Ben Franklin's Autobiography: 4 Purposes
The Autobiography has four purposes reflecting Franklin's cultural heritage, the world in which he lived, his career and social mission, and his vision for the future: 1. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EPIC: to narrate the life and ancestry of its hero who, his place in history secure, wants the first word in making his legend; 2. ORAL HISTORY--To describe the growth and triumph of a nation, with the writer, that nation's symbol and witness; 3. SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY--to offer a record of the trials of the soul in its struggle for perfection and against sin, a proof that the writer, having triumphed over weakness, is "elected" to a higher level of existence; 4. HANDBOOK ON ETIQUETTE/SELF HELP--to instruct, in the manner of a boy scout's manual, the youth in the means to achieve its author's level of success.
1. SELF-EPIC:
Qualities of the Hero, qualifications of the Author
As a self-epic, The Autobiography is framed by Henry Vaughn's statement in his letter concluding Part I.:
"Your history is so remarkable, that if you do not give it, somebody else will certainly give it; and perhaps so as nearly to do as much harm as, as your own management of the thing might do good." (p.79)
Like Odysseus before him, and Genet after, Franklin is given the double "kleos" (fame, honor) of protagonist and narrator of his own adventure. J.P. Sartre's description of Genet in the introduction to A Thief's Journal could apply to Franklin:
"There comes into being that new object: a mythology of the myth (like the blues song that was called "The Birth of the Blues") behind the first-degree myths--the thief...the beggar... --we discover the reflective myths: the Poet, the Saint...Nothing but myths then...A Genet with Genet stuffing..."
Franklin, too, has a Franklin stuffing. Behind the primary myths of scientist, journalist, civic leader and patriot are those of biographer, oral historian, and moralist, who, in Vaughn's words, will "invite all wise men to become like (him)" to show how "compatible it is to be great and domestic; enviable and yet good-humored." (p.81)
Not merely a hero, Franklin is, by Vaughn's estimate, the writer most qualified to tell his own story. Indeed, Franklin's respect for truth is his major claim as author of his biography. Without the semblance of candor, the book's value is lost for the reader who seeks instruction in it.
Franklin was aware of the imperative to seem forthright. His parable about stealing stones to improvise a pier underscores the importance of honesty and establishes his mission to be sincere in the telling of his life. When the precocious Franklin's mischief was discovered and punished, he pleaded his work had been useful, to which his father replied that nothing was useful that was not honest.
Franklin reinforces the appearance of sincerity by exhaustively rehashing his hero's "errata"-- peccadilloes committed in youth that ranged from the breaking of his indentures with his brother, James, to making sexual advances on his best friend, Ralph's lover after putting her in his debt. In each case, Franklin was punished twice, in pain and memory, fulfilling another condition of a hero. (1) But in all instances, Franklin, the narrator expects the reader to forgive and even applaud Franklin, the protagonist,
since his errancy releases him from detrimental bonds.
Yet, the world's expections of Franklin exceeded honesty. In Europe, "he was thought to be a magician...whose magic wand had separated the colonies from Great Britain." (2) Therefore, Franklin had to write an epic equal to his image of wizard, clown, scientific wunderkind, deistic holy man. To match his reputation, as well as explain it, his story moves from parable to parable, to instruct and entertain, like a secular gospel. Here we see Franklin rescuing a copy of "Pilgrim's Progress" from the sea. There we see him walking the streets of Philadelphia with a roll under each arm. Later we find him pushing his wheel-barrow looking busy and still later, we find him on his horse, receiving a gun salute from his regiment. Finally, for filler, he assembles a cast of supporting players, all flawed, who tramp through his pages,
(1) Franklin, protagonist, meets the classical criterion of heroism-- extraordinarily gifted with feet of clay-- and possesses the "man of feeling" quality popularized by Fielding's Tom Jones, good natured, subject to mistakes of judgement and feeling.
(2) from Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little Brown and Company: 1856
wearing shibboleths of their respective foibles. These are the defective mirrors that reflect his strength and virtue, they are Poins and Falstaff to his Prince Hal.
"I know you all and will a while uphold
the unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet, herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
to smoth up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
by breaking through through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him..."
Henry IV, Pt.1 (Act 1, Sc.3)
The circumstances described are all the traps, straps and contraptions from which this moral Houdini escapes to prove his brilliance. Each episode yields its lode of virtue or vice. Each character is a case study in strength or infirmity. In sum, they are elements in the Franklin Periodic Table of Virtues. Yet, none of the ideals in the 13-step path to righteousness necessitates the writing of the autobiography. Franklin was charged to write it because he alone had the "imagination, equal to the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and cool comprehension of them"(3), objects which included his own life.
Throughout The Autobiography, Franklin mentions his writing with a simmering compulsiveness. He details the painstaking, workmanlike, un-brilliant approach to the art. He compares himself to other writers and orators, many who he claims outshine him. He also succeeds at giving them their come-up-ance (Ralph is put down by Pope; Reverend Whitefield repeats himself), the ultimate one of which is that they appear in his autobiography.
Despite his humility about his writing (which may have been the biggest put-on), Franklin accounts this skill as his salvation. This is his final credential to write his own story: the autobiography is his chance to write a masterpiece, to be brilliant, by using himself as a character, preserving his personality in the written word.
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If Franklin is the "Homer of the Self", his life journey from the poverty and obscurity of in which he was born to a state of affluence and..reputation in the world" is a circuitous allegory that begins nearly two hundred years before his birth, in Ecton, Northumberland England. There, in a cottage, his great great grandfather read a Protestant bible while a child stood at the door on the look out for persecuting Papist spies of Bloody Mary, Henry VIII's Catholic daughter.
This anecdote, like all the ones Franklin tells, is a parable demonstrating a cherished value--religious toleration. Why Franklin emphasized this trait is clear. He was evincing, as Vaughn pointed out, "the manners... of a rising people", one of which was religious toleration. His own reputation for free-thinking, as John Adams adduced, was important to Franklin's mystique. It allowed him to "enjoy the entire esteem and affection of all the philosophers of every denomination... not less regarded by all the sects and denominations of Christians." (4)
(3) Ibid
(4) Ibid
But Franklin was also indulging in a classical epic convention of hero-making. According to this mode, it is not enough for a hero to represent his people. He must also represent his forbears, must emerge from a tradition; there must be a seed for his belief and actions. The foreshadowing of Great-great Grandfather Franklin kneeling over a forbidden bible, adds substance to Benjamin's vaunted toleration, lending it a nigh-genetic property.
As a protagonist, Franklin resembles the legendary `eminence grise', `Rolebon,' the elusive biographical subject of Roquentin's work in Sartre's Nausea. A man of many roles, yet mysterious at the center, Franklin, the subject, is imbued with certain core-characteristics on which we can depend. A fussy common sense prevails in his appraisal of people and situations, as well as a knowledge of the cost of things, material and spiritual, which is usually ascribed to mothers and wives. One humorous instant of this occurs in London when he tells his colleague at the printing house that he would derive as much strength from a penny's worth of flour in water as from a pint of beer.
He also makes a point of his flaws--and his aim to goodness. Franklin transcends frailty, rectifies every mistake, conducts his personal and business life with industry and probity, and devotes himself selflessly to public good. No occupation is too low, no life problem beneath his imagination or desire to improve upon it. Even the muddy state of the streets demands Franklin's attention, several pages of it in the Auto. In this respect he meets the standards of the Puritan described by Cotton Mather in Two Discourses: a Master of (his) trade; (who) counts it a disgrace to be no workman."
While Franklin puts a modest veneer on his achievements and avoids bluster and hyperbole, he surely deceives by omission. "Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly," advises `Poor Richard' and this is counsel the author seems to have taken. Many discrepancies exist between Franklin's account and what really happened. None is more flagrant than his self-portrayal as a casual, unintentional public servant. "I shall never ask, never refuse, nor ever resign an office," he told a competitor who wished to replace Franklin as assembly clerk. (p.125) Later he confides that "...they (the public offices) were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous Testimonies of the public's good opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited." (p.134) Yet, as early as two years before his predecessor's death, Franklin was campaigning to replace him as Postmaster General and make Philadelphia the General Post Office of the colonies.
Despite these omissions, The Autobiography remains a primary source for Franklin's major achievements: "Poor Richard's Almanack", "the street lamps", fire company, Franklin stove, electical experiments, the Philosophical Society, The University of Pennsylvania, his military experience. There are also smaller,
heroic moments of physical prowess, prerequisites of the heroic legend. He tosses Collins overboard when he refuses to row; carries a printing form in each hand at the English printing house; dives naked into the Thames and swims a great distance. These feats put him in the company of young George Washington (his cherry tree and stone-throw across the Potomac), Lincoln, the railsplitter and raftman, and "Old Hickory" Jackson. They round out the portrait of a man of ideas with manly virility and athleticism, qualities Franklin was perspicacious enough to see as ingredients of the American archetypal hero.
Such are the flourishes of a writer cannily creating a hero for future cults to worship. None of this hokum was lost on John Adams, Franklin's diplomatic colleague in France. Adams, who had a first-hand view of the "Franklin mystique" in Paris, shrewdly described Franklin as a "printer (who)...learned the full power of the press to exalt and to spread a man's fame." Much of this public relations flair is evident in The Autobiography. Yet, even the cynical and envious Adams admits that for inventing the lightning rod" which "should disarm the clouds of heaven", the ancients would have enrolled Franklin with Bacchus and Ceres, Hercules and Minerva."(6)
(6) Op cit, John Adams
Part 2: ORAL HISTORY
As a historian, Franklin documents not only his own meteoric career but the growth of the colonies and the diminution of British influence, military and otherwise. As Vaughn remarks in his letter, Franklin's story will represent the "manners and situation
of a rising people." Franklin describes the growth of his adopted city, its step-by-step development. We also see the proliferation of the printing business, the growing demand for the printed word, as Franklin franchises his operation to former apprentices who migrated to the southern colonies.
Detailing his efforts to establish the University, launch other civic projects and organize the war effort against the French and Indians, Franklin describes a polyglot heterogenous society in which all elements must be represented and in which a consensus of unlike neighbors must be formed in order for the proper operation of society. He shows and lampoons the political maneuvering necessary to procure the necessities of government over the objections of a religious majority ("...we will buy a great gun," he tells Mr. Syng,"which is certainly a fire-engine: I see, says he, you've improv'd by being so long in the Assembly; your equivocal Project would be just a match for their (the Quakers') Wheat or other grains..." (p.128)
In recounting the war effort in the French and Indian War, Franklin demonstrates the means to enlist the aid of the settlers, from offering remuneration to threatening the taint of disloyalty
to those who would not cooperate. Franklin suggests the origins of the Americans' bold attitude toward the British to be fully demonstrated in the Revolutionary War. He points out that Braddock, the commanding general of the British regulars was too confident, and that the subsequent massacre of his force proved that "the prowess of British Regulars had not been well founded."
Franklin also adumbrates the gradual process of colonial independence. He mentions various proposals to unite the colonies made years before the Continental Congress finally effected the union. The plan was deemed to have "too much prerogative" by the assemblies and to be "too democratic" in England. England's rejection of the proposal, he claims, set the stage for independence. If it had been passed, Franklin suggests, the colonies would have been able to defend themselves and England would not have had to tax the colonies. Franklin goes to London to argue the case of the Assembly to be protected on the frontiers by British regulars for whose protection the colonies are taxed.
Franklin concludes his story in debate with Hanbury, who maintains that "The King is the Legislator of the Colonies."
PART THREE: Spiritual Autobiography
"Remember the Lord thy God, for he gives thee power to get wealth..." --Deuteronomy 8, 18
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"In our occupations we spread our nets, but it is God who brings all that comes into them..." --Cotton Mather, Sober Sentiment
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Toward the end of his life Franklin thanked the son of Cotton Mather for the influence his father's book, Essays To Do Good, had on Franklin's work. This was not the first homage he paid to the Puritan prince. During his first trip home to Boston from Philadelphia, Franklin made a point of dropping in on Mather. As they walked in his house, the spiritual leader urged Franklin to stoop to avoid a cross-beam. Franklin, failing to understand the directive, thumped his head, to which Mather responded,"You are young and have the world before you: STOOP as you go through it and you will miss many hard thumps."
Franklin did not only take this advice to heart, (never arguing, or stating his beliefs in an emphatic way, never mocking received beliefs, etc.) but also Mather's optimistic assertion that "obscure mechanics and husbandmen have risen to estates..." But Franklin's life was best described, if not influenced, by Mather's metaphor of the row boat. "A Christian...is a man in a boat," wrote Mather,"rowing for heaven. If he mind but one of his callings...he pulls the oar and will make but poor dispatch to the shoar of Eternal blessedness." The Christian, Mather adjures his reader, may glorify God by doing of good for others, and getting of Good for himself." (7)
Franklin's autobiography is among other things a record of his two callings-- how he fulfilled his mission to enrich himself and do good for others. Of his election to the assembly, Franklin claims that it enlivened his interest in that body's proceedings and was a great honor but that he mainly applauded this rise in fortune because it allowed him to do more good. When he invents the lightning rod and the stove Franklin abstains from patenting his inventions "because...we should be glad to serve others by any invention of our own." (p.130) His "two callings" also explains the modest terms of his printing partnership with former apprentices.
Franklin acted on these spiritual impulses, rather than compose sermons on them. The values of Calvinism were ingrained in him without the Puritan dogma and mysticism that often accompanied such values. Because he rejected explicit doctrine and replaced it with a civic religion that demanded politics more than theology, action more than reflection (and that reflection decidedly disspassionate) Franklin was maligned (most caustically by D.H. Lawrence in his Studies of American Literature) for not having much spirit to write about. He was accused of stressing conformity and personal restriction, of being a "moral machine." Lawrence went so far as to call Franklin's statement that "the soul is immortal" a "cheap insurance policy" and his statement that "God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice, either here or hereafter" an assumption Andrew Carnegie, the evangelist of wealth, might have been satisfied to write. (In this, he was undoubtedly correct.)
Yet, The Autobiography, for all the speech-making, bustle of activity and good works of its protagonist, contains a measure of reflection. The use of parable and character sketches delineates the "spiritual" progress of Franklin. We see him in crises, tempted on his path to piety, that route leading not only to his exemplary social standing but the success which, according to
Mather, was a sign of blessedness even the devil would acknowledge.
7) Mather, Two Brief Discourses, 18.
The experiences he chooses to tell provide a record of the spirit avoiding the temptations of avarice, selfishness, lust, drunkenness, skepticism and sin. In London, surrounded by besotted pressmen, Franklin maintains his sobriety and preaches the gospel of porridge, bread and water. He spends the money entrusted to him by Vernon only to work assiduously to repay it. Later, he marries, as a repudiation of the lustful life in which he finds himself. And, of course, Franklin shares his doubts about free-thinking and deism, concluding that deism "though it might be true, was not very useful." In each of these circumstances, Franklin reveals his thinking, his anxiety, about personal salvation even while he does not belabor them.
The invisible hand of grace, such a crucial feature of the spiritual autobiography, protects Franklin from problems he is too inexperienced to see. On the boat from Boston he is warned from associating with two hussies who later steal the captain's silver. But life not only provides the spirit with a frictive surface the soul must resist, but also offers inspiration, as when Franklin is introduced to a saint, whose example directs his own conduct-- an old English woman, a nun manquée, who lives in an attic in the house in which Franklin board, and gives her money to charity.
Without delving deeply into the emotional effect this woman had on him, or the trials involving Vernon's money, Franklin uses these moments to suggest the path of his soul, the lucid moments in which an individual sees the alternatives and acts upon them. One has the impression that he was deeply affected by both saints and sinners and that only such extreme emotions could have for instance, accounted for his giving away the patent to the Franklin stove.
PART FOUR: Handbook
Machiavelli wrote The Prince free-lance, but Franklin's autobiography and its moral agenda were eagerly attended. Yet, both had the same purpose, to provide a blue-print for attaining influence. Whereas Machiavelli wrote for men of power on how to increase what they already had, Franklin was writing for the man who sets out like a pioneer with a shirt on his back, to clear a life for himself.
"Your life will give for the forming of future great men" Vaughn wrote to Franklin, in a letter which frames Part Two, the Moral Guide, of The Autobiography. Indeed, Franklin's methodology for greatness was intended as one of Franklin's legacies to the public. In the 1920s such a literary archetype as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby would commit his faults and objectives in a notebook before going off to conquer the world.
Vaughn's idea was for Franklin to compose a manual for future generations, to transcend the phenomenon of his life and make of it a success formula to share with the public and create more Franklins.
Was this egotism or altruism? It was both. Franklin walked that line albeit he did not draw it. This was done, rather, by the very Protestant tradition he inherited and popularized with his "Poor Richard" pieties. It was the paradox laid out by Cotton Mather "of doing of good for others, and getting of good for himself."
The notion of perfecting oneself on a daily basis was not original to Franklin; it had been used by religious people in all sects. Franklin's innovation was to make bettering oneself secular and civic-minded, a means of getting ahead in the world without hurting others, and without referring to the hereafter. His "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion", written in 1728, the same year he founded the Junto, was the testiment of his self-analysis and introspection about the nature of reality and his role in it, but the piety it aimed for was not for God's glory or attention but for the community. Franklin was the first to differentiate goodness from godliness, to stress the practical advantages of a better self, not for heaven's sake but a better world.
His creed in Part 2 is but a small portion of Franklin's self help. Throughout the autobiography he offers pointers (the way Norman V. Peale would do) in anecdotes, puts to scrutiny and to task his own actions and those of any array of negative personae like Dr. Brown, Keimer, Harry, Ralph, and the Reverend Whitfield. Whether it be belligerence, laziness, loose sexual morals or a penchant for creating enemies with an inflammatory nature, Franklin demonstrates these weaknesses in action and himself as one who transcended them. Franklin never meets anyone like himself, nor anyone who makes as great an impression on him as he does on himself. There is perhaps some vanity at work here, but also sound pedagogy. To dilute the number of strong virtuous personalities would have the same effect as making Franklin a little wicked-- it would distract the reader from his lesson.
Lawrence lambasted Franklin for wanting to make "moral machines", "virtuous little automatons". He failed to recognize Franklin's modification of the Puritan tradition he came from. Franklin was a religious man and his god was science; he was the medium of Protestant values into secular terms. In a world of business, progress, and science, fussy rites and stern repression were counter-productive. Yet, responsibility for one's behavior, industry, and the other virtues Franklin extols comprise a regimen for focusing one's energies toward a goal. Franklin's code was like those used in schools, the schools he could not, due to poverty, attend.
Perhaps, he was encouraging conformity and automatism: perhaps in this he was not only successful but prophetic. For we must acknowledge that in our passion for education (not learning, education) and its promise of gradual, unspectacular success, our fascination for unspectacular comforts, our need to feel we belong to an amorphous middle class, our obsession with diet, fitness and health, our mania for self-perfection (from Norman V. Peale to "On A Clear Day You Can See Yourself) and moreover, with the notion that we can control how and how long we live by taking measures in the conduct of our lives, we are Franklin's descendents. "If you love life then respect time for that's the stuff life is made of," Franklin wrote. With our beepers and faxes and car phones and walking phones and our VCRs to tape our favorite shows so we can view them when we want to-- in our endeavors to "take control of our lives"-- we, too, have become conformists who place the community's standards over individual life-styles. We will do almost anything not to rock the boat on which we enjoy our comforts.
For Franklin, whose aborted school career molded him into a life student, life became his school. His Autobiography was a text for life, its recurrent lesson, an attitude for turning life
to its best uses. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, we have to wonder if anything remains from the life or principles of Franklin that can be salvaged for our use; to ponder the value of a "penny saved" when children throw pennies on the pavement; to consider if a spoonful of flour in water is really better for you than a can of beer; to muse sadly if our society offers the wide open field Franklin had in which to let his imagination roam; to regret the cluttering and renovation of those nicely ordered streets in the sophisticated yet liveable universe of colonial urban America. With that chasm between us and Franklin, are Poor Richard's maxims the chiseled scrawl on a weathered rock-face?