Odd Jobs (46 page)

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

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:

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:

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.

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. Though 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.

Within a few days of his London arrival in 1757, Franklin had found lodgings in Craven Street, Strand, with Margaret Stevenson, a widow his age, and her daughter Mary, called Polly. This surrogate household, echoing in composition that of the wife and daughter he had left behind in Philadelphia, remained his home for all his English years; when, in 1772, Mrs. Stevenson moved a few doors away, her distinguished lodger moved with her. She cooked for him and nursed him when he was sick. According to Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert in their lively
The Private Franklin
, “People fell into a habit of inviting them together or sending greetings to both.” Were they, in his fifteen years beneath her roof, lovers? Some historians speculate that his amorous favor fell instead upon her daughter, who was eighteen when they first met. Before Polly Stevenson’s marriage, to Dr. William Hewson, Franklin wrote long paternally instructive letters to her, and she was responsive enough to attempt communicating in the phonetic alphabet he invented, of which the Library of America volume includes three eye-boggling pages. After her husband’s death, she came to Philadelphia at Franklin’s invitation, stayed four years, until his death, then stayed five years more, until her own death, even though she had complained to her son, “Nothing but insignificance or slavery awaits a woman here.”

In London, on the face of it, Franklin behaved as head of the Stevenson household and used it as the comfortable base of his flattering English life. An American friend, after visiting Craven Street, reported that “Doctor Franklin looks heartier than I ever knew him in America.” He became a man-about-town. As earlier in Philadelphia and later in France, his devoted membership in the Masons opened doors and cemented friendships. While still in America, he had been elected a member
of the Royal Society and of the Premium Society, or Society of Arts. He received awards and honorary degrees, and, summers, travelled in the British Isles and on the Continent, receiving more honors. He frequented taverns and coffeehouses, usually dining on Mondays at the George and Vulture with a group of scientists, and on Thursdays with the Club of Honest Whigs at St. Paul’s Coffeehouse. “Conversation warms the mind,” he wrote one of his many new friends, Lord Kames. Not only was Franklin’s one of those reputations, like Poe’s and Faulkner’s, that the French have returned to us enhanced but he was one of those Americans, like Henry James and T. S. Eliot, who found refuge in England from the thinness of native cultural life. Temporarily back in Philadelphia in 1763, he wrote Polly, “Of all the enviable Things England has, I envy it most its People. Why should that petty Island … enjoy in almost every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.”

His renown as a scientist, especially as an “electrician,” had preceded him and smoothed his way, and it is the scientific passages in the London pages of this bulky selection that form the easiest reading and best give the impression of a mind congenially engaged. These years began with his penning, on the boat across the Atlantic, the haranguing summary of Poor Richard’s cautionary sayings which, separately published as “Father Abraham’s Speech” or “The Way to Wealth,” was to enjoy wide circulation and many translations. During his Philadelphia hiatus, he wrote perhaps his fiercest and most eloquent pamphlet, decrying the slaughter of twenty friendly Indians living peaceably in Lancaster by a gang of Scotch-Irish farmers calling themselves the Paxton Boys, in reaction to Indian massacres along the Pennsylvania frontier. Franklin’s passionate language still stings: “What had little Boys and Girls done; what could Children of a Year old, Babes at the Breast, what could they do, that they too must be shot and hatcheted?—Horrid to relate!—and in their Parents Arms! This is done by no civilized Nation in
Europe
. Do we come to
America
to learn and practise the Manners of
Barbarians
? But this,
Barbarians
as they are, they practise against their Enemies only, not against their Friends.”

The bulk of the topical articles and ironical letters published in England, under a parade of pseudonyms—
A New Englandman
, A B
RITON
, The S
PECTATOR
, A T
RAVELLER
, N.N., P
ACIFICUS
S
ECUNDUS
, H
OMESPUN
, F.B., A
MERICANUS
, A
RATOR
,
A Friend to both Countries
—have rather outworn
their complicated occasions. When his sister Jane asked him for a collection of his recent political pieces, Franklin wrote her, “They were most of them written occasionally for transient Purposes, and having done their Business, they die and are forgotten. I could as easily make a Collection for you of all the past Parings of my Nails.” Only when the irony—aimed now from a British persona, now from an American—grows outrageous, do the pieces still throw off sparks, as when whales are alleged to leap up the Niagara Falls in the pursuit of cod (“one of the finest Spectacles in Nature!”) or, in a hoax that was taken seriously in some quarters, the King of Prussia is supposed to be promulgating an edict demanding, since ancient Britain was a kind of German colony, that all British cargoes be unloaded and taxed in Köningsberg, on the analogy of regulations and duties imposed by the Crown upon the American Colonies. As Boston was blockaded and American blood shed, Franklin’s satires became more savage and Swiftian. One of them provides a slogan that Jefferson proposed as a motto for the great seal of the United States: “
REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD.
”