Jonathan Swift remains the most enigmatic of conservatives. He may have espoused all three of the principles by which T. S. Eliot defined his own conservatism in 1928 — “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion” — but Swift preferred defining himself not by straightforward means but by parodying his antagonists: Grub Street moderns, free-thinking regicides, and fanatical nonconformists. Swift was a consummate, mercurial, and compulsive ventriloquist.
The result is that anyone who attempts a biography of the man is faced with a fiendishly devised series of paper trails contrived to mislead. Indeed, Swift devoted his whole career — as a writer, clergyman, loyal friend, ladies’ man, Anglo-Irish patriot, and curmudgeon — to covering his tracks. And when he did write about himself, he was always economical with the truth.
Of course, Swift often savored the first person, scattering his “I” across vast expanses of paper. But discovering his real voice behind the satirical mask seems impossible. The Gulliver of Gulliver’s Travels (who goes mad) and the mock author of A Modest Proposal (who advocates cannibalism as a solution for Ireland’s economic woes) are invented first-person narrators. Only to the inept “Ode to the Athenian Society” (1692) and A Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue (1712) did he sign his name, while most of the rest of his writings emanate from a deafening echo chamber of spoofery. We can’t even agree which works are properly his, because Swift dashed off so many pastiches of the ephemera that sold on the streets for a penny: ballads, odes, prophecies, astrologers’ pamphlets, modest proposals, tooth-drawers’ broadsides. Even when Swift seemed to speak in propria persona — from his pulpit, for instance, or in his voluminous correspondence — he set up weird reverberations. “Never any one living thought like you,” complained Hester Vanhomrigh (the “Vanessa” of his poems). “No human being is capable of guessing at your mind.”
But if all this makes any attempt to grasp the life of the enigmatic dean unlikely to succeed, there are still distinctions to be made among the failures. And in her new Fonathan Swift: A Portrait, the popular biographer Victoria Glendinning has failed badly, confecting no more than a biographical meringue. Though Glendinning asserts that “by now the life of the author of Gulliver’s Travels is extremely well-documented,” the truth is that information is infuriatingly sparse about the years before Swift made his reputation, at the late age of thirty-seven, with Tale of a Tub (1704), the scandalous Satanic Verses of its day.
Rather than ponder the true enigma of Swift’s greatness — that of a parson who penned impious masterpieces — Glendinning speculates ad nauseam about thrice-told and mostly exploded gossip. Did Swift and Vanessa have sex? Horace Walpole was the first to suggest that Swift’s many references to coffee in his letters to her — “I long to drink a dish of coffee in the Sluttery” — comprise a sexual code. “If I were forced to make a judgment,” Glendinning opines, “I would say that maybe they somehow consummated their affair once.”
Did Swift, in 1716, secretly marry “Stella,” as he dubbed Esther Johnson, another of his lady friends? No one ever saw them alone together, but then, Glendinning surmises, Swift may have kept their secret marriage chaste because he had discovered that they were actually brother and sister — or maybe even brother and sister and double cousins, depending on how one dreams up the incest: Glendinning resurrects the old calumny that Swift was really the illegitimate son of either Sir William Temple (for whom he worked as secretary during the 1690s) or of Sir William’s father, Sir John Temple, and that Stella was (in Glendinning’s new twist) really the illegitimate daughter of Sir William and his widowed sister Lady Giffard.
Of course, for airing the incestuous sheets of Stella’s conception, Glendinning has no evidence, but never mind: “You do not have to believe the incest story. It is a willful biographical vagary. . . . I am not putting it forward as the truth, nor even as a possible truth.” So much for Swift’s “well-documented” life. Too often Glendinning’s biography exudes the cheap perfume of a novelette.
An experienced and prize-winning biographer as well as a novelist, Glendinning has already tackled the lives of Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and Anthony Trollope. In Jonathan Swift she has met more than her match. Glendinning snipes at scholars — with “their familiar recourse to sagging bookshelves of published documentation and research” — and prefers to trick out her portrait with white elephants, red herrings, and autobiographical flounces.
Sometimes this leads her into such unnecessary indulgences as using an outdated edition of Swift’s Works “because I bought the set from the Bantry Bookshop in West Cork early in my research and became attached to it.”
At other time it leads her into such silliness as going to an exhibition in Paris (“Georges de La Tour has nothing to do with Swift”) where Baroque portraits prompt such forgettable musings as: “The same man is not the same man. It depends on how you look at him.” Mostly, it seems to lead her into a prose that reads like an undergraduate pulling an all-nighted to crank out a term paper:
One can never have finished with Swift. . . . Pope had genius as a writer. . . . Swift knew the score. . . . You feel his presence, or is it his absence? . . . Swift wanted to be ‘in the swim’ in the great world. He had the personal qualities to make a splash. . . . Writing and reading about Swift is watching a movie about watching. . . . There was never quite a man like Swift. . . . Swift’s intensity is channeled into words, words, words, and always to a purpose. His work is his own monument.
Even though Swift had a recurrent literary nightmare of his pages becoming toilet paper, his works manage to survive Victoria Glendinning’s biographical efforts.
But, far beyond Glendinning’s ken, the relation of those works to his life remains a perpetual puzzle — and one that has to be answered before we can decide whether Jonathan Swift was the most serious conservative writer of all time or the least serious, or even, somehow, both.
The key period is Swift’s “lost years” before the publication of his Tale of a Tub. Those years shackled Swift to Ireland (which he loathed) and determined the remainder of his career. Born of English parents in Dublin — where his father, who died before Swift’s birth, had been a carpetbagging lawyer — Swift was deserted by his mother, who moved back to England with his sister.
Supported by relatives who stayed on, Swift was educated at Kilkenny School and at Trinity College, Dublin, the best institutions in colonial Ireland. Fleeing “the Troubles” (as he already called them) in 1689, Swift became an odd-job secretary, for the best part of the next decade to Sir William Temple, a free-thinking diplomat who had retired to his English estates to dabble in belles-letters and cultivate his garden.
Casting an avuncular (if naive) eye over his secretary’s juvenilia, Temple supervised Swift’s entry into print with his “Ode to the Athenian Society.” Published on April 1, 1692 — a date to which Swift cued many of his later squibs — the poem itself is quite suspiciously poor. But its suavely snide prefatory epistle, Swift’s first published prose, is a signal of the genius of the prose works that were to come. There was in fact no “Athenian Society”; there was only a trio of coffee-house hacks who impersonated a learned society in order to draw attention to their frivolous periodical, the Athenian Mercury, hawked on sidewalks for a penny. Glendinning regards the “Ode” as though it were in the grand vein of Abraham Cowley’s pindaric ode “To the Royal Society,” and Swift’s guile completely escapes her.
In 1694 Swift quarreled with Temple about his stalled career, returning to Ireland where he took holy orders and served briefly in the ramshackle parish of Kilroot in Ulster. But by 1697 he was back with Temple. After Temple’s death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin, his career in the church on hold, his future as a writer a pipe dream. In 1700 Swift secured the small parish of Laracor near Dublin; in 1702 he obtained a doctorate in divinity from Trinity, something of a formality. In his own bitter words, he had “as far to seek as ever.” But then at last, once he had been identified as the author of Tale of a Tub, he managed to achieve a sudden fame but also ill-fortune.
The Tale’s “I” is a hack with no name, starving, syphilitic, and deranged by his failure to save the world. Whatever his respect for the Ancients, Swift ventriloquizes his book into the mad diary of a modern nobody who reduces all politics, philosophy, religion, and literature to mountebankery or to a Bedlamite vaporing that spreads from the lower organs. At thirty-seven, Swift was already haunted by insanity, beginning to suffer from Meniere’s disease, which afflicted him with headaches, tintinnitus, and dizziness. And in the Tale, he seems to suspect that fame is random and that its attainment demands equal doses of dementia and charlatanry.
How does the Tale’s “I” — ostensibly so different from its real author — refract Swift’s long-thwarted ambitions, his horror at the misery of authors, his doubts about ordination, or a fear of going mad? The Tale was the first work to secure Swift’s place in the pantheon of world satirists. But “one of the prophanest banters upon the religion of Jesus Christ that ever appeared” (as a fellow Anglican harrumphed) did not augur well for Swift’s advancement in the church. Several of Swift’s contemporaries were executed or received life sentences for blasphemies less dazzlingly circumspect.
“Did Swift believe in God?” Glendinning blandly wonders, observing how “his light way of writing about religion” gave offense. In her hands, Swift joins the ranks of dirty old vicars scrawling limericks about liturgical knickers. Taking holy orders was for Swift, Glendinning concludes, “not a vocation, [but] a career decision.”
In fact, Swift’s decision was heartfelt, if heart-pounding. Indeed, he became dedicated to the Church of England, championing its prerogatives against nonconformism, free-thinking, Catholicism, and state interference. But Swift’s religious polemics, often unnervingly ironical, appeared after the Tale had made his reputation as a satirist. Assured that Swift “was not a Christian,” Queen Anne refused to give him the English bishopric or deanery for which he yearned. Court wits quipped that the deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin was a suitable posting in 1713 because the Irish were too ignorant to understand the Tale. Shipped back to Ireland, Swift felt “like a poisoned rat in a hole.” English colonialism enraged him, however, and he took up Ireland’s cause, his anonymous authorship of such brilliant pamphlets as A Modest Proposal an open secret. “Fair Liberty,” he boasted, “was all his cry.” By the late 1730s, Swift’s grim decline into senility had begun. “And Swift expires, a driv’ler and a show,” Samuel Johnson recorded dourly, recirculating rumors that the deanery’s staff had exhibited their employer as a freak.
On Enlightenment fantasies of progress, Swift invariably cast the coldest of eyes. But he did so by deploying a word-perfect mimicry of the fools and knaves who try to improve the world with their bogus “proposals” and “projects,” whether for building a better mousetrap or for implementing the universal rule of reason, truth, and philanthropy. Swift loathed social engineers and do-gooders, but their lingo fascinated him.
Was Swift’s “savage indignation” (as he ordered it put on his tombstone) provoked by a Christian’s grasp of original sin or by the worldly pessimism of Thomas Hobbes — the “Atheist of Malmesbury” — over whose works he had pored as Temple’s secretary? One way to read Swift is to assume that he is speaking for himself when, in Gulliver’s Travels, he summarizes English history as:
an heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments; the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce.
But another way to read Swift is to observe that this verdict, so quintessentially “Swiftian,” is actually delivered by the King of Brobdingnag, who is appalled by Gulliver’s patriotic narrative. “I was forced to rest with patience, while my most noble and most beloved country was so injuriously treated,” murmurs the Little Englander. Swift actually supported the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which replaced James II with William and Mary, thereby insuring a Bill of Rights, the Protestant Succession, and the survival of the Church of England. And his period as a polemicist for the Tory party, from 1710 to 1713, was clearly inspired by patriotism.
Swift disagreed testily with his friend William Congreve’s epigram: Believe it, men have ever been the same / And all the Golden Age is but a dream. This encapsulated, so Swift protested, “a vile and false moral, ‘that all times are equally virtuous and vicious,’ wherein Congreve differs from all poets, philosophers, and Christians that ever writ.” Swift made his ventriloquial career as a satirist by peddling just such differences.
Swift’s conservatism is profound but unsettling. Beneath the fervor that he brought to political and theological feuds, to his era’s culture wars, and to his domestic affairs, throbs a bleak pessimism. Is human conflict still reducible to distinctions without differences, to squabbles between High Heels and Low Heels, Big Endians and Little Endians? Will it ever be thus? To the defense of the Queen’s English, as to that of the Christian Logos, he sometimes brought a prescriptive intensity. Yet Swift’s Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue, printed over his own name, seems incongruously flat-footed, when read in conjunction with the satires. Swift was obsessed with lying — “the thing which is not,” as the Houyhnhnms incredulously term mendacity when faced by Gulliver — but he reveled in word-play and verbal subterfuge.
“Proper words in proper places makes the true definition of a style,” averred another of his mouthpieces, in a maxim customarily attributed to the dean himself. Swift, however, will always be prized for his insertion of improper words in improper places. That is either the least conservative of endeavors, or the most. And only the impossible literary biography of literature’s most enigmatic figure could ever tell us which of them Swift was attempting.
VICTORIA GLENDINNING
Jonathan Swift A Portrait
Henry Holt, 324 pp. $ 35
Hugh Ormsby-Lennon teaches eighteenth-century English literature at Villanova University.
