by Paul Collins
"Take the coffee away," he'd gently remonstrate, "give Mr. Paine a little time; he is a gentleman; he wants to wash himself bring him some soap and water."
Jarvis just wanted Paine to buck up and look good, and he generously preserved him at his most handsome by painting a portrait of his new guest. It was all in a day's work for Jarvis-literally, as he was in such demand that he and his assistant Joseph Wood often cranked out six oil portraits a week—though he did cut corners slightly by leaving Paine's hands out of the painting. Well, that would have been too generous. For anyone else he'd have charged $40 for just such a portrait from the neck up; hands were damned tricky work and cost an extra $20.
Paine felt at ease among the art studio's productive chaos of brush jars, easels, and lacquer. Jarvis would paint the portrait subject on canvas, while his indefatigable Wood painted darkly haunting backgrounds; at other times they'd switch to delicate watercolor miniatures upon ivory or card stock. Paine and the artists were all archetypal self-made New Yorkers; misfits who all hailed from somewhere else, each had found a city where they could speak freely, create freely, and reinvent themselves. Wood had been an untutored farmboy in Clarkstown obsessed with art, and ran away from home at fifteen to the big city with the dream of becoming a painter; he was now quickly becoming one of the best miniaturists in the country. And John Wesley Jarvis—a brilliant raconteur and a devotee of good wine, a man whose natural curiosity extended into scientific experimentation and anatomy—he, of all people, had been raised in his youth by his uncle John Wesley, the famously dour founder of Methodism.
Sometimes the old pieties were still visited upon them. Hearing that Paine was ailing, ministers and well-meaning folk were forever stopping by to pester him, hoping to get him to recant his heresies and to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jarvis was usually able to keep them out of the studio, but on one occasion let his guard down when a knock came at the door shortly after dinner. Jarvis opened it to find a very old woman, wrapped in a large scarlet cloak, and asking piteously to meet Thomas Paine.
He's asleep, Jarvis explained—he always takes his nap after dinner.
"I am very sorry for that," she said, "for I wanted to see him very particularly."
It seemed a shame to force a frail and elderly lady to make the trip a second time, and Jarvis relented. Leading her inside and back to Paine's room, the painter woke up the slumbering infidel.
"He rose on one elbow"—it was recalled soon afterward with some mirth-"with an expression of eye that staggered the old woman."
"What do you want?" he demanded.
"Is your name Paine?" the old woman asked solicitously.
"Yes."
"Well, then," she began kindly. "I come from Almighty God to tell you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our blessed Savior Jesus Christ, you will be damned and—
"Pooh! Pooh!" Paine stopped her cold. "It is not true. You were not sent with any such impertinent message."
". . ."
"Jarvis," Paine sighed, "make her go away. Pshaw. God would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with his message. Go away. Go back." And then, preparing to return to sleep, he added, "Shut the door."
The old lady left thunderstruck. Jarvis was enough of a gentleman that he probably withheld his laughter until the woman was out of earshot of his house. He was not unsympathetic to her piety; he had been raised in a strict religious family himself, and though he had little use for them now, he thought churches served a worthy purpose for the rest of society. But as for himself—well, he was busy. He had paintings to paint and wine to drink. Late in the evenings, after Paine had had his nap, the two would philosophize over a bottle; once after a long conversation deep into the night at Jarvis's table, the painter retired for a while, only upon returning at four A.M. to find Paine still at table—or rather, underneath it.
"I have the vertigo, the vertigo," moaned Paine from the floor.
"Yes," Jarvis cracked, raising an eyebrow at the remains of the bottle. 'You have it deep-deep!"
Perhaps; but to Paine it felt like another stroke. Lying there on Jarvis's floor, staring up at the ceiling, at the wooden legs and underside of the table, Paine turned thoughtful for a moment. Here he was, he wondered aloud, his mind strong and yet his body fallen.
Does it not put one in mind of the immortality of the soul? he blearily mused to the painter. Surely . . . surely we continue to exist in a state beyond life itself. . .
Old pop music jangles out of an unseen speaker somewhere in the dreadful fluorescence of a supermarket on Bleecker Street—"I'm a Believer"—and the couple in front of me is arguing about orange juice.
"We don't need the fancy kind," she insists.
"It's better." He shakes the little bottle for emphasis.
"No it's not."
"It," shake, "is."
Is— is not— is . The clerk is waiting at the register with obligatory unsmiling indifference, and I look away in the middle distance of frozen foods, into this space with the same weary feel as most every Manhattan grocery. For a supermarket named Strawberry Fields, the place is kind of a bad trip, and you would not want to be here Forever. But this is where Paine lay waiting for Forever to come—over there, let's say, right where the chunky peanut butter is on sale. You can't tell now, of course: it's all brick and linoleum and drywall, a squat sixty-three feet of frontage that keeps changing identity. Ten years before this it was a Gristede's; a hundred and ten years before that it was a different building altogether, two stories and wooden, and housing a billiard saloon; before then, it was the Gilded Age home of a button and trimmings importer. Go back further still, and you find a workshop for making screen windows. And perhaps next year it will be something new yet again, for the space is once again up for lease.
Jarvis had to move to a new studio in the spring of 1807, and for the rest of that year Paine lived with a baker down on Broome Street. After his rent went up, Paine moved into a miserable lodging house on Partition Street. All along he kept attacking Federalist conservatives in the New York Public Advertiser, but few were listening anymore; by 1808, the once-tireless pen was laid down, and he simply stopped publishing altogether.
So he packed up his trunks one more time and came here to die. His newest lodgings were on what was called Herring Street back then, and Paine struggled to pay his new landlords. A deal to sell his farm in New Rochelle fell through, and a pitiful request to Congress for reimbursement of some of his expenses during the Revolution was met with crushing indifference, then with a final no.
When? When? The end would come soon: it had to. In the dead of winter, as 1808 ground forward into 1809, Paine sat down and wrote out his will. The fate of his body troubled him, though; he fretted over it for months. He'd become acquainted with a local watchmaker and Quaker minister, Willet Hicks, and when the Friend paid a visit to Herring Street in March, Paine cut immediately to the matter at hand.
"I wish to be buried in your burying ground," he said plainly. His father, Paine explained, had been a Quaker, and he himself had been raised a Quaker: now he simply wished to return to its soil.
Well. . . it was an unusual request, you see—he'd go to the burial committee and see what they thought, of course, and. . .well, and. . . Had he changed opinions, perhaps, since writing The Age of Reason?
No, Paine said.
Willet would see what he could do. He, of all people, knew just how fraught Paine's modest request was. The local Quaker assemblies were already shaking themselves to pieces: a schism had been opening up between Orthodox members and a liberal faction headed by Willet's cousin, Elias Hicks. These arguments eventually became so heated that at one assembly the two sides wrestled over the property of the meetinghouse and tore a desk in half. Critics tarred Hicksites as closet Deists, and leagued them with the vilified author of The Age of Reason; one pamphlet charged Hicks with plagiarizing Paine. In many ways The Age Reason did indeed seem like an especially blunt statement of the most li
beral form of modern Quakerism—but Hicks vociferously denied the resemblance. And even if he did see any, it would be deeply impolitic to admit it.
Some days later Willet came back with the burial committee's answer, informing Paine as delicately as he could that . . . well, their answer was not yes. His old sect had forsaken him, and now he had nowhere else to go. The trembling old man felt himself dissolving in despair over the world's indifference to his fate.
I wish to die, he'd tell his landlord, who now sometimes found his boarder weeping. I see no other end to my sufferings.
"One seventy-nine," the clerk intones flatly.
I count the change out and leave. There's nothing left here: the Herring Street house survived long after they'd changed the name to Bleecker, and even after Seventh Avenue cut through part of the old block, but it was demolished in the 1930s. Nothing special: just one more building that had housed a sick old man once, same as every other building in New York.
Paine grew more feeble and helpless here, with gout, strokes, and abscesses battering his health until his landlord could hardly care for him anymore. His failing body was borne a block away to a friendly Democratic household, the Grove Street home of Aaron Burr's old law partner. His new neighbor Amasa Woodworth would stop by every day to check in on Paine, and he made for welcome company, since he was an engineer involved in the invention of a new oscillating steam engine design. It was a topic that held endless fascination for Paine, for steam engines had always appealed to his sense of progress—why, back in the day, he'd discussed steam engine design improvements with James Watt himself. Amasa began keeping Paine company late into the night too, for though the old man was not afraid of dying, he did dread dying alone.
Word trickled out from the sickroom that spring: it was true, Paine really was in his final days. A quiet procession of old friends came by to see Paine, to pay their respects. They found a man so weakened he could barely sit up, and who could not keep down weak milk punch without vomiting it up again. Even Jarvis, now at the top of his game as an artist, took time off from working in his grand studio at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway to visit his old friend. Gladdened by the sight of the dashing painter, Paine would turn over onto his side—gasping "Oh! God.! Oh. . . God." as he rolled upon his sores—and then, regaining his composure, confide in Jarvis. He had been getting harassed constantly by people trying to convert him, he said: ministers were stopping by every day now, angling for a recantation. Even the nurse, Mrs. Heddon, would wait until he was helpless with pain and then pounce upon him with the Bible and Hobart's Companion for the Altar.
I recant nothing, he told Jarvis.
The next morning, warned by his physician Dr. Manley—you are about to die, dissolution is upon you this very dary—Paine refused yet again to accept Christ. The doctor pressed him one last time.
"Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?" he demanded.
There was a long pause of minutes. Perhaps the patient really had died. But Paine's lips moved: words, weak but distinct.
"I have no wish to believe on that subject."
And then . . .
Then . . .
He should have been dead from the start. He'd been cheating Death almost from the beginning: at the age of nineteen, leaving his parents' home for the first time, Pain-he'd not yet added the final e to his name—set out for London and was recruited at dockside for service on a privateer ship called the Terrible, commanded by one Captain Death. Thomas's father showed up on the docks in time to save him from what was either a very good allegory or a very bad Ingmar Bergman film. The Terrible sailed without Pain, and Captain Death and the crew were slaughtered. And there is something curiously familiar in that account, isn't there? For we all nearly board a Terrible we all look back in relief that we did not. We always slip free of Captain Death one more time . . . until, of course, we don't.
He should have been dead halfway into his life. It was in Philadelphia, on November 30, 1774, that the London Packet disgorged a nondescript passenger half-dead with typhoid. Pain was by then a middle-aged failure: the son of a Quaker family of corsetmakers in Thetford had left England a disgraced customs officer and a bankrupt shopkeeper. He was recently divorced from his second wife, having already lost his first wife and only child in childbirth. And after watching five other dead passengers dumped over the ship's side on the way over, it's a wonder Pain didn't throw himself overboard as well. But among his meager belongings was found a letter to Richard Bache, a prominent local merchant:
The bearer Mr. Thomas Pain is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor, of all of which I think him very capable, so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father.
It proved to be the best introduction to Philadelphia one could imagine, for Bache's "affectionate father" was in fact a stepfather with a different name altogether, a gentleman scientist and merchant who had noticed Pain's argumentative and restless brilliance in London coffeehouses: “Benj. Franklin” read the signature.
How many times must progress be born, struck dead, and reborn again, before it finally survives? It was, after all, not the first time Franklin had been intrigued by the fiery zeal of a fellow Quaker. Decades earlier he'd befriended Benjamin Lay, a hunchbacked glovemaker disowned by English Quakers for denouncing slavery and capital punishment as abominations. Exiled to Philadelphia and dismayed to find slaveowning there too, he'd quit town in disgust and lived as a hermit in a cave outside the city limits, refusing to wear or eat anything that had involved the suffering of an animal. Quaker slaveholders probably fancied themselves rid of him. They were not: attired in a biblical beard and a flowing white overcoat, Lay would sweep into Philadelphia meetinghouses to scourge the Friends throughout the 1750s. "In the sight of God, you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart!" roared the furious elder who materialized in the midst of one meeting, wielded a knife on himself, and showered bystanders with fake blood. For his troubles, Lay was physically thrown into the gutter on Market Street. He refused to pick himself up from the muck, preferring to lie there as a reproach to the Friends as they left the meetinghouse. But he still entertained one occasional visitor in his cave-Franklin.
And perhaps it was that same idealistic quality that the now-elderly Franklin saw in the unemployed fellow who held forth in London coffeehouses. Absurdly, this newest protege simply had a notion of going to Philadelphia to start a young ladies' finishing school. Ah, but then Franklin himself had once nearly thrown it all over to become a London swimming instructor. Pain, too, was marked out for greater things-he just did not know what yet. After a job at a local newspaper, where he reinvented himself by changing his name slightly and penning editorials that excoriated the very same inequalities Lay once had, Paine finally found his life's mission in writing a pamphlet.
The pamphlet.
In the will he'd scrawled in Ryder's house on Herring Street, Paine carefully included instructions for his tombstone, a simple headstone with his name, his dates, and an epitaph of just four words: Author of Common Sense. A single pamphlet, written when he was a nobody, published anonymously; of the thousands of pages he had published in his life, for all the tumult and agony he had undergone, it all came back to that one act. Understand this and you understand my life.
Why? True, Common Sense sold one hundred and twenty thousand copies in its first three months after January 10, 1776-and upwards of five hundred thousand copies in the next three years. In those days of expensive paper, each copy was passed around. America's population was only about 2.5 million, many of whom could not even read, so readership of this pamphlet was virtuall
y universal among the literate. It was a feat unequaled by any document in the Colonies save perhaps the Bible. It brought forth a frenzied response by Loyalist propagandists, desperate to stanch the wounds he'd made, but it was already too late. Paine had changed the very terms of the debate. 'Without the pen of the author of Common Sense," John Adams later mused, "the word of Washington would have been raised in vain." This was no small admission coming from Adams, since he'd initially condemned Common Sense as "a poor ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass."
But . . . Who cares now? Why should this still matter, this tax and sovereignty polemic from centuries ago?Lots of political writers have written lots of bestsellers, and a few have even managed to tear the nation from its moorings. Yet we do not still read Rowan Hinton Helper's Impending Crisis of the South. So why this one: what made it special? Why make this one pamphlet the epitaph on his grave? Perhaps the clue lies in plain sight. Though Common Sense was a forty-six-page pamphlet, its animating spirit may be found within its first sentence: "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right." Forget what you thought was wrong, Paine says, and forget what you thought was right: produce proof that they are so. And if there is one word that expresses what the achievements of the Enlightenment are about, it is that one. Proof: