Jonathan Swift by Victoria Glendinning Hutchinson 324pp, £20 in UK
I think it was Emerson who said that biography is simply history with the boring bits left out. In her captivating new life of Swift, Victoria Glendinning doubly insulates the reader against ennui by leaving out also the boring bits of the Dean's life. She then programmes in an extra interest factor by fascinating asides on cultural history - the fashion for wigs in the 18th century, the linguistic idioms of the English spoken in that era, the origin of the Anglo-Irish, Trinity College, Dublin, accent, and even detail on how Swift dressed and what his voice sounded like. Po-faced critics might complain that this is lightweight, but all it really shows is that Glendinning is a professional who knows how to hook her readers.
The heart of the book is twofold: an examination of Swift's Irishness and the thorny question of his relations with women. I do not think a wholly English writer could ever truly understand "savage indignation" - Swift's trademark - for the Anglo-Saxon culture depends very heavily on mute acceptance by the many of the privilege of the few and stoical resignation even in cases where purposeful anger could bring about real change.
Glendinning is alive to such nuances and also understands the understated wit and humour of the Irish, which results from centuries under the heel of England; this is why it is a favourite Irish trick to get people to underestimate you. Swift was very Irish too in his inability to truckle - a self-destructive characteristic in a context where he depended on Court grandees for ecclesiastical preferment.
Glendinning is outstanding in her discussion of Swift's sexuality and his alleged misogynism. Like many people, he found it difficult to integrate the beauty of women with the body and its excretory functions. The early Church fathers, after all, used to have a tag: inter urinam et faeces nascimur. For Swift the problem was compounded by a quite un18th-century obsession with cleanliness and personal hygiene, and it is probable that he was too fastidious for the physical messiness involved in carnal contact with women. We cannot even be certain that he did not die a virgin, though Glendinning thinks he may have been the physical lover both of a woman named Varina and of Hester Vanhomrigh, aka "Vanessa". It is certain that Vanessa was besotted with the Dean, but whether he reciprocated the passion is less certain.
But the key character in Swift's life was Esther Johnson, the famous "Stella" of his verses. It has often been speculated that Swift was "married", perhaps in name only and purely chastely, to Stella. Glendinning begins by asking what exactly this means, in terms of the situation before the 1753 Marriage Act. She inclines to the view that the two of them were married in a secret ceremony in 1716 but that the marriage was not consummated.
She also essays the speculation that Swift might have been interested in Stella's chaperone, Rebecca Dingley, who was socially a much better catch than Stella. Dingley certainly became disillusioned after Stella's death and concluded that she had been the dupe of the other two. Glendinning also discusses whether there might not have been an impediment to the marriage. Maybe Swift was the natural son of his patron and mentor Sir William Temple, and Stella was his natural daughter. Or perhaps Swift and Temple shared a common father, making the Dean Stella's uncle. As she concludes: "For every scenario about Swift and Stella's origins there is just enough material to make a case, and not quite enough to make it conclusively."
This is a very honest book. I have never read a biography where the phrase "I don't know" features so often. All who aspire to write biographies could benefit from imitating Glendinning's humility. Unfortunately, the author's tentative approach sometimes verges on a kind of nihilism or je m'en foutisme. She is too fond of saying "it doesn't matter" about matters of Swift scholarship. This method carries its own danger of Swiftian reductio ad absurdum: if the detail of his sexual life doesn't matter, one can soon argue that the detail of his literary life is also unimportant (what really matters is the survival of Gulliver's Travels, and so on) and soon there is no life to write at all. This fault is particularly noticeable in the very thin section on Swift's political attitudes (my own "take" on this is that he was a crypto-Jacobite). She regards his political affiliations as a "non-question" and quotes Lord Orrery: "He was neither Whig nor Tory, neither Jacobite nor Republican: he was Doctor Swift." This is a bit glib. Any discussion whatever can be foreclosed by the argument that the person, thing or event is absolutely unique and cannot by definition be compared with (or to) anything else.
This is perhaps a minor blemish in a book which is in general shrewd, perceptive, wise, witty and, above all, very human. Her chapter on Gulliver's Travels is worth many an academic tome: she points out that this is a massive case of "compensation" by the author, since Swift never left the British Isles yet set his hero's adventures in the latitudes of Australasia. Those who still regard Australians as lager-swilling boneheads will no doubt be pleased to hear that the country of the Yahoos was set in western Australia, even though Swift based them on William Dampier's description of aborigines.
But perhaps the most delightful aspect of this book is the number of sallies, digressions and thought-provoking asides on everything from Freud to Joe Orton and from Thackeray to Quentin Tarantino. Many unskilled or careless biographers lecture to readers on the "art of biography" yet most of what they say is obvious, banal, jejune or just plain wrong. What Victoria Glendinning has to say is exemplary. That remark by C.S. Lewis comes to mind: we read to prove we are not alone. Reading this book will certainly prove a tonic for anyone inclined to take a black, Swiftian view of human nature.