things, he often warned himself against desiring them. One of the “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion” he drew up at the age of twenty-two forbids praying for specific benefits lest they backfire; because of our ignorance, “We cannot be Certain that many Things Which we often hear mentioned in the Petitions of Men to the Deity would prove REAL GOODS if they were in our Possession.”

The historical Franklin suspected people as well as things. The lesson that what seem meadows from afar may really be marshes was repeated in his own family. As a child he observed that his father and his uncle Benjamin corresponded affectionately while apart, but when living in the same house often quarreled. And he remembered his “very wise” father saying that “nothing was more common than for those who lov’d one another at a distance, to find many Causes of Dislike when they came together.” For himself, Franklin stayed back. Often on the move, he crossed the Atlantic eight times, living for many years apart from his wife and children. Some of his friends, too, complained that he dropped from mind those who were out of sight. His closest relative, his sister Jane, confessed that after not having heard from him for three years there sometimes intruded on her the words of an old song: “can he forgit me / will he niglegt me.” However much a friend to all mankind, with individual friends he was immensely cordial but seemingly incapable of prolonged intimacy. “Fish and Visitors,” as he had Poor Richard warn, “stink in 3 days.” Indeed many of these famous maxims preach distrust. “If you would have a faithful Servant, and one that you like, serve yourself”; “Trusting too much to others Care is the Ruin of many”; “God helps them that help themselves.”

Disillusionment, distrust, detachment—these related traits play little if any part in the Franklin of legend, and the author of the Autobiography clearly made no effort to represent them in his hero or narrator. Yet in the book they do obliquely appear. The narrative of Franklin’s early years consists of a series of educative encounters with persons close to him who prove to be treacherous and whom he learns to distrust: his brother James, who beats him; his sottish friend Collins, who lands him in debt; his slovenly and eccentric employer Samuel Keimer, who exploits and then capriciously fires him; the sharply drawn Governor William Keith, who strands him penniless in London. A severe disappointment in Franklin’s later life shapes the very form of the book. The first section, written before the American Revolution, is addressed to his son, William Franklin, the governor of New Jersey; but the rather different later sections, written after the Revolution, are addressed to “the Public.” Franklin made the change because he felt that William, by remaining loyal to England during the war for independence, had personally betrayed him.

The results of disillusionment are present also in a detachment from things and from people. Much as the historical Franklin at twenty-two decided not to pray for some advantage lest it prove the reverse, the hero of the Autobiography decides never to put himself forward as the promotor of any project and never to request any office Several moves up in the world thus come to him unbidden. He becomes justice of the peace ten years in a row “without my ever asking any Elector for his Vote”; he is made a member of the Royal Society “without my having made any Application for that Honor”; the prestigious Sir Hans Sloane, uninvited, honors him with a visit in London. (Revealingly, Franklin had in fact written to Sloane first.) Franklin’s detachment also subtly affects his descriptions of other characters in the book, who, with some notable exceptions, have names but no solid existence. Their curious nonentity seems of a piece with the “Art of Virtue,” where with religious intensity Franklin remains concentrated on his own conduct—self-reliant, self-taught, indeed self-created. Ultimately one wonders how much the fabulous personal freedom and independence of movement depicted in the book—beginning with the hero’s youthful desire to go to sea, and continuing with his shifts from place to place, job to job—sprang from the author’s fear of staying too close or too long.

Other submerged features of Franklin’s character surface through his indirect treatment of his ambition and competitiveness. The second section of the Autobiography is prefaced by a letter from his friend Abel James, who calls him “kind, humane and benevolent Ben. Franklin.” This accurately describes the personality of the book’s narrator; yet men of such vast accomplishment as the legendary Franklin might be expected to speak in accents more assertive and intense. Of the several fictional characters in American literature modeled on Franklin, the one who most nearly resembles him in this discrepancy