by Leo Damrosch
One other relationship, which developed in the late 1720s, is a story in itself, because it inspired an outpouring of poems. Sir Arthur Acheson, of Scottish descent but an Anglican in the Armagh hotbed of Presbyterianism, had recently been elected to the Irish Parliament, which no doubt explains how Swift came to meet him in Dublin. An invitation soon followed to stay at his country estate near the small town of Market Hill, seventy-five miles to the north. Stella died in January of 1728, and in June of that year Swift began an extraordinarily protracted visit to the Achesons. He was there for fully eight months, followed by four more months in 1729 and another three in 1730. He was thus at Market Hill for nearly two-thirds of the time during that period. Evidently he had no qualms about letting the cathedral manage without him, and staying away probably helped him to deal with the loss of Stella.
At Market Hill there was an attractive successor, if not an adequate substitute. Sir Arthur turned out to be a bore, but his sprightly wife, Anne, interested Swift greatly. Her father was Philip Savage, a distinguished lord chancellor of Ireland and a friend of Swift’s in his London days. “I dined with Phil Savage and his Irish club at their boarding place,” he told Stella in 1710.27 Anne would have been a teenager then, and there’s no evidence that Swift met her. Now he found that she was attractive, willing to take advice about books, and good at repartee.
Swift didn’t produce much prose during this time but, perhaps to his own surprise, he became a prolific poet. As he had done long before in The Humble Petition of Frances Harris, he began impersonating other people’s voices. In one of these poems, Lady Acheson’s waiting woman, Hannah, imagines how exciting it would be if her employers were to rent out a building as an army barracks. A dashing captain might then say, after encountering Swift,
Whenever you see a cassock and gown,
A hundred to one but it covers a clown.
Observe how a parson comes into a room:
God damn me, he hobbles as bad as my groom;
A scholard, when just from his college broke loose,
Can hardly tell how to cry boo to a goose.
Your Noveds, and Blutraks, and Omurs and stuff,
By God, they don’t signify this pinch of snuff. . . .
Now, Madam, you’ll think it a strange thing to say,
But the sight of a book makes me sick to this day.
The names are distortions of Ovid, Plutarch, and Homer, and this speech strikes Hannah as supremely clever:
Never since I was born did I hear so much wit,
And, Madam, I laughed till I thought I should split.28
The most interesting impersonations are of Lady Acheson herself. She was exceptionally thin, as Stella had been toward the end, and Swift constantly urged her to take exercise. After she’d had enough of that, and also of his rather tyrannical reading program, she put up spirited resistance. The poems catch her irritation.
Next, for his diversion,
He rails at my person;
What court breeding this is?
He takes me to pieces
From shoulder to flank;
I’m lean and I’m lank.
“The short lines,” Ehrenpreis comments, “are as thin as their subject.” As for books, Swift was making Anne his student, as he had Stella.
At breakfast he’ll ask
An account of my task.
Put a word out of joint,
Or miss but a point,
He rages and frets,
His manners forgets.29
A “point” is a punctuation mark—hardly a grave mistake to make.
In a poem with the telling title Lady Acheson Weary of the Dean, Swift gives a rare self-portrait, ruefully acknowledging his sallow complexion, “wainscot” hands (the color of oak paneling—tanned, perhaps, from being outdoors so much), heavy eyebrows, and protuberant eyes.
Oh! if I could, how I would maul
His tallow face and wainscot paws,
His beetle brows and eyes of wall,
And make him soon give up the cause.
Must I be every moment chid
With skinny, bony, snip, and lean?
Oh! that I could but once be rid
Of that insulting tyrant Dean.30
According to George Faulkner, “The neighbouring ladies were no great understanders of raillery.” It was evidence of intelligence and wit that Lady Acheson did appreciate it, and Swift wrote complacently to Pope that he had been “writing family verses of mirth by way of libels on my Lady.” To Sheridan he reported, “My Lady is perpetually quarreling with Sir Arthur and me, and shows every creature the libels I have writ against her.”31 If Swift had thought these poems insulting he would not have had them published, as he promptly did.
One poem, however, was not published, An Excellent New Panegyric on Skinnibonia. It has only recently come to light, in a notebook in which Swift and Lady Acheson copied out poems as he had formerly done with Stella. This poem is remarkable for the audacity with which it imagines what women conceal beneath their dresses. First described are country girls, too poor to wear underclothes that would defend their modesty when they relieve themselves:
When the smockless nymphs expose
Pairs of legs from knees to toes,
How you scold to see them naked,
Grimed with dirt by Phoebus bakèd!
In what fury when you spied
Her that showed her brown backside?
How your eyes were fixed upon her,
Zealous for your sex’s honor!
Men might think that every dame,
Were she stripped, would show the same.
Men can’t be prevented from thinking, though Lady Acheson’s backside would presumably be pale rather than brown. Immediately afterward, an impolite gust of wind threatens to expose all:
Zephyr, when you chanced to stoop,
Strove to get beneath your hoop,
And to waft you Lord knows where,
To his palace high in air;
But the Dean with counter-charm
Interposed his valiant arm,
Lent a pin to make all tight;
Zephyr fled with grief and spite.32
Rather than taking voyeuristic advantage, Swift chivalrously supplies the necessary pin to fasten her clothes together.
The strangest of the Market Hill poems is entitled Death and Daphne. The idea of Lady Acheson’s thinness is pushed as far as it can go, with disturbing consequences. In a little myth that Swift conjures up, Pluto, god of the underworld, complains that he hasn’t been getting enough dead souls since Marlborough’s war ended. He orders Death to find a wife and produce some children. Death settles down in London (welcomed there by his friends, the physicians). After covering his skeletal frame with a lawyer’s parchment as skin, he pays court to Daphne.
She, as he came into the room,
Thought him Adonis in his bloom. . . .
For such a shape of skin and bone
Was never seen, except her own.
They fall for each other because they look so much alike. But when Death reaches out to touch the lady, his ardor vanishes:
For when by chance the meagre shade
Upon thy hand his finger laid,
Thy hand as dry and cold as lead,
His matrimonial spirit fled;
He felt about his heart a damp
That quite extinguished Cupid’s lamp.33
Nora Crow Jaffe proposes a persuasive interpretation: Death, paying court to a young woman, is a stand-in for Swift himself. As with the glimpse of Lady Acheson’s backside in Skinnibonia, he clearly felt a strong attraction. And he had to be aware that even if he did acknowledge it, age and physical defects would make him an improbable lover. Death finds Daphne even colder than himself; Swift, Jaffe suggests, “probably feared to find her warm and moist.”34
In any event, Lady Acheson took Death and Daphne as a great compliment. When Swift introduced Orrery to her she unlocked a cabinet, got out the poem, and read it aloud
.
While she was reading, the Dean was perpetually correcting her for bad pronunciation, and for placing a wrong emphasis on particular words. As soon as she had gone through the composition, she assured me smilingly that the portrait of Daphne was drawn for herself. I begged to be excused from believing it, and protested that I could not see one feature that had the least resemblance, but the Dean immediately burst into a fit of laughter. “You fancy,” says he, “that you are very polite, but you are much mistaken. That lady had rather be a Daphne drawn by me than a Sacharissa by any other pencil.” She confirmed what he had said with great earnestness, so that I had no other method of retrieving my error than by whispering in her ear, as I was conducting her downstairs to dinner, that indeed I found “her hand as dry and cold as lead.”35
For a while Swift relished the life of a country gentleman, and during the second of his three stays he even bought some land from Sir Arthur, with the idea of calling it Drapier’s Hill. But it was becoming increasingly obvious that he and his host had nothing in common.
Where friendship is by fate designed,
It forms an union of the mind;
But here I differ from the Knight
In every point, like black and white,
For none can say that ever yet
We both in one opinion met. . . .
His guests are few, his visits rare,
Nor uses time, nor time will spare;
Nor rides, nor walks, nor hunts, nor fowls,
Nor plays at cards, or dice, or bowls;
But seated in an easy-chair
Despises exercise and air.36
Besides, the charms of rural retreat were fading fast. For a while Swift had enjoyed joking with the farm workers:
He’s all the day sauntering,
With labourers bantering. . . .
Hail fellow, well met,
All dirty and wet.
Find out, if you can,
Who’s master, who’s man;
Who makes the best figure,
The Dean or the digger,
And which is the best
At cracking a jest.
As for settling down at Drapier’s Hill, that fantasy evaporated completely.
How could I form so wild a vision,
To seek, in deserts, fields Elysian?
To live in fear, suspicion, variance
With thieves, fanatics, and barbarians?37
The barbarians may be the Irish in general, though Swift was equally capable of using the term for booby squires. The fanatics, of course, are the Presbyterians who dominated Armagh.
Swift left Market Hill for the last time in 1730, and not long after that the Achesons separated, probably because it was obvious that they had very little in common. They can’t have felt that the breakup (divorce wasn’t possible) had anything to do with Swift, since both remained on friendly terms with him. As he would no doubt have predicted, however, Lady Acheson got caught up in the frivolities of fashionable society. He wrote to Ford in 1732, “Lady Acheson presents her service to you, and chides you for neglecting your health, although her Ladyship be a greater criminal in that article (if possible) than yourself. She is an absolute Dublin rake, sits up late, loses her money, and goes to bed sick, and resolves like you never to mend. It is said that you will soon see Sir Arthur at London to lessen a pair of swelled legs.”38 That is the last we hear of the couple with whom Swift once spent so much time. Anne Acheson died in 1737, and Sir Arthur outlived Swift.
90. Dean Swift’s well.
The Market Hill house is long gone, replaced by a faux-Gothic Victorian edifice known as Gosford Castle. The garden that Swift helped to lay out has gone to seed, and all that survives are stone walls that may possibly date from his time. There is also a well, known as “Dean Swift’s Well,” reputed to have curative powers, but there is no evidence that Swift knew or cared about it.
Markethill itself (as it is now spelled) would experience, much later, hatreds that were only latent in Swift’s day. It remained a predominantly Protestant town, and in the 1990s there were three separate IRA bombings, including a thousand-pound blockbuster that detonated outside the police station and damaged hundreds of buildings. Fortunately, a warning had been received and the residents got to safety in time.
CHAPTER 29
The Disgusting Poems
Since Swift had warm friendships with women and respected their intelligence so highly, why should he have been regarded as a misogynist? The main reason is a group of half a dozen poems that he published in the early 1730s. They shocked many readers when they first appeared, and have gone on shocking ever since. Johnson’s verdict is typical: “The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analyzing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas from which almost every other mind shrinks in disgust. The ideas of pleasure, even when criminal, may solicit the imagination; but what has disease, deformity, and filth upon which the thoughts can be allured to dwell?”1
These are generally called the scatological poems, but that’s too narrow. “Disgusting” is more accurate. Over the years apologists have advanced various rationalizations: this kind of thing was common at the time (it wasn’t), or he was just making fun of idealizing love poetry (he was, but that’s not the whole story), or he was a “conscientious priest” wanting to discourage fornication.2 It seems obvious that these poems should tell us a good deal about Swift’s psyche, but just what do they tell?
The first thing to say is that ordinary sex is largely invisible in Swift’s works. He apparently disliked what he regarded as obscenity too deeply even to hint at it. Dr. Lyon, who knew him well, remembered that he hated lewd talk and always reproved it. But references to urination and excretion were another matter, and Lyon believed they were intended didactically. “He always distinguished between obscenity, in common discourse and writing, from what was only slovenly. The former was not to be endured, but he wrote and spoke of the latter merely in order to recommend cleanliness in dress and behaviour, by representing filthiness and sluttishness in the most contemptible light.”3
Lyon was certainly right about the obsession with cleanliness. In Cadenus and Vanessa Venus sprinkles the infant Vanessa with nectar,
From whence the tender skin assumes
A sweetness above all perfumes;
From whence a cleanliness remains,
Incapable of outward stains.
Fortunately for her, Vanessa was up to Swift’s high standards. People who knew her assured Deane Swift that “she was extremely nice [that is, fastidious] and delicate, as well in the cleanliness of her person as in everything she wore.”4
But of course it’s entirely possible to be obscene and still enjoy gratification, as the libertine Earl of Rochester did:
Cupid and Bacchus my saints are;
May drink and love still reign.
With wine I wash away my cares,
And then to cunt again.5
By Swift’s time writers had to be more euphemistic than that, but there are numerous appreciations of sex in Fielding, and endless double entendres in Sterne (a clergyman) and Smollett. Smollett’s Tabitha Bramble orders her housekeeper to “let Roger search into, and make a general clearance of the slit holes which the maids have in secret,” and is confident that her pious servant Humphry “may have power given to penetrate and instill his goodness, even into your most inward parts.”6
It may well be that Swift disapproved of obscene language but not of sex itself. At various times, after all, from the Journal to Stella down to the Market Hill poems, he did enjoy oblique innuendos. In defense of the offending poems, he translated Horace:
Some actions must be always out of sight,
Yet elegantly told, may give delight.7
D. H. Lawrence thought that Swift was “mad with sex and excrement revulsion,” but that’s far from clear. It’s one thing to be reticent about sex, and another thing to be explicit about excrement. And the excremental refer
ences aren’t all equally disgusting. There is justice in C. S. Lewis’s comment on both Swift and Pope: “Their love of filth is, in my opinion, much better understood by schoolboys than by psychoanalysts: if there is something sinister in it, there is also an element of high-spirited rowdiness.”8
In one of the Market Hill poems, A Panegyric on the Dean, Swift makes Lady Acheson thank him for supervising the construction of a pair of outhouses. These will provide a welcome refuge for the farm workers, as Swift observes in parodically religious language, with italics to highlight the double entendres (cloaca is Latin for “sewer”):
Here gentle goddess Cloacine
Receives all offerings at her shrine.
In separate cells, the he’s and she’s
Here pay their vows with bended knees.
(For ’tis profane when sexes mingle,
And every nymph must enter single;
And when she feels an inward motion,
Comes filled with reverence and devotion.)
The bashful maid, to hide her blush,
Shall creep no more behind a bush;
Here unobserved, she boldly goes,
As who should say, to pluck a rose.9
“Sirreverence” was a euphemism for excrement, and “plucking a rose” for urinating.
As the anti-pastoral goes on, it does seem that Swift is curiously fascinated:
Yet some devotion still remains
Among our harmless northern swains,
Whose offerings, placed in golden ranks,
Adorn our crystal river’s banks;
Nor seldom grace the flowery downs
With spiral tops and copple crowns.10
“Copple” meant crested, like a cock’s head. Since Swift put these words in Lady Acheson’s mouth and shared the poem with her, he evidently thought they were droll rather than offensive.
At least one woman writer, Mary Jones of Oxford, enjoyed Swift’s irreverence and imitated it. In a poem of hers, “two nymphs of chaste Diana’s train,” riding in a coach with a pair of beaus, feel the call of nature and hasten into an empty dairy house:
The cream pot first she filled with liquor
Fit for the thorax of the vicar. . . .
A pan of milk, unskimmed its cream,
Did next receive the bounteous stream.