Saucy
Pat Rogers
Jonathan Swift: Major Prophet A. L. Rowse (Thames and Hudson £5.95) In his time Dr Rowse has thought up some startling ways of gaining literary notice. And when you open his new book to find a necrology instead of a list of acknowledgments (everyone mentioned has passed from the face of the earth), you begin to wonder. Can Rowse have carried death-dealing index-cards about with him, or does perhaps the venom from his pen transfix scholars and custodians where they stand? Nothing so malign, it turns out. Rowse planned the book over forty years ago, and undertook his research in Ireland while still a young man. He even projected a play about Swift, and although that scheme lapsed he does not scruple in 1975 to compare notes with the Dean in a friendly dialogue on noncomformist worship.
The biography has been postponed until a time when the author is quite as well known to most people as his subject. Many will read the work out of interest in Rowse, not in Swift. Considerately, the biographer has done his best to merge the two figures. "Swift was not a complete despairer," he tells us, "nor am I. But we are not subject to illusions." As for the tricks of stewards on their masters, described by Swift in Directions to Servants, "one has observed that often enough practised upon oneself. As if it made any difference! — however well-dressed they may appear, the moment they open their mouths one knows who is who." These pronouns may be confusing, but as soon as the prose opens up one gets an inkling of who is meant to be who: "How well one knows the situation! the genius with one skin too few, engaged in growing a carapace." Troubled by "inner insecurity," Swift is "fated to be rejected, and by people he justly considered to be inferior to himself."
This fortunate congruence in outlook permits Rowse to update Gulliver's Travels into a tract for our times. Doctor Swift having anatomised the Hanoverian world, Doctor Rowse is called in by the biographer to give a second opinion in the light of recent symptoms. Swift is, after all, "very much a writer for our time of break-up and decay, the end of our civilisation." Presciently Gulliver had revealed the immanence in history of the Groundnut Scheme, VAT, Concorde and computers. Verses on the Death of Dr Swift foreshadow appeasement in the thirties.
Of course, the identification is not perfect: these days you could hardly be prosecuted for attacking a Lord Lieutenant, or find your preferment blocked for lampooning a Duchess. To make up for this, Rowse tries all he knows to run foul of sex discrimination laws. This he attempts both in general and in particular. Vanessa is described as "a complaining sort of female" and "the boring creature." But she also occasions a wider reflection: "Such feminine recriminations are always a bore to any man of intelligence." Previous biographers, being men, have omitted to notice Vanessa's "feminine unreason, her insufferable importunity, a prime case of the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable'." (Can this biographer, being Rowse, suppose that Vanessa wanted to eat Swift?) She displays "the usual incapacity to strike any balance of fairness or justice, completely subjective, no attempt to see the situation from the outside." Hers is "the reiterated female demand for reassurance, the reference of everything to her own ego." The biographer explains, "My sympathies are with Swift."
Whom or what they aren't with — that is a larger question. Not with critics ("usually persons of very ordinary talents and small perceptions") or with academics engaged in "pointless" controversy about the Rise of the Gentry. But assuredly not with "ordinary people (who) do not know what is good for them and are incapable of acting without direction," who refuse to use what little reason they possess and "should be lashed for it," and who are oblivious of "the inanity of what they have to say." Not with "the snivelling Defoe" or with Pope ("not over-endowed with emotions"). Not with Bertrand Russell, needless to say, and not with the obtuse Shakespeare establishment. Reading this book one gets a, pretty fair idea of what it must be like Co be a clay-pigeon; one starts to duck at regular intervals.
For any other writer this measure of self-involvement would cause the rest of the picture to blur. Not so with Rowse: he really does understand the age rather well, and assesses figures like Sir William Temple and Archbishop King with great shrewdness. There is a moving section on Stella, here brought down in the world a little. Contests and Dissentions is ignored — Rowse can supply enough of his own — but there are judicious comments on Swift's poems. (Though it is misleading to speak of the "coarse realism" of the City Shower as likely to appeal "to the modern kitchen-sink school of writing" — it is anything but a simple slice of life.) At the centre lies an accurate perception of Swift: "though his ambitions and bent were political, his genius was for writing," and thus the writing became a substitute for power.
The odd thing is that all the outbursts distract readers, but not Rowse. His advertisements for himself have never provided his best copy — in any respectable agency, he would have lost the Rowse account by now. Amidst the welter of private obsessions, he has (as usual) kept the narrative going and maintained a clear overall view of his subject. There are a few slips: Swift's supposed dismissal of the Nicene Creed has been shown to be a mare's nest, and the Hanoverian monarchs were not "such Philistines that they made Stephen Duck their Poet Laureate," though that might have given a nice bucolic turn to the Dunciad. The bibliography is deplorably ramshackle, with half the items mistitled, misdated or misdescribed. But somehow it all adds to the entertainment. Books that are long pondered commonly emerge as dry and withered: this one is more personal, pointed and prejudiced than its dead sponsors can ever have guessed.
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