Conjured Spirit

JONATHAN SWIFT (508 pp.) -- John Middleton Murry--Noonday Press ($6).

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by.

Thus Oliver Goldsmith saw the inhabitants of 18th century London. Their armies under Marlborough had defeated Europe's greatest power on its own soil; they had overthrown the old religion and prospered. The revolution of 1688, which guaranteed a Protestant monarch, seemed to have fixed everything. But the bloody slogans of church-state and King-Commons still echoed in English ears, and men who no longer wished to hear a bugle or a Mass would listen to Handel, conversation, politics and smut. Often they listened to the Very Rev. Jonathan Swift, Anglican dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, a man who could use the English language like a whip and was, in the words of his latest biographer, John Middleton Murry, "one of the most difficult men that ever God created."

His life was a long irony. He had no great belief in religion, except as a necessary instrument of government; yet he was in holy orders. He was a charming man to children--with the attractiveness, to borrow a phrase from Henry Miller, of a man about to go insane. He had an obscene imagination; yet his Gulliver's

Travels (really intended as a political satire) has been for two centuries a classic child's book. This man, born at the dawn of the Age of Reason, was to turn into a madman; the skeptical clerk who wrote lucid prose died raving. His was the skull beneath the powdered skin of the 18th century.

Pride & Fall. He had the oddest of childhoods. His father, an Anglo-Irish lawyer of Dublin, died before Jonathan was born. When Jonathan was a year old, his nurse took him away, and his mother and family do not seem to have bothered to ask for him back for three years. An uncle put him through Trinity College and he seems to have sulked his way to bad marks and a "courtesy degree." As a schoolboy, he had once spent one and sixpence for a horse on its way to the slaughterhouse. He wanted the glory of riding it through Kilkenny town. It fell dead beneath him. Pride and its fall became the pattern of his life.

At first, as secretary and protege of the retired but influential courtier-statesman Sir William Temple, he seemed to see the world at his feet. Then came the inevitable slur, or imagined slur, for Swift had the thinnest of skins. He left Temple's protection only to learn that pride is a luxury to the poor. Then a kinsman, the great John Dryden, saw his verses and said: "Cousin Swift . . . nature has never formed you for a Pindaric poet." At 26 he entered holy orders "as [one joins] a regiment." He was tormented by pride and used this as an instrument to torment others. He wrote of himself: "Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire." Early, he knew himself. "My mind," he wrote, "was like a conjured spirit."

Savage Indignation. In an age of savage politics, he was the most savage, in such withering satires as A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal. When he fought, says Biographer Murry, "he bit like a badger till his teeth met." Men feared him, and three women loved him. Pride, it seems, forbade him to give them a man's love in return. With a lunatic idealism, he could not forgive them for having the natural functions common to all humans.

Biographer Murry mercifully spares the readers a psychiatric treatise on the great dean, but the book does, with immense elaboration, spell out one of the saddest stories in literature. Few Americans read King Lear, and fewer still would read it if it existed only in Scholar Kittredge's famous notes. Middleton Murry's book is of that scholarly kind. Yet, readers who do not insist on a bland diet of print will be well rewarded by this study of a man of tragic genius.

Swift died at 77 in agony (at the onset of his final illness five men were needed to hold him in his bed). The inscription on his tomb in Dublin's St. Patrick's says that "the body of Jonathan Swift . . . is buried here, where fierce indignation [saeva indignatio] can lacerate his heart no more." To this great and terrible man, Biographer Murry says, death was "not the opening of a gate but the closing of a wound."

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