Jonathan Swift remained all of his life unsure of his own status. He was a master of invective and a lord of language and a controlling talent and a ruling wit, but in his constant seeking of preferment and promotion, in his uncertain relationship with a number of powerful men, his position was menial, and all the more painful for his hope and belief that it would not always be so.
He was a faithful servant whose rage against his own servility caused him on occasion to lose, to his own detriment, all sense of caution. His peculiar imagination, in which the world can be set to rights only by being turned on its head, and in which reason and logic move naturally towards anarchy and nightmare, arose from the uneasy distance between his talent and his circumstances.
In the household of Sir William Temple, where he had lived as a young man, his duties included reading aloud to his patron and keeping the household accounts. Temple's nephew, who did not like him, later insisted that Swift was not allowed to sit at the table with the family. Swift's "bitterness, satire, moroseness" made him "insufferable both to equals and inferiors, and unsafe for his superiors to countenance", the nephew said. It is unclear whether this was entirely accurate, but the fact that it could be later used as a way of undermining Swift serves to emphasise how vulnerable a position a brilliant and resentful young man with neither tact nor fortune held in such houses.
Swift the solitary bachelor knew a great deal about servants. He allowed them to become a mock-family and a source of much exasperation and amusement. "I am plagued to death with turning away and taking servants," he wrote when he became Dean of St Patrick's in Dublin. He read prayers to his "family", as he often called them, "at a fixed hour every night in his own bedchamber".
In Dublin in 1715, when his friends in London had been disgraced and his personal life had become too complicated, he saw no one else. "I live in a corner of a vast unfurnished house; my family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in the stable, a footman, and an old maid, who are all at board wages." His new cook, whom he called "Sweetheart", he wrote, was "as old and ugly" as her predecessor, "for the ladies of my acquaintance would not allow me one with a tolerable face though I most earnestly interceded for it".
In 1722, when Saunders, one of his servants, died, Swift wrote that he was "one of my best friends as well as the best servant in the kingdom". He erected a monument to him in St Patrick's. On the other hand, Patrick, another servant, who made cameo appearances in Swift's letters to Stella, got drunk three times a week and, once, when he disappeared with the key and returned drunk, Swift had no choice but to give him "two or three swingeing cuffs on the ear, and I have strained the thumb on my left hand with pulling him".
In the middle of all his savage indignation, his efforts to solicit support from the powerful, his whinings and his prayers with his servants, Swift was hilariously funny. He combined a great schoolboy feeling for jokes about toilets and matters of hygiene with the joy of slapstick and with the pleasure, which made him enemies and many friends, of taking the joke too far so that laughter brought not only tears but a permanent disrespect for both elders and betters. Dr Johnson took the view that the many details in Swift's Directions to Servants, which was first published in 1731 but begun much earlier, possibly as early as 1704, must have been noted down over many years "for such a number of particulars could never have been assembled by the power of recollection".
"With Swift comes the voice," Elizabeth Bowen wrote, in a review of a book about the emergence of the Anglo-Irish. "The dooming," as she put it, "of the English dean to become never quite an Irishman but an Irish patriot" offered him a tone which moved beyond the wit of his English contemporaries. In Ireland he learnt to hate his neighbour as himself and then write accordingly; the English language in Dublin could be both a route to power and an accent to mimic; it was for Swift both sweet and malicious. Yeats, in an essay on Swift, quoted Goldsmith, writing "that he had never laughed so much at Garrick's acting as at somebody in an Irish tavern mimicking a Quaker sermon". Thus Directions to Servants reads as a central document in the long, comic and sly history of Irish disrespect which includes Sterne and Sheridan and Wilde, Joyce and Beckett and Flann O'Brien.
This tradition depends not on the originality of the argument or indeed the quality of the wit, but on the lengths the creator is prepared to go to play off the monotony of a rule book, say, or the plainness of an ordinary day, against the sheer energy of the sentences in their dynamic structure and tone, the quality of minute observation, the cheeky choice of detail.
"Never send up a leg of a fowl at supper," Swift advised his cook in Directions to Servants, "while there is a cat or a dog in the house that can be accused for running off with it." So far so good, and reasonable and nicely subversive, but it is in the next sentence that Swift's reason most wonderfully loses the run of itself. "But if there happen to be neither, you must lay it upon the rats or a strange greyhound." That strange greyhound, helped along by the rats, comes to snatch the sentence from the dull and worthy jaws of satire and gobble it up in a feast of mystery and unreason.
It is a stroke of genius with which so many of the sentences in Directions to Servants abound. This makes the work not only a cause of vast and unending entertainment, but, in the final analysis, worthy of detailed study and, indeed, worth heeding, even in the most humble households, and on all sides of the Irish Sea, down to the letter.
© Colm Tóibín 2003.
· This is an edited extract from Colm Tóibín's introduction to Directions to Servants by Jonathan Swift, published next Wednesday by Hesperus Press, price £6.99