Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  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:

  I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults,—if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

  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.

  2. The French Franklin

  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 Roussea
u, 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.”

  This image fascinated the French but the visible reality did not charm his fellow negotiator John Adams, who complained to his journal:

  I found out that the Business of our Commission would never be done, unless I did it.… The Life of Dr. Franklin was a Scene of continual discipation. I could never obtain the favour of his Company in a Morning before Breakfast which would have been the most convenient time to read over the Letters and papers.… It was late when he breakfasted, and as soon as Breakfast was over, a crowd of Carriages came to his Levee … with all sorts of People; some Phylosophers, Accademicians and Economists … but by far the greater part were Women and Children, come to have the honour to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling Stories about his Simplicity, his bald head and scattering strait hairs, among their Acquaintances.

  This riot of “discipation” is not entirely out of character; Franklin had always been sexy. His autobiography confesses how “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth, had hurried me frequently into Intrigues with low Women that fell in my Way.” Poor Richard, especially in the earlier issues of his Almanack, offers some racy aphorisms: “After 3 days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, & weather rainy”; “Neither a Fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parly”; “She that paints her Face, thinks of her Tail.” And his “Old Mistresses Apologue” (1745), advising a young correspondent to resort to older women, startlingly combines medical misinformation with the wisdom of experience:

  Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

  By a gray cat whose name was never disclosed, Franklin had fathered an illegitimate son, William. The boy lived with him and his common-law wife, Deborah; a son of theirs, Francis Folger, died in 1736, at the age of four, and a daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743. Franklin’s wife (whom he had once fondly likened to a “large fine Jugg for Beer”) died two years before his departure to France, and the giddy widower lavished coquettish proposals upon his new female friends. He informed Madame Brillon that there were twelve Commandments, the extra two being “Increase & multiply & replenish the earth” and “Love one another,” and advised her that “the most effectual way to get rid of a certain Temptation is, as often as it returns, to comply with and satisfy it.” From Madame La Freté he expected “half a Dozen of your sweet, affectionate, substantial, & heartily applied Kisses,” and via the personae of the flies buzzing in his chambers Franklin expressed to Madame Helvétius the hope that she and he would combine households. Not just John Adams was disapproving; Adams’s wife, Abigail, wrote to a friend a mordant description of Madame Helvétius, dressed in “a Chemise made of Tiffany, which she had on over a blue lute-string, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman; her hair was frizzled; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze half-handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze, than ever my maids wore, was bowed on behind.” This shabby temptress greeted Franklin with “a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead,” and during dinner was seen “frequently locking her hand into the Doctor’s … then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck.” Mrs. Adams indignantly goes on, “After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog, who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor she wiped it up with her chemise. This is one of the Doctor’s most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him.” The revered septuagenarian probably received from these lively Gallic women few favors more carnal than being petted and kissed and teased for his faulty French; but a “naughty” Franklin persisted in the American imagination, taking bawdy forms on the popular stage and figuring in Melville’s Israel Potter. Melville, sixty-five years after Franklin had died, sums up the legend:

  Franklin was not less a lady’s man, than a man’s man, a wise man, and an old man. Not only did he enjoy the homage of the choicest Parisian literati, but at the age of seventy-two he was the caressed favorite of the highest born beauties of the Court; who through blind fashion having been originally attracted to him as a famous savan, were permanently retained as his admirers by his Plato-like graciousness of good humor. Having carefully weighed the world, Franklin could act in any part in it.… This philosophical levity of tranquillity, so to speak, is shown in his easy variety of pursuits. Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land. Franklin was everything but a poet.

  In his French phase Franklin came closest to being a pure litterateur; in the delicious relaxation of his epicurean twilight, under the stimulus of feminine French wits, he produced bagatelles, parables, parodies of the Bible, and unclassifiable oeuvrets (a word of his coinage) that are to the run of his prose as silk is to serviceable muslin. His “Dialogue Between the Gout and Mr. Franklin” (imitating verses by Madame Brillon and annotated and corrected by her) has, for all its airy form, real midnight power; the former stern advocate of temperance is rebuked by the voice of pain as “a glutton and a tippler” and told, “You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct.” It ends on an eerie puritanical note as the Gout assures its sufferer that “my object is your good, and you are sensible now that I am your real friend.” Apparently unpersuaded, in this same period Franklin drew (or had one of his grandsons draw) for the freethinking Abbé Morellet some anatomical sketches inviting “your piety and gratitude to Divine Providence” for its having placed the elbow just where convenient for bringing a glass to the mouth: “Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom;—let us adore and drink!” And in a earthy spoof of scientific research Franklin proposed experiments “To discover some Drug wholesome & not disagreeable, to be mix’d with our common Food, or Sauces, that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes.” An epitome of Enlightenment amelioration.

  3. The English Franklin

  From 1757 to 1762, and—after a rather tumultuous and unsatisfactory interval back in Philadelphia—from 1764 to 1775, Franklin lived in London, as the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to negotiate its longstanding and intractable differences with the Proprietors, Richard and Thomas Penn. Later, he was appointed the agent of the legislatures of Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts as well. He did secure from the Privy Council in 1760 the concession that the lands of the Proprietors would be no longer exempt from taxation. His defense of the American position before the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons in 1766 contributed to the repeal of the Stamp Act and established him as the preëminent representative of the Colonies. Thou
gh his fifteen years in England were fruitful of little else in the way of political agreement, and ended in bloody revolution and a hasty return, for him they were years rich in honors and sociability.

  In France, he took on the fantastic, delicate coloration of a dream realm, an aristocratic world of powdered wigs and romantic intrigue, of balloon ascents and literary games enacted in the gossamer last days of the ancien régime—a regime bankrupted, in part, by the American aid Franklin had coaxed from it. Writing near the end of his life to Madame Helvétius, he talked of dreams: “Et souvent dans mes Songes, je dejeune avec vous, je me place au coté de vous sur une de votre mille sofas, ou je promène avec vous dans votre belle jardin” (“And often in my dreams, I dine with you, I sit beside you on one of your thousand sofas”—a touch of the poet, surely, in that—“or I walk with you in your beautiful garden”). In England, things were solid, sooty, burly, clamorous, and masculine. After a while, he stayed, it seemed, only because it suited him. The purpose of his second mission had been to petition the King to take over the government of Pennsylvania from the Penns, and to persuade the Ministry and Parliament to recognize the Assembly as the legislative authority of the province. In the words of Bernard Faÿ’s biography, “Franklin walked from one anteroom to another, with his eternal petition in his hand, hearing nothing but words which were more and more vague, and receiving invitations to dinner which were more and more cordial.” According to Faÿ, his position became increasingly equivocal, and eventually untenable: “He continued to serve with Foxcroft as the postmaster-general of America, which was a royal office; he was agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, which was very moderate, for the New Jersey government of his son, which was very Tory, and for the Massachusetts Assembly, which was very radical.” Yet even after his dismissal as deputy postmaster-general early in 1774, as punishment for his disclosure of some secret government letters to the Massachusetts Assembly, he lingered another year, while his wife lay dying in Philadelphia. Jug-shaped Deborah was afraid of sea voyages and had twice refused to accompany him abroad.