'Like a Wagon-Load of Monkeys'

“It is not an accident that Gulliver has become a child’s book; only a child could be so destructive, so irresponsible and so cruel.” 

And only a parent could acknowledge the potential for raw nastiness in the heart of a child. V.S. Pritchett had two children and few illusions about humanity. Fortunately, Jonathan Swift was childless, as his sense of cruelty swelled with the years like an infected wound. In “The Dean,” Pritchett is writing near the start of World War II. The piece is included in his first collection of essays and reviews, In My Good Books (1942). He continues:

 

“Only a child has the animal’s eye; only a child, or the mad clergyman, can manage that unhuman process of disassociation which is the beginning of all satire from Aristophanes onwards; only children (or the mad) have that monstrous and infantile egotism which assumes everything is meaningless and that, like children, we run the world on unenlightened self-interest like a wagon-load of monkeys.”

 

Despite its enduring popularity, Gulliver’s Travels may be the most misunderstood work of literature in our tradition. Few books have been so consistently made “trigger-proof,” in print and on film, resulting in a story as bland as oatmeal. As I wrote in a 2013 essay for The Quarterly Conversation (thank you, Dave) devoted to Swift’s poetry: 

“Jonathan Swift arrives on our bookshelves in disguise, and for most readers he stays that way. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a book for children, a tale of wonder and adventure, with shipwrecks and talking animals, worthy to stand with Robinson Crusoe and Moby-Dick, which are also children’s books. Generations of teachers and librarians have given Lemuel Gulliver their imprimatur of wholesomeness.”

 

It is among the books I have read most often since childhood, neck-and-neck with Defoe’s novel, starting with those bowdlerized kiddie-lit editions. Yet most readers probably have never read Gulliver’s description of a Brobdinagian woman’s breast as she nurses:

 

“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 the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples, and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous.”

 

I’m pleased that Pritchett pauses to praise Swift’s prose: “What a relief it is that the Dean’s style is as lucid and plain as common water: it runs like water off a duck’s back.” A young writer couldn’t find a better model for writing prose.

  

Swift published Gulliver’s Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships on this date, October 28, in 1726.

 

[“The Dean” can be found in Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991).]