by John Updike
Those who would find Franklin’s practical morality too hard-hearted and smugly anti-rational should try to imagine the profligate, besozzled, rather murderous New World it was meant to tame. The Library of America reprints a number of news items that Franklin is now believed to have written for The Pennsylvania Gazette:
We hear from the Jersey side, that a Man near Sahaukan being disordred in his Senses, protested to his Wife that he would kill her immediately, if she did not put her Tongue into his Mouth: She through Fear complying, he bit off a large Piece of it, and taking it between his Fingers threw it into the Fire with these Words, Let this be for a Burnt-Offering.
Last Monday Morning a Woman who had been long given to excessive Drinking, was found dead in a Room by her self, upon the Floor.… Her former Husband had many Times put several Sorts of odious Physick into her Drink, in order to give her an Aversion to it, but in vain; for who ever heard of a Sot reclaim’d?
Saturday last, at a Court of Oyer and Terminer held here, came on the Tryal of a Man and his Wife, who were indicted for the Murder of a Daughter which he had by a former Wife, (a Girl of about 14 Years of Age) by turning her out of Doors, and thereby exposing her to such Hardships, as afterwards produced grievous Sickness and Lameness; during which, instead of supplying her with Necessaries and due Attendance, they treated her with the utmost Cruelty and Barbarity, suffering her to lie and rot in her Nastiness, and when she cried for Bread giving her into her Mouth with an Iron Ladle, her own Excrements to eat.
To be a civilizing force in such a world is no despicable achievement. If Poor Richard’s advice “Get when you can, and what you get hold” is a long way from “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,” his assertion “When you’re good to others, you are best to yourself” is not far from the Golden Rule.
The writings from these Philadelphia years show an ebullient spirit. Franklin’s parodies can be hilarious, as when he versifies the speech of Virginia’s Governor William Gooch, whose capitol building had burned down early in 1747:
L—d have Mercy on us!—the CAPITOL! the CAPITOL! is burnt down!
O astonishing Fate!—which occasions this Meeting in Town.…
Mean time the College and Court of Hustings our Weight may sustain,
But pray let us speedily have our CAPITOL, our important CAPITOL again.
In that same year, he printed the famous “Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” in which, supposedly, a Connecticut woman, being for the fifth time prosecuted for bearing a bastard, argues her case with such spirited and persuasive rhetoric that one of the judges marries her the next day. “How can it be believed,” she asks, “that Heaven is angry at my having Children, when, to the little done by me towards it, God has been pleased to add his divine Skill and admirable Workmanship in the Formation of their Bodies, and crown’d it by furnishing them with rational and immortal Souls?” Franklin’s voice warmed to the feminist cause and its defiance of legislated Puritan morality, and made Polly Baker so real that for years she was thought to be an actual person, cited in debate both in the Colonies and abroad. But John Adams thought the jape one more of Franklin’s “Outrages to Morality and Decorum.”
The Philadelphia Franklin, one should not forget, had enemies. His satire could bite and his liberalism offend. The clergy and the pious distrusted him for impiety. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians remembered that he had defended the Indians against the “Christian white savages” of the Paxton gang, and the German immigrants that he had called them, in one of his few outbursts of ethnic prejudice, “Palatine boors … [who] will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” To the Quakers, who had created in Philadelphia an atmosphere more congenial to him than the musty theocracy of Boston, he nevertheless must have seemed an upstart. One of two deputy postmasters-general since 1751, he used the office as a private fiefdom, staffing post offices up and down the coast with relatives and friends. And there was real enmity between him and the Penns and their deputies. In the Pennsylvania Assembly election of 1764, Franklin was defeated, though narrowly, on both the city and county lists, and the following year, after his return to England, Deborah was obliged to bring in guns and some male reinforcements to defend their house from a mob that believed Franklin to have been too soft on the Stamp Act. He did hold some political offices: clerk of the Assembly for fifteen years (he doodled at mathematical puzzles to relieve his boredom‖), Assembly representative from Philadelphia from 1751 to 1764, and from 1785 to 1788 President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania—in effect, state governor. But his standing was always better with the people at large than with the establishment. Democratic in his instincts, a publicist by trade, he projected a popular image, sometimes calculatedly. The Autobiography confides: “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.… To show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow.”
5. The Boston Franklin
Franklin was born in January of 1706 in a rented house on Milk Street near Marlborough, opposite Old South Church. His father, Josiah, was a Nonconformist dyer from Northamptonshire who, rather than submit to the Church of England, had moved to the New World in his twenties and become a maker of candles and soap in Boston. Josiah fathered a total of seventeen children, ten by his second wife, Abiah Folger from Nantucket. Benjamin was the fifteenth of these seventeen, and the youngest son; though a few of his siblings died in infancy, and the oldest were gone by the time he appeared, he could remember thirteen children sitting down at one time at his father’s table. His autobiography has a fair amount to say of his father—Josiah’s trade, his musical ability, his mechanical skill, his “sound Understanding, and solid Judgment in prudential Matters,” his improving discourse at meals—but only this of his mother: “My Mother had likewise an excellent Constitution. She suckled all her 10 Children. I never knew either my Father or Mother to have any Sickness but that of which they dy’d, he at 89 & she at 85 Years of age.”
In an era when medical remedies for disease consisted mainly of deleterious purges and bleedings, a good constitution was to be treasured, and Franklin’s memories of himself as a boy show him swimming and fishing in the Boston salt marshes, and, in one incident, inciting his friends to appropriate some building stones to make a wharf. He concocted artificial flippers to improve his swimming and once let himself be pulled along in the water by a kite. At the age of seven, he impulsively gave all his halfpence to another boy for a whistle he fancied and was mocked by his siblings for the extravagance; over sixty years later, he made of the memory a moralistic bagatelle to charm and edify Madame Brillon. Franklin could not remember a time when he couldn’t read. In his one year at Boston Grammar School (which had a classical curriculum and became the Boston Latin School), he advanced to the head of the class. But his father, after placing him at George Brownell’s English School for another year, brought him home to the candle-and-soap business. Yet Josiah Franklin was not entirely insensitive to the needs of his gifted Benjamin; registering the boy’s distaste for chandlery, and fearful of his running off to sea as an older brother had, he shopped with him for a vocation: “He therefore sometimes took me to walk with him, and see Joiners, Bricklayers, Turners, Braziers, &c. at their Work, that he might observe my Inclination, & endeavor to fix it on some Trade or other on Land.” At one point, Benjamin was to be apprenticed as a cutler to his cousin Samuel, but finally, out of deference to his passion for reading, he was apprenticed to his brother James, who in 1717 had returned from England to set up as a printer in Boston.
In discussing his childhood reading, Franklin first mentions The Pilgrim’s Progress, from which he moved on to Bunyan’s other works. His father’s “little Library consisted chiefly of Books in polemic Divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted, that at a time w
hen I had such a Thirst for Knowledge, more proper Books had not fallen in my Way.” He read Plutarch’s Lives, and “a Book of Defoe’s called an Essay on Projects and another of Dr Mather’s call’d Essays to do Good, which perhaps gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an Influence on some of the principal future Events of my Life.” Later, he came upon “an odd Volume of the Spectator,” and fell under the spell of Addison and Steele:
I thought the Writing excellent, & wish’d if possible to imitate it. With that view, I took some of the Papers, & making short Hints of the Sentiment in each Sentence, laid them by a few Days, and then without looking at the Book, try’d to compleat the Papers again, by expressing each hinted Sentiment at length & as fully as it express’d before, in any suitable Words that should come to hand.
Then I compar’d my Spectator with the Original, discover’d some of my Faults & corrected them.
Such exercises brought him to a precocious proficiency; when James’s press undertook to bring out a newspaper, The New England Courant, Benjamin slipped an epistolary contribution, ostensibly from a middl-eaged widow called Silence Dogood, under the door at night; it was admired by his brother’s literary friends and printed. Nor was this the first of Franklin’s published writings; earlier still, when he was a mere twelve, he wrote and his brother printed and distributed a ballad called “The Light House Tragedy,” based upon a misfortune that befell the keeper of the Boston light and his family in late 1718. Though it “sold wonderfully, the Event being recent, having made a great Noise,” no copy survives, and Franklin’s father, “by ridiculing my Performances, and telling me Versemakers were generally Beggars,” effectively discouraged his career in balladmongery.
The Silence Dogood letters, of which there were eventually fourteen, open the Library of America collection on a transsexual note. Asking the reader to “bear with my Humours now and then,” Mrs. Dogood explains how “nothing is more common with us Women, than to be grieving for nothing, when we have nothing else to grieve for.” Though the adolescent boy does not always succeed in maintaining the female persona—“her” satires on Harvard College and New England poetry have quite a masculine ring—the androgyny of Franklin’s imagination, from the speech of Polly Baker to his literary gallantries among the ladies of Paris, is one of his surprising qualities. His appreciation of women must have begun with the one who suckled all ten of her children, and continued with his younger sisters, Lydia and Jane. The two children immediately older than he in the vast sibling constellation, both of them brothers, died young, leaving him the oldest child and only male in this last group of three. Jane, who became Jane Mecom, was his favorite, and letters passed between them to the year of his death. She survived him, and wrote his daughter, Sarah Bache, in condolence, “He while living was to me every enjoyment. Whatever other pleasures were, as they mostly took their rise from him, they passed like little streams from a beautiful fountain.”
The phenomenal creative energy that was to produce a model citizen in Philadelphia burst its mold in Boston; Franklin broke with his brother, who beat him, “tho’ He was otherwise not an ill-natur’d Man: Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking.” Also, the Courant had several times offended the authorities, who had jailed James and prohibited him from publishing; in response Benjamin was listed as publisher. His ninth Silence Dogood letters began, “It has been for some Time a Question with me, Whether a Commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical Pretenders to Religion, or by the openly Profane? But some late Thoughts of this Nature, have inclined me to think, that the Hypocrite is the most dangerous Person of the Two, especially if he sustains a Post in the Government.” In his autobiography, Franklin says he felt “rather inclin’d to leave Boston, when I reflected that I had already made my self a little obnoxious, to the governing Party.” Though, in the course of his far-ranging career, he seldom returned to his native city, he exchanged letters with his family, attempted to reassure them that he was not such an infidel as was rumored, supplied financial aid and patronage, and to his last days identified himself by the trade he had learned there: printer.
Arranging words letter by letter in metal is an intellectual form of manufacture, and fits a man for a life of careful making. Spoken words were not Franklin’s métier; he tells of being bettered in eloquence as a child, and early in his Philadelphia years a friend said of him, “In his common Conversation, he seems to have no Choice of Words; he hesitates and blunders; and yet, good God, how he writes!” It is as a maker that he impressed his contemporaries, and impresses us. Franklin defined Man (according to Boswell, in his Life of Samuel Johnson) as a “tool-making animal.” In the Autobiography he tells how, after his trade-seeking walks with his father, “it has ever since been a Pleasure to me to see good Workmen handle their Tools; and it has been useful to me, having learnt so much by it, as to be able to do little Jobs my self in my House, when a Workman could not readily be got; & to construct little Machines for my Experiments.” His inventiveness never ceased; the “trunched old man” who received visitors during the Constitutional Convention would show them his mechanical arm for removing books from high shelves, his letter copier, his chair with a seat that became a ladder, his armchair with its mechanical fan. His enduring inventions range from his stove and lightning rod to bifocals and the glass harmonica. In the New World wilderness, man of necessity became Homo faber, and of all the improvising artificers of apple corers, gearboxes, and computer chips Franklin is the patron saint.
In a sense, too, his successive selves were artifacts—self-made men. He remade the Puritan in him into a zealous bourgeois, and certainly this is his main meaning for the American psyche: a release into the Enlightenment of the energies cramped under Puritanism, and a Middle Atlantic model of virtue distinct from the ossified pieties of the Mathers and Adamses. The step beyond Cotton Mather, himself a considerable dabbler in science and public works, was not a short one, but Franklin took it. Mather, though tainted by his involvement in the 1692 witch trials, was still the dominant intellectual presence in Franklin’s Boston; young Benjamin heard him preach, and even enjoyed an audience with him in 1723. The preacher’s home had a passage with a low beam, and when the young man hit his head, Mather advised him, in the hard accents of Poor Richard, “Let this be a Caution to you not always to hold your Head so high; Stoop, young Man, stoop—as you go through the World—and you’ll miss many hard Thumps.” Franklin’s first pseudonym, Silence Dogood, mocked two of Mather’s publications, Silentarius and Bonifacius or Essays to Do Good, and in a return courtesy Mather dubbed the Courant writers “the Hell-Fire Club.” Mather and Franklin alike had indefatigably curious minds and active pens, but where the clergyman wrote of “the powers of the air,” Franklin tried to analyze evaporation, whirlwinds, barometric pressure, and electrical discharge. Two of his early letters to his own Gazette, “Men are naturally Benevolent as Well as Selfish” and “Self-Denial Not the Essence of Virtue” deliberately overturn two basic Christian tenets—man’s fall and intrinsic sinfulness, and the obligatory war upon the flesh and its appetites. He broke with Puritanism and orthodox theology, but kept considerable piety. His letters as he aged were full of cheerful and not entirely ironical talk of the next life, and his letter of condolence, in 1756, to Elizabeth Hubbart on the death of her stepfather, his brother John, emphatically embraces the supernatural: “It is the will of God and Nature that these mortal bodies be laid aside.… A man is not completely born until he be dead.… We are spirits.”
The Puritan became a respectable, though church-avoiding bourgeois, and then went on to pose as an English gentleman, a French savant, and a philosopher-king with Promethean overtones. Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis (“He seized lightning from heaven and the sceptre from the tyrant”) runs the grand Latin motto Anne-Robert Turgot coined for him, which Philip Freneau paraphrased in homely American verse in his “On the Death of Dr. Benjamin Franklin”:
But, matchless Franklin! what a few
Can hope to rival such as
you,
Who seized from kings their sceptred pride,
And turned the lightning’s darts aside!
This apotheosized Franklin is the outermost shell; the innermost nugget can perhaps be found in the autobiographical passage where, discussing their English forebears, Franklin relayed to his son an anecdote he had heard from his uncle Benjamin: “This obscure Family of ours was early in the Reformation, and continu’d Protestants thro’ the Reign of Queen Mary, when they were sometimes in Danger of Trouble on Account of their Zeal against Popery. They had got an English Bible, & to conceal & secure it, it was fastned open with Tapes under & within the Frame of a Joint Stool. When my Great Great Grandfather read in it to his Family, he turn’d up the Joint Stool upon his Knees, turning over the Leaves then under the Tapes. One of the Children stood at the Door to give Notice if he saw the Apparitor coming, who was an Officer of the Spiritual Court. In that Case the Stool was turn’d down again upon its feet, when the Bible remain’d conceal’d under it as before.” A self-reliant piety yoked to an unembarrassed practicality—here, in this quintessential Protestant gadget, this seat with a Bible on its underside, we have Franklin in embryo, waiting to be born.
The Ugly Duckling
TOLSTOY’S DIARIES, EDITED AND translated from the Russian by R. F. Christian in two volumes: 1847–1894 and 1895–1910. 755 pp. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985.
If all the formal works of, say, Emerson or Kierkegaard quite vanished, and only their journals remained, we would still have a good idea of their thought and sensibilities, and an adumbration of their achievements. In the case of, say, Edmund Wilson or Franz Kafka, the relative loss would be greater, but a fair sense of the man and the reach of his concerns and his imagination would remain. But in the case of Tolstoy, who kept a diary, off and on, from the age of eighteen to that of eighty-two and whose journals occupy thirteen volumes in the complete Russian edition, we would have hardly a clue to the generous-spirited, all-knowing author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Family Happiness, and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” A reading through of the two-volume abridgment of Tolstoy’s Diaries is a claustrophobic experience, an intimate long sojourn with a mentality so morose and censorious, so puritanically perfectionist and dourly dissatisfied, that any significant creative achievement would seem to have been out of the question. The sunlight of Tolstoy’s art scarcely penetrates into the monk’s cell of his unremitting moralism and self-scorn; the artist’s thoroughly illumined world, creating its characteristic Tolstoyan impression of simultaneous transparence and density, lies beyond the horizon of the diaries, which began as a schoolboy’s notations on his strenuous self-improvement and ended as an old man’s melancholy, oblique communications with his hysterical wife and an unseen host of more or less burdensome disciples. A note of unhealth sounds from beginning to end: the first entries are made in the Kazan University clinic, where the young law student was confined with a case of gonorrhea, and the last were scrawled on the internationally renowned sage’s deathbed in the railroad depot at Astapovo, a few days after he had at last fled the conflicting claims of family and philosophy, of earthly existence and ideal goodness.