Another Good Turn on Franklin

P aul M. Zall arrived at the Huntington Library as a scholar in 1957 to research English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. And then he got distracted.

He published a book on Wordsworth in 1985 and has published 23 other books, “mostly biographies of my heroes,” Zall said. His newest is “Franklin on Franklin” and, like most of his works, it is an edited and annotated collection of writings, starting with the original manuscript of Franklin’s famed autobiography.

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Question: Why include the first draft of Franklin’s autobiography?

Answer: The idea is to let them tell their own stories in their own words. Not just their own words but their own words stripped of additions and revisions. In other words, get back to the rough draft. My idea is that that’s where we get them in their real personality rather than how they want to present themselves to the public.

Q: Why didn’t “The Autobiography of Ben Franklin” cover much of his life?

A: The simplest answer is that he died. But the real reason is that he, like myself, got distracted. He got up to the year 1757, which takes him pretty much through his youth, and then he got into diplomacy ... and was distracted by the politics in England. He was what they called an agent in England and got into trouble with the British government. They were trying to nail him on a charge of treason.

In 1775 on the ocean voyage back home, he revised what he had written up to that point. But as soon as he got back to the United States, they put him to work, drafting the Declaration of Independence, going on missions to Boston and Canada and France to get money for the revolution. When he was in France [after the end of the war], he wrote a second part of his autobiography without recourse to what he had already written. And this is where you get his record of virtues and directives about what he would do each day for behavior modification.

Then, when he got back home, the first thing they did was make him president of Pennsylvania. The poor guy was suffering from gout and kidney stones and prostatitis. And then they sent him to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. That’s where you get the expression that nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes.

By 1790, his friends have been urging him to finish his autobiography as a model for American youth. He took everything he wrote earlier, and on his deathbed ... he was still working on it. He died in April 1790.

Q: What are the differences between the versions?

A: The difference is the difference between a nightgown and an evening gown. Because it’s the difference between the man speaking--you can hear his voice--and the man writing as a literary artist. That’s the point of the book, to get back to the real Franklin.

Q: Do Franklin’s other writings show him as witty?

A: I have a book called “Ben Franklin Laughing.” The funny thing is that much of his humor is like Aesop’s fables. That is, he’s telling a story with a point to it.... But Poor Richard’s Almanac, that’s where you get all the proverbs. Eat to live, not live to eat. Great talkers, little doers. These aren’t original. What he would do is update them, like two can live as cheaply as one for half as long. Or one good turn gets the whole blanket. For the middle class, he had his newspapers. And there he would write funny articles under funny names. Anthony Aftwit. Cecilia Shortface.

Q: The “Autobiography” manuscript is at the Huntington. What other Franklin papers does the library have?

A: They have letters, correspondence and most of his printed materials, including his material on the Gulf Stream that is extremely important. They have lots of support material: newspapers and almanacs.

Q: What other documents did you use?

A: There are financial accounts that help you date material. The letters are essential. One of the problems with the autobiography is dating the revisions. You go to the letter of such and such a year and compare the paper that he was using to nail down the dates.

Q: Did Franklin change his manuscript to make himself look better?

A: After he got back from France, his friends kept pushing him to make something for the youth of America. In a couple of the texts that I edited, we put the letters from the friends in, so students would know that what they’re reading is the effect of pressure from his friends. He changed the complexion of the whole thing. It’s the difference between a private memoir and a public document. He was also revising a dozen years later, and much had happened. He would go back in and add little digs at the British.

The picture you get through the autobiography makes him look like a lovable old codger. Actually he’s a very proud, distant man. Hard to get to know, even to his family. We have to talk about this with respect to men like Washington and Lincoln, who were just like that. You could never really get close to them. Is this a mark of greatness? I’ve spent my lifetime trying to figure that one out.

Q: What did Franklin consider his biggest achievement?

A: What he did with electricity; that’s what made him the first world-class American, the best-known American, even better known than Isaac Newton. Franklin, whatever he did, he could always fall back on that. But again, it’s typical that after he’d finished seeing that electricity and lightning were the same, he put that aside and went off and did something else. We would call it a short attention span. That’s why he was able to do so much.

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Paul Zall will speak about Franklin’s life story Friday at 2:30 p.m. in Friends’ Hall at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens , 1151 Oxford Ave., San Marino. Free. (626) 405-2100.