While Sidney worked, the Mexican bullfighter Rodolfo Gaona was stunning crowds with his capework. He was talented enough that he was soon being commissioned for theater and soft drink posters and streetcar cards. In Mexico City, Sidney worked as a silk screen artist. This was how he found his way to Mexico City. Sidney went as far as the money could take him. Lubba, worried Abram was going to kill him, gave Sidney some of her pushka money – the small sum her husband afforded her every month to run the house. When he returned home, Abram knocked him unconscious: he didn’t wake up until the next day. Sidney didn’t call his parents to warn them he’d be gone. In 1922, when he was nineteen, he and a friend spent a weekend in New Jersey’s Asbury Park, a resort town known for its numerous queer bars. The family called Sidney fageleh, a Yiddish word meaning ‘queer’ or ‘fag’, though never to his face. In his late adolescence, he was sometimes seen in Prospect Park, a place where gay men cruised – family members claim that Abram, who was part of a patrol that maliciously beat these men every Saturday night, saw Sidney there and beat him along with the rest. He later abandoned acting, which he called his ‘first love’, determining it to be ‘too feministic’. After school, he acted in plays as a part of the New York Globe’s Bedtime Stories Club, and changed his name to Franklin so his father wouldn’t find out. Sidney wasn’t athletic and he wasn’t popular. He was the son of Russian Jews Abram and Lubba Frumkin – Abram, a policeman who was keen to prove his masculinity to his Irish coworkers, simmered with a fierce disdain for his son, who was grandiose and creative and uninterested in becoming an accountant or teacher like the rest of his nine siblings. Sidney Franklin was light on his feet and red-haired and slim. The New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross had said theirs was a friendship between a great man and a lesser one. As young men, the two had split bottles of brandy in Spain, had traveled through the countryside together (a remarked-upon odd couple, one clean and effete and the other greasy and unshaven), had watched bombs explode in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Fifteen years earlier, on 2 July 1961, Ernest Hemingway donned his ‘emperor’s robe’ and shot himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun.
On 26 April 1976, after suffering a stroke that robbed him of the ability to walk and speak, the matador Sidney Franklin died in a nursing home in Manhattan, roughly thirteen miles from his native Brooklyn. In the view of the value pluralists, ‘there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality’ (Hampshire 1989a: 177).Nobody ever lives their lives all the way up except bull-fighters. This dissenting countermovement, which emerges most clearly in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and John Gray, is fuelled by an appreciation of the perpetuity of plurality and conflict and, correspondingly, by the conviction that visions of moral unity and harmony are incoherent and implausible. On the other hand, the way of the fox corresponds to the nemesis of monism, the philosophical tradition of value pluralism, to which this collection of essays is devoted. On the one hand, the way of the hedgehog corresponds to the creed of value monism, reflecting a faith in the ultimate unity of the moral universe and belief in the singularity, tidiness and completeness of moral and political purposes. The fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, quoted in Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, serves as a metaphor for the long-standing contrast and rivalry between two radically different approaches to public ethics, each of which is couched in a radically different vision of the structure of moral value. Archilochus quoted in Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 22 ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’.
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