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.