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The Unfinished Life of BenjaminFranklinKevin J. Hayesa

a University of Central Oklahoma, USAhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.881624Published online: 05 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Kevin J. Hayes (2013) The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin, Prose Studies:History, Theory, Criticism, 35:3, 310-312, DOI: 10.1080/01440357.2013.881624

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Paryz casts these three authors as “representative men” at a “special moment inhistory, marked by great hope as much as by lingering apprehensions” (295). This was aperiod in history when Emerson could declare our intellectual independence fromEurope at the same time that Americans were making passage to points west and on toIndia in their own Manifest Destinies, with Thoreau and Whitman both pointing theway to the open road ahead. Paryz brings to bear many noted scholars onpostcolonialism, imperialism, and Orientalism, as well as a number of other scholars,even if he does not always clearly stitch them together with his own ideas. There is akind of disjointedness in his writing, as he brings in multiple theoretical ideas andanalyses of literary texts, in some ways mimicking the cataloging so typical of thetranscendentalists. For instance, he brings in Leo Marx’s discussion of pastoralism inthe chapter on Thoreau’s Walden but does not clearly tie it to his thesis and leaves thereader hanging with an abrupt end to the chapter. He also makes a few bizarrecomments about his authors, as when he says, “Emerson feels much more at home withancient Greeks than with contemporary Americans” (3). And I am not sure that he hasmade a clear connection to Transcendentalism, as his title suggests he will. Certainlythe authors are all identified with American Transcendentalism, but Paryz could havepushed his argument to show how self-reliance and individuality, progress and self-cultivation are hallmarks of the anxiety of postcolonialism and American expansionism(imperialism), as well as of the transcendentalist hero who explores the inner terrainsof the self, who becomes a Columbus of the self.

q SUSAN L. ROBERSON, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USAhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.881623

The Unfinished Life of Benjamin FranklinDOUGLAS ANDERSON, 2012Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Pressxiv þ213 pp., ISBN 97811421405230, hb. $55.00

In 1980, Frank Lentricchia published After the New Criticism, a survey of post-structuralist approaches to literature. His title is problematic: the critical approaches hediscusses are not really after New Criticism; they merely constitute more recentmanifestations of it. The focus has changed, but the methodology remains the same.The New Critics of the fifties and sixties sought to explicate literary works, ignoringbibliographical, biographical, or historical scholarship while scrutinizing texts forthematic patterns that structure the whole. Now critics take other themes – Marxistcritics examine structures of power; feminist critics look at the depiction of women –but their methodology remains essentially to present a close reading of a text showinghow a theme structures a work. Three decades have passed since Lentricchia’s bookappeared, but we are still not beyond the New Criticism, as Douglas Anderson’sUnfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin amply demonstrates.

The introduction begins with this sentence: “The following pages are about a book,not a man” (1). In other words, he freely admits that he will ignore biography in favor

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of a close reading of the text. Similarly, Anderson slights the textual scholarship thathas been done since the heyday of New Criticism. In “A Note to the Reader,” heexplains that he will quote from a 1964 edition of Franklin’s autobiography. Heacknowledges that this edition contains dozens of transcription errors, but he simplydoes not seem to care. He uses the edition regardless of its flaws. He does say that healso consulted the genetic text of Franklin’s autobiography prepared by J. A. LeoLemay and Paul M. Zall, but Anderson’s endnotes reveal that he actually made littleuse of it.

Anderson’s nonchalant attitude toward textual accuracy reinforces his affinity withthe New Critics, who often perform close readings of literary works blithely unawarethat the texts they explicate contains errors in transcription that effectively render theirexplications nonsensical. At times Anderson wonders about what Franklin should have,would have, or could have written in his autobiography. Had he made full use of theLemay/Zall genetic text, which identifies Franklin’s revisions – his cross-outs, his falsestarts, his interlinear additions – Anderson could have made some definite conclusionsregarding Franklin’s purpose instead of making baseless surmises and conjectures.

After reading “A Note to the Reader,” I wrote in the margin of my review copy,“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” My anxiety only increased as I read Anderson’sintroduction: not a good sign. Partway through the first chapter, I jumped from the La-Z-Boy in our living room and rushed into my library to consult the tattered copy of thegenetic text I have had since graduate school. I decided to read the rest of The UnfinishedLife of Benjamin Franklin in the breakfast room, where I could keep the genetic textopened to the appropriate page and consult it whenever necessary.

In his introduction, Anderson asserts that toward the end of his life Franklin was“dispersing rather than consolidating his written legacy, giving parts away rather thanjoining the pieces together” (10). Using changes in Franklin’s handwriting as a guide,Lemay and Zall distinguish three late stages of revision, all based on differences inFranklin’s increasingly trembling hand. Franklin made one round of revisions in 1788,another in 1789, and the last during the winter of 1789–1790. In other words, thegenetic text presents evidence leading to a much different conclusion from the oneAnderson reaches. Franklin’s late revisions show that he was joining pieces of hisautobiography together, adding further explanation and smoothing out his transitions.Describing his trek across New Jersey after running away from Boston at 17, forexample, Franklin wrote, “I stopt at an Inn, where I staid all Night, beginning now towish I had never left home.” In a late revision, he expanded his text, adding theadjective “miserable” to modify “inn.” On second thought, he crossed out the word“miserable” and substituted “poor,” removing the negative term in favor of a neutralword to indicate the inn’s impoverished condition (Franklin, 22). Such fine-tuningcharacterizes many of Franklin’s late revisions.

Had Anderson based his study on the genetic text, he could have clarified many ofhis interpretations. Franklin’s next night in New Jersey provides another goodexample. That night he stayed on the outskirts of Burlington with John Browne, aphysician and innkeeper. In the autobiography, Franklin describes Browne as anunbeliever and mentions a vicious parody of the bible he had written but neverpublished. According to Anderson’s interpretation, Franklin disliked Browne’sblasphemous parody: “irresponsible mockery”, Anderson calls it (17). Here is thepassage from the autobiography Anderson interprets: “He had some Letters, and was

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ingenious, but much of an Unbeliever, and wickedly undertook some Years after totravesty the Bible in doggrel Verse as Cotton had done Virgil. – By this means he setmany of the Facts in a very ridiculous Light, and might have hurt weak minds if hisWork had been publish’d” (Franklin, 23). The genetic text reveals that Franklin addedthe phrase “some Years after” in revision. The added phrase clarifies that Browne hadyet to write his parody when the two first met and, therefore, it was not Franklin the17-year-old runaway who was making a judgment on Browne’s work but Franklin theexperienced printer and bookman. The genetic text reveals many subtle nuances inFranklin’s work that are unapparent in the 1964 edition.

The genetic text of Franklin’s autobiography is not the only major work ofscholarship Anderson slights. Discussing the collection of pamphlets Franklinpurchased in London that supposedly belonged to his Uncle Benjamin, Anderson cites a1962 article by Edwin Wolf, 2d (misspelled “Wolfe”). Once again Anderson’sknowledge of scholarship ends in the early 1960s. He seems unaware that Wolf workedtirelessly over the next three decades to identify as many books in Franklin’s library ashe could, including dozens of those pamphlets. Wolf left his catalogue of Franklin’slibrary incomplete, but I finished the work and published it in 2006 as The Library ofBenjamin Franklin. According to his critical methodology, Anderson does not need toknow about what books were actually in Franklin’s library: he is only interested inwhich ones are mentioned in the autobiography.

To be sure, The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin is not without positive aspects.Anderson does a good job explaining those portions of Franklin’s autobiography forwhich no other biographical or bibliographical information exists. For instance, hisdiscussions of the influence of Pilgrim’s Progress on Franklin’s autobiography in the firstand second chapters are excellent. But the good parts of Anderson’s study cannotcompensate for its major flaw. His premise, that you can write about a book withoutwriting about its author, simply does not hold. Franklin’s life, the story of Franklin’slife, and the story of Franklin’s composition of the story of his life are inextricablyintertwined. There is nothing inherently wrong with explicating texts – provided it isdone with knowledge of the bibliographical, biographical, cultural, historical, andtextual scholarship, something that Anderson ultimately fails to do.

q KEVIN J. HAYES, University of Central Oklahoma, USAhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.881624

References

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text. Ed. J. A. LeoLemay and P. M. Zall. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.

Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.Wolf, Edwin, 2d and Kevin J. Hayes. The Library of Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia, PA:

American Philosophical Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, 2006.

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