WRITERS AND MADNESS
13
blazons of triumph, formulae of their extraordinary achievement, be–
fore which we forget even to ask why they had to become writers.
The great writer is the victorious suitor who has captured a beautiful
bride
in
an incomparable marriage. There seems almost no point i:1
asking him why he had to love and seek marriage: his reasons seem
all
too abundant, he has only to point to the incomparable attractions
of his beloved. He has lost his private compulsions in the general–
in the positive and admirable qualities, known to all men, of the thing
achieved. (The Kierkegaardians, by the way, should remind them–
selves that life must be just such a conquest and appropriation of
universals.) But life does not contain only such happy bridegrooms,
otherwise we might never know all the enormities and paradoxes of
love; and if there were only great geniuses among writers, perhaps
we might never know this other truth: the compulsions and paradoxes
on the dark side of their calling-which they, the great ones, could
afford to forget
in
the daylight blaze of their triumph.
The mistake is not to have invoked the idea of power but, once
invoked, not to have seen it through: we have but to pursue it far
enough and we can find it present everywhere in Swift's writings, and
indeed the central impulse of
his
prose itself (perhaps the best in
English). What is that stripped and supple syntax but the design of
greatest possible economy and force, by which he launches each sen–
tence at its mark like a potent and well-aimed missile? (And each
missile thuds against the bestial human face from which he would
escape.) Swift's lack of interest in being a literary man as such may
account, then, for some of
his
strongest qualities. The conception of
literature as an instrument or a diversion or even a vanity may exist
along with the power to produce the greatest literature: Pascal's con–
viction of the vanity of eloquence is one reason why he is a greater
prose-writer than Valery, the aesthete, who mocks at this conviction.
Here it seems almost as
if
from examining Swift's writings themselves
we might arrive at Freud's perception: that the writer is more than
commonly obsessed by a desire for power which he seeks to gratify
through his public fantasies.
Because of an introverted disposition, he is unable to gratify
this desire in the usual arenas of external action. Introversion is the
brand of his calling: he is the divided man, his consciousness always
present but a little absent, hovering over itself, ready to pounce and
bring back some fragment to his notebooks. The introverted disposi–
tion suggests some excessive and compelling need to be loved; and we
would suspect that here too it must result primally from some special
