The Plot to Print a Masterpiece; J. Markowitz

Never heard of it? Yes you Mr. Markowitz is business editor of the Pitts bUTAh Post-Gazette. have. The supposed author, de scribed on the title page as "first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships," was a restless sailor called Lemuel Gulliver. The real author was a landlub ber with a deep-grooved habit of never putting his name on title pages. The sheltering tree that would become freedom of the press was in those days still a sprig. A "scandalmonger" could lose slices of his ears; and practically any thing Jonathan Swift ever wrote might have earned him bed in prison or a drubbing in some alley. He was that sort of writer. Damn ably contrary, to the wreck of his own ambitions. And Gulliver's Travels - the 223 224 THE FREEMAN April title bestowed by word of mouth - was his most contrary book. Un abridged, it reads as tough on the establishment as the Declaration of Independence, for which indeed it may hitve been a Iiterary an cestor. Three years after 'the book came out Swift received from an admirer in Philadelphia the honest frontier gift of a cured ham, and Gulliver undoubtedly was popular reading in the colonies when young shavers named Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were form ing their own tender notions of politics.

That anyone might charge Jona than Swift, Doctor of Divinity, with fomenting revolution would of course have scandalized him. He hated war, was profoundly loyal to governing institutions con sistent with law and liberty; but he detested those vices and ex cesses of power which eternally blight the happiness of men. In short, he was torn by the conflicts between freedom and a corrupted order that Americans would re solve ,a half century later in favor of revolution. Seeds of Bitterness Gulliver could only have come from a soul rich in grievances, and Swift started collecting his early in life. At his birth, one might say, in 1667. He came into this world seven months after his father left it. The elder Swift hav ing been employed as an estate manager in Ireland, the posthum ous son grew up in a land ener gized to lyricism by ancient feel ings of inj ury and alienation. He was educated, grudgingly, as he believed, by the bounty of rela tives. A'll his adult life he was sub ject to prostrating attacks of dizzi ness, deafness, and fears of insani ty, against which, in later years, he furiously exercised, walking or riding 'miles every day or, in bad weather, tramping the stairs of his house. Despising yet also crav ing wealth, he set out on two con tradictory careers: the church and the writing of satires.

His verses and essays in the Tatler and other papers of literary London made him one of the lumi naries of the dawn of modern journalism, though he was "fam ous" only to people in the know. A fashionable painting of the time, now in the London Portrait Gallery, shows him an alert, busi nesslike parson, elegantly wigged and double-chinned, looking up from his writing desk. "The most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of the age," Joseph Addison called him. He had a prose style as lean, accurate, and keen for cutting as a scalpel. The bloated politics of his time begged for such a knife. It was his surgical journalism that 1976 THE PLOT TO PRINT A MASTERPIECE: GULLIVER'S TRAVELS 225 turned public opinion against a bleeding series of wars in France, tumbled from power the glamorous Duke of Marlborough, and helped effect the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. For this service a grateful crown awarded him the deanery of a cathedral. Not Wells, Salis bury or another of the influential English churches, but St. Patrick's in Dublin, separated merely by the breadth of England and the Irish Sea from a court that had enjoyed quite enough of his close scrutiny of public affairs.

So back to his native city he went, to the exile, in his own gentle phrase, of "a poisoned rat in a hole." Though he took up his cathedral duties with a surprising piety, in time the sheer flagrancy of the exploitation of Ireland goaded him to the risky old habit of anonymous pamphleteering. He became an underground hero to the Irish, whose plight, he once said, came down simply to this, almost a thumbnail of our own Declaration of 1776: "Freedom consists in a People being gov erned by Laws made with their own Consent, and Slavery in the contrary." In 1721 he suddenly announced in a letter that he was "writing a History of my Travells [giving] Account of Countryes hitherto un known." Not real travels, cer tainly. These would be voyages of the mind. The idea had popped up at some dinner of the Martin Scriblerus Club, a literary society to which Swift had belonged in his great London years. How for tunate for literature that he never got round to the proj ect till his bile had sufficiently ripened in failure and banishment.

The moody labor took four years. Then, triumphantly, in a letter of August 14, 1725: "I have finished my Travells ... They are admirable Things, and will won derfully mend the World." To Alexander Pope, a friend of Scriblerus days and by then Eng land's reigning poet, he confided that his aim was "to vex the world rather than divert it." But he was more entertaining than he knew. The artist in him kept the preacher under control, and his rage and wit, ,his suffering and indignation fused into a book that is one of the greatest ever written. Irresistible Adventures The Travels are, first of all, ir resistible adventures. They run along fantastic but temptingly believable trains of plot, loaded with a vast freight of critical observations, commentary, digs, jabs, slashes, and thrusts. Swift is the most tireless of satirists. His blade is always cutting, for ward and back, nicking the ob server as well as the observed.

226 THE FREEMAN April There is no safe place to stand against him. Gulliver - h umani ty' s "gullible traveler" keeps get ting marooned in fascinating coun tries. Lilliput: where the people are six inches tall but where in cessant faction, greed· and war seem the more deplorably vicious just for being so small. Then Brobdingnag, a land of giants, where Gulliver gets one pride killing lesson -after another in how small we are. The third voyage (past the point where many children's editions leave off) takes the traveler to a "flying island" where human intelligence, the one gift that might amend the chronic botch of history, utterly wastes itself upon worthless "projects" and idle aspirations. Finally, the ironic utopia of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos: civilization itself hope lessly lost to a brutalized human ity and taken up by a species more qualified, the horse. Like the best science fiction, it all comes off with precise, credible details and with what George Saintsbury called "the dexterous relief of the satirist's lash with the mere tickling of the humor ist." And the cream of the jest is that every queer country Gul liver visits is unmistakably 'one's own.

In March of 1726 S.wift took ship with his manuscript to Eng land. He was 58 now and wore what Dr. Johnson calls "a counte nance sour and severe, whic;h he seldom softened by any appear ance of gaiety." Yet he must have enjoyed that spring and summer 250 years ago as a guest ,at Pope's villa in Twickenham, near London. There were country excursions and dinners, long evenings spent over a· good bottle and good talk with old friends still near the cen ter of things: among others John Gay, author of The Beggar's Op era, and John Arbuthnot, who had been physician to Queen Anne. Selling the Manuscript The survivors of Martin Scrib lerus were well 'content with the "Travells" - and determined to bring it to 'market. Not only would they find Dean Swift a pub lisher but also wangle a fee for him, the first - and as it happened, the last - that the greatest satirist in the English language ever pock eted for a piece of writing.

Soon afterward Benj amin Motte, a printer in Fleet Street, received a letter from someone claiming the name Richard Symp son. He announced that as "man ager for my friend and cousin," a certain retired Captain Gulliver, he, Sympson, had been entrusted with the memoirs of marvellous voyages. "I know the author in tends the profit for the use of poor seamen," the letter said, "and 1976 THE PLOT TO PRINT A MASTERPIECE: GULLIVER'S TRAVELS 227 I am advised to say that two hun dred pounds is the least sum I will receive on his account." Motte was not duped. He was the successor to Swift's old pub lisher and he undoubtedly had been warned to expect the dean's "Travells" one day in some such melodramatic disguise. He only balked at a demand that within three days he "deliver a bankbill of two hundred pounds, wrapped up so ·as to make a parcel, to the hand from whence you receive this." He counter-offered payment six 'months after publication and won the point.

The manuscript probably was recopied to remove any trace of the real author's hand, and Swift departed for Ireland, home, church, and alibi. Then one September night a hackney coach stopped at the printer's door and a package of copy sheets changed hands in the dark. Motte never saw Cousin Sympson's face. About a month later - the date deserves remembrance: October 28, 1726 - the book went on sale. The Sales Continue The rest, it is fair to say, is history: a publishing history that shows no sign of ending, with some two dozen editions currently in print in English, scores of oth ers in languages around the globe, and Gulliver sailing off in translation each year on new voyages, viaggi, viajes, podroze, and rei,sen unnumbered. Happily the author had a glimpse of this im'mortality while alive. (He died 19 years later at age 77 in 1745, senile, modern scholars and medical experts now agree, rather than "mad," as his detractors long alleged.) The book's first printing sold in a week and "hath been the conversation of the whole town," John Gay wrote to Swift from London. "Gul liver is a happy man that at his age can write such a merry work,"

chimed in Dr. Arbuthnot, predict ing "as good a run" as that of Pilgrim's Progress. " 'Tis gen,;. erally said that you are the Au thor," slyly reported Gay, but "you are not much injur'd by [this] ... From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the Cabinet-Council to the Nursery." There was prophecy in that, too. By chopping so extensively that many people who think they have read Gulliver's Travels actually have read perhaps half of it, edi tors succeeded in hacking a "chil dren's classic" out of a work thought to be so politically loaded it required publication by secret plot. And it is still loaded. The essen tial political vision of the Rev. Dr. Swift has dated astonishingly lit228 THE FREEMAN April tle. To our Bicentennial celebra tions he would bring the sobering perspective that changes in gov ernmental form do not, for very long, improve the political beha vior of man himself. The whole cannot be a great deal more than the sum of its not terribly noble parts. Lilliputian meanness will lower the quality of public life under presidents as well as kings, in parliaments as easily as palaces.

A century in which the sheer amount of destruction, decadence and despotism actually perceived has outflown the farthest reach of Swiftian imagination can get a special shock of recognition out of Gulliver's ultimate judgment on mankind. Driven mad (but super shrewdly mad) by a society of humane animals and brutish hu mans, the traveler perceives that man is, after all, merely a design ing beast - "a sort of animals to whose share, by what accident he could not conj ecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggra vate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which Nature had not given us." There, in a few words, is the human dilemma: as challenging in 1976 as it was in 1726. The men who plotted to print a masterpiece 250 years ago, like those others who plotted to found a nation 200 years ago, never meant to leave us perfectly comfortable with our selves as we are. t) IDEAS ON LIBERTY The Planners of Balnibarbi IN THESE COLLEGES the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments and tools for all trades and manufactures, whereby, as they under take, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without re pairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase an hundred fold more than they do at present, with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discour aged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair ...

From Gulliver'l1 Travels, JONATHAN SWIFT The Right to Food E. C. PASOUR, JR. PEOPLE IN THE U.S. and through out the world now have a height ened awareness of the age-old problems of hunger and poverty. It has been estimated that 460 million people throughout the world today suffer from acute mal nutrition. At the same time, capac ity to produce food is at an all time high in the U.S. and through out the highly developed coun tries. Increasingly, questions are being raised about the apparent inj ustice of this coexistence of hunger and affluence. The movement to provide more food to hungry people throughout the world has increased significant ly since the early 1970's. The 1974 World Food Conference in Rome took what many regarded as an essential first step. The confer ence adopted an objective that Dr. Pasour is Professor of Economics at North Carolina State University at Raleigh.