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Provided by Doug Millison
I find Pynchon's Franklin funny and complex--political intriguer,
proto-raver/performance artist/mad scientist, ladies man, etc.. Who knows
if Pynchon's presentation is anything like Franklin was as a person, but
much of what I've ever read about him seems to fit, and the character has a
lovably wacky Pynchonian edge. There's also the "playing with a Founding
Father" angle, which could put P's treatment of Franklin and George
Washington -- saints in the U.S. A. pantheon -- in the same category.
He was known to be fond of women, I believe, and I seem to remember an
anecdote where Franklin was reported to have said that he especially loved
older women "because they are so grateful" for the attention (quoting from
memory).
New York Review of Books ran an article earlier this year by Gordon S. Wood
about Franklin.
Here's the intro paragraph of Wood's article:
"Of all the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin is the most puzzling, the
most difficult to understand and explain. He is a bundle of contradictions.
At one and the same time he seems to be the most American and the least
American of the Revolutionary leaders. He is the classic American success
story, the prototypal self-made man, rising from obscure origins to great
preeminence. He began as a printer's apprentice, the son of an
insignificant tallow chandler and soapmaker, and became so rich and
successful as a publisher of newspapers and books that he could retire at
the age of forty-two. Despite his dramatic rise, however, he seems to later
generations never to have shed his lowly origins. Of all the Founding
Fathers he seems the most folksy, the most popular, the one with the
greatest common touch. Ordinary Americans today seem to be able to identify
with him in a way they cannot with Washington or Jefferson. He remains the
most rustic, bourgeois, and democratic of the Founders."
and other tid-bits:
"More important, unlike the other Revolutionary leaders, who were young men
virtually unknown outside of their little provinces, Franklin already had
an established worldwide reputation. He was known all over Britain and
Europe for his scientific work on electricity. He had received honorary
degrees from St. Andrews and Oxford and was a member of the leading learned
societies of Europe. By the time of the Revolution he was already an
international celebrity, and of course he had no way of knowing what a
great folk hero he would become. None of the Founding Fathers had so much
to lose and so little to gain. We can generally comprehend the personal
motives of the other Revolutionary leaders, but Franklin is different. He
alone already had the position and the prospect of fame that the others
could only yearn for. Since Franklin could scarcely have foreseen how much
the Revolution would enhance his reputation, why at his age would he have
risked so much? How and why did this cosmopolitan imperial enthusiast
become an Americab patriot?"
Pynchon and Franklin share at least one trait:
"But despite this huge body of writings he never truly reveals much of
himself. He always seems to be calculating and holding something of himself
back--characteristics of restraint bred perhaps by his spectacular rise and
the kind of patronage-dominated world he had to operate in. In his personal
writings, especially in his Autobiography, he assumes so many roles and
personae that it is difficult to know how to read him. Is he serious? Or is
he ironical? Behind all the masks we do not know who he really is.
"Many-sided" is the best we can do. "
"For many Americans throughout our history, and especially in our own time,
the Poor Richard side of Franklin, who preached frugality, industry, and
thrift in the "Almanack" he published between 1732 and 1757, has not been
much valued. Imaginative writers and sensitive souls from Poe and Melville
through Twain and D.H. Lawrence have ridiculed Franklin as the embodiment
of America's middle-class complacency, its get-ahead materialism, its
utilitarian obsession with success. Yet, as Robert Middlekauff, professor
of history at Berkeley, points out in his neat little book, these
nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticisms of Franklin were not those of
his eighteenth-century enemies. Franklin's Autobiography was not published
until after his death, and thus his eighteenth-century enemies did not know
the folksy bourgeois character that we have come to know. They hated and
feared a very different Franklin."
Wood, citing the book he's reviewing in his NYRB article, says Franklin
made friends easily, but also made many political enemies, his loyalities
were questioned in light of his success in London and Paris, and he had a
great enemy in Thomas Penn "son of the Quaker founder of the colony of
Pennsylvania, William Penn, and the principal proprietor of the colony
during Franklin's lifetime...[snip]...In the process he and the proprietary
interests in the colony, including William Smith, the first rector of the
Philadelphia Academy, found themselves increasingly at odds with the
so-called Quaker Party in the Pennsylvania assembly, a party often
dominated by the non-Quaker Benjamin Franklin. The major issues at stake
were how the colony's defense was to be organized and the taxing of the
proprietors' lands. Because of the Quakers' pacifism Franklin arranged for
the colony's militia to be supported by private means, independent of
government. Penn naturally viewed this as a threat to the authority of his
government and came to see Franklin as "a dangerous Man." At the same time
Franklin and the Quaker Party continually sought to tax the undeveloped
proprietary lands in the province--a move stoutly resisted by Penn and his
governors."
By the 1760s, Franklin "and the dominant members of the assembly were
working to revoke Pennsylvania's proprietary charter and to transform the
province into a royal colony under direct Crown authority. Franklin and
others in Pennsylvania had come to believe, naively perhaps but
nevertheless sincerely, that the people of Pennsylvania, in comparison with
the other colonists, were seriously disadvantaged in being ruled by a
feudal-like proprietor."
Franklin as "imperialist":
"In the 1750s and early 1760s Franklin was very much the imperialist. He
had an emotional commitment to the Empire, a grand vision of a pan-British
world, that was rivaled perhaps only by that of William Pitt. Few
Englishmen were more proud of being English and few were more devoted to
the English monarchy."
Another Pynchonian thread:
"In 1753 he had become deputy postmaster in America..."
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