Made In America - Bill Bryson [35]
And in between all this he somehow managed to find time – quite a lot of time – to pursue what was his greatest, if least celebrated, passion: namely, trying to roger just about any woman who passed before him. This curious expression, you may be surprised to learn, appears to be an Americanism. The earliest reference to it is from eighteenth-century Virginia, though we have no idea now which hyperactive Roger inspired the term or why it faded from use in the New World. We may as well have called it to benjamin, such was the portly Franklin’s commitment to the pastime. From earliest adulthood, Franklin showed an unwavering inclination to engage in ‘foolish Intrigues with low Women’, as he himself sheepishly put it.7 One such encounter resulted in an illegitimate son, William, born in 1730 or 1731 and raised in Franklin’s house by his long-suffering common-law wife, Deborah. Throughout his long life Franklin’s dynamic libido was a matter of wonder for his contemporaries. The artist Charles Willson Peale, calling on the great man in London, found him with a young woman on his knee8 – or at least he was discreet enough to say it was his knee – and others commonly arrived for appointments to find him in flagrante with a parlourmaid or other yielding creature.
During his years in England he became close friends with Sir Francis Dashwood, who presided over a notorious den called the Order of St Francis, but more popularly known as the Hellfire Club, at his country house at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Members took part in black masses and other wildly blasphemous ceremonies that invariably culminated in drunken orgies involving pliant women garbed as nuns. In his quieter moments, Dashwood was joint postmaster general of England and co-author with Franklin of a revised version of the Book of Common Prayer. There is no certain evidence that Franklin took part in these debauches, but it would have been a wrenching break with his character had he not. It is certainly known that he was a frequent, not to say eager, visitor to Dashwood’s house and it would take a generous spirit indeed to suppose that he ventured there repeatedly just to discuss postal regulations and the semantic nuances of the Book of Common Prayer.
The eighteenth century, it must be remembered, was a decidedly earthy and free-spirited age. It was a period that teemed with indelicate locutions – pisspot for a doctor, shit-sack for a Nonconformist, groper for a blind person, fartcatcher for a footman (because he followed behind), to name just four. Words and metaphors that would bring blushes to a later age were used without hesitation or embarrassment. At the Constitutional Convention Elbridge Gerry would make a famous remark (curiously absent from modern high school textbooks) in which he compared a standing army to an erect penis – ‘an excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure‘9 – and no one thought it inapt or unseemly, at least in the company of men. Franklin himself peppered his almanacs with maxims that were, to modern ears, coarse to the point of witlessness: ‘The greatest monarch on the proudest throne is obliged to sit upon his own arse’; ‘He that lives upon hope, dies farting’; ‘Relation without friendship, friendship without power, power without will ... are not worth a farto.’
It is worth noting that few of his aphorisms, coarse or otherwise, were of his own devising. Though a few cannot be traced to earlier sources – for example, ‘An empty bag cannot stand upright’ and ‘Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other’ – most were plundered without hesitation or scruple from other similar publications of the day, such as James Howell’s Lexicon Tetraglotton, Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia and other writings, George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs, and, especially, Jonathan Swift’s Bickerstaff Papers. It was from Swift that Franklin took the droll idea of predicting in the almanac’s annual forecasts the imminent death of his leading competitor.10 ‘Why should I give