Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch (review)

In the Prologue to this book, Mr. Damrosch takes pains to distinguish himself from Irvin Ehrenpreis, author of the monumental, three-volume biography of Jonathan Swift published from 1962 to 1983. Mr. Damrosch need not have bothered. Although his book is clear, readable, and entertaining, although one can speed through its loose prose interspersed with numerous maps and illustrations, it could scarcely be confused with Ehrenpreis’s serious and authoritative work.

Ehrenpreis begins his biography by repudiating all the rumors that surround his enigmatic subject. Mr. Damrosch retails at length every dubious story that might titillate his audience—the more salacious, the better. Thus, Stella is the daughter of Sir William Temple; and Swift is the son of Temple’s father, Sir John Temple. Thus, Swift learns of his close relation with Stella and rushes away from company in despair that they can never marry. Or, perhaps, they do marry. Thus, Swift and Vanessa almost certainly have sexual intercourse and refer to their liaisons as drinking “coffee.” Among the less prurient and more plausible notions, Swift chafed under the authority of his mentor, Sir William, and hated life at Moor Park. Reading Mr. Damrosch’s book is not really like watching the cheap Hollywood production of a classic work: he does provide lively tidbits about Swift’s world. The problem is that he largely omits detailed discussion of Swift’s art, which is the reason that his audience cares about his life and world in the first place. Even more disturbing is the fact that all Mr. Damrosch’s juicy revelations have been explored at length by other critics, whose suggestions have supposedly sunk into an obscurity that Mr. Damrosch seems eager to perpetuate. As the poet Charles Wright observes in “The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear”: “It’s hard to imagine how unremembered we all become, / How quickly all that we’ve done / Is unremembered. …”

Not quite, however. In 1959 the Irish writer Denis Johnston published a book-length biography titled In Search of Swift, in which he propounded just the thesis about Swift’s and Stella’s parentage that Mr. Damrosch offers as his coup. Johnston speculated that his theory would be “unwelcome,” and this admission seems to have empowered Mr. Damrosch: “He was right about that. The few professional Swift scholars who noticed his book at all denounced it as amateurish nonsense, and Ehrenpreis never once mentions it in the two thousand pages of his biography.” And therefore, the discovery is Mr. Damrosch’s own? This disingenuous argument ignores the illustrious scholars (including Frank Ellis) who endorsed Johnston’s theory. I myself have included examination of Johnston’s work for forty-three years in my teaching of Swift at Smith College.

The late A. C. Elias, author of Swift at Moor Park (1982), narrowly escapes the same fate as Johnston. Elias presented evidence that Swift resented Sir William Temple, an idea that Mr. Damrosch apparently wishes were his own. “This book was ignored at first,” claims Mr. Damrosch, “because although Elias was a gifted scholar, he was not an academic Swiftian. But gradually his findings have found acceptance. …” Mr. Damrosch’s assessment here demeans the well-recognized contributions of the independent scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of Swift. Elias was among that stellar group who served on the advisory board of the Ehrenpreis Centre (as well as on that of Swift Studies) from its inception in 1986 to the end of their lives. He served in company with Frank Ellis and with David Woolley, an oboist and one of the great Swift scholars of our time.

It is probably wisest to leave the question of Vanessa and coffee in the Sluttery, where Swift placed it. There, Mr. Damrosch’s quotations about coffee can discreetly cohabit with the quotations from other Swift scholars that they repeat.

Mr. Damrosch belittles Ehrenpreis for depicting Swift as asexual. On the contrary, he believes not only that Vanessa...