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Satire out of time
Spectator, The, Aug 15, 1998 by Hensher, Philip
JONATHAN SWIFT
by Victoria Glendinning
Hutchinson, 20, pp. 324
Nobody has ever written a really good book about Jonathan Swift, and I think no one ever will. He is one of those figures, like Carlyle, whose interests and intelligence are so various and profound that none of his biographers is capable of following him from beginning to end, and sooner or later has to admit defeat. I love his English political writings, the satires and the poetry, but am baffled by his religious life, and cannot quite get his Irish life into focus. Victoria Glendinning, it seems to me, is fascinated by the poetry, by the conversational Swift, by Stella, and has covered the Queen Anne material rather dutifully; she doesn't, however, really respond enthusiastically to Swift's low comedy and taste for a completely silly joke.
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Other biographers also fall short; an American called Ehrenpreis wrote an enormous, three-volume life, full of industry but missing the point on every page. Pope does much better as far as his commentators are concerned, and there is a library of excellent books on him; his genius, though limitlessly deep, is narrow, and may be fully understood. Swift, in the end, is always a puzzle beneath the limpid surface of the writing; he is a writer from whom it is difficult to withhold consistent admiration and, in the end, despite everything -- despite Celia, despite poor Mrs Gulliver, despite his taste for beating Laetitia Pilkington a measure of love. But in the end, one doesn't know him.
No age has ever understood him entirely. His contemporaries were fascinated by him, but could not understand his motivations, his secret passions, his obsessions; as Victoria Glendinning notes, there are more anecdotes told about him than about almost any other English writer. The sheer flood of stories, however improbable there is one about Swift inviting Pope to stay for supper; when Pope declined, he insisted on handing over the money he would have spent on entertaining him suggests a man who intrigued and baffled his contemporaries. Swift was too embarrassingly coarse for 19th-century readers, but in Lilliput, The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub, they found a Swift bookish, playful, and delightful; and that is certainly part of the truth.
It is as if nobody will ever be able to read Gulliver's Travels from beginning to end; there will always be something in it too big for a single reader or for a single age. I read it all the time, and every time I do so I think I understand it less than I did when I was eight years old. The brilliant political satire is for his contemporaries, but the astonishing end was beyond them, as the Age of Reason morality moves effortlessly into absurdity and Gulliver moves into the stables. For us, the interesting stuff is in the vicious scatological obsessions, the constant harping on the monstrosity of the human body; a future age may see the key to the whole thing in the dazzling play of intellectual discourses in the beautiful and exotic third book, set in Laputa.
But no one likes it all equally, and I think our version of Swift will puzzle future readers as much as the Victorian Swift puzzles us. The scatology and fastidious revulsion are certainly part of Swift's makeup; there is the macabre poem about the prostitute disassembling herself before going to bed, or the famous one which concludes with the revelation that `Celia shits'. But this aspect has somehow grown too large, and has blocked out some of Swift's more pressing concerns.
We see the general monstrousness of A Modest Proposal, ironically arguing that the children of the poor should be cooked and eaten:
A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
But I don't think we have much interest in the circumstances that gave rise to the writing of such a pamphlet, and the Drapier's Letters, which with incomparable invective force argue against the granting of a patent to coin brass halfpennies in Ireland, languish neglected. Where the scatological element is missing, Swift doesn't seem to interest us, and some of his most remarkable things - the nutty Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, or On the Conduct of the Allies, the grandest political essay in English - are unfamiliar even to quite curious readers.
The biggest hole in our concept of Swift is that we do not, I think, see him as principally a political animal. In the last years of Queen Anne's reign, he was extremely close to the centre of power. Friendly with Robert Harley and Bolingbroke, he was a power-broker in a small way and would, in time, have become a large operator. With the death of the Queen, Swift was caught up in the great purge of the Tories and suspected Jacobites, and, exiled to Ireland, his career in high politics was over. But for the rest of his life, the memory of the last years of the Queen acted on his imagination in the same way as the memory of childhood works on more conventional writers: it provided him with a stock of ideas and fantasy from which everything later sprang. Like Pope, he found exile to opposition more useful to his vocation as satirist than a job in the administration ever could have been, and it was the memory of near-power, the thought of what might have been, that kept him going, and filled his books from 1714 onwards. The Journal to Stella, a series of his letters from Queen Anne's court to Esther Johnson, is pretty hard going, but it must be read; in its explorations of power and influence, of kindness and posturing political energy, it provides the raw material for everything afterwards, from A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation to Gulliver's Travels, from the Drapier's Letters to the Verses on His Own Death.
