R O R Y    B R E N N A N

Review for Books Ireland

Rory Brennan March 2017

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Jonathan  Swift. The Reluctant Rebel. Viking.

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Do the best biographies kick off with an anecdote? This seems to be a fashion today.

Anyway this excellent one does. Two Trinity students in 1710, after a night’s jollification, deface the equestrian statue of King William. They steal his baton. In turn they too are nicked, but the matter is treated as no mere jape. They get heavily fined and threatened with exposure holding a repentant sign in College Green, a sort of stocks or pillory sentence which could result in serious injury from a vindictive crowd. In the end this is rescinded, but the story is an illustration of the violence and insecurity of the times. Trinity, stoutly Protestant, overreacts to a lark perpetrated on their monarch-saviour, who delivered them from the Papist (in the phrase of the day) James.

 

They still fear the Jacobite ghost prowling outside, perhaps even lurking within the college.

 

The Williamite wars and James brief ascendancy in Ireland profoundly marked Swift and his largely administrative-level class of clergy and lawyers, causing many to flee to England.

One might compare their brief if intense trauma to the longer agonies of the still recent Northern upheavals. But the young Swift was born to the cries and strains of an earlier threat – the rebellion in the 1640s of the Old English Catholic gentry and Gaelic chiefs with its real atrocities and greatly exaggerated massacres. Disinformation galore is not new if topically pertinent. John Stubbs’s life of Swift is as much a story of the times, and he evinces a mastery of Irish affairs as much as he does of the intrigues of court matters in London. This earlier war shadowed Swift’s youth in the way our War of Independence scarred our own politics. These parallels are mine and not intended to be exact, but they set Swift in an understandable context. To the societal unease of his time is added bereavement and separation. Swift’s father died of “the itch”, then a term for syphilis, contacted it was suggested not by intercourse but by filthy bed linen when travelling. Swift had a notorious abhorrence of uncleanliness all his life, perversely coupled with a taste for the scatological, most famously illustrated when Gulliver urinates on the blazing palace of the Lilliputian king. The separation that also must have deeply estranged him was the near-kidnapping of him by his wet-nurse, a standard figure of the age for the reasonably well-off. She took him to Whitehaven, the first of his many voyages across the Irish Sea.  Now a note on his sense of Irishness. Swift claimed to be English and with real justification as both his parents were from there, and indeed his mother Abigail died in Leicester.  But Ireland so completely formed - or deformed! - him as to make his assertion virtually ridiculous. 

 

There is something mischievous and contrarian in his pose. Perhaps an analogy is an Ulster person today who constantly decries his or her province but rounds on anyone from England or the South who mildly criticizes it. The Ireland that Swift came to defend was the Anglican one, indeed he had more sympathy with the routed and powerless Catholics than with the Nonconformists or Dissenting Presbyterians whom he categorised as fanatical. A glance at today’s chronic intransigence in Stormont could be said to still affirm his point. Kilkenny College exposed him to a severely classical curriculum, not dissimilar from Shakespeare’s a century or so before. Note that Luke Wadding, the Franciscan scholar, attended Kilkenny too, attesting that wealthier “Papists” could gain entry. Swift’s performance at Trinity was infamously poor, rather in the tradition of brilliant writers doing poorly at university – their originality upsets their staid mentors. He took his degree “by special grace” but in fact his attendance was interrupted by the campaign of James to keep his throne. Stubbs says he read history instead of the prescribed works, a choice that enriched his mind for the magnificent diatribes, arguments and vitriolic polemics to come. 

 

His employment as secretary to the diplomat Sir William Temple at Moor Park near London was due to family connections. Influence was all in his time as the obsequious dedications of literary works demonstrates. It applied to every field, civil, military, ecclesiastical and obviously political. To be without it could mean destitution, even starvation. His status at Moor Park was that of upper servant, not professional as we would understand it. Here he encountered the child Esther Jonson, daughter of a housekeeper there, who would mature into his friend/muse/companion/putative lover Stella. Temple had him organize his writings, but more significantly involved him in political affairs, entrusting him with a message to King William. His first encounter with the sycophancy of the court revolted him; the satirist stirred, and we are on our way to the idiot bickering in Gulliver over the height of heels and which end of an egg to crack. Later he would complain of the sting of being treated like a schoolboy (his phrase) by Temple but it was through him that Swift gained contact and entry to the fickle world of Whig and Tory and the magnates who fought for dominance in them.

 

His pen was his key, his weapon. The pamphlet, frequently anonymous, was something like the investigative programme of its day, the evening TV news, even something of the crude, simplifying sloganeering of the tweet. In this Swift came to excel and so was invaluable, if most of the issues seem dusty and arcane today. Whigs, siding on the rights of parliament, Tories leaning towards the King, were basically factions, not parties as we know them, riddled with bribery and barefaced opportunism. Swift too swapped sides, ending with the Tories for he was what we might now term “a natural conservative”, prizing stability overall, accepting that some (or many) must endure disabilities. His works aside from Gulliver, the Tale of a Tub, the Battle of the Books, are known because he wrote them; only scholars read them. A rebel then? Swift had the conceit of the intellectual, the arrogance of the man of ability who knows his worth, whose display of such qualities inhibits his promotion. The rebel emerged in the scorn. But Swift too had charm, a sociable nature, was witty, perceptive and humane, all qualities his overshadowed but brilliant poems reveal. He had fortitude, enduring vertigo, diagnosed since as Meniere’s disease with “millstones grinding in his ears”.

As a young man Swift curiously returned to Dublin, took orders and embarked on a career in the Church of Ireland. Curious because he ranked Ireland as a backwater. One senses, faute de mieux, settling for what’s available. He held a poor living in Kilroot on the Antrim coast, among the Dissenters he despised. He had few parishioners, but one was Jane Waring whom he clumsily courted, she becoming Varina in his writings. Everyone has sobriquets, himself as Presto, Esther Vanhomrigh, his other possible marriage blanc relationship, as Vanessa.

 

He obtained a decent living at Laracor in Meath which allowed him to sojourn in London among the great lords, Oxford and Bolingbroke, who notoriously failed to reward him with high clerical office for all his propagandizing.  Exiled to his native land, this paradox produced great literature, the blistering Modest Proposal with its hideous cloak of reasonable civility, the supreme example of irony’s lethal rapier. His “misanthropy” has its roots in ineradicable human folly and in the bitter, jostling groups with little to divide them – shall we say Fianna Fail and Fine Gael? Or the Tweedle Dum-Dee of Blair and Cameron?  He also missed his fellow scribblers and their eponymous club, the convivial if rivalrous company of Pope, Addison, Congreve, Steele et al. Stubbs delves into all aspects of Swift’s life with assured skill, missing nothing, sprinkling his massive endeavour with a few caustic epigrams of his own. Stella and Vanessa were set up in separate establishments and circumspectly visited though tongues wagged like dog’s tails. Stubbs refutes Denis Johnston’s theory that Stella and Swift were the natural children (a coy term) of Temple and so could not marry. The dates do not tally. His bizarre emotional and sexual proclivities still fascinate. He was no brothel frequenter like his repellent fellow-cleric Laurence Sterne. 

The reluctant Irishman took up arms in his land’s defence. The commercial iniquities imposed in England’s interest (yes, Brexit), most famously under the nom de plume or rather nom de guerre of Drapier, denouncing an allegedly debased currency.  He was hailed in Dublin, was saluted with fireworks and bequeathed to the city the mental hospital that still exists, progressive for its day. The liberty he served was not ours, living on the tithes of those who rejected his church, supporting the Treaty of Utrecht that endorsed slavery. His epitaph surely concerns freedom of speech, however we see it.

 

Our smartphones, the computer I am using now, may have parts sourced under cruelly exploited labour. Swift remains relevant. His sad decline and confused end in the deanery is well known.

Stubbs has given us a vibrant and memorable portrait of a highly gifted, haunted man.

 

The term magisterial is overblown, but this is a very fine book.