One wants very much to make an idol of Jonathan Swift. He has come down to us as a relentless opponent of cruelty, a merciless teller of hard truths, a "champion of liberty"—as the translation of his Latin epitaph puts it—and so on. Besides, he is so very much myself, is he not? His life is among the few in history that has touched so directly and impressively on church, state, and the art of letters—the three domains around which my own obsessions gather (i.e., religion, politics, literature).
He gives us all hope that you can spend a few short years close to the heart of policymaking, dine out on it for years (though there is a self-deprecating passage cited in the present volume in which he addresses how quickly people start to doubt that he ever was as important a person as he claims), and then be cast back into clerical obscurity— and nevertheless still join the ranks of the immortals through the power of the pen. He is polemicist, prophet, policy analyst, muckraker—in short, all the things I want to be.
And yet, after being in his presence for even the time it takes to finish this relatively short biography, one is ready for a break. The man's vaunted truth-telling is more frustratingly partial than one might have wished. His denunciations of war and the ingratitude of courts and the hypocrisies of those in power were made in defense of a Tory administration that does not bear up so well in the eyes of history.
Swift was deployed, we know, as a propagandist for the government of Harley and Bolingbroke. And—as Glendinning portrays it—precisely one of his assignments in this role was to ridicule the idea that the Tory government had any crypto-partiality for James Stuart—the Catholic "Pretender" in exile in France. Mock the notion Swift did. Yet as soon as Queen Anne died and George I ascended to the throne, where were Harley and Bolingbroke to be found? Why, across the channel, in the court of the Pretender.
Swift, who later parodied religious controversies as a dispute between those favoring the cracking of eggs on the big end vs. those who were partial to the little end, was now the one with egg on his face.
In Gulliver, Swift will go on to gloss this incident in a self-exonerating way, through the allegory of the wars of Lilliput and Blefuscu. His protagonist, when a captive of the Lilliputians, helps negotiate a peace between the two powers, just as Swift's beloved Tories were responsible for the Treaty of Utrecht. For this—as well as an incident in which Gulliver pisses on the Queen of Lilliput's palace, in order to douse a fire—he is attacked and defamed by his enemies in the Lilliputian court, and is thereby forced to seek protection from the erstwhile enemy Blefuscu.
Universal condemnation of the horrors of war—or special pleading? Surely both. But the point is that nothing Swift wrote was ever wholly free of the latter motive. Even his later pamphlets defending the autonomy and dignity of Ireland were driven—suggests Glendinning—more by a desire to see Englishmen in Ireland treated as full-blooded Englishmen, rather than to see the Irish treated as the equals of their brothers across the sea.
George Orwell of course was unable to escape noticing these things about Swift, when he came to write about the man. As the twentieth century's literary saint, prophet, essayist, pamphleteer, polemicist, rejecter of all ideological hypocrisies and cant, and remorseless truth-sayer, Orwell has a plausible claim to be Swift's modern successor. But also precisely because he played these roles, he could not resist seeing and pointing out the flaws in the idol.
Thus, Orwell's essay on Swift joins a series of pieces in which he developed one of his favorite themes: the way in which pacifism, anarchism, and utopianism of all kinds are often close kindred to totalitarianism and contempt for life. Orwell's Swift joins the ranks of Orwell's Tolstoy and Orwell's Gandhi as another anti-life prophet, who simply cannot tolerate the moral compromises and ambiguities and partialities inherent in any human community.
He is therefore singularly unimpressed by Swift's vaunted opposition to war—or, at least, of a specific war. Here is Owell's interpretation of the Lilliput and Blefuscu episode in Gulliver:
Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, ostensibly a satire on human greatness, can be seen, if one looks a little deeper, to be simply an attack on England, on the dominant Whig Party, and on the war with France, which – however bad the motives of the Allies may have been – did save Europe from being tyrannized over by a single reactionary power.
Speaking of the motives of the Allies, meanwhile, this was a line of attack Swift himself developed in his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies, in which he defames the other countries fighting on Britain's side of the war of Spanish Succession. If this is an anti-war argument, it must be said, it is one of a distastefully Trumpian variety. One is reminded of our morally Lilliputian leader's -- our orange Yahoo president's -- frequent tub-thumping on the theme of how our NATO allies "aren't paying their share."
It is hard to say that Swift comes across better, at last, from Glendinning's portrait than he does from Orwell's assessment. She, the biographer, ultimately makes for much better company than her subject. The book before us is full of Glendinning's arrestingly spot-on and artfully phrased observations, not only about Swift, but about his meaning to history, and posterity's reaction to him.
Take for an example her treatment of Swift's rather mysterious and atypical personal life. The Dean of St. Patrick's never married, we know, nor even had an indisputably romantic and erotic relationship with any other person; and yet he governed his emotional life around a series of intense mutual attachments to female friends.
Was this a sign of repression, closeted homosexuality, a dark and suppressed secret relating to illegitimate incestuous consanguinity between Swift and the women in his life—or simply the fact that it is not so very odd after all to base one's personal life on platonic friendships, rather than romantic intimacy?
I, of course, was an instant partisan of the platonic friendships theory. Until I reached the following line from Glendinning: she observes that a person's preference among these various theories always "derives from one's own experience and practice and from a defensive hope that one's own experience and practice is the norm."
Wow. Good point. I felt a bit caught with my hand in the cookie jar.
In the hopes that Glendinning's excellent and insightful portrait might survive into future editions, I point out—as I usually do where I see them—the following copy errors:
p. 41 "would be also be sound on Ireland" [sic]
p. 81 "called the Tale" The "e" is the only letter un-italicized
p. 89 "He had being [sic] doing more in London"
p. 146 "while remaining free of of [sic] its juridiction"
p. 182 "Blefescu" [sic] This edition misspells the name of Lilliput's fictional adversaries Blefuscu throughout
p. 194 "In one of the poems attributed to Vanessa, she railed against 'curs'd discretion' [...]" While not quite an error, this sentence is curiously repetitive of one on the preceding page.
p. 214 "took a sup from the bottled" [sic?]
p. 237 "who wrote it; it it is signed [...]" One too many "it's"!
p. 282 "Blefescu" again
p. 285 inverted comma before "generously" is facing the wrong way
p. 295 missing quotation mark before "in which we could meet [...]"
p. 304 "The Hidden Ireland" The "T" needs to be italicized.
p. 308 Lines are attributed to a "W.S. Auden" who, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist. The lines are actually by the famous Auden, Wystan Hugh, and are from a different poem than the one cited.
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