Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

UNDERWRITING

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................ixPreface: Claims.....................xiIntroduction........................11 Philadelphia......................352 Boston............................633 Hartford..........................794 New York City.....................985 Boston............................118Notes...............................141Works Cited.........................171Index...............................183

Chapter One

Fear in Hand: The Friendly Society, the Philadelphia Contributionship, and Other Projects

As I have not read any part of the life in question, but know only the character that lived it, I write somewhat at hazard.... Should [the autobiographical lessons] even prove unsuccessful in all that a sanguine admirer of yours hopes from them, you will at least have framed pieces to interest the human mind; and whoever gives a feeling of pleasure that is innocent to man, has added so much to the fair side of a life otherwise too much darkened by anxiety and too much injured by pain. In the hope, therefore, that you will listen to the prayer addressed to you in this letter, I beg to subscribe myself, my dearest sir, etc., etc., Signed, BENJ. VAUGHAN.

Benjamin Franklin was afraid, and it is Vaughan who gives him away. Indeed, the Autobiography refuses to admit that Franklin worries at all, manifesting a tone and disposition contrary to what his "hazarding" correspondent, Benjamin Vaughan, called "anxiety." Yet one discerns in the odd concern of Vaughan's entreaty a real concern: that perhaps Franklin's answering bravado would address a shared anxiety Vaughan wanted dispelled. In his response to Vaughan's plea for words-a reply drawn from a mind capable of putting pleasure where anxiety had once reigned-Franklin means to describe anxiety's opposing guise. He will incarnate a cool comfort with the mutable, hazardous world.

The Autobiography went on to fulfill that prescription. It underwrites his life with a contract-like stability, all terms and conditions manipulable and each outcome strategically foreseeable. In Franklin's world there are no surprises; at any point in the narrative, the future is welcomed, as a reasonably predictable function of his ability to meet it with reason and virtue. In the bargain, he gained a surface of calm in the present. This glossed the world he inhabited as a projection of his own self-willed mastering of (indeed, his aversion to) financial chance and mortal danger.

Franklin has become both a famous construction (for the critical-minded) and an inimitable essence (in the popular imagination), portraying for his readers an easy rider jaunting through turbulent times. Critically speaking, the absence of the admission of fear in his writing-indeed, the optimistic momentum of the story of his life and of his collected views on how to live life prudently-suggests a narrative strategy that has psychoanalytic sources. Socially, it indicates the crafting of a new practical response to that which might cause anxiety, if not existential terror, in the public he cared about and sought to define.

Starting with D. H. Lawrence, many critics and biographers have noted Franklin's fearless, perhaps superficial, pose. Michael Zuckerman provides a collation of such commentary, observing that Franklin "gave himself so utterly to the public that sophisticated commentators have questioned whether he had any interior existence at all." Zuckerman points to Herbert Liebowitz's remark that the Autobiography "contains no intimations of neurotic behavior, no dreams or nightmares, no crises of spirit" (446). That lack of interior reflection translated quite well into the prescriptive demands of his social individualism. Larzer Ziff has shown how Franklin's exteriority helped pave the way for a new poetics of an externalized, representing identity that set off an anxiety he did not share. H. W. Brands declares with some finality regarding Franklin's surface and direction: "It was part of Franklin's credo to look forever forward, to dwell not on the past but on the future" (155).

But few have wondered what that interior life might comprise and how the exterior craftwork of optimism may be viewed as a product of the interior. The particulars of the memoir's composition reveal just how much the finished story diverges from the angst-ridden terms of its production. Yet when that examination happens, we begin to glimpse inwardly. In words that evoke his worry about impending death, Franklin responded to the continued proddings of his friend the mayor of Passy, Louis Guillaume le Veillard, for the completion of his autobiography: "But considering now the little remnant of life I have left, the accidents that may happen between this and October ... I have come to the resolution to proceed in that work to-morrow, and continue it daily till finished, which, if my health permits, may be in the course of the ensuing summer" (quoted. in Max Farrand, Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs: A Parallel Text Edition, xxii). Franklin's health was rapidly deteriorating as he undertook the third part of the Autobiography; he suffered from gout, an extremely painful bladder stone, and in December 1787, he fell down some steps, an accident that sprained an ankle and left him badly bruised. He made out his will shortly thereafter. This urgency in completing the autobiography arises from both obligation to his correspondents and an appropriate fear of the chances of time.

Franklin's lifelong obsession with copying-as both metaphor for the attainment of virtue and practical insurance against the loss of important documents-betrays his worry about the relationship between personal fortunes and physical loss. Using informal circulation as a method of textual preservation, Franklin habitually sent at least two fair copies of important letters and documents to friends. The Autobiography is itself the best example of this fixation. His grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was instructed to make two fair copies of the unfinished manuscript just before his death and mail one to Vaughan and the other to Veillard. Fear of loss (which stands in interesting contrast to Thomas Jefferson's inveterate burning of manuscripts) drove Franklin to safety measures that preserved the meaning of his life to the "rising generation."

The question of fear emerges critically, then, from a psychoanalytic intuition about Franklin's interior life and points beyond to the compositional methods and sociocultural contexts of Franklin's life. Other questions follow: How did Franklin manage to fashion such good-natured self-assurance out of the late-Calvinist culture of malevolent fearmongering in which he was reared. And how did he keep that optimism amidst the increasingly risk-obsessed society he sought to build? As these questions would seem to imply, I do not claim in what follows to pursue a psychoanalytic discussion, laying bare Franklin's interior life. Rather, it is a series of readings that elicit a view of interior perturbations and represented assurances, a socializing preoccupation, based on what is ostensibly denied us as readers of Franklin.

* * *

This chapter is also about the getting and...