Gulliver in Context

THE PORTABLE SWIFT (601 pp.)--Edited by Carl Van Doren--Viking ($2).

The world of Lemuel Gulliver is one of the permanent and self-contained creations of literature. But it has a context, and the context enriches it. In reprinting Gulliver's Travels entire for this "portable" edition, Editor Van Doren has surrounded it with earlier and later examples of the prose of Jonathan Swift--a prose that for polished, deadly decorum and energy in satire no writer has ever equaled. Van Doren's introduction also supplies the chief facts about the battles --literary and political--in which Swift fought with all his gall.

Swift held politicians in scorn, but served two of them--the Tory Lords Bolingbroke and Oxford--so as to sway a kingdom. He despaired of mankind, but his friendships with Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope and Gay were among the happiest of the age. Women disgusted him, but he loved one woman all his life. Exiled from England to the deanery of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he conquered, with Gulliver (1726), the world he wished to shame. And though he detested Ireland, he wrote so fiercely in her defense (in The Drapier's Letters and A Modest Proposal) that the Irish took off their hats when he passed in the street.

Some of Swift's best letters and politer verses are included in this volume, and so is the proud Latin epitaph that he wrote for his tomb: ". . . ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit; abi viator et imitare si poteris strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicem . . ." W. B. Yeats, nearly 200 years later gave this inscription a great translation:

Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.

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