The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin Read Online Free Page B

his personal writings is the remarkable character of his public writings, especially his Autobiography —“this most famous of American texts,” as one scholar calls it. 30 Literary scholars have continually interpreted and reinterpreted the Autobiography but still cannot agree on what Franklin was trying to do in writing it. Among the Founders, Jefferson and Adams also wrote autobiographies, but theirs are nothing like Franklin’s. His resembles a work of fiction in that we cannot be sure that the narrative voice is the same as the author’s. Indeed, much of the reader’s enjoyment of the Autobiography comes from the contrast between Franklin’s descriptions of the “awkward ridiculous Appearance” the teenaged printer made upon his arrival in Philadelphia and “the Figure I have since made there.” 31 It is hard to interpret the Autobiography, since, as scholars have pointed out, Franklin moves between several personas, especially between the innocence of youth and the irony of a mature man. 32
    In all of Franklin’s writings, his wit and humor, his constant selfawareness, his assuming different personas and roles, make it difficult to know how to read him. He was a man of many voices and masks who continually mocks himself. 33 Sometimes in his newspaper essays he was a woman, like “Silence Dogood,” “Alice Addertongue,” “Cecilia Short-face,” and “Polly Baker,” saucy and racy and hilarious. At other times he was the “Busy Body,” or “Obadiah Plainman,” or “Anthony Afterwit,” or “Richard Saunders,” also known as “Poor Richard,” the almanac maker. Sometimes he wrote in the London newspapers as “An American” or “A New England-Man.” But other times he wrote as “A Briton” or “A London Manufacturer,” and shaped what he wrote accordingly. During his London years he wrote some ninety pseudonymous items for the press using forty-two different signatures. 34 For each of the many pieces he wrote both in Philadelphia and in London he had a remarkable ability to create the appropriate persona. Indeed, all of his many personas contribute nicely to the particular purpose of his various works, whether they are essays, skits, poems, or satires. “Just as no other eighteenth-century writer has so many moods and tones or so wide a range of correspondents,” declares the dean of present-day Franklin scholars, “so no other eighteenth-century writer has so many different personae or so many different voices as Franklin.” No wonder we have difficulty figuring out who this remarkable man was. 35
    Of all the Founders, Franklin had the fullest and deepest understanding of human nature. He had a remarkable capacity to see all sides of human behavior and to appreciate other points of view. He loved turning conventional wisdom on its head, as, for example, when he argued for the virtue and usefulness of censure and backbiting. 36 But then again are we sure that he is not putting us on? He certainly enjoyed hoaxes and was the master of every rhetorical ploy. No American writer of the eighteenth century could burlesque, deride, parody, or berate more skillfully than he. He could praise and mock at the same time and could write on both sides of an issue with ease.
    It is easy to miss the complexity and subtlety of Franklin’s writing. He praises reason so often that we forget his ironic story about man’s being a reasonable creature. In his Autobiography he tells us about how he abandoned his youthful effort to maintain a vegetarian diet. Although formerly a great lover of fish, he had come to believe that eating fish was “a kind of unprovok’d Murder.” But one day when he smelled some fish sizzling in a frying pan, he was caught hanging “between Principle and Inclination.” When he saw that the cut-open fish had eaten smaller fish, however, he decided that “if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” And so he had heartily dined on cod ever since. “So