Defoe's Achievements
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
Defoe's Achievements Daniel Defoe. By John Robert Moore. Chicago. 409 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former chairman, department of English, Brooklyn College DANIEL DEFOE is one of...
...except Samuel Pepys, had so many chances to see politics and statecraft from inside...
...If he wrote letters to his family, they were destroyed...
...Here too he baffles criticism...
...Such a career should make a dramatic biography, for no writer of that day...
...Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former chairman, department of English, Brooklyn College DANIEL DEFOE is one of the most baffling figures in English literature...
...Satires, pamphlets...
...Then he appended what Mark Twain called a "piety ending," and stopped...
...But among his multifarious achievements he was also one of the creators of the novel...
...He simply took a simple character, identified himself with it and, under the cool light of reason, considered what he himself would most likely do in a given set of circumstances...
...Irony, evenly sustained and unerringly directed, he had in abundance, but there was never a twinkle in his eye...
...Seemingly, Defoe went on filling page after page until he had enough for a volume...
...His literary output was so prodigious that no complete edition of his works has ever been published, or is likely to be...
...The result, oddly enough, was literature...
...Akin to Saint Paul only in the capacity to be all things to all men, he was only too successful in concealing his inmost thoughts...
...At almost any point in her narrative Moll Flanders could accommodate another lover or two without disturbing the pattern...
...Moll Flanders has plenty of the latter, and is one of the least erotic stories in literature...
...Yet perhaps it is this very lack which makes his novels what they are...
...A letter from Scotland, where Harley had sent him to do undercover work for the Act of Union, reveals something of his methods: "Today I am going into partnership with a member of Parliament in a glass house...
...The result is that most of what we know about Defoe and his family has to be pieced together from parish registers, court records and similar arid and impersonal sources...
...He is reputed to have been a confidential advisor to William III: he is known to have served Robert Harley as reporter and secret agent...
...But Defoe kept no diary, and his more confidential reports were apparently made by word of mouth...
...But humor was no part of Defoe's equipment...
...Most of the huge bulk of Defoe's writing is more interesting to the historian than to the general reader...
...His success as Harley's private agent was seemingly due to a combination of ordinariness and mental flexibility...
...except the drama—poured from his pen...
...travel books, periodicals, novels—almost every form of writing then practiced...
...As a tradesman and a Dissenter he was outside the tight little literary world of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison—not far enough out to escape a stab from Pope, but too far ever to meet him as an equal...
...Born on the eve of the Restoration, he lived to see George II on the throne...
...tomorrow with another in a salt work . . . and still at the end of all discourse the Union is the essential, and I am all to everyone that I may gain some...
...After the matchless record of his life on the island, Crusoe goes on to wildly irrelevant adventures in the Pyrenees and elsewhere...
...It has been remarked that Crusoe is unique among great novels in that it contains neither humor nor sex...
...They trudge ahead from episode to episode, held together only by the personalities of their protagonists...
...Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and the rest are not "made" at all...
...How is one to discuss the structure of books which have none...
Vol. 42 • April 1959 • No. 16
