A Conjur'd Spirit

JONATHAN SWIFT by Nigel Dennis. 160 pages. Macmillan. $3.95.

Jonathan Swift is the Lucifer of British letters. Unfortunately, posterity has precautiously trimmed the old devil's toenails. As traditionally abridged, Gulliver's Travels is a charming classic for children. Yet Gulliver unexpurgated is no tale for tender ears; it is a ferocious assault on the human species. And Swift unsweetened is no nursery rhymester; he is the most powerful ironist since Aristophanes, the blackest of all the great blackguards who have lacerated the conscience of mankind.

Fearful Contradictions. Like Moses from the mountain, Swift came raging out of the peat bogs to cry doom and damnation on the idolatrous race of men. He is God's angry man, a prophet of the wrath to come who screams with infernal glee as he opens the vials of vituperation on the heads of humankind. His passions are scoriae, his imagination a holocaust. His wit is an indentured imp that leaps to any bidding--it can tickle the funny bone, attack with acid, fry living flesh on a deadpan, reach down the throat of a corpse and come up with a ghastly guffaw. His language is bare, strong, lucid, manly: perhaps the most intensely concentrated prose ever written in English. In energy he is the last Elizabethan; not even Shakespeare's Lear surpasses the vigor of Swift's invective or the reach of his rage. In conscience he is the first Victorian; not until Dickens did Britain produce a major writer who so fiercely cried out against man's inhumanity.

A giant indeed, but a sick giant.

Good and evil, God and Devil battled in Swift's life as they did in his work. He was a madman as well as a genius, and his existence was a contest of fear ful contradictions. He was a compulsive sadist with a tender heart, a lifelong impotent passionately involved with women, an earnest clergyman obsessed with excrement, a magnificent intellectual addicted to childish puns, a great master of letters who considered his life a failure because he failed in politics, an Irish national hero who loathed the land of his birth.

Swift's sickness and his satire are examined simultaneously in this slender but consummate volume by Britain's Nigel Dennis. Himself a satirist (Cards of Identity) of no mean attainment, Author Dennis has an acute affinity for his subject. More clearly than any of Swift's latter-day biographers, he looks into the works as into a window on the man, and arranges the facts of his life to explain the state of his soul.

Swift was born in Dublin on Nov. 30, 1667. His father died seven months before that date. His mother, destitute, left her baby with one of his uncles and went back to England. At the age of six, Swift was sent away to school. He felt he had been treated like dirt, and to compensate the insult he indulged in delusions of grandeur. One day he spent his last penny to buy an old horse from the knacker, then jumped on its back to ride "high and mighty through Kilkenny." At that instant, the horse fell dead.

Sour & Severe. Like the horse, the world of the present always let little Jonathan down; so he retreated into the past. He identified with his grandfather, a romantic royalist and churchman. This experience, Dennis suggests, was intoxicating. From identification with his grandfather, the boy proceeded insensibly to identification with his grandfather's king and even with his grandfather's God. In short order he became a species of juvenile Lucifer deluded by superhuman pride, a pathological authoritarian who felt himself the sole repository of right--and fully entitled to tell everybody else what it was. At 19, when he was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, Swift was a squarejawed, "sour and severe" young man with a terrible temper and a ruthless will. "My mind is like a conjur'd spirit," he said of himself, "that would do mischief if I would not give it employment."

Employment was found in England.

Swift became secretary to Sir William Temple, an eminent scholar-statesman; and at 28, partly to complete the identification with grandfather's God and partly to secure a living, he was ordained an Anglican priest.

Lash of Heaven. Grandfather's God, as Swift experienced him, was a god of ungovernable wrath, an old Hebraic horror who allotted all good to himself, all evil to man, and took sadistic delight in torturing the beastly criminal he had created. Swift considered himself the instrument of this dread deity, and boasted that

My hate, whose lash just heaven hath long decreed Shall on a dav make sin and folly bleed. . .

A genius for hatred, alas, inhibits the capacity to love. His "nature," Swift remarked mysteriously, did not permit him to marry. Nevertheless, that nature peculiarly required a woman--as a source of comfort, as an object to torture. What to do? With a characteristic mixture of sentiment and cruelty, Swift seized upon Hester Johnson, a member of Sir William's household whom he had tutored as a child and aroused as a young woman, and carried her off to Ireland. There he set her up in a house of her own and so dominated her simple mind that for the next 27 years she apparently consented to live as his platonic companion and sometime muse--she was the Stella of his Journal to Stella.

Man of Power. His private life arranged, Swift launched energetically into public affairs. In 1707, at the age of 40, he went down to London on an errand for his bishop. To his amazement, the great men of both parties were "ravished" to see him. A big political battle was brewing, and both Whigs and Tories were eager to recruit his pointed pen. Swift picked the winning side, rode into power with the Tories.

For the next three years he was, in effect, Britain's minister of information and culture. He was what he had always longed to be: a power among men. But Swift could never quite shake the old sense of inferiority. To conceal it, he outlorded the lords he moved among. He tongue-lashed the Secretary of State and at political meetings gave "no man liberty to swear or talk b--dy."

All at once the bubble burst. When Queen Anne died, the Tories were summarily turned out of office. Swift was lucky to be left with a dreary benefice in Dublin, the deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The shock permanently damaged his mind. All his nightmares of rejection recurred: he suffered fugues of persecution in which delusory daggers and imaginary nooses pursued him. "I am left to die," he wailed, "like a poisoned rat in a hole."

Gigantic Tantrum. The last half of Swift's life has been aptly described as a "gigantic tantrum." His Luciferian will to power raged in tiny Dublin like a demon in a bottle. "I have determined," he bellowed, "to have no one about me I that denies my authority!" He gave way I to continual diatribes. The young women of quality who came to him for instruction were pinched for discipline till their arms turned black and blue. And when there was nobody there to torture, the demonic dean relieved the pressure of his passions by running rapidly and repeatedly up and down the stairs.

The pressure was steeply stepped up by the arrival in Ireland of Esther Vanhomrigh, a young woman Swift had known in London. After eight years of harrowing tension--it seems clear that the affair was never consummated-Swift apparently chose Hester instead of Esther. A few weeks later, at the age of 33, Esther died.

Swift's rage destroyed human beings, but it created literature. Night after night the old churl sat by a snug fire in his splendid mansion and wrote hate letters to a world he chose to think had cheated him. In 1726, after six years of meticulous composition, he published Gulliver's Travels, the most profound and powerful satire ever written in English.

Yahoo Obsession. Author Dennis studies the Travels as a morbid acrostic of Swift's character. In Part IV, for instance, there are striking suggestions that Swift at this period of his life was dangerously schizoid, that he was identifying with the rational-spiritual principle (the Houyhnhnms) and repressing the animal aspect of his nature (the Yahoos). In any case, the horror and tragedy of Swift's old age are clearly foretold in the leading characteristic of the Yahoos: their excessive concern I with ordure. From that time forward, scatological allusions litter his prose and befoul his poetry. On the textual evidence, it would seem that his lifelong horror of women, his refusal of all sexual contact with them, was rooted in his horror of their excrement.

As the man grew older, as dizziness, deafness and amnesia successively set in, Swift lapsed into "incessant strains of obscenity and swearing." A statute of lunacy was taken out against him, and he spent the last three years of his life sunk in bestial stupor. "I am what I am," he muttered not long before his death. "I am what I am." He was a Yahoo. Yet he was Lucifer too: the great sinner was also a bringer of light.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.