The Sheila Variations

A re-post for Benjamin Franklin’s birthday, born in Massachusetts on this day in 1706.

My grandmother had a big illustrated copy of Poor Richard’s Almanac, which I had practically memorized by the time I was 6 years old. The illustrations were goofy and elaborate, and I somehow “got the joke”: that so much of it was a joke, a satire on the do-good-ish bromides of self-serious Puritans worrying about their neighbor’s morality. Obviously I wouldn’t have put it that way at age 6, but I understood that the book in my hands was not serious at all. Clearly, many did not get the joke. Benjamin Franklin, throughout his life, was a master at parody and satire, such a master he is still fooling people! He was his very own The Onion! He presented ridiculous arguments and opinions and people nodded their heads in agreement, and then afterwards wondered uneasily if they were being made fun of. They were.

Franklin played such a huge role in creating bonding-mechanisms between the colonies – through newspapers, through a printing service, through the wildly popular Almanac. And he also was hugely instrumental in the development of science in colonies as well as helping to create free community services (he started the first fire-brigade in Philadelphia on the British model. He opened the first public lending library in the colonies). He was an Elder Statesman to the relatively young men who made up the Revolution. Everyone had a part to play but Benjamin Franklin perhaps played the most crucial role in his time as a diplomat in France, an emissary of the fledgling colonies. He became so beloved a figure that the French – the cranky French! – fell in love with him, commemorated him in songs and portraits, putting his mug on plates and cups and platters and buttons. In a time when nobody knew really what anybody looked like, Benjamin Franklin was instantly recognizable the world over. The French falling in love with him was extremely important, and helped ingratiate the rebellious American colonies to the French, so much so that they made the (in retrospect) unbelievably risky – and insanely dumb, really – choice to back the Revolution financially. (Dear France, you are a monarchy. You are supporting throwing over another King. You’ve got to know that that is going to boomerang on you. Oui? Non?)

When the Battle of Yorktown went down, Franklin was still in France. The following story may be apocryphal (as so many Franklin stories are), but I love it nonetheless:

Word came to France of the decisive American victory, and the complete surrender to George Washington in Yorktown. Franklin attended a diplomatic dinner shortly thereafter where everyone was discussing the British defeat.

The French foreign minister stood, and toasted Louis XVI: “To his Majesty, Louis the Sixteenth, who, like the moon, fills the earth with a soft, benevolent glow.”

The British ambassador rose and said, “To George the Third, who, like the sun at noonday, spreads his light and illumines the world.”

Franklin rose and countered, “I cannot give you the sun or the moon, but I give you George Washington, General of the armies of the United States, who, like Joshua of old, commanded both the sun and the moon to stand still, and both obeyed.”

One of my favorite periods in Benjamin Franklin’s life was early on, long before his time as an ambassador to France. He was a teenager, and trying to get his work published. No luck. So he created an alter ego, a widow in her 40s named Mrs. Silence Dogood. The name alone … Mrs. Silence Dogood wrote chatty letters-to-the-editor about various issues of the day, her observations, thoughts and feelings. Benjamin Franklin, the teenage boy who had created her, would push “her” letters under the door of his elder brother’s print shop (BF’s brother printed the New England Courant). Franklin’s older brother found the letters amusing (having no idea the author was his teenage apprentice brother), so he started publishing them. Mrs. Silence Dogood’s letters received a lot of attention, locally, and people loved her. She got marriage proposals through the mail. Please picture the 15-year-old Benjamin Franklin engineering this hoax just so he could see his work in print … it’s just too awesome. Silence Dogood was a little bit dim (although she had no idea she was), she was very sentimental, quite arch, and did not realize how funny she was.

Like any good actor or performer, Franklin created a whole backstory for Silence Dogood. He cared about his character. He imagined his way into her “thought” processes. She shared her entire life story in one of the letters. I can barely read it without laughing out loud. All I can see is a teenage boy scribbling it all out in his tiny room by candlelight, giggling to himself.

Just one excerpt from the 15 Silence Dogood letters eventually published, this about her marriage to her “Master”:

We lived happily together in the Heighth of conjugal Love and mutual Endearments, for near Seven Years, in which Time we added Two likely Girls and a Boy to the Family of the Dogoods: But alas! When my Sun was in its meridian Altitude, inexorable unrelenting Death, as if he had envy’d my Happiness and Tranquility, and resolv’d to make me entirely miserable by the Loss of so good an Husband, hastened his Flight to the Heavenly World, by a sudden unexpected Departure from this.

If you didn’t know the whole thing was an elaborate joke, you might see in this flowery language an actual woman trying to express herself. This type of writing was the style of the day. Nobody would ever guess a pimply kid was writing it. But once you know the joke, there is barely a line of Silence Dogood’s prose that is not 100 % hilarious. She is very EARNEST in her opinions and humility (“why should any of you want to listen to little ol’ me?”), her outrage about hoop skirts, her expressions of loneliness and yearning for a man. But it’s all just Benjamin Franklin riffing.

Of course his older brother eventually discovered the truth and was furious about it. Benjamin Franklin fled Boston, moved to Philadelphia, and left Silence Dogood behind him.

But I love that Silence Dogood – a drag performance – was his start as a writer. You get the sense he could have just kept going. Poor Richard’s Almanack (wrote a post about it here) was also a “performance”. The almanac also included proper almanac features, but it was the narrator’s “voice” of “Poor Richard” himself that distinguished it from other almanacs. Sprinkled throughout were little pearls of “wisdom”, epigrams and “sayings” (these are what the almanac is still known for).

Let’s move on to Hitchens’ essay about him, included in Arguably. This particular essay is a review of Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought, by Jerry Weinberger, a book Hitchens admired very much.

Hitchens writes, of Benjamin Franklin’s famous Autobiography:

There are two kinds of people: those who read Franklin’s celebrated Autobiography with a solemn expression, and those who keep laughing out loud as they go along.

Hitchens describes reading it in a bar in Annapolis and guffawing to himself. When someone asked him what he was reading, he showed them the cover, and the reaction was pure confusion. Well, pick the damn book up then, and you’ll see.

You have to go into Franklin’s Autobiography with skepticism, and you need to keep an eye out for the booby traps everywhere. Some of it is serious, some of it is not. Some of it is personal myth-making, other parts are making fun of those who turn their own narratives into epic myths. Take nothing at face value. DO NOT TRUST HIM. Benjamin Franklin is both brilliant and totally unreliable as a narrator. It’s like people who post links to the Onion on their FB pages, saying, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS IS GOING ON????? I AM OUTRAGED.” And the comments section fills up with people saying, “Uhm, that’s satire.” Once the credulous folks realize they have been Punked, they often resort to defensive huffy comments such as: “Well, it’s so close to the truth that I AM STILL OUTRAGED.” (Yes. That’s satire. We are doomed.)

Without further ado, here is an excerpt.

While I was intent on improving my language I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s) having at the end of it two little sketches on the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many examples of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradictions and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, made a doubter, as I already was in many points of our religious doctrines, I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took delight in it, practiced it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people even of superior knowledge into concessions the consequence of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved.

I continued this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence, never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; It appears to me, or I should not think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or, I imagine it to be so; or, It is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engaged in promoting. And as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning and sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive assuming manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat most of those purposes for which speech was given to us. In fact, if you wish to instruct others, a positive dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may occasion opposition and prevent a candid attention. If you desire instruction and improvement from others, you should not at the same time express yourself fixed in your present opinions. Modest and sensible men, who do not love disputation, will leave you undisturbed in the possession of your errors. In adopting such a manner, you can seldom expect to please your hearers or obtain the concurrence you desire. Pope judiciously observes —

“Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.”

He also commended it to us

“To speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence.”

And he might have joined with this line that which he has coupled with another, I think, less properly —

“For want of modesty is want of sense.”

If you ask, Why less propoerly? I must repeat the lines,

“Immodest words admit of no defense,
For want of modesty is want of sense.”

Now, is not the want of sense, where a man is so unfortunate as to want it, some apology for his want of modesty? And would not the lines stand more justly thus?

“Immodest words admit but this defense,
That want of modesty is want of sense.”

This, however, I should submit to better judgments.

I’ll finish with The Decembrists’ “Ben Franklin Song.”

 
 
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