Odd Jobs (45 page)

Christ’s easy yoke drew dozens and then thousands and millions into Christianity, which for the first three centuries of its existence was professed in the Roman Empire under penalty of death. Neither in terms of Judaic scripture and religious practice nor in the context of other world religions was the transformation of value Jesus introduced totally new, but it felt new to those who embraced it, in the aftermath of his brief ministry and alleged resurrection. He is the new wine, and of all the Gospel writers Matthew takes the most trouble to decant him from the old skin. The Judaic God had walked in the Garden with Adam, joked with the Devil, bullied Job, and wrestled with Jacob: still, it was a scandalous act to send His Son to earth to suffer a humiliating and agonizing death. The concept profoundly offended the Greeks with their playful, beautiful, invulnerable pantheon and the Jews with their traditional expectations of a regal Messiah. Yet it answered, as it were, to the facts, to something deep within men. God crucified formed a bridge between our human perception of a cruelly imperfect and indifferent world and our human need for God, our human sense that God is present. For nearly twenty centuries now, generations have found comfort and guidance in the paradoxical hero of the Gospels, the man of peace who brings a sword, the Messiah who fails and shouts his despair aloud, the perfect man who seems to drift, who seems in most of his actions to be merely reacting to others, as they beg him to heal them, or challenge him to declare himself the King of the Jews (“The words are yours,” he replies), or ask him, as does his Father in heaven, to undergo crucifixion.

In the Lutheran Sunday school I attended as a child, a large reproduction of a popular painting in a milky Germanic Victorian style showed a robed Jesus praying in Gethsemane, his hands folded on a conveniently tablelike rock, his lightly bearded face turned upward with a melancholy radiance as he asked, presumably, for this cup to pass from him, and listened to the heavenly refusal. I was a mediocre Sunday-school student, who generally failed to win the little perfect-attendance pin in May. But I was impressed by the saying that to lust after a woman in your heart is as bad as actual adultery and deserving of self-mutilation, because it posited
a world, co-existent with that of trees and automobiles and living people around me, in which a motion of the mind, of the soul, was an actual deed, as important as a physical act. And I took in the concept that God watches the sparrow’s fall—that our world is everywhere, at all times, in every detail, watched by God, like a fourth dimension. Some of the parables—the one in which the prodigal son received favorable treatment, or those in which foolish virgins or ill-paid vineyard workers are left to wail in outer darkness—puzzled and repelled me, in their sketches of the dreadful freedom that reigns behind God’s dispensations, but the parable of the talents bore a clear lesson for me: Live your life. Live it as if there is a blessing on it. Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground. I could picture so clearly the hole that the timorous servant would dig in the dirt, and even imagine how cozily cool and damp it would feel to his hand as he placed his talent in it.

Like millions of other little citizens of Christendom I was infected with the dangerous idea that there is a double standard, this world’s and another, and that the other is higher, and all true life flows from it. Vitality, perhaps, is the overriding virtue in the Bible; the New Testament, for all its legalisms, obscurities, repetitions, and dark patches, renews the vitality of the Old. From certain verbal prominences, burnished by ages of quotation like kissed toes on bronze statues of saints, and from certain refracting facets of the tumbled testamental matter a light shuddered forth which corresponded, in my consciousness as a child, to the vibrant, uncourted moments of sheer happiness that I occasionally experienced. I still have them, these visitations of joy and gratitude, and still associate them with the Good News. “Know too,” Matthew’s Gospel ends, “that I am with you every day to the end of time.”

T
HE
L
IBRARY OF
A
MERICA
, in advertising their sixteen-hundred-page volume of Benjamin Franklin’s writings, calls him “the most delightful Founding Father.” We do not expect, and it is not certain that we desire,
a founding father to be delightful. Sober cool white marble is what we have made of these men, and Houdon’s bust of Franklin is almost unrecognizable; we miss the spectacles, and the twinkle behind them. The other founders looked at him a bit askance. Of Franklin as he seemed at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, one of the delegates from Georgia, William Pierce, wrote, “Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age.… But what claim he has to the politician, posterity must determine. It is certain that he does not shine much in public council; he is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary man, and tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard.… He is eighty-two and possesses an activity of mind equal to a youth of twenty-five years of age.” An observer from the other end of the newly united states, Manasseh Cutler of Massachusetts, visited Franklin at his Philadelphia home and found “a short, fat, trunched old man in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate and short white locks, sitting without his hat under the tree.” Franklin was the oldest man in attendance, as he had been at the second Continental Congress, a dozen years before. There the dynamic orator John Adams had observed him “from day to day sitting in silence, a great part of the time fast asleep in his chair.” At both epochal gatherings in Philadelphia the local sage, for so much of his life an ornament and a servant of the colonial establishment, and for most of the last thirty years a resident abroad, did not fit into the new aristocracy of lawyers and military men, Massachusetts merchants and Virginia planters who had led the young nation into revolution and independence.

Franklin’s traceable contribution to the Declaration of Independence consists of a few emendations to Jefferson’s prose—most notably, where Jefferson had written “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” Franklin scratched the two adjectives and substituted the crisp “self-evident.” At the signing of the document, he supposedly said to John Hancock, “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately”—but the early biographies make no mention of the remark; it first appeared in print in 1839. In regard to the U.S. Constitution, his ideas were generally voted down. He favored a single legislature and a plural executive branch whose officers would serve without salary. His speech warning of the dangers of “making our Posts of Honour Places of Profit” was read, in deference to his age and frailty, by his fellow Pennsylvanian James Wilson; Alexander Hamilton seconded, and the motion, James Madison noted, “was treated with great
respect, but rather for the author of it than from any conviction of its expediency or practicability.” When Franklin moved—rather surprisingly, for a man once notorious for his Deism and freethinking—that each session of the assembly begin with a prayer (“The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth,
that
GOD
governs in the Affairs of Men
. And if a Sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without his Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid?”), the delegates, but for three or four, said prayers were unnecessary, and one member claimed aloud that the Convention couldn’t afford a minister. Franklin’s view that the executive should not be allowed an absolute veto over the legislature did prevail, but not his arguments in favor of strictly proportional representation of each state in the federal legislature. His most useful performance was as the author of the compromise that settled upon a proportionally determined House of Representatives and a Senate in which states were equally represented—it carried narrowly, five states against four, with Massachusetts divided and not counted. In the two and a half remaining months of the Convention, Franklin spoke rarely, but on the liberal side: once, to defend the clause that would make the national executive impeachable; another time, to protest limiting suffrage to freeholders; again, to say that fourteen years of American residence was too long a time to require immigrants to qualify for public office; and yet again, to oppose a property qualification for officers of the government—“Some of the greatest rogues [I] was ever acquainted with were the richest rogues.”

At the Convention’s end, he rose to move a unanimous vote in favor of the plan hammered out with so much rancor and apprehension, and containing so few of his pet ideas. His speech breathes a benign democratic faith and the patient fatalism learned in his life of dealings with passive-aggressive Quakers, autocratic minions of the British monarchy, the adroit lords and ladies of the French court, and his testy fellow revolutionaries:

This blessing, which did much to quiet popular resistance to the centralized form the Constitution had taken, was Franklin’s last great gift to his nation. The unanimous vote carried, and the Constitution was eventually ratified. His attempts to place his grandson, William Temple Franklin, and his son-in-law, Richard Bache, in the new government were frustrated; the Congress voted him no reward, not even an address of thanks, for his eight years of invaluable diplomacy in France, and declined to settle the accounts of his mission. Franklin died in 1790. He had been of a different generation from the other founders—Washington was twenty-six years younger, John Adams thirty, Jefferson thirty-seven, Madison all of forty-five—and what they had needed from him was his potent presence, as the most celebrated American of the pre-Revolutionary time; they had needed his image.

This image is with us still—in the face on the hundred-dollar bill, in the name that attaches to The Franklin Mint and Franklin and Marshall College, in the Franklin Streets you can find in most Pennsylvania cities, in the twenty-five American counties called Franklin and the upwards of thirty towns, in the iconographic vignettes of the young man who walked into Philadelphia with loaves of bread under his arms and of the older man who went out with a kite to capture the lightning, in the living sayings of Poor Richard and the steady warmth of the Franklin stove. A Philadelphia actor called Ralph Archbold offers to impersonate Franklin at schools and conventions and advertises “more than 200 performances annually since 1973”; this is not inappropriate, since Franklin himself was an inveterate impersonator, preferring to write under pseudonyms and bringing to all his life roles a theatrical flair and good-humored adaptability. The image of himself that he projected was protean—at one point an embodiment of fanatic thrift and industry and at another of pagan rakishness, in one phase a substantial British clubman and in an earlier a lean and penniless journeyman. Reflecting back upon the bulky, farraginous, sometimes tedious and opaque volume which J. A. Leo LeMay has assembled for the Library of America, the reader seems to see many Franklins, one emerging from another like those brightly painted Russian dolls which, ever smaller, disclose yet one more, until a last wooden homunculus, a little smooth nugget like a soul, is reached.

The political patriarch, though the biggest, is in a sense the hollowest Franklin; it is not hard to feel, with Pierce of Georgia, that politics did not engage his attention, at least his deepest and most ardent attention. His non-ironical political writings in this collection are the heaviest
going, and not just because the contextual circumstances and tensions are very lightly explained, in accordance with the Library’s policy of presenting classic American texts with minimal apparatus. Franklin instinctively saw relations between men and nations as matters of competing self-interest, construed in material terms. Though he mustered a certain patriotic indignation as the American Revolution approached, there is little from his pen that has Thomas Paine’s furious sense of an incubuslike British tyranny, or of Jefferson’s fervid religious belief in a natural man with sacred rights. From Franklin’s vantage in London, the conflict of the 1770s was brought on by “a corrupt Parliament, that does not like us, and conceives itself to have an Interest in keeping us down and fleecing us.” It was a matter of markets and demographics in his analysis, and though a wiser king or less venal ministers might have made some difference, Franklin seems basically resigned, should reasonableness fail, to an inevitable historical process. He wrote to Samuel Mather in 1773, “But all these Oppressions evidently work for our Good. Providence seems by every Means intent on making us a great People.” Two years earlier, he had confided to his sister Jane, “Upon the whole I am much disposed to like the World as I find it, and to doubt my own Judgment as to what would mend it.” Such a doubt makes for a lacklustre inspirator but for a cool and flexible diplomat.

From late 1776 to 1785, Franklin served the fledgling, embattled Congress as one of three commissioners to France and, after 1778, as sole minister plenipotentiary. The French took to him, and he to them, amazingly; years and cares seemed to fall from him. “Being arrived at seventy,” he wrote from the Paris suburb of Passy to Thomas Bond in Philadelphia, “and considering that by travelling further in the same road I should probably be led to the grave, I stopped short, turned about, and walked back again; which having done these four years, you may now call me sixty-six.” While periodically coaxing millions of livres from the French Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes, for the tattered American cause, he fell in love with French ladies and printed flirtatious bagatelles for them, sometimes in French and sometimes in English, on his private press. The French, seeing in him a mixture of the sage Voltaire and the noble savage predicated by Rousseau, turned him into a
knickknack of the Enlightenment. According to Carl Van Doren’s biography, “Houdon and Jean-Jacques Caffieri modelled busts, in marble, bronze, and plaster. There were other paintings and busts, miniatures, medallions, statuettes, drawings, and prints, endlessly reproduced, first on snuff-boxes and rings and in time on watches, clocks, vases, dishes, handkerchiefs, and pocketknives. Probably no man before Franklin had ever had his likeness so widely current in so many forms.” His image, often in dark “Quaker” garb and trimmings of fur, was rendered so often he complained, “I have … sat so much and so often to painters and statuaries that I am perfectly sick of it.”