A Difficult Master
WOLFE, ANN F.
A Difficult Master Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography. By John Middleton Murry. Noonday. 508 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N.Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" Dean...
...Reason dethroned love, and, with the passage of time, a polluted concept of married love decomposed utterly into the "excremental vision...
...Even so, how view without a measure of Swiftian indignation the titan's arrogance, his scatology and his boorishness toward the two women who loved him...
...He brings to life the famous friends Harley, Steele, Addison, Sheridan and the "drabs of quality" whose sprightly company was the breath of life to an egotist of Luciferian pride and ambition...
...Alternating discussions of Swift's private and public life, the temperate author explores the complex interplay of biography and literary creation...
...Settling at last for the Dublin post, he strove to improve the lot of the Irish...
...He attracted and enjoyed friends, then insulted and treacherously cast them aside...
...In her mortal illness, he barred her from the Deanery, fearing she might die there...
...He turns up fresh interpretations of the earlier works and speculates on the pathological excesses of Gulliver's Travels...
...Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" Dean Swift of St...
...His wit, renown and charm kept him close to the seats of the mighty...
...According to the author, the cruelty to Stella and Vanessa was rooted in the youthful idealist's courtship of Varina...
...In the end, because of his lampooning pen, he was denied the long-sought English Deanship...
...His proposal of marriage unwelcome, the impoverished young parson "withdrew into the citadel of his pride and remained there forever...
...Later, with unconscionable casuistry, he would rewrite the history of the friendships...
...In his own selfish fashion, Swift cared for Stella, molded her to a pattern of platonic love, then made her the scapegoat of his thwarted passion for the more exciting Vanessa...
...His last years at St...
...He was a master of lucid prose, the keenest mind of his generation and "one of the most difficult men that ever God created...
...Immediately upon the death of his body, which survived his mind by three pitiful years, souvenir hunters stripped the hair from his venerable head...
...The latter was particularly true of his ambivalent relationship with Stella...
...Patrick's were a nightmare darkened by the madness that he had always dreaded...
...The idealism corroded...
...In straitened circumstances, yet touchily refusing money for his writings, Swift thrived on the sensation of being at the center of power...
...Murry, as far as the reviewer knows, is the first biographer to do so...
...In his human relations, Swift remains a paradox...
...He is especially successful in recreating the social atmosphere and the harsh climate of political cynicism that conditioned Swift's satires and influenced the course of his career...
...It is one of our literature's bleak ironies that Swift's Galatea should lie interred beside her misogynistic Pygmalion...
...The gruesomeness of the Dean's end was of a piece with his bitter imagination and his contempt for the degradation of mankind...
...One makes due allowance, of course, for the boyhood poverty and humiliations, the progressive disease, the frustrations inevitable for a sensitive spirit in a class-bound oligarchic society...
...Patrick's was more than the literary high priest of fierce indignation...
...There are and probably will be more colorful studies of the enigmatic Dean and his rancorous genius, but none more judicious, searching and impartial...
...Even if Stella was not his wife and Mr...
...Murry believes that she was the Dean's final gesture toward the woman he had companioned since her childhood betrayed monstrous callousness...
...Few can discuss this greatest of our satirists without partisanship...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 14
