by Leo Damrosch
When the farm wife returns, she rejoices to discover that her containers have been magically filled up, and she relishes the beer in particular, although it does taste a bit flat.
Our beer is dead, but no great matter,
’Tis better still than common water.
Yet Swift’s “spiral tops” are disconcertingly closely observed. As the poet Geoffrey Hill says, “It is the very coolness of the verbal draughtsmanship, the detailing of the fecal coils, that is so chilling.”11
In Swift’s Dublin neighborhood, the Liberty of St. Patrick, a visitor described “a degree of filth and stench inconceivable except by such as have visited these scenes of wretchedness. Into the back yard of each house, frequently not ten feet deep, is flung from the windows of each apartment the ordure and filth of its numerous inhabitants; from which it is so seldom removed that I have seen it nearly on a level with the windows of the first floor.”12 In American usage, that would be the second floor.
Swift commented on the same thing. Anyone walking the streets of Dublin “must needs observe the immense number of human excrements at the doors and steps of waste houses.” Swift imagines that partisans of England have deposited these so as to make it appear that the Irish have enough to eat. Then fantasy takes over. “They would confirm this by pretending to observe that a British anus being more narrowly perforated than one of our own country, and many of these excrements, upon a strict view, appearing copple-crowned, with a point like a cone or pyramid, are easily distinguished from the Hibernian, which lie much flatter and with less continuity.” But this claim is unfounded, for the writer has consulted a distinguished physician “who is well versed in such profound speculations, and at my request was pleased to make trial with each of his fingers, by thrusting them into the anus of several persons of both nations; and professed he could find no such difference between them as those ill-disposed people allege.”13
References of this kind were not uncommon in Swift’s time. A distant acquaintance, Lord Castle Durrow of Kilkenny, wrote to say that he was delighted to receive a letter from Swift, and then remarked that since he was fond of rural retirement, “once indeed in two years I appear in the anus of the world, our metropolis.”14
Back in 1719, when Swift was nursing his grievances and seeing (but in what way, exactly?) the cleanly Vanessa, he wrote a poem called The Progress of Beauty that gives a highly unromantic glimpse of a lady’s dressing room. In Pope’s Rape of the Lock, when the lovely Belinda puts on makeup, she “sees by degrees a purer blush arise, / And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes.” Swift’s Celia likewise knows how to “teach her cheeks again to blush,” but that’s because she’s a prostitute who has not only lost the ability to blush in earnest, but has all too many defects to cover up:
To see her from her pillow rise,
All reeking in a cloudy steam,
Cracked lips, foul teeth, and gummy eyes,
Poor Strephon! how would he blaspheme!
The soot or powder which was wont
To make her hair look black as jet,
Falls from her tresses on her front,
A mingled mass of dirt and sweat.
Nasty as this is, it’s only partway along the road of Celia’s fate as a victim of syphilis (for which mercury, though poisonous, was thought to be a remedy).
When mercury her tresses mows,
To think of oil and soot is vain:
No painting can restore a nose,
Nor will her teeth return again.
Two balls of glass may serve for eyes,
White lead can plaster up a cleft;
But these, alas, are poor supplies
If neither cheeks nor lips be left.15
Swift apparently had a horror of prostitutes. Twelve years after writing this, he returned to the theme in a poem with the innocuous title A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. It begins, as his satires often do, as a charming pastoral:
Corinna, pride of Drury Lane,
For whom no shepherd sighs in vain . . .
The name Corinna must have been chosen for its association with love poems, but the theater district around Drury Lane was a notorious hunting ground for streetwalkers. No one “sighs in vain” for Corinna because anyone who wants her can have her. They wouldn’t want her, though, if they could see her undressing:
Now, picking out a crystal eye,
She wipes it clean, and lays it by. . . .
Now dext’rously her plumpers draws,
That serve to fill her hollow jaws;
Untwists a wire, and from her gums
A set of teeth completely comes.
Pulls out the rags contrived to prop
Her flabby dugs and down they drop. . . .
With gentlest touch, she next explores
Her shankers, issues, running sores.16
Plumpers were often used by respectable people, in an era of widespread tooth loss. Johnson defines them as “something worn in the mouth to swell out the cheeks.”
Finally Corinna falls asleep, but there’s no relief there. In a nightmare she experiences the punishments of the Bridewell house of correction, “and feels the lash, and faintly screams.” Waking up, she finds the animal kingdom taking over:
A wicked rat her plaster stole,
Half ate, and dragged it to his hole.
The crystal eye, alas, was missed,
And Puss had on her plumpers pissed.
This poem has been well described as “aversion therapy.”17 It’s not about sex, and in fact there isn’t any. Corinna has returned to her garret at midnight because she found no “drunken rake” who was willing to touch her.
Satires on removing fake attractions go back to ancient times, as in an epigram by Martial that Swift certainly knew. When he printed three of his disgusting poems in a 1734 pamphlet, he introduced them with a line from Ovid, Pars minima est ipsa puella sui—“A woman is the least part of herself.” But Ovid avoids describing images that, he says, are obscene, whereas Swift highlights them.18
This is not scatology, though. Its subject is the alarming vulnerability of the human body. Many diseases that could be cured today were chronic or fatal then, and Swift’s own body was a torment to him, with the ever-recurring vertigo and nausea. He may not sympathize with Corinna, exactly, but his poem considers the anguish she must feel:
But how shall I describe her arts
To recollect the scattered parts?
Or show the anguish, toil, and pain
Of gathering up herself again?19
Three of Swift’s poems, however, do invoke scatology. Instead of depicting diseased prostitutes, they are about naïve young gentlemen. In The Lady’s Dressing Room, Strephon is alarmed when he takes a close view of Celia cleaning her face, much like Gulliver among the giantesses.
The virtues we must not let pass
Of Celia’s magnifying glass.
When frighted Strephon cast his eye on’t
It showed the visage of a giant,
A glass that can to sight disclose
The smallest worm in Celia’s nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail;
For catch it nicely by the head,
It must come out alive or dead.
What really shatters Strephon is discovering the purpose of the mysterious chest beneath Celia’s bed.
So things which must not be expressed,
When plumped into the reeking chest,
Send up an excremental smell
To taint the parts from whence they fell:
The petticoats and gown perfume,
Which waft a stink round every room.
Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away,
Repeating in his amorous fits,
“Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”20
Lawrence made an interesting suggestion: maybe it was Swift’s sensitivity to language that was offended. “‘Celia, Celia, Cel
ia shits!’ Now that, stated baldly, is so ridiculous it is almost funny. . . . The fact cannot have troubled him, since it applied to himself and to all of us.” Lawrence also confessed a wish to go back across the years and say to the lady, “It’s all right, don’t you take any notice of that mental lunatic.”21 He doesn’t indicate what other kinds of lunatic there are, or why we should assume that Swift is identical to foolish Strephon.
The most recent editor of Swift’s poems tells us that this was one of the most popular in Swift’s lifetime and was frequently reprinted.22 He obviously felt no embarrassment about it, since he published it with two others in an elegant, large-type edition. And because the final word breaks off with a dash in the original editions, it’s up to the reader to supply it. As with Swift’s political poems, in which the rhyme makes clear what name to fill in, the rhyme on “fits” offers the reader a little puzzle-solving game.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu saw an opportunity to get in a kick at Swift, and published a riposte in which he himself pays a lady £4 for sex but is humiliated by impotence. In his defense, he identifies the cause:
Your damned close-stool so near my nose,
Your dirty smock, and stinking toes.
At this the lady retorts, “The blame lies all in sixty-odd.” When Swift then threatens to write a lampoon on the lady’s dressing room,
She answered short, “I’m glad you’ll write,
You’ll furnish paper when I shite.”
And she adds,
Perhaps you have no better luck in
The knack of rhyming than of ——.
Lady Mary’s grudge was an enduring one, and a reminder that although official culture was decorous, obscenity was freely used in private. Twenty-five years later, she gleefully showed a visitor a commode lined with books by Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. This, she explained, “gave her the satisfaction of shitting on them every day.”23
There may be an entirely different way, though, to hear Swift’s message. The ending of The Lady’s Dressing Room recalls the maneuver in A Tale of a Tub when Swift suggests that the only way to be really happy is to be “well deceived.” So here he recommends that Strephon plug his nose—“smell no evil,” as a commentator says—and learn to content himself with superficial appearances.
I pity wretched Strephon blind
To all the charms of female kind;
Should I the Queen of Love refuse
Because she rose from stinking ooze? . . .
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravished sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.24
In a poem called Strephon and Chloe, the game again is to imitate the idealizing language of pastoral, and then to deflate it with frank colloquialisms.
Strephon, who heard the fuming rill
As from a mossy cliff distill,
Cried out, “Ye gods, what sound is this?
Can Chloe, heav’nly Chloe piss?”
Relieved to find that she’s “as mortal as himself at least,” he decides to borrow her utensil:
But soon with like occasions pressed
He boldly sent his hand in quest
(Inspired with courage from his bride)
To reach the pot on t’other side,
And as he filled the reeking vase,
Let fly a rouser in her face.
Geoffrey Hill remarks that “‘he boldly sent his hand in quest’ is the language of lyrical pornography applied to an unlyrical situation,” and as for the surprising fart, “it would be difficult to find a word that blends the outrageous and the festive more effectively than this.”25
This wasn’t the first time Swift had associated farting with sex. Thirty years earlier, he wrote a furious lampoon on Lord Romney, who had promised to get him an appointment at Canterbury or Westminster and then did nothing about it. “The handsomest man of his time,” a modern authority tells us, “he was a notorious profligate, and the terror of husbands.” In Swift’s poem the peer’s mistresses, knowing the way his love expresses itself, position themselves at both ends.
And now the ladies all are bent
To try the great experiment:
Ambitious of a Regent’s heart,
Spread all their charms to catch a fart.
Watching the first unsav’ry wind,
Some ply before, and some behind.
My Lord, on fire amidst the dames,
Farts like a laurel in the flames. . . .
So from my Lord his passion broke;
He farted first, and then he spoke.26
One last poem of this kind, a weaker effort called Cassinus and Peter, repeats the line “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” but also has a strange classical allusion that may be revealing:
I come, I come—Medusa, see,
Her serpents hiss direct at me.
In the myth, anyone who looked at the serpent-haired Medusa would be turned to stone, but Athena provides Perseus with a shield in which he can safely watch her mirror image while he cuts off her head. As Freud interpreted it, the gorgon’s head is a displaced symbol of the feared female genitals. Whether or not one finds that persuasive, Swift is certainly talking about forbidden sights that are psychologically fatal:
Here Cassy lies, by Celia slain,
And dying, never told his pain.
Perhaps what disturbs Swift most is the unsettling fact that Yeats described:
Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement.
Freud, talking about children’s jokes, observes that “in the imagination at this stage there exists a latrine, as it were, where what is sexual and what is excremental are distinguished badly or not at all.”27
It’s conceivable that Swift’s imagination got stalled at a childish stage, or regressed there. In the days when psychoanalytic writers liked to deduce formative traumas without any evidence, the nurse who took him to England was identified as the culprit. “However devoted to her little charge,” one analyst explained, “she was in some way overly conscientious and harsh in her early toilet training, and left this stamp of the nursery morals of the chamber pot forever on his character.” Another writer was sure that she must have disturbed Swift with “caresses of a faintly lascivious character.” A third interpreter scandalized Swift specialists with an essay called “The Excremental Vision,” in which he claimed that Swift offered a valuable insight into “the universal neurosis of mankind” by restoring anality to its foundational role in personality development.28
It’s apparent, at any rate, that some kind of obsession is involved, and that Swift felt compelled to share it with the world. Was he thinking of himself when he jotted a note, “A nice man is a man of nasty ideas”? And a couplet in Strephon and Chloe surely speaks from experience:
For fine ideas vanish fast,
While all the gross and filthy last.29
Ideas, in Locke’s philosophy, were not abstract concepts but direct sense impressions—all too direct, for the hypersensitive Swift.
It’s important to remember that these poems were written, as Lady Mary cruelly emphasized, by a man in his sixties who was haunted by mortality. As a recent critic suggests, the loss of Stella must have heightened Swift’s horror of bodily decay: “Although the overt accusations in these poems are about whoredom, dirt and deceit, the underlying one seems to be that, like Stella, these women are physical beings in pawn to disease and death. Swift details their physicality with triumphant rage.”30
At any rate, Swift had no inhibitions about sharing these poems with his women friends, as Martha Whiteway teasingly reminded him. “As you have been remarkable for never being severe on the ladies, I am surprised you should say that we forsake the men at forty. I deny the fact; while they sing our praises, we continue to hold them in admiration. For an example of this, I give the author of The Lady’s Dressing Room and Strephon and Chloe, who, by writing these poems, gained the
hearts of the whole sex.”31
CHAPTER 30
Waiting for the End
“IN A JEST I SPEND MY RAGE”
The occasional writings that Swift produced in his final decade were mostly indignant, and sometimes furious. A couple of years after leaving Market Hill, he returned to a poem he had left unfinished there, An Epistle to a Lady, Who Desired the Author to Make Verses on Her, in the Heroic Style, and turned it into a fierce defense of satire. Although he invokes Democritus, the “laughing philosopher” of Greece, the laughter is bitter:
Like the ever-laughing sage,
In a jest I spend my rage
(Though it must be understood
I would hang them if I could). . . .
Poultney deep, accomplished St. Johns,
Scourge the villains with a vengeance.
Let me, though the smell be noisome,
Strip their bums; let Caleb hoyse ’em;
Then apply Alecto’s whip
Till they wriggle, howl, and skip.1
“Hoyse” is “hoist”; Alecto, whose name means “unceasing anger,” is one of the avenging Furies.
A disturbing poem from the same period is called The Day of Judgment. It begins by imitating pious poems about God’s righteousness, and then springs its trap: human beings are so contemptible that it would be a waste of God’s time to bother with a Last Judgment at all. The Almighty dismisses the human race with contempt:
“So some folks told you, but they knew
No more of Jove’s designs than you;
The world’s mad business now is o’er,
And I resent these pranks no more.
I to such blockheads set my wit!
I damn such fools! Go, go, you’re bit.”
This God is a bitter jester, in the spirit of the London “biters” whom Swift had described years before: “You must ask a bantering question, or tell some damned lie in a serious manner, and then she will answer or speak as if you were in earnest; then cry you, ‘Madam, there’s a bite.’”2
“Jove” was a common poetic equivalent for Jehovah, but the name perhaps reflects covert skepticism about Christian theology. Certainly Swift declined to publish this poem, and it didn’t appear in print until thirty years after his death. At some level he may even have been haunted by the vision that Mark Twain’s Satan reveals at the end of The Mysterious Stranger: “There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream.” In a letter to Pope, Swift said, “The common saying of life being a farce is true in every sense but the most important one, for it is a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind of composition.”3