By Stuart Mitchner

Once upon a time a long time ago Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) came to Bloomington, Indiana, in the form of a Classic Comic of Gulliver’s Travels being read by an eight-year-old boy and an impish, bespectacled, congenitally effusive young man of 25-going-on-15 who will eventually be proclaimed Swift’s “best and fullest biographer” by Christopher Ricks in the London Review of Books.

The boy and the biographer are both seated on the living room floor, the Swiftian-to-be having politely refused the boy’s parents’ offer of a chair. “It’s exciting, but scary” the eight-year-old says when asked his thoughts on Gulliver’s Travels. To show what he means by “scary,” he points out the frames where the Lilliputians are swarming over Gulliver’s body, binding it with ropes, staking his long blond hair to the ground. After discussing the imagery, the biographer begins to make playful comments about the “Life of Swift” on the comic’s last page, which the boy has read and finds disturbing. At this point, the parents intervene and the biographer is coaxed into a chair.

Savage Commentary

Because my parents had the first 20 issues of Classic Comics bound as a present for my ninth birthday, I still have the copy of Gulliver’s Travels Irvin Ehrenpreis and I were perusing together all those years ago. Looking over the “Life” at the end, I’m struck by the vehemence of the language describing Gulliver’s “savage commentary on the European world” as “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Pretty heady stuff for an early reader; no wonder I found it disturbing, not to mention the concluding paragraph, in which “Swift’s satire became more and more violently bitter, possibly the result of a mental disease which, by 1736, caused him to become insane. He never recovered and died on October 19, 1745.” In the brief biographies at the end of every Classic Comic, each author dies in such and such a time and place, but Swift’s fate became one of the numerous shadowy elements of a childhood occasionally haunted by the sound of phantom footsteps and the sight of an abandoned playground where the empty swings were still in motion. 

With Swift’s November 30th birthday almost upon us, I’ve been reading the first volume of my old friend and teacher’s three-part magnum opus, Swift: The Man, His Works, and The Age (Harvard University Press 1960-1983). Some allusions have a special meaning for me, such as the preface’s acknowledgment of “those sanctuaries” where his work was done, “the condition to which all others naturally aspire” being “the Bodleian Library, Oxford.” On the tour of Oxford he gave me when I visited him in the summer after my sophomore year in college, Irvin showed off the Bodleian as if it were his personal piece of sacred ground. In his chapter on the researches of the Dublin Philosophical Society, there are some tidbits he might well have amused my parents with (he and my father shared an office for many years), such as “the curiously shaped stone” taken out of the bladder “of a noble man’s cook,” and the chronic vertigo Swift traced to an over-indulgence in apples (“I got my giddiness, by eating a hundred golden pippins at a time”). I also found a sentence of Swift’s that Irvin once quoted to me after reading a convoluted passage from a story I was working on: “I cannot write anything easy to be understood though it were but in praise of an old shoe.”

Sour Grapeshot

When the concluding volume of Swift: The Man, His Works, and The Age was published, some reviewers were, as Ricks puts it in his May 1984 LRB piece, “snide about Ehrenpreis’s having taken more than twenty years to complete this biography.” Dismissing such quibbles as “sour grapeshot,” Ricks calls the work “a great act of consonance” and observes that while Ehrenpreis “has the great good sense never to emulate the supreme Swiftian manner,” he “does nevertheless command the steely style” that T.S. Eliot praised as ‘the purest, the most supple, the most useful type of English prose.’” Furthermore, Ricks says, “Ehrenpreis’s judgments are better than judicious: they vibrate, as do all the best Augustan antitheses, with a succinct indignation at how cruelly unbalanced is the world which their balanced phrases contain.”

In Touch

The notion of balanced phrases in an unbalanced world reminds me of the last two times I was in touch with Irvin. When I last saw him he was still living in Bloomington, and I was moved to find that someone who seemed above such earthly activities as marriage had just become a father. The atmosphere in the little house behind the picket fence on First Street suggested a finely balanced ideal of domestic contentment, the infant asleep in his crib in a small lovingly decorated room, the fall evening mild and hushed around the idyllic scene.

After sending him some family news in October 1983, I received a letter recalling how good my parents had been to him and how touched he was to hear of my mother’s death, and adding, “It wasn’t like her to die,” an Irvin-ism so truly, funnily in character I could hear him saying it. Expressing surprise that I’d become a father (“paternity never seemed your destination”), he then concluded, “I am writing at once, very sadly, thinking how little the greatest rewards can compensate us for the oppressions of life even at its best.”

In the summer of 1985, I had a letter from my father with the news that Irvin had died after a fall in Germany. Just that. In a subsequent issue of The New York Review of Books, to which he was a frequent contributor, Irvin was remembered as “a man of Swiftian irony and lightning wit. Slight of build, animated in gesture and expression, he was superb in conversation. He loved a scandal, and would decorate his stories with melodramatic prefaces, and punctuate them with gleeful laughs.”

That sounds reassuringly like the man I shared the living room floor with, my favorite adult.

Swift Comes to Princeton

A few days ago when I couldn’t find a single work by Swift in the house except my Classic Comics Gulliver, I called our friend and neighbor Panthea Reid whose Swiftian husband John Fischer died in May. I told her I was on my way to McCaffrey’s and was hoping I could stop by and pick up a reading copy or two from John’s library. Panthea said she’d be glad to find something for me, but could I bring back some bananas so she could bake a banana cake for her grandson?

After we made the exchange, a bunch of Chiquitas for a handful of Swift, she showed me the editing project she was carrying on for John who had inherited it from the late A.C. Elias, Jr., and, from, in effect, the true source, Esther Johnson, Swift’s Stella, whom he met in 1689 when she was eight, he twenty-two. The daughter of Sir William Temple’s housekeeper at the time when Swift was Temple’s private secretary, Esther was baffled by the difficult words in various books, including Milton’s Paradise Lost and Swift’s own writings, a problem he addressed by writing an “Explanation of Difficult English Words” for her. Around 1710, some 21 years after they met, she copied Swift’s definitions into her own book, a small, neatly bound volume listing alphabetically over 2,000 words with the definitions that Swift provided.

Now here we are on Mt. Lucas Road in the luminous autumn of 2015, a week short of Swift’s birthday, and I’m looking over Panthea’s shoulder at the actual handwriting of the woman to whom Swift may have been “secretly married,” according to “some biographers” quoted in my Classic Comic of Gulliver’s Travels, a rumor Irvin rejected the day we were sharing the living room floor.

And as Panthea and I talk, here’s Swift, bringing together John Fischer and Irvin Ehrenpreis, when she mentions the lecture John delivered during the Swift Symposium in Münster Germany (since renamed the Ehrenpreis Centre of Swift Studies) on the occasion of Irvin’s 65th birthday, June 9, 1985, a talk that moved Irvin to ask John to tell his mentor and Irvin’s dedicated rival, Aubrey Williams, “not to hate me in his heart.” Less than a month later, in Münster, Irvin lost his balance on a flight of stairs and fell to his death. In June 2004, after exchanging emails and phone calls with Irvin’s son, David, whom I had last seen in a crib, I understood Irwin’s side of the story behind the last sad sentence of his last letter to me. According to David, his father had been “a very happy man” through the early 1970s: “He loved my mother more than life itself, but when she got sick and eventually died, he simply never recovered.”

On the other hand, Irvin’s colleagues seem to agree that he was content and productive in Münster and was planning to buy a flat there after his retirement. And I keep reminding myself of the New York Review’s reference to “gleeful laughs,” not to mention the fact that Irvin was busy with new projects and continued writing for the NYRB right up to the end, his last review appearing on March 28, 1985.

Incandescence

Writing about A Tale of a Tub in the first volume of Swift: The Man, His Works, and The Age, Irvin observes, “At the source of his incandescence, there is not a consistent persona but an ironical pose, which wins its literary effect only to the degree that it is seen through.”

I found a touch of Swift’s incandescence in “On a Shadow in a Glass,” which can be found among a number of riddles attributed to him in the second volume of William Ernst Browning’s edition of the Poems:

By something form’d, I nothing am,

Yet everything that you can name;

In no place have I ever been,

Yet everywhere I may be seen;

In all things false, yet always true,

I’m still the same — but ever new.

Note: I’ve also been reading Leo Damrosch’s acclaimed biography Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale 2013), which can be found at the Princeton Public Library. The Classic Comics cover and illustrations are by Lillian Chestney. I am especially grateful to Panthea Reid for consulting Swift scholars Hermann Real and James Woolley on my behalf.