Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-In, and: Jonathan Swift: Our Dean by Eugene Hammond (review)

Toward the close of this biography's second volume, Mr. Hammond cites a reference that Swift wrote for a servant, surprising because it was written in 1740 when Swift is usually said to have lost the fight against what we would probably now diagnose as Alzheimer's: "The bearer served me the space of one year, during which time he was an idler and a drunkard; I then discharged him as such; but how far his having been five years at sea may have mended his manners, I leave to the penetration of those who may hereafter chuse to employ him." As Mr. Hammond comments, "No one but Swift could have written this letter. No one could have written it for him. It captures his characteristic style and temperament as well as any piece its length." Just so. It is a tribute to the quality of the biographer's complete familiarity with his subject that he can focus on a gem like this. Quietly, it compels us to reassess Swift's "senility" and to perceive that it was not unpunctuated by periods of perfect lucidity.

Irish Blow-In covers the first forty-seven years of its subject's life, breaking off at the predictable point in August 1714 when Queen Anne has just died, the Tory ministry has fallen, and Swift has returned disconsolately to Ireland where he will have another thirty-one years to live and will write the works for which he is principally remembered: The Drapier's Letters, A Modest Proposal, and Gulliver's Travels. Since the second volume proposes that the real turning point in Swift's life actually came later, it is a pity that Mr. Hammond did not flout convention by splitting the volumes in 1718: "Once [Swift] fully realized in 1718 that Oxford did not want the two of them to march hand in hand to posterity, Swift's personality suffered a seismic shift." Swift's Irish fate was sealed, Mr. Hammond argues, by the death of his hope that Lord Oxford would recall him to service—namely, the joint compilation of what Swift believed would be the definitive historical record of the events of 1710–1714. Everything Swift thought, wrote, and did after 1718 was, in a sense, displacement activity. The really shocking implication here is that the two principal women in his life, the two Esthers, were also thus a displacement activity. Swift's fawning and pathetic solicitation of Oxford after the latter's release from the Tower suggests that he would have abandoned the ladies in Ireland, whither they had followed him, at the drop of that peer's tricorn hat.

Mr. Hammond's stated intention for this massive biography—a labour of love that has taken decades to complete—is to capture "how it felt to Swift himself to live his life." Fortunately he does not execute this intention in its psychologistic dimension. Rather, his overriding concern is that which has obsessed Swift biographers since Orrery and Deane Swift: in what did Swift's greatness as a writer consist and how does that relate to his moral character? Can Swift have been a great writer if he was not a good man? Hammond offers this verdict: "Swift's originality is to this day the most foundational reason for his still being remembered and enjoyed as a writer, and it is what he liked about himself as a writer. For much of his life, he disdained the ordinary way of doing anything." One might situate the source of Swift's originality in the evidence that he was not in any conventional sense a good man—that he was an extremist, even judged by the standards of his time. Inconsistently perhaps, Mr. Hammond expends much effort seeking to demonstrate that Swift's intentions were usually moral, or at the very least excusable, thus threatening to return him to middle-of-the-road moderation:

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