Words On Pieces of Paper

By Roger Rosenblatt.

Picture Shallus doing the words, "engrossing" the Constitution, as the process was called, copying it out at an elegant angle in large, legible script. The four sheets of parchment were vellum, the skin of a lamb or a calf, stretched, scraped and dried. The ink, a blend of oak galls and dyes. The light, an oil lamp. The instrument, a feather quill. All nature contributing to the assignment, human nature in the form of Jacob Shallus, ordinary American citizen, son of a German immigrant to Philadelphia, soldier, patriot, father of eight and, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, assistant clerk to the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The convention handed Shallus the documents for copying on Sept. 15, 1787. He had 40 hours to transfer to four sheets of parchment 4,440 words, for which the payment was $30, good money for moonlighting.

Two centuries later Shallus becomes history's triviality, his story revived by a scholar, Arthur Plotnik, in a new biography. But the words on paper are given Bicentennial parades. Amazing little artifact. What started out at one man's writing desk eventually journeyed the country from city to city as the nation's capital moved, went into hiding during the War of 1812, was transferred from federal department to department until it wound up in the National Archives in Washington, sanctified in helium and watched over by an electronic camera conceived by NASA. The quill age to the space age, and at every stage, a nation full of grateful believers making a constant noisy fuss over a piece of writing barely equivalent to a short story: much theme, no plot and characters inferred.

Call the Constitution literature? Sarah Orne Jewett once wrote to Willa Cather, "The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper . . . it belongs to literature." One would have to say that the Constitution qualifies, human minds having been teased for centuries with the possibility of making a government that would allow that mind to realize itself. The document shows other literary attributes as well: a grounding in the ideas of its time, economy of language, orderliness, symmetrical design, a strong, arresting lead sentence. Then, there's all that shapely ambiguity. Even those who have never read the document, enduring wars, debts, threats to health, privacy, equality, down to questions raised by AIDS and aid to the contras, are convinced that the / Constitution's words foresaw all that.

Which, in a way, they did. The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves. Within the exacting articles and stipulations there was not only room to fly but also the tacit encouragement to fly, even the instructions to fly, traced delicately within the solid triangular concoction of the framers. Even 200 years after the fact, when people debate whether the Constitution is fit for so complicated and demanding a time, Americans take as granted the right to grow into themselves. They must have read it somewhere, in a fable.

Still, picture Shallus, before any of these hopes were raised or satisfied, the four skins laid out before him, the ink, the quill and the lamp. And the words, like mysterious ciphers, handed over to him by the best minds of the age, who had just sweated out a Philadelphia summer to claim intellectual territory, which was to translate to a civilization. Did Shallus read what he had copied when he finished? Would he have understood it if he had? How could he dream that all those words, thought out so meticulously, were conceived only for him? Citizen Shallus bent over his desk in his country, deliberately, exquisitely in the act of being born.