I decamp from the waterfront and head west. I jog north onto Hanover Street, then turn onto a narrow lane where, in the shadow of the North Church, Cotton Mather’s parish, I find what I’m looking for: a colonial-era print shop called Edes & Gill.
The print shop is closed. I am disappointed. No one likes disappointment, of course, but it hits me especially hard. It’s as if I’m missing the gauge other people have, the one that distinguishes minor setbacks from major calamities. An audit from the IRS or a parking ticket. A concussion or a paper cut. It’s all the same to me—all equally disappointing. I don’t know why. I hope you can help, Ben. You were, after all, the “perfect model of sanity.” How did you do it? How did you prevent those minor disappointments, and God knows you had plenty, from ballooning? How did you avoid sinking into John Bunyan’s slough of despond, that bottomless bog of melancholy?
I press my nose against the shop window and peer inside. I see a large wooden contraption, the printing press, and the metal balls used to spread ink evenly and the composition stick to arrange the metal type. Printing was intricate, grueling work. A single page in a newspaper might take twenty-five hours to produce. It was a noble vocation, though. The printing press was a powerful, almost mystical force, converting perishable spoken words into something that endures. No ordinary machine, it was the engine that powered the Enlightenment.
I can picture young Ben, eleven years old, his little nose pressed against a window like this one. At the time, he was working at his father’s soap and candle shop and hating every minute. It was difficult, dirty work, with none of the intellectual stimulation he craved. In the little spare time he had, he read and swam and loitered at Boston’s handful of print shops. I can see the appeal. Now here was real work, at once physical and intellectual—useful, too, in a way soap and candles were not.
Fortunately for young Ben—distrust not providence—his brother James, nine years his senior, ran a print shop. It was a competitive business, but James, like most of the other Franklins, was talented and determined. Ben’s father sensed his youngest son’s fascination with printing and his bookish inclination and persuaded James to take on Ben as an apprentice.
The apprentice system was serious business. Apprentice and mentor entered a legally binding agreement, with a commitment of about seven years. The apprentice worked, without pay, side by side with his mentor and even lived in his house. The apprentice was indentured, financially beholden, to the master craftsman. Leaving before you had completed your term of apprenticeship was a crime, punishable by imprisonment.
The arrangement worked for both parties, provided apprentice and mentor got along. James and Ben Franklin did not get along. They argued frequently. Yet it was in this tense and cramped print shop on Boston’s Queen Street where young Ben taught himself to write.
He had access not only to a generous collection of books but also periodicals such as Addison and Steele’s Spectator, a spicy London journal. Ben developed a unique way of teaching himself. After reading an essay, he’d jumble passages, then attempt to reconstruct them. He was learning by imitation, but with a twist: he mimicked the writer’s technique then added his own flourishes. “There is much difference between imitating a good man, and counterfeiting him,” he’d later say. The imitator honors the good man. The counterfeiter defames him.
This is how I learned to write too, though I was older than Ben. I read writers I admired: Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Italo Calvino, John Steinbeck, Paul Theroux. I constructed sentences like theirs. At first, too much like theirs. I was counterfeiting. Eventually the sentences I crafted were like theirs yet not theirs. They were mine. I was imitating.
My first public piece of writing appeared in the newsletter of the local Red Cross chapter of Madison, New Jersey. It was about a blood drive, or maybe tips for flood preparation. I do remember the frisson of pleasure I felt when I first laid eyes on the finished product. Here were my words, mine, and in print with my name attached. I was nineteen years old—ancient by Franklin standards.
Young Ben was only twelve when he wrote two poems. Both had maritime themes. One was about the capture and execution of the infamous pirate Blackbeard. The other was a ballad, “Light House Tragedy,” a grim account of the drowning of a lighthouse keeper and his family. It was rather dark material for a twelve-year-old, but even then, Ben knew a good story when he heard one.
Ben hawked the poems at the waterfront like popcorn or cotton candy, and they sold well. Before he could get too excited, though, his father squashed any dreams his son might have harbored about pursuing a career in poetry. “Verse-makers were generally beggars,” the elder Franklin opined, a statement that, sadly, has aged well. Ben was grateful for this piece of fatherly advice, he recalled, for he “escap’d being a poet, most probably a very bad one.”
I’m not so sure. Franklin had more than a touch of the poet’s sensibility. He read poetry throughout his life and used it to teach himself to write. He’d convert prose to verse, then back to prose again. Cadence mattered to Franklin. He wrote for the ear more than the eye. (That is why his writing contains so many italics; he is trying to mimic the emphasis found in speech.) He continued to write poetry all his life, mainly to sharpen his prose, and he advised young writers to begin with verse. He found poetry useful, as do I. When my writing gears jam, as they often do, I crack open a book of poetry and, sure enough, they start turning again.
Ben’s big writing break came in 1721. His brother James decided to launch a newspaper, the New England Courant. There were already two newspapers in Boston, but they were gutless rags that toed the government line. The Courant was going to be different. Its mission, as articulated by James Franklin, was to “expose the vices and follies of persons of all ranks and degrees” and to do so “without fear of, or affection to any man.” It’s safe to say the New England Courant was America’s first “real” newspaper.
The competition wasn’t exactly thrilled about this upstart. The Boston News-Letter described its new rival as “a notorious, scandalous paper… full freighted with nonsense, unmannerliness, raillery, profaneness, immorality, arrogancy, calumnies, lies, contradictions, and whatnot, all tending to quarrels and divisions, and to debauch and corrupt the minds and manners of New England.” Then they got nasty. The Courant’s enemies dubbed James Franklin and his writer friends the “Hell-Fire Club.” They did not mean it as a compliment, though I suspect James Franklin and his scribes took it that way.
James Franklin launched his newspaper in the midst of a smallpox outbreak. This was not fortuitous, though it did give James plenty to write about. The New England Courant took a stance against a controversial new smallpox inoculation. This position strikes me as odd, given the Franklin family’s pro-science stance, but James’s position was based on animus, not science: Cotton Mather favored the new procedure, so James Franklin was against it. (Ben Franklin would go on to become a vocal advocate of smallpox inoculation.)
It was in the midst of this atmosphere of rancor and fear when, one morning, James Franklin woke to find a sheath of papers slipped under his door. It was a letter, an essay of sorts, from a woman named Silence Dogood. She was fond of the newspaper’s readers, she said, and hoped to “add somewhat to their entertainment.” Intrigued, James Franklin continued to read.
Silence Dogood was born at sea, en route from old world to new. Tragically, and in a twist, her father had died during his daughter’s birth. He was standing on deck, rejoicing at her birth, when “a merciless wave entered the ship, and in one moment carry’d him beyond reprieve.” Once in Boston, life didn’t get any better for Silence. Her mother and husband died too, leaving her orphaned and widowed.
Silence ends her missive with a promise to write again, and a disclaimer: she knows she can’t please all her readers “but I would not willingly displease any; and for those who will take offense, where none is intended, they are beneath the notice of your Humble Servant, Silence Dogood.”
James Franklin liked what he read. On April 2, 1722, he published Silence Dogood’s essay on the front page of the New England Courant. Unbeknownst to him, he had just launched his sixteen-year-old brother’s writing career.
Ben had hoped to write for his brother’s newspaper, but he knew that was unlikely. He was too young, too green, not to mention saucy and provoking. So he invented Silence Dogood, disguising his handwriting and his identity.
The name was a nod to Cotton Mather. It was partly ironic—Mather was incapable of silence—but mostly serious. The name “Dogood” was not meant as a pejorative. The trope of the nosey, obsequious do-gooder didn’t exist yet. Doing good was noble, not suspect. Over the course of the next several months, Silence Dogood, alias Ben Franklin, wrote thirteen more essays, all published in the Courant.
I return to 17 Milk Street, Franklin’s birthplace. There’s a Greek restaurant on the ground floor, directly below the Franklin bust. I order a salad and coffee, find a quiet seat and, between bites of grilled halloumi, read Silence Dogood.
Silence is anything but silent. She brims with observations and opinions, which she delivers in a snappy, accessible style. She is smart and feisty. Hers is a homespun, tell-it-like-it-is wisdom.
In her second essay, Silence lays out what she likes and what she doesn’t in a passage that reads less like a description and more like a warning. “Know then, that I am an enemy to vice, and a friend to virtue. I am one of an extensive charity, and a great forgiver of private injuries: a hearty lover of the clergy and all good men, and a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power.”
When Silence (that is, Franklin) wrote those words, open revolt against British rule was more than half a century away, yet Franklin’s rebel colors are visible, even if they were worn by a take-no-prisoners widow named Silence Dogood. “I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges, is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly.”
Over the next dozen essays, Silence Dogood’s blood boils often. She attacks religious hypocrites, ridicules Harvard men and hoop petticoats (“monstrous topsy-turvy mortar-pieces”), and rebukes town drunks. She touches on themes that would occupy her puppeteer Ben Franklin’s long and useful life: education, religious zealotry, arbitrary power, the status of women, elitism.
She is no mere scold. She is solution oriented, suggesting civic projects to improve the lives of all Bostonians. She argues for freedom of speech and education for girls. She wants to curb bad habits such as excessive drinking and cultivate good ones such as philanthropy. She is not modest: “I never intend to wrap my talent in a napkin.” It was not she but Franklin who was wrapping his talent in a napkin, and behind a mask.
Masking is as old as civilization—older, even. Humans have worn masks, in one form or another, for at least 30,000 years. We mask during wartime and peace, festivities and funerals, fertility rites and theatrical performances, parades and pandemics.
Masks conceal. We hide behind them. Masks also reveal. From behind a mask, we are free to express ideas and opinions otherwise forbidden. The word person comes from the Latin persona meaning mask, as in the mask worn by actors on the Greek and Roman stage. For the ancients, a person is not the human behind the mask. They are the mask. We are not playing roles. We are our roles. We wear masks all the time. We’re just not aware of it.
When indigenous peoples, such as the Nuxalk of British Columbia, don a ceremonial mask, they are not impersonating anyone or anything. They transform into another version of themselves. Masking, as Ralph Ellison said, is “a play upon possibility.”
That playfulness extends to gender. There is a long tradition of men masquerading as women. In some cultures, men mask as women to ensure a good harvest or many children. In others, men pose as women to express a feminine side otherwise off-limits to them. Some Roman warriors masked as women to tap into female fierceness. They would don a helmet featuring the face of an Amazonian in hopes of channeling her ferocity.
Masks were part of colonial American culture too. At masquerades, masked women were free to proposition men at will, and without harming their reputations. In Charleston, South Carolina, women donned masks when traveling outside to shield themselves from the wind and sun. These masks also freed them to “look where they pleased and to make whatever facial expressions they chose, all without social consequences.” Another word for masking is experimenting.
Submerged in the Silence Dogood essays, I surface every now and then and remind myself these essays were written not by a middle-aged widow but by a sixteen-year-old boy. So convincing was Franklin that several readers wrote to the newspaper proposing marriage to Silence Dogood. Yet Franklin had about as much in common with his invented Silence Dogood as I have with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Franklin was not a woman, nor was he middle-aged nor was he from the countryside. (He had never spent a single day in a rural setting.) Writing so credibly in the voice of Silence Dogood demanded boatloads of imagination and empathy.
The use of pseudonyms was common in the eighteenth century, but it was rare for a man to write in the voice of a woman. This was Franklin’s “androgynous imagination,” as John Updike called it, at work. He also reveals the first inkling of his proto-feminism. Even at this young age, he clearly agreed with Daniel Defoe, who believed women were treated unfairly and could, in fact, outperform men in many cases. Throughout his life, Franklin argued for a woman’s right to a proper education, even if he denied such an education to his own daughter. Franklin was many things. Consistent was not one of them.
In an ideal world, writers wouldn’t need a mask. The reader would judge their words on their merits. But Franklin’s world wasn’t any more ideal than ours is. He knew masks mattered and must be chosen carefully. By conjuring Silence Dogood, he chose well. The residents of eighteenth-century Boston weren’t about to listen to a semieducated printer’s apprentice with a sharp tongue and penchant for swimming. But they would listen to a wise country woman, a straight talking but compassionate soul with a genuine interest in improving the community. As a woman, Silence Dogood could criticize people and institutions that Franklin could not.
Silence Dogood was Franklin’s first mask but by no means his last. Masking became a lifelong habit. “Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly,” said Richard Saunders. Only it wasn’t really Richard Saunders. He didn’t exist. Nor did Alice Addertongue or Polly Baker or Caelia Shortface or Jethro Standfast or Anthony Afterwit or Ephraim Censorious or Martha Careful or dozens of other invented characters.
Franklin’s masks came in many forms. They might be rich or poor, common or aristocratic, male or female, young or old. He wrote as a Native American chief, an enslaved African, an Algerian emir. He wrote as a pregnant single woman and as the king of Prussia. He wrote from the perspective of the letter Z, a deformed leg, a mayfly, and his own gout.
Franklin had a theatrical bent and once compared life to “a dramatic piece.” He could slip in and out of roles as fluently as Tom Hanks. In London, he played the part of the English gentleman. In France, donning a marten fur cap on his wigless head, he played the role of the backwoodsman philosopher. The French couldn’t get enough of this Ben.
Why did Franklin wear so many masks? For starters, it was fun. He enjoyed fooling people. His fictitious characters were so convincing some readers mistook them for real people. After reading the words of Sidi Ibrahim, the “Algerian emir,” people searched bookstores and libraries for the works from which they were supposedly extracted. When Polly Baker, the woman charged with birthing children out of wedlock, ran logical circles around the male magistrates judging her in a courtroom, she was so convincing many Europeans thought she was real and refused to believe otherwise. As has been observed, it is easier to deceive people than to convince them they’ve been deceived.
Then there was the king of Prussia, who supposedly wrote an edict announcing his intention to make all Britons Prussian subjects. When the article ran in a London newspaper, many readers worried a Prussian invasion was imminent. “Here’s the king of Prussia, claiming a right to this kingdom!” exclaimed the writer Paul Whitehead at a posh London gathering with Franklin also in attendance. “Damn his impudence,” cried another man. “I dare say, we shall hear by next post that he is upon his march with one hundred thousand men to back this.” Franklin, overhearing these comments, smiled knowingly.
Later, writing to his sister Jane, he explained why he had written the spoof. “I have held up a looking-glass in which some [British] ministers may see their ugly faces, and the nation its injustice.” Peering into a mask we see our own reflection, and more clearly than in any mirror.
Franklin’s masking was useful in other ways. It helped Ben launch his many projects, from hospitals to schools. He rarely attached his name to these proposals. Instead, he’d pen an anonymous essay attributing the idea to “a number of friends” or “some public-spirited gentlemen.” Only later, when the proposal had garnered support, would Franklin come forward, and then merely as a fellow participant, not the driving force behind the project.
Franklin’s masks freed his friends to critique his writing honestly. His audience found a masked Ben useful too, for “it relieved readers of the unpleasant experience of taking advice from Benjamin Franklin.” As for Richard Saunders, the pseudonymous author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, they were happy to take advice from him. This subterfuge still works today; many advice columnists use pseudonyms.
Masking also enabled Franklin to act older and wiser than he was. From the middle-aged Silence Dogood to the wizened Father Abraham, truth-teller in The Way to Wealth, he regularly donned the cloak of the wise and the old. So accustomed was he to playing the part of the aged sage that when his time came, he slipped into the role effortlessly.
Masking is not free. It comes at a price. Franklin’s serial masking raised suspicions about him. One critic, writing in 1740, carped that Franklin was “never at a loss for something to say, nor for somebody to say it for you, when you don’t care to appear yourself.” John Adams was less kind: “I can have no dependence on his word. I never know when he speaks the truth, and when not.” (Adams and Franklin often butted heads.)
All this masking, I confess, makes me uneasy. Who was the man behind the mask? Or was Ben Franklin all mask? Biographers have combed through every follicle of the historical record looking for the “real Benjamin Franklin.” They have yet to find him. He is the stealth founder. “Who can do more than guess about this man?” said Franklin biographer Edmund Morgan. This from an esteemed Yale scholar who spent a lifetime studying Franklin and editing the forty-three volumes (at last count) of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. What chance do I have?
Maybe Franklin was just a more extreme example of a charade we all engage in. We all wear masks. Perhaps I am just as veiled as Franklin. At home, I wear the Husband Mask and the Dad Mask. Out in the world, I wore my Journalism Mask for many years. It was a good mask, a useful one—up to a point. It was excellent at concealing, enabling me to feign impartiality and report effectively, but not so good at revealing. I exchanged it for my Writer Mask, which is more useful, albeit extremely fragile. Then there is my Extrovert Mask, nearly as brittle and in need of constant recharging. I suspect I wear other masks as well, covert ones I’m not even aware I’m wearing. Maybe it is not me writing these words but a masked version of me. Does this make me a phony, as some labeled Franklin, or is it the anti-maskers who are duplicitous while Ben practiced a kind of masked authenticity?
There is the word that lies at the heart of all these vexing questions: authenticity. We’re told it is the highest ideal, that our essential task is to live an authentic life, to find our real self, as if it has gone missing like our car keys or a wayward sock. To call someone “inauthentic” is to accuse them of acting in “bad faith,” as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, and suggests they are somehow immoral.
Our “cult of authenticity,” as one scholar calls our obsession with finding our true self, can be traced to Polonius, the character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet who dispensed fatherly advice to his son. “To thine own self be true,” he said. The cult really gathered steam in Franklin’s time. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that society is to blame for this inchoate feeling of disconnectedness. So heavily coated are we with social norms and cultural conventions that we’ve lost touch with our true nature. Our task, Rousseau said, is to strip away this artificial veneer and reconnect with our authentic, presocial self.
So seemingly self-evident is the primacy of authenticity that we rarely question it. But what if it is not true? What if there is no authentic self to find, only a collection of masks in various shapes and sizes? What if the Buddhists are right and there is no authentic self because there is no self? The notion that we possess a fixed identity is an illusion. All is flux, including us.
This aspect of Buddhist philosophy unnerves me. I may be a neurotic person prone to bouts of melancholy, but I always thought of myself at least as a person, a solid self. Now I’m told this is an illusion. “I don’t like this,” I think, but who is the “I” that is doing the thinking? If there is none, then how am “I” supposed to get out of bed in the morning? What prevents my nonself from floating off into the ether? And, crucially, if there is no self, then who has been shelling out all that money to my therapist?
The philosopher and 1960s guru Alan Watts offered a way out of this metaphysical maze. Stop fretting about this illusory authentic self and instead be a “genuine fake.” Genuine fakes are not con artists and they are not deluded. Genuine fakes so fully inhabit their role, their roles, there is no distance between part and person, mask and face. What matters is not the kind of masks we wear but how well they fit. Ben Franklin’s masks fit well. He was a genuine fake.
Franklin subscribed to an “as if” philosophy. Live your life as if it were good and, before you know it, it is good. Treat your fellow humans as if they were good and, in due course, they are good, or at least better. As Franklin said, speaking through one of his masks, Richard Saunders, “What you would seem to be, be really.”
In the latter half of 1723, Ben Franklin’s many masks, and his life, began to unravel. His brother had discovered Silence Dogood’s true identity. James Franklin was angry, and when he got angry, he often got violent. He beat his younger brother on more than one occasion. Their relationship deteriorated, and Ben’s writing days ended, at least for a while. By giving voice to Silence Dogood, Franklin had silenced himself.
One day, he absconded from his brother’s print shop. James Franklin responded by ensuring no other printer in Boston would hire him. Ben’s indiscreet religious utterances didn’t help his standing in town. He was “pointed at with horror by good people, as an infidel and an atheist,” he recalled. For Franklin, a social animal, there was no worse punishment. He yearned for the embracing fold of people who understood him. He knew what he needed to do. He needed to flee Boston.
I can relate. Franklin felt about Boston the way I feel about Baltimore: a place you run away from, as far and as fast as possible. I can’t point to any one event or person that prompted me to abscond. My parents divorced when I was six years old, an especially brittle age for such familial ruptures—not that there is a “good age,” of course. Mine was a frequently sad childhood but never an abusive one. No, it was the stale, claustrophobic air of our suburban Baltimore neighborhood that I needed to escape. The fault, I know, was partly mine. I was, and it pains me to say it, unremarkable: athletic but not athletic enough, smart but not smart enough. I feared I was falling into a dark and bottomless chasm of mediocrity.
I needed to begin anew somewhere else. I needed to flee. So I did, first to New York, then New Delhi. Just as Franklin devoted himself to “forgetting Boston as much as I could,” I’ve attempted to do the same with Baltimore.
It is a futile endeavor, this perpetual escaping, as both of us learned. We never forget where we came from. Our hometown remains a part of us, and more so as the years tick by. Childhood looks better when viewed through the gauzy lens of time. Writing in 1788, at the age of eighty-two, Franklin recalls “the innocent pleasures of youth” and pines to visit his hometown once more. “The Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even the tone of voice and accent in all please, and seem to refresh and revive me.” As for me and Baltimore, I still love crabs, still pronounce water “wa-der” and still experience a satisfying pang of familiarity whenever I visit the city. It’s not far, only forty miles from where I live now. The pull of home is stronger than we suspect.
Franklin left Boston, but Boston never fully left him. He retained the Puritan passion for projects, for callings; he just transformed that impulse into a secular vision. Boston taught Franklin the value of self-discipline and of conversing with people from all walks of life, be they revered preachers or grizzled dockworkers, renowned scholars or common candle makers. And it was in Boston where, in 1743, he watched a performance that would change his life, an electrical demonstration by an itinerant and hyphenated showman-scientist named Archibald Spencer.
Franklin didn’t turn his back on Boston, not exactly. He turned sideways, rejecting some of what the Puritan city offered (see Puritans) but accepting much else (see books), and transforming still more. He took the Puritan devotion to God and added an extra “o,” concluding that “the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man.” That was going to be his life’s calling. That much he knew. The only question was where.
Franklin’s father had come to Boston to retreat from the world. His youngest son saw the town, and especially its bustling port, as something else: a gateway. The sea was his way out. In late summer 1723, he sold a few of his precious books to pay the ship’s captain; then, one September day, Benjamin Franklin, all of seventeen years old and with only a few coins in his pocket, boarded a sloop bound for New York and the wide and wondrous world that lay beyond.