We´re going to be friends, Suzy Lee
I´ve always been very curious about people making history as they live. Take the Surrealists. I once went to a Man Ray exhibition and the thing that struck me the most interesting was a set of photographs of the same maniquin dressed completely different in each one of the pictures. Each composition had a note below it that said something like: dressed by Salvador Dalí or dressed by Max Ernst and some other names we´ve all heard before. My feeling was: these people were just living their lives – doing weird things, but nonetheless, living their day to day. That there were to be exhibitions over their works years after their deaths or that their manifesto would be part of a class in any given university some day, is independant to what they were doing as they were just living their lives.
I´ve recently come across the correspondance between Franklin and David Hume (1711-1776) where they discuss matters from the lightning rod to damnation. And being so close to February the 14th, that got me thinking about friendship.
Being a printer and a public man, Franklin took his writing rather seriously. He said about a preacher: “His writing and printing from time to time gave great Advantage to his Enemies.” Non-public writing, like letters, probably gave Franklin a little room to be less cautious. Thomas J. Haslam in his essay Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, Autobiography and the Jealousy of Empire cites J. A. Leo Lemay: “We may wonder if Franklin´s sacrilegious attitude in a letter to Hume of May 18, 1762 is not closer to the real Franklin than religious attitudes in letters to other correspondants.”
Sometimes it´s hard to catch fondness in writings from the 18th century since they´re mostly too formal but there´s an example in a letter from Franklin to a mutual friend where he jokingly refers to Hume as that excellent Christian (Hume being a declared infidel) that makes me think they had some sort of a friendly-accomplice relationship.
These two men´s relationship comes to us in the form of letters (as many other relationships in history). Like the Surrealists in their daily extravagant activities registered in Man Ray´s photographs, it is in the unpublished writings (unpublished then) or the accounts of others that we find raw and genuine history being made. Ben was well known for his inventions and his contributions to building a new nation, but imagine we´d only gotten Franklin´s official writings, we wouldn´t have thought of him much as a Philosopher, however Hume declared him one, not due to Franklin´s writing exactly, but due to their conversations:
America has sent us many good things, Gold, Silver, Sugar, Tobacco, Indigo &c.: But you are the first Philosopher, and indeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden to her: it is our own Fault, that we have not kept him: Whence it appears that we do not agree with Solomon, that Wisdom is above Gold: For we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter, which we once lay our Fingers upon.”
(Letter from Hume to Franklin, Edinburgh 10 May 1762)
To which Franklin, being grateful for his friendship, answered:
I nevertheless regret extreamly the leaving a Country in which I have receiv’d so much Friendship, and Friends whose Conversation has been so agreable and so improving to me; and that I am henceforth to reside at so great a Distance from them is no small Mortification, to My dear Friend, Yours most affectionately
B Franklin
(Letter to Hume, London, May 19. 1762)
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- From the DailyLife drawer(s)