The root of the disagreement between Johnson and Swift?

Samuel Johnson's dislike of Jonathan Swift's work is famous. Jackson Bate offers the reasonable explanation that what Johnson saw in Swift was a dark reflection of himself--the self he could have been had he let his satiric bite run free rather than constantly attempting to check it and temper it with religious belief. Bate writes,

The Life of Swift strikes the modern reader as the only hopelessly biased Life. Here we can only try to remember Johnson's lifelong fear, especially after the breakdown in his fifties, of the powerful satiric bitterness of his own nature, and his dread--a dread with which he was constantly living--of falling into the anger and the sense of emptiness about life that he associated with Swift.

I suspect Evelyn Waugh may have played a similar role--a sort of "there but by the grace of god"-style role model--for satirically inclined interwar writers.

Bate's position is convincing, and it conforms to what we know of Johnson and of Swift (even as it does nothing to lessen the wish that their lives could have overlapped, giving them an opportunity to meet). But perhaps the explanation is simpler? Perhaps, it's rooted in a simple disagreement about the proper way to approach a hill?

As we saw on Friday, Johnson is documented as a hill-roller: in his fifties, while on the trip to Scotland with Boswell, he took a wistful roll down one, to the amusement (and, presumably, brief worry) of all around. Swift, on the other hand--well, let's let Leo Damrosch, author of last year's excellent biography, tell it:

Swift . . . became convinced that exercise was beneficial, in an era when medical theory discouraged it, and most people avoided it. At Moor Park, as he told Deane Swift long afterward, he would work for two hours and then take a break by running up to the top of a nearby hill and down again. "This exercise he performed in about six minutes; backwards and forwards it was about half a mile."

Oh, I'll admit it seems silly: Could two such great minds as these truly be set at odds by such a silly difference? Could a preference for rolling rather than running down a hill really be enough to cause Johnson to cast Swift beyond of the pale of his appreciation?

Perhaps not--but then, perhaps we should remember what Swift's friend Gulliver learned about the origins of the ongoing conflict between Lilliput and Blefuscu:

It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

Suddenly that hill is looking more like a mountain, isn't it?

A brief descent into scatology

I am not, in general, a fan of body humor. That's not to say I don't appreciate vulgarity: friends will gladly attest that, given the right situation or set-up line, I can be as vulgar as any fifteen-year-old boy who's just learned that the gerund form of a certain words can serve as a forceful adjective.

For the most part, however, I line up with Nina Stibbe--or, at least, the twenty-year-old Nina Stibbe who wrote the letters collected in the wonderfully funny Love, Nina. After complaining that A Winter's Tale "doesn't even seem like a comedy" because "the poor little son dies of a broken heart and the baby daughter is left in the woods to die and the wife spends sixteen years as a statue," she moves on to another of the authors on her A-Level syllabus:

It's like Chaucer. People always going on about how rude and funny it is because someone farts.

That said . . . two bits of low body humor made me laugh this week. The first came in Leo Damrosch's excellent new biography of Jonathan Swift--which is appropriate because Swift was as attuned to bodily effluents as any writer, and he's one of the few whose ventures into scatology can make me laugh. There's the sheer horror of the exclamation "Celia shits!" (on which Patrick Kurp can offer a refresher, should one be needed) and also Gulliver's multi-sized problems with waste: his unappreciated firefighting by micturation in Liliput and his spectacular failure to jump a giant cowpat in Brobdingnag.

What made me laugh in Damrosch's book, however, came not from Swift's own work, but instead when Damrosch needed to help the reader understand how poorly sewage was handled in the period. To whom did he turn? Another writer who was never afraid to note what goes into and comes out of the body: Samuel Pepys. In his diary entry for October 20, 1660, Pepys wrote,

This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar in lieu of one that Sir W Batten had stopped up; and going down into my cellar to look, I put my foot into a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.

It's the easily (and horribly) visualized "great heap" combined with the now archaic, even prissy-sounding "house of office" and "doth trouble me" that makes me smile: this feels like a misfortune that could only occur to Pepys.

With Swift and Pepys on my mind, I was primed to appreciate a passage from Gwen Raverat's memoir Period Piece (1952) I came across this afternoon, in which she writes about the sewage-laden Cam River late in the nineteenth century:

There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown over Trinity by the Master, Dr Whewell, and saying, as she looked down over the bridge, "What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?" To which, with great presence of mind, he replied, "Those, ma'am, are notices that bathing is forbidden."

Which can only be topped by the genius of Bill Watterson:

 

And with that, we flush the scat humor. By Friday, it will all be clean as ever around here, folks. Promise.

"We have had a good solid winter."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The lovely 70-plus-degreeness of the day, as unseasonal in its own way as the snow that fell two weeks ago, has reduced my brain to a froth, incapable of putting together a proper post. Instead, I offer some unconnected quotes from recent reading, in hopes of distracting you until such time as my brains have become accustomed to the absence of cold.

1 First, from Jill Lepore's look at the strange history of marriage advice, "Fixed," in the March 29th issue of the New Yorker:

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

That's as succinct and convincing an argument for history as I've ever encountered. It could serve as a epigraph, for example, to the series of podcasts on the American Civil War by David Blight that I just finished listening to (and, as I've said before, highly recommend). It's particularly well suited to that war because the lessons we've drawn from it and the disavowals we've made have been very different in the North and the South since almost the moment the fighting stopped. And thus the path forward has never been quite so clear as we might wish it to be.

2 In the wonderful piece on Jonathan Swift's poetry that he wrote for me at the Quarterly Conversation, Patrick Kurp quoted from the introduction to Victoria Glendinning's 1998 biography of Swift:

He is extremely “nice” in the eighteenth-century sense. He is not always “nice” in our sense of lovable and pleasant. He is a disturbing person. He provokes admiration and fear and pity. All I can assure you is that in keeping company with Jonathan Swift you are not wasting your time.

Could there be a better way to introduce a subject--and a biographer--than such a clear-eyed appraisal? It offers instant assurance that your companion on this trip will be perceptive and truthful, and that, in addition, she can write. As someone whose natural tendency is to string clause upon clause, giving a sentence its leash until it pulls up, panting and confused, of its own worn-out accord, I admire the blunt punch of Glendinning's style, both in that passage and throughout the biography.

And if you've not read Patrick's article, you definitely should do so: it's smart and funny and, because it's about Swift, beastly and foul as well.

3 Finally, in honor of the weather that's so addled me, I return to the new New York Review of Books edition of Thoreau's journals, a book that belongs on every bedside. March 31, 1852 found Thoreau less lucky than we Chicagoans: it was "a cold, raw day with alternating hail-like snow and rain." But his mind roved on to spring nonetheless:

Perchance as we grow old we cease to spring with the spring, and we are indifferent to the succession of years, and they go by without epoch as months. Woe be to us when we cease to form new resolutions on the opening of a new year!

Thoreau had sins, no doubt, and awkwardnesses and failings, as we all do, but indifference, like inattention, was never of their number.

The next day he wrote,

We have had a good solid winter, which has put the previous summer far behind us; intense cold, deep and lasting snow, tense winter sky. It is a good experience to have gone through with.

Indeed. And now it's time for baseball.