed a fault. “To avoid the Trouble of renewing now & then my little Book, which by scraping out the Marks on the Paper of old Faults to make room for new Ones in a new Course, became full of Holes: I transferr’d my Tables & Precepts to the Ivory leaves of a memorandum Book, on which the Lines were drawn with red Ink that made a durable stain, and on those Lines I marked my Faults with a black Lead Pencil, which Marks I could easily wipe out with a wet Sponge.” The number thirteen, in which he saw no ill omen, made it possible for him to go through one whole course of perfection in thirteen weeks, and four courses in a year.
Franklin seemed always to be asking himself and his reader, “How am I doing?” In his inward battle between Appearance and Reality, Appearance always wins and remains a challenge to Reality. Self-improvement was his “Way to Wealth,” his sure path to success. Humility, “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” was the afterthought thirteenth of his virtues. “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the Reality of this Virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it. I made it a rule to forbear all direct Contradiction to the Sentiments of others, and all positive Assertions of my own.… and I adopted instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so, or so it appears at present.” His Autobiography became a prototype for generations of popular success sagas—from Samuel Smiles to Horatio Alger, Edward Bok, Elbert Hubbard, Andrew Carnegie, and Dale Carnegie. Franklin pioneered with elementary rules for “Personal Relations” in an era before mass media had made possible a vocation of “Public Relations.”
Foreshadowing the new age to come, Franklin emphasizes appearances—the image—not in confession but as a boast. His Autobiography explained his technique for success as a rising young printer in Philadelphia, and no twentieth-century public relations consultant could have done better.
In order to secure my Credit and Character as a Tradesman, I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious & frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary. I dressed plainly; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I never went out a-fishing or Shooting; a Book, indeed, sometimes debauch’d me from my Work; but that was seldom, snug, & gave no Scandal: and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchased at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow. Thus being esteem’d an industrious thriving young Man, and paying duly for what I bought, the Merchants who imported Stationery solicited my Custom, others propos’d supplying me with Books, & I went on swimmingly.
Poets and romantics would not admire Franklin’s cosmetics for the successful self. John Keats called Franklin “a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims.”
“He that falls in love with himself,” warned Franklin’s Poor Richard, “will have no rivals.” But the modern explorer of the self would have rivals everywhere. The temptation of the modern self-made man (which John Bright noted of Disraeli) was to worship his creator. And each such sounder of the self naturally distrusted others. “Benjamin’s barbed wire fence,” was D. H. Lawrence’s name for Franklin’s “list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a grey mare in a paddock.” In Franklin, Lawrence in 1923 saw only “this dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America.… Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin or we move in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. It is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are inside us.” So Lawrence foresaw the rewards and frustrations of the self pursuing the self.
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Intimate Biography
WE might suppose that it would be easier to write the life of an individual than of a city or a nation. But in the West the art of history long preceded the art of biography. The word “biography” does not enter the English language to describe “the history of the lives of individual men, as a branch of literature” until 1683, when John Dryden used it to describe the writings of Plutarch (A.D. c.46–c.120). But what Plutarch wrote was not biography in the modern sense. He called his work Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The lives of these soldiers, statesmen, lawmakers, and orators were “parallel” because Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Alexander and Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero, played similar roles in the public life of their time. Plutarch offered twenty-three pairs (with an essay comparing each of nineteen pairs) and four single lives, making fifty in all. Though peppered with telling anecdotes to amuse the reader, the dominant purpose of his Lives was ethical. He hoped by these examples to encourage virtue and discourage vice in public life. A Greek from Boeotia, he could not conceal his preference for the Spartan over the Roman virtues, but he aimed by the similarities of roles and qualities to encourage mutual respect of Greeks and Romans and provide models for imitation.
Plutarch’s lively style and his shrewd selection of anecdotes made his work popular in following centuries. Sir Thomas North’s elegant and idiomatic Renaissance translation (1579) from Jacques Amyot’s French was the principal source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Whole passages of Shakespeare were mere revisions of North. But Plutarch’s Lives had a rhetorical rigidity. They generally followed the prescription for an encomium—a celebration of a man, originally a Greek choral hymn sung in honor of the victor at the national games or at the end of the komos, a banquet in praise of the host. The plan called for the man’s origins, nature, character, actions, virtues, achievements, and then for a comparison with others. Plutarch included no women, who presumably could provide no useful public models. Vasari too wrote only Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
These classical “lives” became prototypes for later writing about individuals. A rival for Plutarch was Suetonius (flourished A.D. 112–121), whose Lives of the Caesars overflowed with anecdotes of lust, violence, and idiosyncrasy. But sycophancy or malice prevented these from being biographies in the modern sense, the full-bodied story of a life from beginning to end. Instead they were homilies, biographical Sunday school lessons. With few exceptions, English “biography” remained in this sanctimonious mold. A popular English clerical writer of the mid-nineteenth century defined biography as “the chronicle of goodness—the history of the lovely, the beautiful—the assurance of the certainty of something better than we are.” “How delicate, how decent is English biography,” exclaimed Carlyle, “bless its mealy mouth!”
The transformation of “lives” from a branch of morals or of the his
tory of the arts into a literary art was accomplished by a most unlikely author on a most unpromising subject. “Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators,” Macaulay wrote in 1831, “than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.” Macaulay meant first both in time and in eminence. In the years since there has been only occasional ill-tempered dissent.
Boswell’s subject, Samuel Johnson, would hardly have qualified for one of Plutarch’s noble Greeks or Romans. He was not a public figure, a statesman, a soldier, a lawmaker, or an orator. Though honored by the king as a pioneer lexicographer, he struggled to support himself by writing dedications and prefaces to other people’s books. In the public eye of London he was a crotchety man of letters and surely not a model of courage or character. In later years his Dictionary would be superseded, his edition of Shakespeare and his Lives of the Poets would seldom be read. He would live on in literary history as the man about whom the great biography had been written.
The author James Boswell was no more likely as the author. First of all, as a Scotsman he was one of the “race” for whom Dr. Johnson had outspoken contempt. A man of irregular habits and sexual excesses, frustrated in his chosen profession, he had little to commend him to a man who considered himself a moral arbiter and, above all, respected rank and “subordination.” When Boswell undertook his life of Johnson his small literary reputation depended on an obscure work about Corsica. To this work Dr. Johnson reacted characteristically. “I wish there were some cure, like the lover’s leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession. Mind your own affairs, and leave the Corsicans to theirs.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 82