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Reviewed by:
  • Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel by John Stubbs
  • W. B. Carnochan
John Stubbs. Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. Pp. 739. $39.95.

Yet another biography of Swift. Why? One answer, not wholly facetious, retraces the meta-mathematical-fantastical habits of mind behind Borges's "The Library of Babel" or [End Page 57] Swift's Laputan engine that enables workers to crank out in due course every possible book that could ever be. If this new biography of Swift did not exist, or the next one that follows, then not every possible book would have been written, and the world would be incomplete. Every new effort is a symbolic attempt to finish the unfinishable.

Break the question into parts: the subject of the biography; the audience; the author; and then all these together. As to the subject, are there new facts or new interpretations depending on the new facts? Do old problems demand new speculation? But if the story is driven neither by new facts, interpretations, or inferences, what need remains? Enter the audience.

The rewriting of history depends not only on bare facts or even their interpretation but on the ever-changing audience. What is most up-to-date is whatever best fulfills the moods, expectations, and tastes of the moment. And whatever comes latest in a particular line carries the presumption of being most up-to-date. Who would have guessed that only three years after Leo Damrosch's biography, hailed by one reviewer as likely to be "definitive" for "years to come" and another as surely "the definitive one-volume Swift biography of our time," two new biographies would come on the scene? Consider the case of readers, not academics, who become newly interested in Swift. They look for a biography and find Ehrenpreis (1962–1983), Damrosch (2013), Hammond (2016)—also reviewed in this issue—and Stubbs (2016). Which to read? Overlooking the question of length, which might matter, given the extreme lengths of Ehrenpreis and Hammond, and also presuming (unrealistically) no recourse to reviews, I think it would be a coin toss between Stubbs and Hammond, on the premise that what is most recent will have absorbed and in some way or another transcended its predecessors—and that it will be most closely aligned with the conventions of the immediate present. Maybe not true, but a plausible starting point.

Finally, the author. The job takes boldness, especially when the road is crowded with the efforts of others. Biography demands extremes of patience, tenacity, erudition, and the ability to create a context and a person with the sensitive touch of a novelist. Not every aspiring biographer has the talent. Mr. Stubbs does, and any reader who settles on Swift: The Reluctant Rebel as an introduction to Swift's life will have made a good choice—though there is a caveat: it is best to be passably familiar with Swift's works before reading the Stubbs biography, for this is not a "life and works" in which the works are treated independently; it is a "life" in which the works are woven skillfully into a single tapestry.

A main point of difference between the approaches of Damrosch and Mr. Stubbs is that Damrosch's biography registers as more "academic," though also more "literary" while that of Mr. Stubbs is less encumbered by what has gone before. A simple measure is the sheer number and tone of allusions in the two biographies to Ehrenpreis's three volumes, long accepted as "standard." Mr. Stubbs's index cites only two references to Ehrenpreis in the text, both incidental. I found two others in the text and, among several in the notes, a reference to Ehrenpreis's "customary shrewdness." In Damrosch, to the contrary, the text includes many allusions to his predecessor, especially in the early pages, often of a stern academic kind: "serious questions that Ehrenpreis chose not to mention"; "Ehrenpreis ignores" (several times); "Ehrenpreis never mentions the story"; "it is hard to understand how Ehrenpreis…"; "this is pure projection on his part, laying the [End Page 58] groundwork for a now very dated Freudian interpretation of personality"; and, "there is not...

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