Jonathan Swift: man of mystery

Untangling the facts and fictions of Jonathan Swift's life

by Pat Rogers

When Harold Bloom got busy defining the Western canon for us some twenty years ago, his short list of the main men and women in literature included only one figure from the high eighteenth century. That was Samuel Johnson, whom Bloom later admitted he read all the time “because he is my great hero as a literary critic and I have tried to model myself upon him all my life.” No Voltaire, Diderot, or Rousseau. No Defoe, Fielding, or Sterne. And no Swift. But the ship has sailed, and now even Johnson can do little more than cling on to canonical status in the place where it really matters most—the corpus of student texts. Like Pope, he didn’t write anything deemed worthy of admission to the Norton Critical Editions—a publishing decision no doubt based on canny sales forecasts. Only Swift holds secure, thanks mainly to Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal. These remain living classics, influential on writers and readers alike. Gullivermorphs easily into popular culture and science fiction. And Swift sometimes manages to rate among the British authors on whom graduates are writing the most dissertations, not too far behind Shakespeare and Angela Carter. He’s almost become Swift Our Contemporary.

As a result, scholars and devoted readers, as well as marketing people, can see there is room for a good new biography. Luckily, the gap has been filled by Leo Damrosch in a book that is more than good—it is masterly in its control of the material, its neat formal organization, and its deft unbuttoned style.1 To understand just what Damrosch has achieved, we need to explore the biographic context a little. He isn’t a professed Swiftian like some of his predecessors, although he has written excellent books on subjects such as Blake, Hume, Johnson, Pope, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Understandably, he shows some impatience here with the hitters designated by Swift’s academic team, accusing them of closing their minds to the work of independent scholars and “amateur” researchers. But there is a more prominent, if cumbrous, elephant in the room, and in almost every chapter of the new life the author has to confront the issues that arise.

Long domiciled at Harvard, Damrosch spent the earlier part of his career teaching at the University of Virginia. His span there coincided with the major production of a senior colleague, Irvin Ehrenpreis, at that time engaged in a monumental triptych of volumes devoted to Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, published between 1962 and 1983. Damrosch has waited until now to deliver his opinions on the version of Swift that emerges from this set of doorstoppers (Ehrenpreis died from a fall in 1985, while teaching at the University of Münster, a powerhouse for research into the Dean of St. Patrick’s). The critical verdict on Ehrenpreis’s workis distinctly negative. Among “the very real limitations” that according to Damrosch impair its claims to authoritative status is “a now very dated Freudian interpretation of personality.” This charge is irrefutable: The work buries amidst an impressive body of hard research a rather crude psychobiography. It might be added that Ehrenpreis didn’t have much gift for narrative and wrote undistinguished prose. Forty years ago a writer (me, as it happens) foolishly wrote that a measure of dullness is respectable in a standard life, like sobriety in a banker. The analogy looks bizarrely inapt today, but it remains true that some classic biographical enquiries suffer from turgid expression. Damrosch tells a pacier tale, with chapters on particular topics, such as Dublin life, cleverly integrated into the chronological account. And he writes with far more verve, contriving to blend informality with solid argumentation.

The book prompts questions about what kind of biographer a given subject requires, and about the kind of evidence that needs to be deployed. Most people these days lead an open life, especially on social media, with their capacity to circulate rumors and untruths in a nanosecond. But it wasn’t like that in the past, and some individuals made a virtue of their caginess. Does Swift fall into this category? Early on, Damrosch admits that “hidden though he wanted his inner life to be, he was anything but a recluse.” Near the end, he quotes Johnson’s remark that Pope “hardly drank tea without a stratagem,” and adds a comment by Swift’s friend Lord Orrery that the Dean, for all his ironical teasing, “was undisguised and perfectly sincere.” In between, Damrosch has been forced to trawl through a mass of stories about his subject, some reliable, some highly implausible. He gives them all a decent hearing, even down to the yarn of an aged bell-ringer that Swift had a son by his great friend Esther Johnson (always known as Stella). While he accuses Ehrenpreis of overconfidence in pushing psychoanalytic speculations, he thinks his former colleague was too skeptical with regard to many of these rumors. It is true that, just as one in a hundred conspiracy theories may have something behind it, so occasionally tall tales will warrant a fresh look. With men and women who lived in earlier centuries, you can hardly make biographic bricks without anecdotal straw.

It’s possible to clear up one minor puzzle. This concerns the fate of the knife used by the French adventurer Guiscard to stab Robert Harley, Queen Anne’s chief minister and Swift’s political patron. Damrosch quotes an account by a relative and biographer, the confusingly named Deane Swift, who had seen the knife in Swift’s possession. He remarks that these might prove convincing, “but maybe they don’t, which highlights the slipperiness of most evidence about Swift.” Another friend described the weapon differently and claimed that it stayed within the Harleys’ possession. We can add that the knife, along with the coat that the minister was wearing when attacked, remains at the ancestral seat of the Harley family in Herefordshire, and the owners have a line of provenance which fits Deane Swift’s version.

Damrosch’s big idea is to proclaim his subject “a man of mystery.” On the surface this appears surprising. Swift kept detailed account books for long periods, jotting down every penny he grudgingly spent, and he preserved all kinds of scraps that record fugitive bits of writing. He wrote an intimate daily journal for the eyes of Stella, and his letters from the age of about forty were lovingly hoarded by their recipients. Everyone agreed that he enjoyed social encounters. Compare this with his contemporary Daniel Defoe, whose masterpiece Robinson Crusoe lies in the background ofGulliver, published seven years later. For long spells Defoe worked as a political spy, he often went underground for months at a time when on the run from creditors or the law, and he even died in hiding. He used a large variety of ingenious pseudonyms (Swift just four or five, mostly transparent) and switched publishers as regularly as some people buy new shoes. He left far fewer letters, almost all on business and impersonal in style, and no private journal. Unlike Swift, he did not essay any sort of autobiographical sketch. It is true that his counterpart may be an unreliable narrator of his own life in works such as “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”—Is this ironic, angry, self-mocking, self-boosting, self-consolatory, or all the above in places? In addition, Defoe lacked the wide circle of intimates that Swift had acquired in London and Dublin. (The new book is good on these, both male and female, especially the Dean’s close ally Thomas Sheridan, grandfather of the dramatist.) The company Defoe kept included traders and projectors prior to his first failure and bankruptcy; fellow inmates of jails in the capital; and obscure political fixers in the provinces. Nobody knew when he would leave London and pop up unannounced in Bury St Edmunds or Berwick on Tweed. It’s even been suggested recently that he was born in 1644 (fifteen years earlier than we thought), was bisexual, and had extensive dealings with William Penn. Most scholars relegate this to a category of the wildly improbable, but Defoe is shadowy enough to make such alternative histories hard to disprove.

What Damrosch means when describing Swift as a man of mystery, it emerges, is that a number of unsolved puzzles surround big events in Swift’s career. The first relates to his birth. Was he really the posthumous child of the obscure Dublin functionary Jonathan Swift senior (whose vital records are murky), or perhaps the son of the aged John Temple, father of his patron Sir William? Damrosch gives a fair degree of credence to the latter possibility, first proposed over fifty years ago by the Irish journalist and man of the theater Denis Johnston in a work of gripping forensic enquiry. And why did the boy’s mother decamp across the sea to the English Midlands, or his nurse carry the infant to the remote Cumberland port of Whitehaven? For that matter, was Stella really the daughter of William Temple, and thus conceivably (to make a bad pun of the sort Swift liked) a half-niece of her subsequent protector? Damrosch is prepared to countenance all these possibilities. He doesn’t, however, mention the theory raised by another modern biographer, Victoria Glendinning, that Stella could have been the daughter of Temple’s sister, Martha Giffard.

The problems continue to mount as we follow Swift’s life. The very nature of Swift’s sexuality remains a moot question. Ehrenpreis thought he was asexual, but Damrosch has very little time for this view. Others have suggested he might have been a repressed homosexual, but the evidence here is equally scanty, that is to say nonexistent. For that matter, he could have been a repressed heterosexual, liking women but impotent. Frankly he could have been almost anything, except perhaps a woman in disguise (a theory once put forward, but rightly ignored by Damrosch, as it in no way matches the authenticated cases of such a deception). The evidence is more profuse in respect of two further issues, concerning Swift’s relations with Stella and his other supposed inamorata, Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa); but unfortunately the facts are no easier to establish. The story that Swift contracted a secret marriage with Stella was first put about in his own day, and some of the circumstantial details have a degree of conviction. Damrosch certainly isn’t willing to dismiss it as mere prurient gossip.

Then there is the Vanhomrigh affair, semi-fictionalized in Swift’s longest and most ambiguous poem, “Cadenus and Vanessa.” In Damrosch’s account, Vanessa did indeed harbor a strong passion for her friend, and Swift may have reciprocated by offering what to all appearance counts as what we normally call love. The word “coffee” in their exchanges may indeed be a code word for sex, something doubted by many scholars. Damrosch shows impatience with biographers such as Ehrenpreis and David Nokes who have minimized Vanessa’s likely distress at her treatment, and again I think he’s right. The arguments deployed here do a good deal to reinforce the case made by one of the amateur Swiftians, that is Sybil Le Brocquy (1892–1973). A playwright and actress known to W. B. Yeats as well as a leading figure in the Irish arts world, she was the mother of Louis Le Brocquy, the painter and friend of Samuel Beckett. In her old age, she produced studies of Vanessa (1962) and Stella (1968) which contain a lot of suggestive, if not conclusive, thinking.

One more contentious issue concerns Swift’s attitude towards the Jacobite movement. Damrosch usefully sets out some of the facts, including Swift’s expressed support for the Old Whig creed—here he goes along with J. A. Downie’s valuable study of Swift as a political writer. But he doesn’t reach a definitive conclusion, and nowhere considers the awkward evidence found in behavior rather than protestations. The Dean’s close circle of friends included people like Lord Bolingbroke, the Duke and Duchess of Ormond, and Bishop Atterbury. A government formed under any restored Stuart monarchy would have included these men, as well as people like Lord Lansdowne, Sir William Wyndham, and Lord Bathurst, whom Swift had known from his days in the Brothers Club when he wrote on behalf of the Tory administration. Even his buddy in the Club, the poet Matthew Prior, would have been in line to regain his old job as under-secretary of state. (These were all Protestants, by the way.) Swift showed unfailing loyalty to these individuals when they were sent to the Tower of London, or impeached and banished by George I’s parliament. He maintained contact even though his letters were routinely opened by the authorities.

As Damrosch notes, a key passage in the first voyage ofGulliver displays hatred for the methods used by Robert Walpole’s government to entrap Atterbury for his role in a plot to restore the Stuart Pretender. But he doesn’t stress that this feeling extended not just to Walpole but to the King himself, as shown by innumerable references to “swarms of bugs and Hanoverians” and the like. Swift loathed James II, and would have wanted his son to renounce the faith—which was never going to happen. But if the 1715 rebellion had succeeded, as could just have occurred, and the new James III had been willing to rule by a Protestant government, as was essential in practice, who can doubt that Swift would have quickly come to an accommodation?

These unsettled questions naturally oblige a biographer to speculate. With a subtler command of rhetoric than his predecessors, Damrosch avoids dogmatism. He has to make heavy use of expressions like “probably” (at least a dozen times), “one can imagine that,” “quite possibly,” “may well have,” “presumably,” and so on. In fact Damrosch goes in for quite a lot of the guessing which he deplores in Ehrenpreis: He’s just more open about what he is doing. He is also content to leave many questions undecided, a strategy which helps to make the image of the “mystery man” more cogent. When it comes to reading the text of Swift’s work he usually strikes a more decisive note. Excellent passages are devoted toA Tale of a Tub, The Drapier’s Letters, A Modest Proposal, and above all Gulliver’s Travels—besides this, the author neatly inserts familiar extracts fromGulliver throughout his book to reinforce some local point at issue. The Journal to Stella provokes some intelligent comments on the baby language Swift used to establish intimacy with his friend. Damrosch has an illuminating reading of the scatological verse, here described as “The Disgusting Poems,” and kept back until tantalizingly close to the end of the book. (Earlier on he had aptly detected a “low threshold of disgust” in Swift.) Here the discussion steers a judicious middle course between those who see a horror in these poems at the workings of the body—among them D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, united on this point as they often weren’t in life—and those like Norman O. Brown who tried in the 1960s and ’70s to argue that Swift was merely anatomizing the human instinct to confuse the sexual and the excremental. My own view runs closer to the first camp, since overwhelming evidence exists that Swift had oddly flinching responses to corporeal things: Witness the monstrous breasts that the apparently tiny Gulliver is able to observe in Brobdingnag, with their “spots, pimples and freckles”—this of something that most men, and many women, find among the most attractive features of the human body.

Damrosch has read all the best critics, including Claude Rawson, Denis Donoghue, and Michael V. DePorte, and is up to date on the latest scholarship. Still, nothing is perfect, and even his acute critical sense falters a little on The Battle of the Books, partly because it is “too deeply invested in a long-forgotten controversy to have much appeal.” For once he seems to have missed the stream of illuminating secondary work which has made the great European-wide quarrel over Ancients and Moderns a theater of exciting intellectual debate. Throughout he gets very nearly all the details right, however. It’s not true to say “it was obvious that the king didn’t have long to live” when Swift visited England in 1727: George had suffered minor illnesses for a decade, but seemed in good health when he set out for Hanover, only to undergo a rather ignominious death en route. The unstable Jacobite Duke of Wharton, at a mere twenty-two, could never have been lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1720, as stated here. The Harleian miscellany of volumes was not bequeathed to Oxford but broken up for sale and catalogued by Samuel Johnson, while the manuscripts were sold to the new British Museum. Lastly, it’s odd to find a former stalwart of the University of Virginia say thatthe news of Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim in 1704 was brought to London by “a Colonel Parkes”—this was Daniel Parke, a native of the settlement that had just become Williamsburg, as well as perhaps the most colorful and celebrated Virginian around the turn of the century.

Such niggles matter not at all beside the splendid virtues of this book. We shall need still to turn to Ehrenpreis for the wealth of detail and the solid critical matter he provides, and other biographies have their merits. But what Damrosch has given us is superior to anything that has gone before, in its mastery of all aspects of the subject. Its depth of research, its level-headed appraisal of contentious issues, its easy readability, and its far-from-overblown dimensions make it a work where everyone will find a fascinating store of information and enjoyment. Almost a hundred well-chosen illustrations complement the fare. The volume won’t put an end to all the mysteries and complex debates surrounding its subject, but that is not through any defect on the biographer’s part. Blame it on Swift.