Polite Conversation

(Editor’s Advice: If you don’t know who Colly Cibber is, you probably shouldn’t read this piece.)

In one of W. H. Auden’s essays, he remarks that English literature had a strong tendency to become a sort of cozy, family affair, full of in-jokes that bound everyone who was in together and excluded all those who were out, to the extent that all concern for actual literary merit fell by the wayside. I was recently led to encounter this world when, in my review of Thomas Adès new opera, The Exterminating Angel, I referred, in a footnote, to Jonathan Swift’s mock dialogues Polite Conversation, a book I had read as an undergraduate more than 50 years before, as an example of a parody of the ennui of the upper classes. Swift, writing under the guise of “Simon Wagstaff,” explains his purpose: to ensure that conversations among the well-bred never lapse for lack of an appropriate, amusing, and utterly inoffensive remark, he has composed three dialogues for the elegant, which together contain well over a thousand.

My memory jogged, I searched for an online copy of Swift’s little book and the first two copies I found were an excellent microcosm of Auden’s complaint, one digitized from a copy from the Cornell University library and one from Berkeley. Both books were from the same limited edition printing, by Chiswick Press in London, in 1892—500 copies, the first 50 on Japanese vellum and the remaining 450 on “Handmade paper”. The copy from Berkeley, done with much better optical character recognition than the Cornell, is number 438.

This edition features an introduction and notes by George Saintsbury, a very eminent Victorian literary gent, still something of a name before the Deluge, aka “the Sixties”. The sort of literary criticism that Saintsbury engaged in was totally upended by the cultural revolution led by Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, with its exaltation of the notion that any literary work should be considered first of all in relation to itself and secondly to other works, but under no circumstances in relation to the life of the author. However, the old books still lingered, to a significant extent. Both the old and new cultures were intensely elitist, and massively well read, though not always the same books, and, of course, not read in the same way. When I was at Oberlin, you could still take a course in “Addison and Steele”, editors of the Spectator, a daily newspaper that began publication in 1711.¹ One can easily imagine Saintsbury reading bound copies of the Spectator in full. In fact, one can imagine him re-reading them in full, with undiminished delight.

Saintsbury’s introduction begins in an immensely chatty way, referring the reader to the treatment of “Polite Conversation* in William Makepeace Thackery’s English Humourists: “In some ways nothing could be a better introduction to “Polite Conversation” than the account of it which Mr. Thackery has given in his “English Humourists”, going on to say “[t]hat account is in its way not much less of a classic than the immortal original itself”, even though Thackery’s purpose, in describing the “action”, is to give an account of “manners six or seven score years ago” rather than to critique either Swift or his obsessive portrait of mindless society nattering. “Fancy the moral condition of that society,” says Thackery, viewing affairs from the Victorian vantagepoint of the year 1853, “in which a lady of fashion joked with a footman, and carved a sirloin, and provided besides a great shoulder of veal, a goose, hare, rabbits, chickens, partridges, black puddings, and a ham for a dinner of eight Christians. What—what could have been the condition of that polite world in which people openly ate goose after almond-pudding, and took their soup in the middle of dinner? Fancy a Colonel of the Guards putting his hand into a dish of beignets d’abricot, and helping his neighbor, a young lady du monde!”²

One can only say, after reading Thackery’s outburst, that it was a crime against the Human Spirit that the Almighty did not somehow allow the Dean himself to behold a sensibility so eagerly and stoutly conventional, so perfectly gifted at missing the point, as to make Swift’s own editor, the peerlessly obtuse Simon Wagstaff, seem drier than Mephistopheles. A world in which persons of breeding speak informally to their inferiors, perform acts of menial labor, and make frequent and unmistakable references to unmentionable matters—in mixed company, no less! Speech fails one! At least it most certainly should!

Saintsbury, to return to him, acknowledges the coarseness of the period, but has a far more gallant appreciation of the “young lady,” aka “Miss Notable”:

“As for ‘Miss’, no doubt she says some things which it would be unpleasant to hear one’s sister or one’s beloved say now. But I fell in love with her when I was about seventeen, I think; and from that day to this I have never wavered for one minute in my affection for her. If she is of coarser mould than Millamant³, how infinitely does she excel her in flesh and blood—excellent things in a woman!”⁴

Saintsbury goes on to imagine “How agreeable it would have been to hire the always available villains, overcome those footmen [summoned to protect Miss from the overly attentive Col. Atwit], put Miss in a coach and six, and secure the services of the also always available parson.”

Not all of Saintsbury’s introduction is that, well, jolly. More to the point, he says, “Although there are more magnificent and more terrible, more poignant and more whimsical examples of the marvellous Swiftian irony, I do not know that there is any more justly proportioned, more exquisitely modulated, more illustrative of that wonderful keeping which is the very essence and quiddity of the Dean’s humour.”

I don’t know what Saintsbury means by “wonderful keeping”. A pure guess is “wonderful evenness of tone”. Swift always writes “in character” and never drops his pose, never exaggerates it, and never lets it slip. If a joke won’t fit, it doesn’t go in. About irony itself Saintsbury says “The liquor is too dry for many tastes; it has too little froth, if not too little sparkle for others. The order of architecture is too unadorned, depends too much on the bare attraction of symmetry and form, to charm some eyes. But those that have the taste never lose it, never change it, never weary of gratifying it. Of irony, as hardly anything under the sun, cometh no satiety to the born ironist.”

If “wonderful keeping” means “wonderful evenness of tone,” then my major complaint with Polite Conversation is that Swift’s keeping is less than wonderful. The whole of Polite Conversation, with its echt-Swiftian introduction, and the three dialogues, runs a good 200 pages. Fifty pages, I think, would have given me four times the pleasure.

What Swift sets out to do, is write the book that Simon Wagstaff would actually have written, rather like (or, rather, exactly like), an insane composer creating a parody of Wagner’s Ring with four parody operas, each as long as its original. Yet in the introduction in particular, which runs for more than fifty pages, Swift overshoots the mark. Like his great friend, Alexander Pope, Swift’s appetite for irony exceeded his imagination. Once either gets past a certain limit—the establishing of the persona he will use and a statement of “his” project—his invention falters, and his invective inevitably turns to familiar targets—the unnamed “wits” and “pedants” whom Swift and Pope despise as much as do their alter egos, along with specific targets like “Tibbald” (Lewis Theobald⁵) and Colly Cibber⁶, here damned because Wagstaff praises them. Since “we” know the joke, which Swift hammers home, that stupid Wagstaff is praising all the wrong people (Swift’s enemies) and damning all the right ones (Swift’s friends), the joke is both self-indulgent and self-congratulatory—the joke is on the joker, and it is the all-ingenious Swift who ends up placing the foolscap upon his own crown, the ironist wounded by his own blade.

As for the dialogues themselves, they verge on the indescribable—Swift’s relentless pursuit of the ephemeral revealing—as all of his works inevitably did—the deeply obsessive nature of his personality. Here’s a sample from the first dialogue, as Lord Sparkish, Colonel Atwit, and Mr. Neverout begin to assemble the party:

Col.: Tom, you must go with us to Lady Smart’s to Breakfast.

Neverout: Must? Why, Colonel, Must’s for the King.

[Col. offering in Jest to draw his Sword.]

Col: Have you spoke with all your Friends?

Neverout: Colonel, as you’re stout, be merciful.

Sparkish: Come, agree, agree; the Law’s costly.

[Col. taking his Hand from the Hilt.]

Col.: Well, Tom, you are never the worse Man to be afraid of me. Come along.

Neverout: What, do you think, I was born in a Wood, to be afraid of an Owl?

Many writers, I suppose, could have assembled similar handful of clichés and mindless wordplay, but few would pursue it for two hundred pages, and the few that would, I suspect, would have a more substantial moral in mind than the simple depiction of society chatter without any substance at all, for here Swift is not making any specific criticism of the London of his time⁷—there is no “key” that would link the characters to real people—nor even to make general statements about human nature in the manner of Erasmus’ Ship of Fools, but rather to delineate in exhaustive detail how fashionable people talk—in little whirlwinds and eddies of conversation that arise from and resolve themselves into nothing with all the significance of the birth and death of an electron/positron pair⁸—ennui expelled by its own creation, one might suspect.

The effect is most pronounced in the First Dialogue, which consumes more than half the book, and during which absolutely nothing happens. I confess that I find the characters almost entirely interchangeable and can only imagine that Miss Notable stimulated the young George Saintsbury’s fancy to such an extreme degree by her “coarse” behavior, which allows her to fend off the far coarser advances of the gentlemen who surround her. Yet one has to say that Swift holds his usual misogyny remarkably in check (Saintsbury quite reasonably praises him for this), so that Miss Notable is markedly superior to her courters, the rude Mr. Neverout in particular, which explains, and to some measure justifies, Mr. Saintsbury’s enthusiasm—though Miss does go so far as to express her contempt for men by spitting, which neither Mr. Saintsbury nor Mr. Thackery sees fit to mention.⁹

It is the Second Dialogue that presents the feast that so alarmed and so amazed Mr. Thackery. It’s a good measure of Swift’s ability that the frenzy of the feast is conveyed entirely through the dialogue. Thanks both to its shortness and its frenzy, it’s easily the most entertaining of the three. The final dialogue is both short and subdued, an odd afterthought that does allow Miss to explicitly assert her virtue by refusing the Colonel’s offer of his “protection” that so won Mr. Saintsbury’s approval.

George Saintsbury was a man who lived too long. Born in 1845, if had died at sixty, or sixty five, he would have died reasonably at peace with both himself and his world. Instead, he lived to see his world destroyed, and his literary world view thrown in the ash heap of history. Swift was another story. The Great Dean was an enormous influence on James Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both works filled with parodies piled on top of parodies. The “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, a deeply unpleasant and mean-spirited imitation of “shop girl” prose, is fully Swift’s equal for snobbery, smuttiness, and misogyny, while both the “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” episodes are deliberately written in “boring” English,¹⁰ one clichéd and the other mechanical.¹¹ After World War II, Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s one-time protégé, followed in the footsteps of both men with Waiting for Godot (1953), perhaps the most famous play of the twentieth century, in which, again, nothing happens, though here the characters are consciously/unconsciously striving to escape ennui (“That’s right, let’s abuse each other”) instead of simply being it.

Afterwords
You can download a scanned copy of Polite Conversation for free from the link I gave at the top of the story. For $0.99, you can get a copy of the same “Saintsbury edition” from Amazon Kindle, sans student underlinings and the occasional coffee spill. Since Swift has inspired some serious idolaters from his lifetime through the present, I’m surprised that no second-hand annotated versions are available on the web, but there aren’t. If you want real detail, you’ll have to spring, in some manner, for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift: Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: Polite Conversation, Directions to Servants and Other Works. (For some reason, this edition lacks volume numbers.)

I rented this for $41 via Kindle for three months, the cheapest form of access. Getting your way around such a massive electronic work can be tricky, but if you want to get seriously up close and personal with PC, there’s no other way. Naturally, modern PC makes coming to grips with Swift a little tricky as well. This work probably would have been “freer” and better, I suspect, if it had been completed around 1990 instead of 2013. There are close to 1400 footnotes for Polite Conversation alone, but when Mr. Neverout suggests to Miss that she “cut the cheese”, the editors can only guess that some sort of sexual innuendo is suggested—an eminently reasonable guess, since virtually every comment Tom directs to Miss includes some sort of sexual innuendo. There are any number of sites on the web that will tell you that “cut the cheese” means “fart”, though in all the ones I consulted the authors dated the expression from their own adolescence. If there’s a scholarly examination, I didn’t find it. The Cambridge folks often refer readers requiring complete detail to the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, which doesn’t have it. Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, “A dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pickpocket eloquence,” (originally published in 1785; updated in 1811) doesn’t either, but defines “cheeser” as “a strong smelling fart”, so I think we can go out on a limb with this one, particularly since Swift’s cloacal obsession, despite strong competition, remains unequalled in all of English literature.