Biography: Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington By Norma Clarke Faber, 350pp. £20Jonathan Swift was mad for women. Although he had a fundamental horror of the sexual act - like an arrested child, he associated it with the excremental anarchy of the body - he was governed by an equally deep need of the female.
This unresolvable complex had a peculiarly dualistic character: Swift lived mentally in an incestuous ménage à trois with his sexual troubles, as if they were at once his daughter and his mother. Not the least of what made him monumentally human - a separate matter to the diligence that turned his neuroses into literature - was the genius he had for finding suitable women to befriend, offend and love. And the best of these was Laetitia Pilkington.
I mean "best" in a literary sense. Although Esther Johnson (Stella) and Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) were better loved by Swift, and may have been morally better too, they weren't artists. And although the mad old Dean ended up describing Laetitia as "the most profligate whore in either kingdom", he could not take away from her that she was most decidedly an artist, indeed a genius in her own right. Not only are her three volumes of memoirs an invaluable record of her times, but she also painted in print what is still the most affecting portrait of Swift himself.
THE RELATIONSHIP BEGINS in 1728 - her account is so immediate it seems proper to synopsise it in the present tense. When they first meet, at Doctor Delany's house in Glasnevin, Swift is 62, and mourning the recent death of his Stella. Laetitia is probably 19 or 20 years old. On being told she is married, Swift presciently exclaims, "What, this poor little Child married! God help her, she is early engag'd in Trouble".
Laetitia's husband, Matthew, is invited to preach at St Patrick's the following Sunday. After the service, Swift stands at the cathedral door giving alms to beggars. He refuses only one of them, an old woman whose hand is dirty: water is not so scarce that she couldn't have washed. Back in the Deanery, Swift tells Matthew to push off and in a high state of childish excitement takes Laetitia into the library to show her the gifts he's received from famous friends. He allows her to choose two medals - she makes, silently, a typically canny choice: the heaviest must be the most valuable. Swift then shows her a cabinet containing all the money he had got when he was "in the Ministry" (as a government adviser, he was effectively the Alastair Campbell of his day). He opens and shuts "a whole Parcel of empty Drawers", saying in a surprised voice, "Bless me, the Money is flown".
At dinner, Swift has the cook hauled up before him: the meat is over-roasted and must be taken back to the kitchen and "cooked less". He asks Laetitia, if she were Queen, what would she "chuse to have after Dinner". She answers, "Your Conversation". "Phooh!" says he, "I mean what Regale?" She says a dish of coffee. Ceremoniously making the coffee, he burns his hand and orders Latetitia to put a glove on it. Then, fanning himself with his gown, he puts on the voice of "a prudish Lady", saying, "Well, I don't know what to think; Women may be honest that do such things, but, for my Part, I never could bear to touch any Man's Flesh - except my Husband's, whom perhaps," he says, resuming his own voice, "she wish'd at the Devil".
And that, brutally truncated, is only half the day. The rest of it and the whole of the night are, if anything, odder, funnier, and the more touching. Swift had met his match, and couldn't keep from striking it.
The temptation to continue quoting is almost irresistible, but paying the kind of exclusive attention to Swift which that cruel and tender monster hungered for, does a disservice to the woman who satisfied the hunger. This tiny creature from Cork - though not the three foot two inches tall the creator of Lilliput said she was - had her own life, the vicissitudes of which, in Norma Clarke's words, "astonished and enthralled" 18th-century readers. Present-day readers may be more blasé about stories of independent women who thrive on celebrity and are wounded by it - think of Susan Sontag; think, even, of Jordan - but if we are less astonished and still enthralled, the reason in part is that Mrs Pilkington blazed the trail. By modelling in prose the images of Hogarth's great series of etchings The Harlot's Progress, Laetitia "created a glorious and exciting new form" of writing about the female self.
THE MEMOIRS ARE, of course, self-serving. She wrote, as Clarke says, "to vindicate herself and blame others . . . to give both pleasure and offence". In her own words, "lemon and sugar is very pretty". Certainly, the aftertaste is sometimes sour, and there was, too, a callous side to her insouciance - when she departed Dublin for London she left behind three small children. Nor is it entirely creditable or believeable that in London she was an innocent abroad, who allowed herself to be pimped by her husband to a lecherous painter, James Worsdale, for money and influence. She was, Madonna-like, "a material girl in a material world".
Matthew Pilkington is worth a book to himself. Similarly tiny in size but tinier in spirit, he had, as well as considerable charm and talent, one immense fault: servility. The story of his downfall, which is as complex as a Henry James novel, centres on his willingness to be of service to Swift, who used him, ruthlessly, as a kind of publisher's runner, literary agent, and political messenger-boy in London. The result was disastrous: the government, enraged by the publication of Swift's satires, had Matthew arrested. In jail, servile as ever, he became what a recent scholar has called, "the Government's star-blabber".
LAETITIA, NOW BACK in Dublin, was mortified. But worse than mortification was to follow: a scandalous and theatrical divorce on a charge of "criminal conversation"; the death of a fourth child; the bizarre stabbing of her father; a descent into the Marshalsea prison and semi-prostitution. Whether or not she dispensed sexual favours for money, in Clarke's view, "remains unclear: if she did it would have been understood as an inevitable, matter-of-fact product of her distress". And yet as she fell she rose. Forced to become, in her own remarkable words, "a Noun Substantive, obliged to stand alone", she survived, made friends with her genius, and wrote the Memoirs.
Virginia Woolf said of her, "If ever a woman wanted a champion, it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington". In Norma Clarke she has found one. This book is flowingly written, humane, wise, and wonderfully entertaining.
Brian Lynch's novel about the 18th century poet William Cowper, The Winner of Sorrowis published by New Island Books. Next month he becomes writer-in-residence at the Princess Grace Library in Monaco. www.brianlynch.org
Less ordinary: Laetitia's life
Birth:1708 or 1709, but she claimed 1712.
Parents:Her mother was a Corry from Cork, her father, Guisebert Van Lewen, a Dutch doctor, who stabbed himself to death accidentally. At his deathbed Laetitia and her mother came to blows.
She said:"I have been a Lady of Adventure, and almost every Day of my Life produces some new one."
They said:She was "a saucy, proud and impertinent person", according to Bishop Sherlock, the Lord High Almoner of London - in revenge she skewered him in her Memoirs.
Marriage:Her husband Matthew and a gang of armed men burst into her bedroom at midnight and found her reading a book with a surgeon from Dr Steeven's Hospital. Some days later, Matthew, a clergyman, was found in bed with a Mrs Warren, "administering Christian Consolation to each other".
History:The records of Laetitia's trial for adultery in the Spiritual Court were destroyed in the burning of the Four Courts in 1922. Matthew tried to sell their children into slavery - Dublin was a popular port for what were called "kid ships". Laetitia's probable lover, James Worsdale, founded the Dublin and Limerick Hellfire clubs.
Joke-book:In 1759, a collection of her anecdotes, Mrs Pilkington's Jests, was a best-seller.
Conquests:The poet-laureate Colley Cibber was almost 70 when he took up with Mrs Pilkington. Another conquest, John Duncombe, a colonel in the Guards, was "the most lewd, debauch'd, gaming, swearing, blasphemous wretch that lived". He paid Laetitia to write him love letters which he then showed off in White's Club for gentlemen.
Death:Dublin, 1750. The funeral took place at St Ann's Church, Dawson Street. A commemorative tablet by the Cork sculptor Ken Thompson was unveiled in 1997.