For Ben Franklin, freshly returned to his “dear Philadelphia” after his Great London Adventure, life got worse before it got better. He had been working for the kindly Quaker merchant Thomas Denham for only a short while when both men fell seriously ill, Franklin with pleurisy, a dangerous disease of the lungs. Denham eventually succumbed to his disease. Franklin nearly did too. He was only twenty-one years old.
In his memoir, Franklin reveals little about this dark period, but he does sound a pessimistic note in what is an otherwise stubbornly hopeful work. “I suffered a good deal, gave up the point in my own mind, and was rather disappointed when I found my self recovering; regretting in some degree that I must now some time or other have all that disagreeable work to do over again.”
What to make of Franklin’s tumble into the slough of despond? Not too much, I think. He was human and, like most of us, occasionally felt the black dog of depression nip at his heels. There is nothing remarkable about that. What is remarkable is that if you read Franklin’s voluminous writings, you find so little darkness and so much light. His outlook, I think, is best summed up in an exchange with his sister Jane.
Ben, older now and back in London, was enduring another rough spell. This time it wasn’t his health but his political opponents, haughty British parliamentarians slinging copious amounts of mud in his direction. His sister asked, in so many words, Doesn’t this upset you?
Not really, Franklin replied. “These are the operations of nature. It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails; again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the sun shines on us. Take one thing with another, and the world is a pretty good sort of a world; and ’tis our duty to make the best of it and be thankful.”
I read those words and feel small. Franklin lived in a time before antibiotics and airplanes, before air-conditioning and modern dentistry. A time before free two-day shipping. Life was a crapshoot. Any number of ailments and accidents could cut you down; that is, if the redcoats didn’t get you, yet Franklin declares it, on balance, “a pretty good sort of a world.”
I’m beginning to suspect it’s not the world that is the problem but my perception, my vision. Consider one of Franklin’s best-known inventions: bifocals. They enable you to see both near and far, and all in one handy pair of spectacles. Franklin possessed that ability naturally. He could see the horrors of the world, near as they were, but he never lost the distant, brighter view. He was no Pollyanna. He knew what evil men (and it was almost always men) were capable of. But he never let that truth blind him to more useful truths.
In the depth of his illness, at age twenty-one, Franklin composed his own epitaph. He deployed the language of his craft, printing, and in typical Franklin style, a stiff dose of humor. As usual, the humor masked a serious point. Ben compares his body to an old book, its pages ripped out, its cover stripped of lettering. The man, like the book, will reappear, though, “in a new & more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the author.”
Every first edition of a book contains errors. Trust me. I was giving a talk about one of my books at the Rochester Public Library when someone asked, “I assume you know about the typo on page 247?”
“Oh, uh, yes, that typo, of course,” I improvised before scrambling to find page 247 where there was indeed a misprint. Publishers correct these errors, called errata, in future editions, creating, as Franklin notes, more perfect though never flawless versions. This process of fault finding and correcting is never ending.
So, Franklin thought, why not apply this printer’s method to life? We all make mistakes. We all commit errata. His Puritan brethren called these errata “sins,” with all the guilt and hair-shirting that word entails. Not Franklin. For him, errata were simply mistakes. They happen and they are correctable. In the next life, yes, but—and this is crucial—in this life too. Our lives are written in pencil, not pen.
Franklin’s friend, the preacher George Whitefield, read his epitaph and lost no time trying, not for the first time, to convert Ben. “I have seen your epitaph. Believe [in] Jesus, and get a feeling… of God in your heart and you cannot possibly be disappointed of your expected second edition, finely corrected, and infinitely amended.”
Franklin surely chuckled, but he wasn’t buying what Whitefield was selling. He didn’t believe correcting our errata required any outside editorial assistance. Nor did he subscribe to the beliefs of the early Romantics, such as his contemporary, Rousseau. In his memoir, The Confessions, Rousseau mines his troubled childhood for the source of his chronic melancholy. More than a century later, Freud would posit essentially the same idea, albeit more scientifically. We are wounded at a young age and spend the rest of our lives trying to unwound ourselves. Ben didn’t see it that way.
Franklin’s notion of errata implies a fluid and fixable world. Nothing is broken beyond repair. Our childhood need not scar us for life. We are not the sum of our wounds. Every errata is correctable. You just need a good printer. Better yet, print thyself. The writer corrects future editions. In the end, we are the authors of our own lives, and we all self-publish.
Franklin lists five errata in his autobiography. They range from the financial (spending money that was not his) to the intellectual (writing his ill-conceived dissertation on virtue) to the personal (attempting to seduce his friend’s lover in London). Most of these transgressions were interpersonal. They represented a tear in the social fabric, and for Franklin, the most social of animals, there was nothing more regrettable. He made a point of correcting each of these errata, even if it was decades later.
Mistakes are made. Mistakes are corrected. More perfect editions are released. If this all sounds a bit too tidy, that’s because it is. Not all of Franklin’s mistakes made his list of errata, and not all could be corrected.
A few years after his brush with death, Franklin married Deborah Reed, and they had a son, a “fine boy” named Francis, or Franky, as he was known. He was the Franklins’ only child after six years of marriage and was deeply loved. One day, four-year-old Franky developed a fever and the telltale pustules of smallpox. He soon died. Deborah and Ben were devastated. Did they do all they could? A crude but effective smallpox inoculation existed at the time, but Franklin did not have his son immunized. A vocal proponent of the procedure, he had intended to do so, he said, as soon as his son recovered from “the flux,” an unrelated stomach ailment.
Franklin would regret this lapse for the rest of his life. Writing to his sister Jane, some four decades later, he said he still could not think of Franky “without a sigh.” Some errata cannot be corrected in future editions. They can only be accepted. This painful truth is something Franklin struggled to come to terms with. Just as I do. Just as we all do.
Thomas Denham’s death came as a blow to Franklin. He had lost a man who “counsell’d me as a father,” he recalled. “I respected and lov’d him: and we might have gone on together very happily.”
Franklin couldn’t afford to freeze, unable to maneuver like the flying fish he had seen over the Atlantic. He needed to pivot midflight. So he did. He got his old job back with that “odd fish,” Samuel Keimer. As expected, they squabbled. Franklin was an excellent worker, but Keimer wanted to cut his pay. In the end, it was a “trifle” that severed their relationship. Franklin heard a commotion one day and, always curious, poked his head out the window. Keimer scolded him loudly and profanely and, worse, did so in earshot of the neighbors. He had publicly humiliated Franklin, and for Ben there was nothing worse. Ben Franklin walked out of Keimer’s print shop, never to return.
Again, Franklin was broke and unemployed. His “Plan of Conduct,” so resolutely conceived aboard the Berkshire, had stalled. He needed a miracle. He knew it would not come from either heaven or himself. For Franklin, miracles always arrived in the form of other people.