The Personality of Jonathan Swift, by Irvin Ehrenpreis

[p034] The Personality of Jonathan Swift, by Irvin Ehrenpreis (Methuen, 15s.) Should one toss the phrase ‘mad genius’ into a conversation, the chances are that several persons will say or think ‘like . Swift’. Or if one mentions Jonathan Swift, the ordinary. moderately educated person: is very. likely to respond. with a: 63

[p035] LABOUR REVIEW description or a mental image: of a brilliant man, never too sane, who wrote ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, took a gloomy view of mankind, went raving mad and died in a public asylum. The eighteenth century found madness a convenient reason for dismissing his social and political criticism; the nineteenth century, unconcerned wth Bolingbroke and iron-curtaining the plight of Ireland, mourned Ophelia-like over the pathos of it: ‘O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’; the twentieth century, obsessively fascinated by neurasthenia, has probed dark secret roots and used Swift’s case as yet another specimen for the post-Freudian album. The madness of Swift has for two hundred years been an object-lesson, a tragedy, a terror.... Yet, quite simply, it is just not true. Swift was no more mad than any other old man suffering from intermittent deafness and vertigo, and later the failure of the speech organs. When his memory was failing, and unscrupulous persons were exploiting him, his friends took the only recourse they had in order to protect him: a ‘statute of lunacy’ was taken out so that a committee of guardians should be legally empowered to manage’his affairs. He was increas- ingly senile, nothing more. ‘Sometimes he would say nothing, sometimes incoherent words: he never talked nonsense or did a foolish thing.’ At the last, finding himself unable to speak his meaning to his servant, he managed to say ‘I am a fool’, and presently died. Ehrenpreis’s examination of Swift’s old age presents us with a quieter and yet even more heart-rending picture than that of the too-celebrated myth. The first five chapters are interesting, but they serve in the main to prepare for the startling and entirely convincing conclusion. Not the least striking of the points Ehrenpreis makes is that at the very beginning, while Swift was still alive, the ‘madness’ rumours were being put out by his personal enemies, and that the myth owes its power to Dr Johnson’s perpetuation of these tales. It is only to be regretted that Ehrenpreis chooses to make his case in such a low-pitched murmuring tone, instead of using the vigorous polemical note it undoubtedly deserves. Amoral Morality