Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“YOU HAVE A LOT TO LOSE, A MEMOIR, 1956-1986” by C. K. Stead (Auckland University Press,  $NZ49:99)

            With very few exceptions, all memoirs and autobiographies are exercises in self-justification (or, if you’re Maurice Shadbolt or James McNeish, exercises in self-mythologisation). Very, very few autobiographers adopt an apologetic tone, criticise themselves, highlight the mistakes they have made, or publicly regret foolish things they have said or written. After childhood years have been covered, successes, achievements and public approval are usually the focus. On the whole, all this is true of C.K. (Christian Karlson) Stead’s second volume of autobiography.

You Have a Lot to Lose, a Memoir follows on from Stead’s South-West of Eden, which covered the first 23 years of his life. In his opening “Note by Way of Introduction” (p.ix), Stead tells us that this book is  “a literary biography – a story of books and how they came about”, and he does indeed tell us in detail which events or people fed into which poem, short story or novel he has written. He also notes “I have left things out, most often in the interests of economy, but sometimes for reasons of discretion, or privacy… I claim to be a truthful recorder, not a comprehensive one” (p.xi) Fair enough. No autobiography can cover absolutely everything in a person’s life, and presumably the “discretion” and “privacy” elements are those that could refer to people still living. Now in his 88^th year, Stead has outlived many of his contemporaries, but not all of them. Stead’s statement does, however, warn us that (as in all autobiographies) what he covers will be selective.      

To give a clumsy “narrative” summary of You Have a Lot to Lose, it goes like this:- In 1956, 23-year-old Karl Stead, his wife Kay coming with him, takes up a position as junior lecturer at a New South Wales university, the climate and milieu of which he describes very vividly in some of this autobiography’s best pages. Later in the 1950s, he moves to England and works at the university in Bristol doing postgrad. research towards his doctoral thesis, which will eventually become his influential book on Modernist poets The New Poetic. In his time at Bristol he is under the supervision of  the Leavisite critic L.C.Knights. Many visitors and friends are mentioned, most being ticked off in a paragraph as if resurrected from diaries. He shifts to London, still working on The New Poetic and does the round of Kiwis living in London or near it (Dan Davin, Maurice Shadbolt, David Ballantyne). In 1961, he is back in New Zealand and takes on a lectureship in the University of Auckland’s English Department, where he begins his climb up the academic ladder. There are anecdotes of friends and colleagues (Barry Humphries, Maurice Duggan, Keith Sinclair, Robert Chapman, Kendrick Smithyman, Bill Pearson). The New Poetic is published to acclaim. In these years, three children are born to Kay and Karl. Always sympathetic to the Labour party, Stead becomes politically very active during the Vietnam War, opposing New Zealand’s involvement. His discontent with New Zealand’s apparent subservience to the USA feeds into his first novel Smith’s Dream, published in 1971. [But, as he notes on p.168, Stead is now a bit unhappy at the political ambiguity implicit in both the alternate endings he wrote for the novel.]

Stead wins what was then called the Winn-Manson Menton Fellowship, honouring Katherine Mansfield, which takes him and his family to the Cote d’Azur for the best part of a year. There is one traumatic event (a car crash), but all his family survive. This year is the prelude to many other visits to Paris and the rest of France. From Menton, Stead returns to New Zealand, resumes his academic position, and work on his Katherine Mansfield’s Letters and Journals. Being an important member of  PEN, he had some fractious encounters with Fiona Kidman and Lauris Edmond over matters such as having PEN branches outside Wellington and over the nature of New Zealand book awards, which were then being set up. He goes back to London a number of times (anecdotes about Karl Miller and A.S.Byatt). By now he has advanced from lecturer to associate-professor to a full professorship. His second bout of intense political activism comes in 1981, when he joins those publicly opposing the Springbok tour from apartheid South Africa. He is part of the small group that occupies mid-field of the Hamilton grounds when the All Blacks are about to play the Springboks. He is arrested and locked up for a short time, which makes him think back to the oppressive state he imagined in Smith’s Dream. In the 1980s, he is involved in a number of literary and social controversies, sometimes leading to his being regarded as either anti-feminist or anti-Maori or both, charges which he refutes. He writes more poetry, he produces another major work on the poetic Modernists, and he works more on novels. He is awarded a CBE.  In 1986, at the age of 53, he takes early retirement from academic life to become a full-time writer. His career as an academic fits neatly the 30 years that this memoir covers.

This is a raw, crude and reductive summary of what You Have a Lot to Lose is “about’. In places this memoir reminds us of largely forgotten things. (Who now really knows – or cares – about the reaction against the “New Apocalyptic” and the emergence of the “Movement” in British poetry in the 1950s?) While reading the earlier chapters, I noted that Stead does not indulge in name-dropping for its own sake, as the people he mentions are either colleagues or friends - but as this is a sort of chronicle, it inevitably mentions many people who will mean nothing to most readers. In the later chapters, however, some pages are dizzying lists of names of luminaries met at literary conferences or readings. As another general comment I have to say too, that as a fellow Francophile, I understand Stead’s love of Paris and of France in general, but regrettably many of his observations on that country come across as  tourist jottings.

Some big names in New Zealand literature have been  important in Stead’s life. He liked some aspects of James K.Baxter, but was dead against others. He sums Baxter up thus: “I loved the poet in him and found the high-toned hypocritical moralist absurd, and at times almost intolerable.” (p.181)

Far more nuanced is his attitude to Janet Frame, whom he knew better than he knew Baxter. He often worried about her mental state, and gave this advice to an English doctor who wanted to examine her: “I said I thought she was entirely sane, but that it was as if she lacked one layer of protective skin – like an extremely sensitive and timid teenager.” (p.73) He mildly refutes (footnote p.74) Frame’s own idea that all her troubles sprang from an early misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Twice he was at odds with her. She apparently violated their friendship by writing a story that gave what was clearly a negative version of him (pp.119-121). He disliked the way she reacted to her own time in Menton and the (posthumously published) novel In the Memorial Room which she wrote about it (pp.222-224). Often Stead makes remarks about her “little girl” voice. It is interesting to learn that originally Stead’s second novel All Visitors Ashore was going to be written as a joint effort with Janet Frame.

Allen Curnow, as both academic colleague and neighbour, was a good friend for many years, although Stead acknowledges his crotchety side. Of Curnow’s ungracious poem on the death of Baxter, Stead says that it ended in a way that was “gratuitously cold and competitive.” (p.219). Surely, I thought, the same could be said of Curnow’s take-down of  M.K.Joseph, “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. With disapproval, Stead quotes Vincent O’Sullivan’s remark that “Dichtung und Wahrheit” was “a mean-spirited, grubby swipe” (p.254). Stead doesn’t agree, but on this one, I’m on O’Sullivan’s side. (I won’t go into detail about this – for further comments on “Dichtung und Wahrheit” see on this blog my review of Terry Sturm’s biography Allen Curnow: Simply By Sailing in a NewDirection.)

Then there was Frank Sargeson, with whom Stead’s relationship was usually very friendly, but occasionally strained. Notoriously Sargeson was suspicious of academics and this may have fed into the unpleasant moments. When Sargeson died, Stead recalls his sorrow at losing a friend.

When I attempt to assess You Have a Lot to Lose, I find myself drawing up lists of positives and negatives, which basically means all the points in which I agree with Stead’s views and those where I disagree.

First the many positives.

I think that as a young lecturer in Australia, Stead was right to detect a sort of crypto-fascism in Arnold Toynbee’s view of history (p.11).

He was also (always) right about judging literature by a close reading of the text itself; but he was aware that this could be taken to theoretical extremes. Thus he describes F.R.Leavis, a nothing-but-the-text man, as “famous as an acute and demanding critic, guardian of the highest literary standards, but known for dogmatism and a messianic temperament that seemed to require conformity from his disciples.” (p.27) Later, he describes a minor Leavisite as “the perfect Leavisite, very high and mighty about the sins of popular culture, the press, the BBC, the British Council, the publishing industry. He knew which few books were to be respected, and which few authors revered, and that the rest could be ignored or deplored.” (p.56) Nothing-but-the-text can lead to ignorance of context and literature’s relationship with the world in general. Also on general literary matters, I can only agree with Stead’s condemnation of the gobbledegook and redundant jargon that came with post-modernism: “I had watched literary fashions come and go, and had especially avoided the fashion for literary theory, preferring to write in intelligible English…” (p.338)

Stead is aware (pp.82-83) that the views about Maori which he and most Pakeha held in the 1950s were complacent and often based on ignorance. This he now regrets.

Of his encounters with Charles Brasch, he writes that Brasch was “very serious and very kind” and acknowledges his debts to him. But he remarks that Brasch was “also very precious. One felt he was almost certainly gay, but probably not happy about it…” I admit this was the image I had already formed of Brasch while plodding through Charles Brasch Journals 1938-1957 and Charles Brasch Journals 1959-1973 for review on this blog. A hesitant mandarin, clearly homosexual but sometimes agonising over whether he should get married (to a woman).

I can only agree when Stead laments that universities are not what they used to be. He misses a time “when we did not think of students as ‘customers’, or ‘clients’, sources of revenue, and were not reluctant to fail them if they didn’t come up to the standard we set.” (p.160) Later he regrets that he witnessed at Auckland “the gradual transformation of the university from a place in which learning and research were self-directing and self-justifying, to one in which education became a commodity, an item for sale and for profit, and in which the managers slowly but surely became more important than the educators.” (p.173)

Likewise, Stead is right about book awards. He was part of the setting up of the New Zealand Book Awards, but notes correctly “nothing in the matter of book prizes is ever quite pure, free or dependable – there is always an element of luck, of literary-lottery in who wins and who is overlooked”. But he goes on to suggest that the original NZ Book Awards were “ ‘purer’ than later, when they became entwined with the publishing industry and sponsorship, and took on a commercial aspect” (p.241). Stead has, however, some personal motives for writing this. He was obviously hurt when he didn’t receive an award he thought he deserved (pp.345-346). And, though he does not complain too much about it, he is a little annoyed that his novel All Visitors Ashore had to share an award with a novel by Marilyn Duckworth. He says “These things seem to matter at the time and leave afterwards only a sense of cynicism about book prizes and the people who administer them. They are distorters of the market, great if you win, a piss-off if you don’t, and in the years you don’t have an eligible book or an interest in one, a bore. They are commercial rather than literary-critical events…” (p.373)

Of the bone people, a book that did, surprisingly, win a major award (the Booker), I believe Stead is right to demur. His comments on the bone people, especially on the matter of violence against children, seem to me both robust and sound (pp.375-376)

All the last few paragraphs have done, of course, is to align my tastes and prejudices with Stead’s tastes and prejudices.

Now we come to the more problematic bits – in other words, where Stead’s tastes and prejudices are not aligned to mine.

Stead clings to his argument (as he did in his review of Michael Heyward’s The Ern Malley Affair) that Harold Stewart and James McAuley perpetrated “the hoax that rebounded on the hoaxers” when they undertook to create Ern Malley. This I do not believe. Fair and square, and fully conscious of what they were doing, and in no way “liberated” by the new form they were inventing (the very defensive argument used by Max Harris, supporters of “Angry Penguins” and many poseurs since), Stewart and McAuley showed how gullible some members of the avant-garde could be. Of course they did not demolish Modernism – it’s not as if the Ern Malley poems cancelled The Waste Land – but they did flush out those tag-alongs who claim to admire and appreciate something because it is currently fashionable. Stead half admits this when he writes, a propos Ern Malley, that “fashion is something which to a certain extent sets its own standards and imposes a degree of blindness” (pp.23-25). Sure thing.

Bringing back memories of, nearly fifty years ago, sitting as an Honours student in Stead’s tutorials, I also have a sinking feeling as he again declares his annoyance that W.H. Auden edited and revised his earlier published poems, taking out much of their naïve 1930s leftism (pp.132-133). My own view is that Auden (whom Stead describes as a “technician”) continued to produce great work to the end – not just a postscript to his younger self – and much of the contention arises from the belief that he was the sort of “lost leader” that Browning deplored and a traitor to various causes.

            Stead can be very snarky about people of whom he essentially disapproves. Of Maurice Shadbolt he writes “He was like an actor; he behaved the great writer, and with such confidence!” (p.206) He is fiercely ironical about the American poet Robert Creeley, who visited New Zealand, saying “Creeley was one of those cult poets who attract disciples to whom a taste for his work represents enlightenment… Creeley had been blessed by William Carlos Williams, and thus had in effect apostolic powers to pass the blessing on – and there were those eager here to receive it” (pp.247-248). Of young Margaret Atwood, whom he met at a literary beanfeast in Canada, he says “She looked like [Botticelli’s] Primavera and sounded like a frog.” (p.308)

Sometimes he dredges up academic bitcheries that would be totally unknown to the uninitiated. He says some pleasant things about one of Auckland’s History professors Nicholas Tarling, but he also damns him as a “dealer and academic tyrant” (p.289) in trying to block Stead’s (successful) application for a research position. Indeed (and this is not Stead’s fault), we are often made aware of how much sniping there was (and is) in both literary and academic circles in, for example, the reaction to Stead’s essay “From Wystan to Carlos” (Chapter 10) but also in the essay he wrote on John Mulgan, which suggested that back in the 1930s Mulgan failed to get a Rhodes scholarship simply because his grades weren’t good enough (pp.294-295). In his biography of Mulgan, Long Journey to the Border, Vincent O’Sullivan reacted suavely to this essay by simply ignoring it, but implicitly showed how flawed Stead’s idea was.

There is another matter that is perturbing in a number of ways. Stead remarks “In the years before 1963 it had been a reasonable assumption that one’s students who were not married were either virgins, or not engaged in sexual activity. After 1963 the opposite was the case… ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’; and though I was no longer quite young there were indeed to be moments that would seem ‘very heaven’ “ (p.128). He also informs us that “among the academics and writers who were our friends”  there were many extra-marital affairs and much bed-hopping. He likens the adultery in academe to events in Iris Murdoch’s novels  (p.145).

This leads up to the account he gives of his affair with the student (now deceased) Jenny North (pp.181-187 and passim). He first attempts to indemnify himself against possible criticism by saying “Looking back in the light and shadow of the ‘Me Too’ movement of 2018 it’s perhaps important to say there was nothing that could even remotely be called coercion or harassment; and it would be as wrong to say that I exploited age and status as that she exploited youth and beauty. We were two adults equally smitten, for a long time hesitating silent and embarrassed on the brink of saying so.” (pp.181-182) Well… maybe. Every description he gives of Jenny, who had been the family’s babysitter, suggests a naïve, flower-power hippie looking for a guru. Stead says that he told his wife Kay what the situation was, as he had done during an earlier infidelity, and there were “tears and anguish”, although he doesn’t elaborate upon them (p.187). There were resolutions not to go on on with the affair, but it did continue (pp.226-228).

What disturbs me about this? First, Stead’s blithe assumption that there was no power imbalance – rising academic nearing 40 will obviously make an impression on younger woman nearly 20 years his junior. Second, Stead tells us in detail of all the poetry (especially the sequence Quesada) and plot-points in his novels that the affair generated – Jenny, in effect, becomes good “copy”. Third, what a ruddy cliché it all is. Mature academic finding muse in younger chick. Perhaps I will be criticised for being moralistic or daring to pass judgement on somebody else’s love life, which isn’t any of my business. But by devoting these pages to them, the author makes them my – and any other reader’s – business. Besides, I am judging “the words on the page”, which is, after all, the only way to judge a text – right? There’s the possibility that Stead has reported it ineptly, and Jenny was a robustly mature person. But that is not what the text conveys.

Enough of this. I will await stoically the inevitable brickbats.

Stead does undertake some self-analysis in You Have a Lot to Lose and is aware that he often rubbed people up the wrong way. Of the late 1960s he says “These were the years when I discovered that I was radical politically and conservative academically, a division which felt quite comfortable and reasonable, but which at times made me the object of wrath from one side or the other and often from both” (p.165). Of the 1980s he says “From this distance I can see that I must have appeared to many like a hyperactive child, writing poetry, fiction, non-fiction, a professor and not-a-professor, opinionated and clamouring – in your face and a pain in the arse. Never mind the quality of the writing, who would want a prize to go to this remorselessly present person if there was any way it could be directed elsewhere?” (p.347) He discusses keeping a dual personality by working and publishing both in Britain and in New Zealand: “That way I would be able to remain a New Zealand writer based in Auckland, but with regular access to the other world where I felt less subject to the slings and arrows my presence and my personality (for whatever reason – and maybe the fault was all mine) seemed to provoke in my dear homeland.” (p.350) (Emphasis added).

I won’t be so crass as to suggest reasons why New Zealand literati and other interested people may have been negative about Stead; but I will point out the high quota of self-praise there is in this memoir. You have to have a very healthy ego to produce a text like this. Stead credits himself with the definitive interpretation of Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916”, giving a footnote (p.47) listing all the publications and collections of Yeats criticism in which his interpretation has been republished. The many footnotes regarding his own imaginative work always imply that these are important works of literature which we should all read. He tells us that after a recent re-reading of his own novel  “The Death of the Body still strikes me as exceptionally clever and entertaining” (p.369). There’s the possibility that other people will agree with this verdict – but isn’t it for them to say rather than the author?

As I have been at pains to show in this notice, there is much about Stead’s views that I applaud. But it may be the cocksure tone with which he has presented his views, rather than the views themselves, that has, in the past, alienated many of his peers.

Personal footnote

My review of You Have a Lot to Lose ends above, but I would be very amiss if I did not note a few personal matters. As I have indicated above, nearly half a century ago I was for two years a member of Stead’s tutorial class at the University of Auckland. He was, bar none, the best-prepared tutor I encountered at uni., always steering us towards making a close analysis of the text itself rather than indulging in vague generalisations about it. Subsequently, I have had a cordial nodding acquaintance with Stead, though he did rebuke me for some elements of my review on this blog of his That Derrida Whom I Derided Died.https://reidsreader.blogspot.com/2018/09/cillamcqueenpoetasomething-new.html Most important to this footnote, however, is that in advance of publication, he sent me a copy of the two pages in You Have a Lot to Lose concerning the death of my father (pp.201-202), perhaps to check that I didn’t find them offensive. I didn’t, although I would say some ripe things about Frank Sargeson’s response to my father’s death if I could be bothered. If you’re interested, see my review of Sarah Shieff’s excellent edition of Letters of FrankSargeson.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“GULLIVER’S TRAVELS” by Jonathan Swift (first published in 1726)

Or to give it its full title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon and then a Captain of several ships.

Has there ever been a canonical work of literature that has suffered such a curious after-life as this masterpiece by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)? Accepted on its first appearance as the hard and savage satire it is, and immediately popular in the eighteenth century, being both lauded and reviled, Gulliver’s Travels gradually became demoted to the status of a children’s book, bowdlerised and sanitised. Mention the title now, and most people who have heard of it will immediately think of colourful illustrated kiddie versions, most of which limited themselves to a playful retelling of the Lilliput section. It was in this version that I first encountered it as a child, also seeing two film versions [see Footnote below] which did something similar. Only as a teenager did I get to read the complete, unabridged version, and I encountered it again as an undergraduate when it was part of a course on Augustan and other 18^th century Eng. Lit.

Some months back, I decided to read Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver yet again, because I had just read and reviewed (for the New Zealand Listener) Lauren Chater’s novel Gulliver’s Wife, which uses Swift’s book merely as a pretext to deal with other matters. And it all came back to me – the parody, the savage satire, and in the end the reasoned misanthropy.

I will not teach you to suck eggs by giving you a detailed “plot summary”. You probably already know that Gulliver’s Travels is in four parts as Lemuel Gulliver narrates his four fantastical voyages, sometimes being ironical and sometimes being credulous, putting the Gullible into Gulliver. Giving a quick and totally subjective reaction, I would judge its four parts thus:

Part One is the most whimsical section, even if it does have jabs of satire. True, it begins with Gulliver tied up and constrained by Lilliputians, but the Lilliput section allows us to see, in effect, a human being playing with toys and being in charge of little mannikins. Charming, and therefore easily kiddified. Most children would be delighted by the account of Gulliver capturing the whole of the Blufuscan fleet by dragging it off course. Which children have not played with toys in the way Gulliver plays with the enemy fleet?

Part Two, in Brobdingnag, is a much more unified and compelling work than the first part. The land of Brobdingnag is less pleasant, as a human being is now controlled by giants. Gulliver is found in a [gigantic] farmer’s field and is put in the care of his [gigantic] daughter, who looks after Gulliver as a privileged pet. The farmer exploits Gulliver for profit as a freak to display at fairs. Gulliver has civil conversations with Brobdingnagians only when the [gigantic] king takes possession of him and interrogates him – at which point very sharp satire is released, most of it topical and very political.

For me Part Three, the journey to the flying island of Laputa and other places, is the most unsatisfactory and hardest part to read. It is essentially a grab-bag of satire on many subjects with barbs shot in many directions – not political so much as cultural and existential. Its loose scatter-shot narrative makes it jarring.

But there is a great return to style in Part Four, the journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms, where Gulliver relates to these civilized, reasoning horses and is duly disgusted by his human counterparts, the barbarous Yahoos. Giving another purely subjective reaction, I think this is the greatest section of the book and I suggest it comes closest to Swift’s essential theme – the innate imperfection of human beings.

If that is a neat summary of the narrative as narrative, it of course does not examine the book in a more thematic manner. As I now see it from my most recent reading, I believe there are three major ideas and narrative styles in Gulliver’s Travels. There is parody of other works, there is satire, (political, cultural and existential), and there is what I can only describe as “bodily-ness” – an awarenes of and consideration of the human body, and its strangeness.

To deal first with parody, it may be a relatively minor aspect of Gulliver’s Travels, but it is important nevertheless. Remember Swift was writing at a time when there were published many narratives of voyages to distant countries, some of them authentic, but many of them either exaggerated or completely fictitious. Only six years before Gulliver’s Travels was published, for example, that inspired liar Daniel Defoe had produced his Captain Singleton which purported (as so many of Defoe’s fictions did) to be the true memoirs of an adventurer who had, among other things, crossed the sub-Saharan African continent. In reality, this feat was not achieved by any European until more than a century after Defoe wrote. Jonathan Swift plays with this sort of fraud. Gulliver’s Travels was published with maps of the non-existent lands Gulliver visited. Throughout the book, the narrating Gulliver has the ironical habit of ridiculing lies in other travel books and swearing the truth of his own. The very last chapter of the book is a long defence of his veracity (Book 4, Chpter 12). Read the first three pages of the voyage to Brobdingnag (Part 2, Chapter 1) and you will see how Swift piles on sailing terms as if he were an old sea dog, like the narrators of so many travel books then. In Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa, the long and detailed “scientific” account of  how the island flies ridicules such precise descriptions in traveller’s tales (Part 3, Chapter 3). Not that anybody ever took Gulliver’s Travels to be a true tale, but they did understand the parody.

Far more important, however, is the satire. The dominant satire is political satire and political commentary. It is relatively mild in the Lilliput section.  The Emperor of Lilliput makes any minister looking for preferment dance on a rope (Part I, Chapter 3), ridiculing both court etiquette and the irrelevant reasons for men of little talent or ability to be given responsible positions in government. Lilliput’s war with the kingdom of Blefuscu (separated from it by the sea) resembles wars between England and France. After Gulliver has defeated the Blufuscan fleet, there is in Lilliput a conspracy against him, led by a Lilliputian admiral who thinks he has been cheated out of winning a victory himself. Thus court intrigues and cabals are satirised. There is a foolish confllict between Big-Enders (those who believe a boiled egg should be cut open at the big end) and Small-Enders (those who believe a boiled egg should be cut open at the small end). This ridicules both party factions in England’s parliament and the trivial reasons that are sometimes given as justification for war between nations. Again, we recall that Swift was writing at a time when political parties were only beginning to be formed, and political tendencies were more in the nature of loose factions. Swift himself was Tory as opposed to Whig. His satire here is still relevant, although there are doubtless some topical references that would now be unnoticed by most readers (including me).

When Gulliver reaches the land of Brobdingnag, the political satire is revved up considerably and becomes more shrill. Introduced to the Queen of Brobdingnag, Gulliver flatters her by using the most elaborate and obsequious forms of address and titles  – clearly parodying court etiquette in England (Part 2, Chapter 3). After Gulliver praises what he sees as the greatest achievements of England, the King of Brobdingnag turns to his first minister and says, as Gulliver reports, “how contemptible a thing was human grandeur which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I” (Part 2, Chapter 3). The climax of direct political satire comes when Gulliver gives an encomium on how wonderful the English constitution and system of government are – but when the king quizzes him, he has to admit that in England there is corruption, cronyism, faction, back-stabbing, unjust laws, routine violence and the like, leading to the giant king’s well-known and oft-quoted riposte “By what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pain extorted from you; I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (Part 2, Chapter 6). Gulliver makes it even worse in the next chapter when he dares to say how gloriously war is waged in Europe, and how often victory has been won by firearms, cannon and bombardment, all of which merely appals the king (Part 2, Chapter 7). Anti-war satire emerges again in Part Four, where the intelligent Houyhnhnms are strictly pacifistic with regard to their own species. It is Gulliver himself who explains to his Houyhnhnm “Master” all the derisory reasons for going to war and concludes “A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can” (Part 4, Chapter 5). And of course in Part 4, Gulliver, now converted to the Houyhnhnms’ way of reasoning, attacks government and profiteering first ministers; lawyers who speak gobbledegook and spin out cases to increase their fees; barbarous medicine; the ruination of the country by the importation of luxury goods; aristocrats who are indemnified against prosecution for crime and many other corruptions.

However, satire is aimed at quite a different set of targets in Part Three, where we get what I have called cultural and existential satire. The main targets of satire in the account of the flying island of Laputa are intellectuals who are so attached to abstract ideas (mainly mathematical and astronomical) that they do not understand concrete realities. Therefore they are so far removed from the common people, dwelling in the land of Balnibarbi beneath them, that they do not hesitate to rule them by fear. Jonathan Swift is the conservative Tory satirist when Gulliver visits the Academy of Balnibarbi and meets all the “Projectors” – that is, the theorists who insist they have rational plans to improve the world, but whose strange innovations are merely fantastical (extracting sunlight from cucumbers etc.). Swift’s satire here, like Alexander Pope’s, is that of a man looking back to the Renaissance where all knowledge could [reputedly] be held by one well-informed man. In contrast, the “Projectors” herald the world of specialists, whose interests are divorced from the world in the sense that they focus on only one small part of reality, and ignore other equally important contingencies. In some ways, this satire foreshadows one of the major ideas in John Ralston Saul’s 1992 intellectual bestseller Voltaire’s Bastards – that specialisation and the misuse of reason create an elite divorced from the common good.

There is further conservative satire when Gulliver visits the land of Glubbdubdrib, and sorcerers summon up the spirits of the past. Gulliver, upon seeing them, concludes that we have degenerated greatly from the time of the celebrated people of classical antiquity (Part 3, Chapter 8).

Even if some of Swift’s satire belongs to his own age, I was, in my most recent reading of Gulliver’s Travels, shaken by Swift’s account of a “project” to reduce all language to a few essential words and to have books written mechanically (Part 3, Chapter 5). To me this anticipates such projects as mid-twentieth century “Basic English” and in our own times the diminution of real literacy, even in the educated part of the population.

Much more could be said about the novel’s satire, but what I have said so far will do to make the point.

It is what I have identified as the third element in the novel’s conception that most struck and startled me in my recent reading. This is what I have called the “bodily-ness” of it – the way Gulliver’s Travels works as a reflection on the human body and its strangeness

Obviously Gulliver encounters smallness in Lilliput and hugeness in Brobdingnag. He is seen as a giant in Lilliput and seen as a mannikin to be displayed in fairs in Brobdingnag. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, his body is equated with those of brutish, unreasoning creatures (the Yahoos). In each of these cases, the human body is conceived in a different way. Large and important in the universe; then tiny in the universe; then disgusting in the universe. When in Brobdingnag, Gulliver at once understands how vulnerable he is: “I apprehended every moment that he [the first giant he sees] would dash me against the ground, as we usually do any little hateful animal which we have a mind to destroy.” (Part 2, Chapter 1) The (relatively) tiny Gulliver is menaced and threatened at different times by [giant] rats, a puppy dog, a frog, a disgusting monkey and a vindctive dwarf. The Brobdingnagians make for him a sort of doll’s house in which he can be safe – a situation which reminds me irresistibly of a sequence in the old science-fiction movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, which also posited the idea of a human being tiny in the vastness of the universe.

Few canonical novels have been as concerned with bodily functions, as soaked in urine and as befouled by excrement, as Gulliver’s Travels. In Lilliput, Gulliver has difficulties in finding a place to piss and poo, and tiny Lilliputians have to carry away his ordure in a wheelbarrow (Part I, Chapter 2). The Lilliputian army marches between Gulliver’s legs, and some of the tiny soldiers look slyly up through his ragged and torn trousers to see his huge dangling member (Part I, Chapter 3). Gulliver puts out a fire in the Lilliputian royal palace by urinating on it (Part I, Chapter 6). In Brobdingnag he hides discreetly from gigantic women when he has to piss. Also in Brobdingnag, huge flies excrete on food – their droppings unseen by the giants who devour the food anyway (reminding us that we too must sometimes eat fly-blown food). The huge flies also excrete on Gulliver. In Balnibarbi, Gulliver encounters a  “projector” who is attempting to reconstitute food from excrement and who is himself covered in excrement, causing an unholy stench (Part 3, Chapter 5). In the land of Luggnagg, he has to lick the floor when obsequiously approaching the king (Part 3, Chapter 9). On his first day in the land of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver is surrounded by shitting Yahoos, some of whom climb up the tree against which Gulliver is leaning, and shit on his head (Part 4, Chapter 1).

In the general grossness of all this, the human body itself is presented as particularly gross in Brobdingnag, where Gulliver can, in effect, see human bodies in minute detail. This leads to such sights as occur when he watches a Brobdingnagian nurse suckling a baby: “I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the reader an idea of its bulk, shape and colour. It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous… This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifiying glass…” (Part 2, Chapter 1)

Later, he says it is a “nauseous sight” when he sees the huge queen eat so much (Part 2, Chapter 3). He sees among beggars “a woman with a cancer in her breast swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes, in two or three of which I could easily have crept, and covered my whole body. There was a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than five woolpacks…” accompanied with monstrous lice crawling on them (Part 2, Chapter 4). He is disgusted by the huge ladies-in-waiting who play with him by stripping him naked and laying him upon their breasts, where he is almost overcome by their smell and once again repelled by the huge grossness of their bodies (Part 2, Chapter 5).

In all this, we cannot help noticing that there is a strong strain of misogyny in Gulliver’s observations, as all the most disgusting people he describes are women. (Some ingenious critics have attempted to argue that men are similarly caricatured, and besides, these are the observations of the narrator but not of Jonathan Swift. I’m not sure that I agree with this).

Apart from inspiring disgust, the human body has another limitation. In Luggnagg, Gulliver sees “Struldbrugs”, who can live to extreme old age – but this is no blessing as extreme old age means living through years and years of pain and suffering as the body decays but death does not come. Death is a release. (Part 3, Chapter 10). (Incidentally this theme, of the disadvantages of [apparent] physical immortality, is one of the main ideas of Tennyson’s poem Tithonus and of Aldous Huxley’s novel After Many a Summer.]

The concepts of the grossness and physical limitations of the human body reach their fullest expression when Gulliver encounters the Yahoos: “My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed, in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure.” (Part 4, Chapter 2) By implication, WE are disgusting Yahoos. The noble reasoning horses, the Houyhnhnms, see things this way. The calm reason and pacifism of the  Houyhnhnms contrasts with the barbarism, filth and brutality of the Yahoos, of whom Gulliver is assumed to be one. Houyhnhnms have no conception of lying or deceit, as if they are in some sense in a prelapsarian state. They believe they act in accordance with nature. They are amazed that Gulliver wears clothes, which they have never seen before. When Gulliver explains that modesty requires clothes, the Houyhnhnms say that nature would not require such a thing.

Human beings, as the Houyhnhnms see them, are basically thinking, but corrupt, animals  - “Master” Houyhnhnm’s view, which he expresses to Gulliver, is “that, he looked upon us as a sort of animals to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us.” (Part 4, Chapter 7) Gulliver comes to agree, and comes to see himself as a Yahoo – a fallen and disgusting being. He lives willingly with the Houyhnhnms for three years and when he eventually returns home to England he is as disgusted by all human beings, including his own family, as he would be by any Yahoo.

Although it was not Swift’s intention, I admit that I find something repellent in the pure and perfectly reasoning Houyhnhnms. For all the narrator’s assurance that their whole outlook is based on Friendship and Benevolence they, to this reader, sound like a bad nightmare born of Plato’s Republic. These wonderful horses mate rationally and have only two offspring each to stabilise the population. Their offspring are not raised by their parents, but from infancy are nurtured and taught by the whole of Houyhnhnm society. They do not fear death and they do not lament it, as it is part of the cycle of life – so no tears at funerals for them. What a sterile Utopia this sounds. Indeed, how inhuman. But then, that may have been Swift’s point. Humanity does not admit of such perfection.

There have been many attempts to account for Swift’s radical misanthropy (and misogyny) in this novel, most of them centring on the personality of Swift himself. The Anglican clergyman (Dean of St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin) has been depicted as a neurotic bachelor who never married, but who had odd relationships with two woman who were both much younger than he - Esther Johnson whom he called “Stella” in his correspondence; and Esther Vanhomrigh, for whom he invented the name “Vanessa”. There used to be rumours that he secretly married “Stella” – in his lectures The English Humourists of the 18^th Century, Thackeray assumed Swift’s marriage was an established fact -  but there is no proof of this, and the likelihood is that Swift lived and died a virgin, never knowing women intimately and perhaps even fearing the sexual side of women. Yet to explain the novel’s misanthropy in these biographical terms seems to me very glib. Rather, I would place Gulliver’s Travels among those works that really force us to ask what a human body is and how it works – including the puzzle that we know our minds and bodies are connected, but somehow persist in thinking that our reasoning minds are separate from our decaying bodies. In this respect I would pair Gulliver’s Travels with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis before I would pair it with the satires of Voltaire.

And yet the satire is there and it is more savage than anything since Juvenal. Like Juvenal, Swift recklessly and brilliantly smashes everything that is wrong with the society that he knew, without suggesting a remedy. Though he lived to a good age, the anger and effort that went into such condemnations must have been exahausting. The monument to him in St Patrick’s cathedral was earned, saying in his death he had gone “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit”; “Where fierce indignation can no longer rend his heart”.

Literary Footnote: After my most recent reading of Gulliver’s Travels, I went back and read again George Orwell’s 20-page essay “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (published in 1946). Basically Orwell spends most of his essay picking apart the topical political satire in Gulliver’s Travels, and then damning Swift as a cranky, reactionary Tory who was opposed to “progress” and who can therefore be equated with all the political ideas in the modern world that Orwell detests. While – as he always does – Orwell scores some valid points, and while nobody can deny Swift’s conservatism, much of this essay appears to me wrong-headed, over-stated, and missing the real point of much of Swift’s satire. After spending about 17 pages attacking Swift’s world-view, Orwell suddenly backtracks in his last two or three pages, and says that, in spite of everything, he still admires Swift as a great satirist. His reason for doing this is a valid one – we should be able to admire the style and force of a work of literature, even if we disagree with its ideas. I agree.

Cinematic Footnote: The first two film adaptations I saw of Gulliver’s Travels were both very entertaining examples of the kiddification of Jonathan Swift’s work. 

The British live-action film The Three Worlds of Gulliver, made in 1960, dealt only with Lilliput and Brobdingnag, added romantic love interest, and made it a wholesome adventure story by bowdlerising furiously. Gulliver puts out the fire in the Lilliputian palace by spitting a mouthful of wine on it, not by urinating on it.

Some years later I saw on television Max Fleischer’s cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels, made in 1939 and dealing only with a sanitised version of the  Lilliput section. Its sentimental story centred on Gulliver bringing peace to Lilliput and Blefuscu by brokering a marriage between the prince of one kingdom and the princess of the other, whereupon they combine their national anthems and sing the rousing ditty “Faithful Forever”. Apparently it was a box-office success in its day.

The only version I have seen that was more-or-less faithful to Swift’s original conception was the 1996 television mini-series Gulliver’s Travels starring Ted Danson and an all-star cast and covering all four of Gulliver’s journeys. It was not nearly as savage as Swift, but it included some of the novel’s satire, even if its ending had the “out” that Gulliver is mentally affected. In this version, Gulliver is finally reconciled with his family. In Swift’s novel, Gulliver remains disgusted with, and alienated from, the whole human race.

And finally there is the truly odd one which, amazingly, I was able to find, in full and subtitled, on Youtube as I was researching this “Something Old”. The New Gulliver was made in 1935 in Stalin’s Soviet Union. After marching along with his young friends in a Komsomol (Young Pioneers) troop, singing a song in praise of Lenin, a boy is rewarded for being the most productive in the group by being given a copy of his favourite book – Gulliver’s Travels. He falls asleep and imagines himself as Gulliver, helping the oppressed proletarians of Lilliput to overthrow the tyrannical royal government. Of course the stop-action animation of the tiny Lilliputians was primitive by our standards, but in an odd sort of way the film was quite charming, even if one was aware of its propagandistic purpose.

In 2010 there was an updated, Americanised Gulliver’s Travels starring Jack Black and again confining itself to the Lilliput part of the story. I have not seen this, but the consensus of critics was that it relied on a very juvenile series of gags.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

HOUYHNHNMS  AND YAHOOS

My wife and I have never kept or owned horses. Among other things, we don’t have the money. Only in early childhood did either of us ride on horseback. We both remember being taken on fairground rides for little children, and doing a turn on some retired, placid old horse as it went at a slow clip-clop, led around by its owner. Quite an adventure when you are four or five, but not exactly a display of equestrian skills. Most of our children have had the same sort of fairground experience. But that is the extent of our acquaintance with horse-riding.

However, my wife has a curious habit. If we are going on a long car journey, she will always point out the handsome horses in fields. More than once, she has asked to stop because she wants to see, close-up, some sturdy dobbin with its nose poking through a fence. She admires the placidity of such animals, and so do I. Occasionally we have ventured to stroke a horse’s nose.

There is something very calming about a quiet, ruminating horse. Perhaps their long faces make them seem thoughtful and a little solemn. It is easy to imagine them as philosophical creatures who have, by accident, become beasts of burden. My recent re-reading of Gulliver’s Travels makes me at once think of them as Houyhnhnms. They are resigned to their role of being ridden or occasionally pulling a carriage, though their days of pulling ploughs or being everyday transport have long gone. Compared with their slow ruminative walk, we are the thoughtless, barbarous Yahoos, rushing about pointlessly.

Houyhnhnms came into my mind when we were visiting Prague in December 2018. We saw two tired, submissive and obviously over-worked horses harnessed to a carriage which took tourists on a short ride around one of the city’s main squares. Looking at them, I thought it was the daily sight of such patient working horses that probably inspired Jonathan Swift.

Later, in February 2019, I was on my own in Toulouse, and I visited the city’s natural history museum. Again, Houyhnhnms occurred to me. Displayed was the skeleton of a horse being ridden by the skeleton of a human being. What an impertience, I thought, for the little ape creature to be riding on the larger and more majestic Houyhnhnm.

Elsewhere in the museum was the skeleton of one of our simian cousins. That, I thought, is what we essentially are. Yahoos.

But I thought that only for a moment. Misanthropy is not for me, but I do get Jonathan Swift’s point about us and about horses.