Keep your pants on!, Or, Mr. O'Hara regrets to inform you that he'll be late for lunch.

I fear that Friday’s post on swearing may have dragged my mind temporarily to the gutter, for, on reading the following passage in Geoffrey Wolff’s biography of John O’Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, my first thought was that I had to share it with you folks:

Eventually [John] McClain was shocked by his roommate, when he returned home from the Sun with a young woman to pick up O’Hara for a lunch date. Having forgotten the engagement, O’Hara greeted the couple wearing his underpants, instructed them to wait while he concluded an ongoing chore, and, without closing the door to his bedroom, wrapped up a performance--theatrically strident--of lovemaking. He had partners aplenty, and each was destined to learn from O’Hara the names and preferences of the others. Such narratives, even more than the knowledge of his promiscuity and his frequent contagions of the clap, tempered the devotion of the women he pursued during the McClain period.

Now, to each his own, but if you were to show up for a lunch date to find such a performance underway, would you not count it as a de facto cancellation of the date? And therefore not wait it out? How excruciatingly uncomfortable those minutes must have been . . .

Which reminds me of a line from the oral biography of George Plimpton, George, Being George. In the middle of a batch of accounts of Plimpton’s--and, apparently, everyone’s--freewheeling sex life in the early 1970s, his friend Fayette Hickock says,

When I think about George going to orgies,, I think of him not as leering with his tongue dangling out, but just as George as George. Like, okay, wow, let’s see where this is going to take us.

Elsewhere in the book, Gay Talese describes 1970s America as “the most sexually permissive place in the history of the world,” which, by what feels like an almost medieval association of opposites, makes me think of Adam Thirlwell’s discussion in The Delighted States of an anthology of Laurence Sterne’s writing called The Beauties of Sterne that was published in 1782, after Sterne’s death:

The writer of the “Preface” to The Beauties of Sterne expressed sadness that the “chaste lovers of literature” had been “deprived” of the possible “pleasure and instruction” to be derived from the works of Laurence Sterne--since they could not risk encountering the “obscenity which taints the writing of Sterne”: “his Sentimental Journey, in some degree, escaped the general censure, though that is not entirely free of the fault complained of.” The purpose of The Beauties of Sterne was therefore to give the reader an expurgated version of the works of Laurence Sterne. But this is not an easy task, to expurgate the work of Laurence Sterne--because it is not easy, turning an unserious novel into a serious extract.

That said, much of what offended in Sterne in 1782, while still entertaining, looks relatively mild these days--and what is more fun in Sterne, anyway, is his more subtly sexual matter, much of which, Thirlwell points out, escaped the censor:

Sterne was exploiting the fact that sexual vocabulary does not quite exist; it mimes the ordinary vocabulary of sexuality. A person can talk about sex while pretending to talk about niceness. A person can talk about sex without ever mentioning sex: the point of flirting is its utilitarian benefit, is that it allows for deniability.

Much, much more fun than O’Hara’s boorishness, no? The martini as opposed to the Jager Bomb, in a sense.

To close, a poem from a man who would not have stinted at Jager Bombs--so long as there was quantity--any more than he balked at public lewdness: Lord Rochester. Here, however, he drops his vulgarities in favor of a flirtatious subtlety, as he attempts to put over a not-particularly-convincing denial of unfaithfulness:

Love and Life

All my past life is mine no more;
The flying hours are gone,
Lie transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

The time that is to come is not;
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot;
And that, as far as it is got,
Phillis, is only thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows;
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that Heaven allows.

In other words, as Shaggy once said, “It wasn’t me.”

Connolly on "the mellow Stoicism" of Lord Chesterfield

In a deeply sympathetic brief essay on Cyril Connolly, Sven Birkerts writes of Connolly's occasional "venomous spray of self-loathing," occasioned by his disappointment in his own literary output when set against the great works that animated his life. Birkerts writes,

His adoration of genius could not but lead him into the most bitter self-reproach: "Why not me?"

The vigor and precision of the prose, however, were a rebuttal, for they partook, often, of something like genius. It was as if he had to contradict himself into brilliance.

The piece from which I drew the opening lines of yesterday's post, a review of Samuel Shellabarger's Lord Chesterfield (1935), reveals many of Connolly's virtues as both a prose writer and a sympathetic, attentive critic--in a mere five pages. Connolly, attuned to the "transitional age full of a certain beautiful clumsiness" in which Lord Chesterfield wrote poetry and wonderfully amoral letters to his bastard son, finds Chesterfield sympathetic; Shellabarger, on strictly religious grounds, does not. Connolly rightly points out the essential absurdity of Shellabarger's even troubling to write about this age:

Above all this is no subject for the religious, for it represents the first flowering in English life of the Roman spirit, with its urbanity, good sense, and stoical courage, the first reasonable, measured, intelligent attack which the Augustans launched on the citadel of happiness, after impregnating themselves with the spirit of Horace, the city-bred sophistication of Martial and Juvenal, and the solid qualities of the pagan world rather than the Renaissance's wild adaption of them.

It is a truism of biography that the writer inevitably ends up hating his subject, but Shellabarger seems to have begun by hating Chesterfield, and his unrelenting condemnation prevents him from appreciating anything the man accomplished. It's hard to disagree when Connolly, writing about Shellabarger's dismissal of Chesterfield's letters, writes,

A man who could write such a phrase as "Cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity" deserves more than moral condemnation.

Yet that fundamental disagreement does not prevent Connolly from giving Shellabarger what credit he deserves. I've drawn on Anthony Powell's paraphrase of this next line before, but it's worth presenting in its full context:

Granted that the author disapproves of Chesterfield, he has written a very interesting book about him, for he is intelligent enough to see that his life represents, as it were, the second line of defense of paganism, just as Rochester's, for instance, is the front line which apologists find almost too hot to hold and which they often have to evacuate.

Lord Rochester, presumably, would have scorned our offers of help regardless, preferring to gloriously fail to hold the front line himself.

Even Connolly's final, sharpest barb is leavened with an elegiac note of appreciation:

Those who are going to write about men of the world ought, I think, to like the world, but apart from this there is much that is interesting, understanding, and well-put in this biography, which has, indeed, a certain mournful epigraphic quality, appearing at a time when we seem about to bid a final farewell to the life of reason, and in a year that has witnessed the demolition of Chesterfield House, and the death of the last Earl of Chesterfield. The Cyrenaicism of Rochester killed him in his thirties, the mellow Stoicism of Chesterfield secured him happiness until he was eighty.

Three or four perceptive, memorable, even quotable lines in a five-page review, written on deadline--it may not have satisfied Connolly, but I'd sure think it a good day's work.

Some laughs, or, "A dark, even-handed misanthropy"

To leaven yesterday's tales of robbery, killing, and general amorality, today let's have some humor!

I've really just got a few funny items for you, but I think that can be excused when this first one is, I venture, the funniest thing I've ever read. It is, not unexpectedly, by P. G. Wodehouse, and it opens the story "Buried Treasure," a tale of the Angler's Rest club that is collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937). The only additional introduction you need is the knowledge that in Angler's Rest stories Wodehouse identifies each speaker by the name of his drink. And now, to the joke:

The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying.

"He'll have to let it grow or shave it off," said the Whisky and Splash. "He can't go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache or he has not. There can be no middle course."

Wodehouse's most impressive achievement in those paragraphs is to maintain complete surprise: even though you know a joke's coming, his opening lines get your thoughts running so completely in one particular track that the sudden jump to another, previously unconsidered track is hilarious.

Now let's shift from the verbal to the visual, and from the twentieth century to the eighteenth, where I've been spending so much of my reading time lately. One of the books that's been holding me in that period is Tom Jones (1749), and the designer of the Penguin Classics edition deserves plaudits for choosing the perfect cover image, James Gillray's print Fashionable Contrasts;--or--The Duchess's Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke's Feet (1792).



Created to celebrate and satirize the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York, the print's simplicity is stunning, especially when contrasted with the other works of Gillray and his contemporaries, which tended to be overloaded with characters and symbols. And what a title!

Gillray, whose work I've noted before, was a contemporary of Blake, Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank, an artistic descendant of Hogarth, and an influence on Goya. As Vic Gatrell tells us in his spectacularly entertaining City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006),

Gillray was an enigmatic fellow, and we're not going to like him. In appearance he seems to have been rather daunting, so it comes as no surprise to learn that, with his "slouching gait and careless habits," he was too taciturn to have intimate friends. As the artist-journalist W. H. Pyne remembered, he was "meanly mischievous" to other people and as lazy in his personal relationships as in his art, and "a stranger to the feelings of friendship." But although he was "a careless sort of cynic, one who neither loved, nor hated society," "his aberrations were more the results of low habits and the want of self-esteem, than from malignity, envy, or meanness."

And though, as Gatrell points out,

Artistic London was a small world, and he grew into his trade alongside significant others. . . . [and in] their tavern lives, these men mingled with literary and theatrical hacks as well as each other, acting out the fashionable cult of dissolute genius with growing conviction,

Gillray seems never quite to have been fully a member of that fraternity of artists, standing decidedly aloof.

Except for a few depictions of St James's characters from life, his works lack warmth or affection. . . . Many are moved by a dark, even-handed misanthropy--by something approaching hatred, mixed with sadism.

That certainly seems the case when you look at some of Gillray's other works, such as this celebration of Nelson's victory on the Nile, Destruction of the French Collossus, which could with some adjustments have been slipped into the pages of an EC comic of the 1950s:



Given the horrors clearly available to Gillray's imagination, it may not surprise you to learn that he went insane in his later years. In his last days he thought George Cruikshank (later to be celebrated for his illustrations of Dickens) was Sir Joshua Reynolds and he himself was Rubens, while a suicide attempt in 1811 inadvertently recreated some of the grotesquely comic air of his prints:

He once tried to throw himself out of [his patron] Hannah Humphrey's upper window, and was saved because he jammed his head and was spotted from White's club across the street.

But now I've allowed my interest in Gillray to derail me from my initial intention to leaven your day with humor--can anything be further from the comedic than suicidal insanity? I'll try to make up for it with, first, another Gillray, this one with none of the elegance of Fashionable Contrasts--for as any Swift fan could tell you, when all else fails, one can always opt for scatology, which Gillray did in his 1793 take on the possibility of a French invasion, The French Invasion;--or--John Bull, Bombarding the Bum-Boats:



Gross, yes, but hard not to smile at, and presumably effective politically. The French, it seems, may find themselves needing the services of the Poopsmith.

Having descended into the gutter, I'll stay there and close with this pleasantly scurillous anecdote that Henry Fielding tosses off in Tom Jones regarding actress Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II and good friend of I've Been Reading Lately favorite Lord Rochester:

On this subject, reader, I must stop a moment, to tell thee a story. "The famous Nell Gwynn, stepping one day, from a house where she had made a short visit, into her coach, saw a great mob assembled, and her footman all bloody and dirty; the fellow, being asked by his mistress the reason of his being in that condition, answered, `I have been fighting, madam, with an impudent rascal who called your ladyship a wh--re.' `You blockhead,' replied Mrs Gwynn, `at this rate you must fight every day of your life; why, you fool, all the world knows it.'

`Do they?' cries the fellow, in a muttering voice, after he had shut the coach-door, `they shan't call me a whore's footman for all that.'"

Finally, since it's a day of visuals, and I've already violated all bounds of good taste, I may as well add some nudity. Here's a 1672 engraving by Richard Thomson of a painting by Peter Cross depicting Nell Gwyn as Cupid:



Gwyn's sly smile and, um . . . perkiness . . . may be NSFW these days, but they must have been just fine in Samuel Pepys's day, for he reportedly kept a copy hanging over his desk at the Admiralty.

The works of the Devill

Like so many things on this blog, this brief pre-breakfast post is Anthony Powell's fault. While looking to see if he'd written about his friend Cyril Connolly in his Some Poets, Artists and "A Reference for Mellors" (2006), I came across the following statement about Lord Rochester, attributed to Connolly:

Rochester represents a frontline almost too hot to hold by apologists for pleasure, one which has to be abandoned in favor of more defensible positions.

A man who claims to have spent five years on end drunk is, on that basis alone, always going to be a bit difficult to defend.

Powell sent me, as he so often does, to John Aubrey, who in his Brief Lives had this to say in his sadly brief account of Rochester:

His youthly spirit and oppulent fortune did sometimes make him doe extravagant actions, but in the country he was generally civill enough. He was wont to say that when he came to Brentford the Devill entered into him and never left him until he came into the Country again.

"Extravagant actions" is a nice bit of understatement--covering as it does everything from the kidnapping of the lady who would become his wife to the hired assault on Dryden to his pornographic poetry and his play, Sodom, written for the King and court, which consisted mostly of nudity and sex and included a stage direction ordering the cast to "Fall to fucking."

But, though I'd not have thought to blame the Devill, all that was known to me. Far more unexpected is what I learned upon looking up Rochester's wife, Anne, Countess Rochester. Aubrey's entry for Rochester's contemporary, poet John Denham, concludes--with typically intriguing Aubreyan vagueness--with the note that

His 2nd lady had no child: was poysoned by he hands of the Countess of Rochester, with Chocolatte.

This may require a trip to the library.

Oh, and finally, a side note: if you don't view this blog in a reader, you'll see that I've added a tag cloud to the right side, by which I (or you) can track the current balance of my various obsessions. Hmm . . . I have written about Lord Rochester rather a lot. Have I written about him too much? Is that even possible?

More London notes, these having to do with the drink

Today, as promised, some notes on beer, drink, pubs, and the perils thereof, derived from Hogarth and others while I was in London last week.

1 On our first night in town, our friend Gideon led us through crowds of happy drinkers who were spilling out of pubs into the warm air of a lovely spring evening to Rose Street, a narrow, roofed alley, in the middle of which is a side door to the pub that was our destination. I should have placed the alley myself, but I didn't until Gid pointed it out: in 1679, it was the site of the Rose-alley ambuscade, when John Dryden was set upon and beaten by a group of thugs thought be in the pay of Lord Rochester, who was avenging a literary slight. Like so many literary sites in London, the alley remains, as does the pub where the hired muscle surely secured the necessary measure of Dutch courage. It has, however, changed its name: what is now the Lamb and Flag was, in Rochester's day, the Bucket of Blood.

2 In 1751, Hogarth contributed a pair of engravings to a growing public campaign against gin drinking, a reaction to the Gin Craze, which saw the working classes consuming low-priced, low-quality gin at unfathomable rates. The more immediately arresting of the pair is Gin Lane, in which the evils of gin drinking (and, as Dickens approvingly pointed out, of the ill effects of allowing people to suffer in poverty) are depicted in reliably shocking Hogarthian fashion.


Though it traffics far less in the grotesque, the accompanying engraving, Beer Street, which shows the stalwart British turning to beer, rather than gin, and thus establishing themselves as solid, upright citizens, is worth taking a look at, too. Any Hogarth, after all, contains a wealth of entertaining detail; check out, for example, the trader copping a feel from a female peddler.

And then there's the poem underneath the image, which is enough to win Beer Street a place on this blog:

Beer, happy product of our Isle,
Can Sinew and Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil,
Can chear each manly Heart.

3 Another pub that received some of our custom while we were in London was the Toucan in Soho Square, which pours primarily Guinness. Hanging behind the basement bar is the following letter, which was clearly printed at some point in a newspaper, though I haven't been able to figure out where or when:

I will read with interest Mr Lomax's letter (Viz. this issue) re: lager commercials. I personally am a fan of the clever Guinness adverts, with their challenging visual imagery, their air of illusion, and the maturity and mystique which actor Rutger Hauer provides. If I have one criticism it is that they fail to mention that Guinness turns your shit to treacle.
P. McMurphy, Derby

4 The Toucan also featured the following quotation about alcohol from Ian Paisley behind the bar:

I would be happy to see the devil's buttermilk banned from society.

I knew I didn't like that guy.

5 I'll close this group with a sticker that my friend Jen and I marveled at when we saw it stuck to a wall:

Specified Risk Material

What, Jen and I wondered, could this sticker signify? And how scary is a Specified Risk Material? Less scary, Jen argued, than an Unspecified Risk Material. Perhaps it ought to be affixed to a bottle of fine gin, or my martini shaker.

Tomorrow, I'll close this week of London reading with a couple of brief notes on people and places.

For your Saturday

Posting may be light the next week or so, because we have family in town and work has been taking up an inordinate amount of my other time and thought.

But I feel I need to start the weekend off with something.

First, from a letter of October 25, 1918, from Violet Trefusis to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, reproduced in Sackville-West's son, Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage (1978)

Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a sufragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.

Let's follow that with words from someone else who felt the pull of strong passions his whole life, but who directed much of it towards god, John Donne.

A Hymn to God the Father

I
Wilt though forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.

II
Wilt though forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou has done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

III
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by they self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.

Donne and his struggles with desire were an influence on the poetry of Lord Rochester, who, however saw no reason to check his desires, living as he did without a belief in any higher power or eternal reward.

And, finally, in case you're trying, as your weekend beckons, between a quiet evening of reading and a raucous night on the town, I'll close with some Thomas à Kempis. Being an unbeliever myself, I think his words are unlikely to save you from damnation, but their peace might save you from a hangover.

From The Imitation of Christ (1420-27)

The man who has not diligently practiced holy repentance is not worthy of heavenly consolations. If you want to experience this repentance in your heart, go to your room and shut out the din of the world, as it is written: commune with your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Retire to your room and there you will preserve what you usually lose by leaving it.

If you keep to your room you will find delight in it, but if you only visit it, it becomes irksome and annoying. If, at the time of your conversion, you had accustomed yourself to stay in your room and remain there, it would now be your good friend and a source of great pleasure to you.

As a keep-to-my room sort, all I would add to Thomas's prescription is a martini and, of course, a good book. Enjoy your weekend.

Lord Rochester, part three

Part one is here, and part two is .

Ultimately, however, the reason to care about Rochester is his poetry, which at its best is remarkably fun and inventive. I'll leave you with a couple of my favorites, all varying degrees of nasty. I'll begin with a couple of brief ones--the first, Greene surmises, written on the occasion of the end of his longest-lasting love affair, with a Mrs. Barry:

Upon Leaving His Mistress

'Tis not that I am weary grown
Of being yours, and yours alone:
But with what face can I incline,
To damn you to be only mine?
You, whom some kinder pow'r did fashion,
By merit, and by inclination,
The joy at least of a whole nation.

Let meaner spirits of your sex
With humble aims their thoughts perplex:
And boast, if by their arts they can
Contrive to make one happy man,
While, mov'd by an impartial sense,
Favours, like Nature, you dispense
With universal influence.

I also enjoy this early poem, a sort of libertine's creed, which is unrepentant, yet honest about the monotony of the totally dissipated life:

The Debauchee

I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I dally about her, and spew in her lap;
There we quarrel and scold till I fall asleep,
When the jilt growing bold, to my pocket does creep;
Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge the affront,
At once both my lass and my money I want.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coyl do I make for the loss of my punk?
I storm, and I roar, and I fall in a rage,
And missing my lass, I fall on my page:
Then crop-sick, all morning I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning till eleven again.

"The Debauchee" leads nicely into a couple of stanzas from "The Maim'd Debauchee," in which, old and infirm, the poet offers up his debauched life as an example for the youth--that they might choose the same road:

So when my days of impotence approach,
And I'm, by love and wine's unlucky chance,
Driv'n from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,

My pains at last some respite shall afford,
While I behold the battles you maintain,
When fleets of glasses sail around the board,
From whose broad-sides volley of wit shall rain.

Nor shall the sight of honourable scars,
Which my too-forward valour did procure,
Frighten new-listed soldier from the war;
Past joys have more than paid what I endure.

Should some brave youth (worth being drunk) prove nice,
And from his fair inviter meanly shrink,
'Twould please the ghost of my departed vice,
If, at my counsel, he repent and drink.

And finally, a long poem that tells of a temporary infirmity. Remarkable even among Rochester's work for its explicitness and vulgarity, it seems a good way to close this series:

The Imperfect Enjoyment

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms,legs,lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.
My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,
Hangs hovering o'er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er,
Melt into sperm and, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done't:
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a c***.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys,
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o'er
My panting bosom, "Is there then no more?"
She cries. "All this to love and rapture's due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
Ev'n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,
With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;
Which nature still directed with such art
That it through every cunt reached every heart -
Stiffly resolved, 'twould carelessly invade
Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:
Where'er it pierced, a cunt it found or made -
Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,
Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore
Didst thou e'er fail in all thy life before?
When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets
Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,
But if his king or country claim his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;
Ev'n so thy brutal valour is displayed,
Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But when great Love the onset does command,
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar'st not stand.
Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,
Through all the town a common fucking-post,
On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt
As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt,
May'st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away;
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May'st thou ne'er piss, who did refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend.
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

A brief publishing note to close: Lord Rochester's Monkey was written in the early thirties, but Greene's publisher, Heinemann, rejected it, presumably because it was deemed too racy--as was, at the time, Rochester's verse. It wasn't until 1972 that a scholar noticed a reference to the book in Greene's papers and asked him about it; with a bit of updating, the book finally saw print in 1974. It's a brief book, and the publisher, Bodley Head, dressed it up with illustrations on each page, primarily of the principal characters and locations. It's out of print now, but used copies are readily available, well worth the cost for Rochester or Greene fans.

Lord Rochester, part two

Part one is here.

I have to admit that what has come down to us of Rochester's drunken antics tends to read more like the ill-natured thoughtlessness of the privileged--a court version of frat-boy pranking--than the work of a true wit. And there is no doubt that he had his unpalatable side; he was frequently violent, and even the most generous reading of his marriage has to account for his leaving his wife alone in the countryside for months on end with only his horridly overbearing mother for company. But even aside from the poems, hints of a more interesting and complicated personality break through. When temporarily banished from court for satirizing Charles II, Rochester took on the guise of an astrologer and doctor and plied that trade, incognito, on Tower Hill. At other times, he pretended to be a tinker or a vagrant; in these stories there are shades of the stories of Haroun al-Raschid, a deep-rooted restlessness and desire to shed the self.

By age thirty, Rochester's life of womanizing, whoring, and carousing through stews and rake-hells had caught up with him; he fell into poor health and died of a variety of ailments, syphilis looming large among them, at thirty-three. His apparent deathbed conversion, much bruited about by those hoping to curtail the scandalous behavior of Charles II's court, has been a source of controversy ever since. Greene treats Rochester's deathbed dialogues with ministers as serious inquiries, but he is unwilling to grant that Rochester's conversion and repentance were true. After all, a few months before he died, when, despite a temporary improvement, he surely knew the end was near, he wrote "The Wish":

O that I now cou'd by some chymic art
To sperm convert my vitals and my heart,
That at one thrust I might my soul translate,
And in the womb myself regenerate:
There steep'd in lust, nine months I wou'd remain;
Then boldly ------- my passage out again.

Certainly, Rochester's companions at court viewed tales of his conversion with a jaded eye. But that didn't keep those who wanted from pushing the story wholeheartedly. The following poem, written by a Sir Francis Fane, argues for Rochester's sneaky goodness; even supposing Rochester's repentance to be genuine, I find the only appropriate response to this argument to be laughter:

Satan rejoic'd to see thee take his part,
His malice not so prosperous as thy art.
He took thee for his pilot, to convey
Those easy souls whom he had led astray:
But to his great confusion saw thee shift,
They swelling sails and take another drift,
With an illustrious train reputed his,
To the bright regions of eternal bliss.

Greene's biography is similar to Anthony Powell's reviews of biographies, in that it frequently focuses on odd details and controversial topics at the expense of a straightforward narrative, assuming, perhaps correctly, that any student of English literature will have a more than passing knowledge of the Restoration. At times, though--for example, when he's attempting to settle the question of whether Rochester is guilty, as he has been charged over the years, of having rival John Dryden cudgeled by thugs--Greene's elliptical tendencies get the best of him. It's like reading the corrections box in a newspaper: what you want, and what they will never supply, is both the truth and the original mishandling of it.

But as readers of this blog know, odd details are something I greatly cherish in a biography, and Greene delves deeply into letters and diaries of Rochester and his contemporaries to provide them. The letter I posted a few days ago is a good example; another is this note about a brief stay Rochester made in France, from the pen of William Perwich, the English agent in Paris:

On Monday this Court went to St Germains, where the King [of France] made a general muster of all his Army, with the ceremony of great guns in the field, and that night he went hence my Lord Rochester was robbed in a chaise (of some 20 pistols and his periwig).

Or this note about the fate of Rochester's letters:

A greater loss still, a history of the Restoration Court in the form of letters to [his friend] Savile, went to the bonfire. For Rochester had asked his mother to burn his papers, lest the example of his works should lead others to sin, and she obeyed with alacrity. "Apropos," wrote Horace Walpole, "did I ever tell you a most admired bon mot of Mr Bentley? He was talking to me of an old devout Lady St. John, who burnt a whole trunk of letters of the famous Lord Rochester, 'for which,' said Mr Bentley, 'her soul is now burning in heaven.'"

Greene quotes from a letter Rochester wrote to Savile,

I have seriously consider'd one thing, that [of] the three businesses of this age, women, politics, and drinking, the last is the only exercise at which you and have not prov'd ourselves arrant fumblers.

More tomorrow.

Lord Rochester, part one

It seems reasonable that biographers, especially those who are essentially dabbling in biography rather than making it their career, should find in their subjects mirrors of their own preoccupations and personalities. After all, few biographers actively choose a subject whose life and opinions they find utterly uncongenial; from there it is but a small step to discovering that one's subject is, it turns out, a slightly refracted version of oneself.

Thus it is no surprise that Graham Greene, in Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974), presents a Lord Rochester whose libertinism and cynicism are born from a disappointed ideal, a sense that the world and all in it have fallen far short of what we might have been--a view that hews closely to what I would attribute to Greene himself. While Greene's ideal was born of Catholicism (which has the added benefit of ascribing nobility to suffering, however self-inflicted, and repentance, however repetitive), it is unclear where Rochester's originated, unless it was simply by analogy: what I see around me is highly praised, despite being utterly unworthy; the fact that I am perceptive enough to see that means there must be something better--a good, perhaps--that lies beyond this tawdriness. In such a world, a man who sees through the pious declarations and pretension to virtue has a choice: he can either stand strong, resist the world's temptations, and call out its failings with religious fervor, or he can succumb--to drink, lust, cynicism--and thus provide crucial support for his own contention. Rochester chose the latter, argues Greene, who, though he might not have put it so bluntly, did the same.

So Rochester, after serving bravely in naval engagements against the Dutch while still in his teens, arrived at the infamously wild court of Charles II as the greatest excesses of the Restoration were just getting underway, letting out all the wantonness that had been bottled up by two decades of war and Puritan rule. Becoming a close friend of the King, Rochester joined him and others in drunken escapades, sharing of mistresses, and all manner of generally unruly behavior (another reminder, if any are still needed, that when right-wing loonies screech about the horrors of contemporary morality, they're demonstrating yet again their willful ignorance). Rochester became embroiled in duels, attempted to kidnap his future wife, and, all the while, wrote poetry that was by turns viciously satirical and breathtakingly salacious. He turns up frequently in the diaries of Pepys, who, despite their similarly concupiscent natures, seems always a bit unsure about Rochester.

Rochester quickly became the foremost poet and wit of the Restoration court, apparently as charming as he was rackety and unreliable. As his friend George Etherege said of him, "I know he is a Devil, but he has something of the Angel yet undefac'd in him." A Mr. Waller writes,

Last night I supped at Lord Rochester's with a select party: on such occasions he is not ambitious of shining; he is rather pleasant than not: he is comparatively reserved; but you find something in that restraint, which is more agreeable than the utmost exertions of talent in others.

Another friend, poet Nathaniel Lee (who was destined to end his days in Bedlam), based a character on Rochester in a play and wrote of him,

He was the spirit of wit and had such an art in gilding his failures, that it was hard not to love his faults. He never spoke a witty thing twice, though to different persons; his imperfections were catching, and his genius was so luxuriant, that he was forced to tame it with a hesitation in his speech to keep it in view. But oh how awkward, how insipid, how poor and wretchedly dull is the imitation of those that have all the affectation of his verses and none of his wit.

More tomorrow.

The World's Worst Mustache, Redeemed

That, you will surely agree, vies for the title of most grotesque mustache in the history of the world. Yet I cannot fully condemn its creator. How, you ask? How could I countenance such a blight?

It's simple. That mustache was borne by Henry Wilmot, first Earl of Rochester, the father of the Restoration poet, libertine, and drunk Lord Rochester. Rochester's poetry--bawdy, crude, cynical, satrical, and vicious--is a source of great fun. But I would redeem Lord Rochester's father from punishment for his mustache had his son written nothing more than the following letter to, as Graham Greene puts it in his biography of Rochester, "his fat, patient, and disreputable friend," Henry Savile:

Mr Savile,
Do a charity becoming one of your pious principles, in preserving your humble servant Rochester from the imminent peril of sobriety; which, for want of good wine more than company (for I can drink like a hermit betwixt God and my own conscience) is very like to befall me. Remember what pains I have formerly taken to wean you from your pernicious resolutions of discretion and wisdom! And, if you have a grateful heart (which is a miracle amongst you statesmen), show it, by directing the bearer to the best wine in town: and pray let not this highest point of sacred friendship be peform'd lightly, but go about it with all due deliberation and care, as holy priests to sacrifice, or as discreet thieves to the wary performance of burglary and shop-lifting. Let your well-discerning palate (the best judge about you) travel from cellar to cellar, and then from piece to piece, till it has light`ed on wine fit for its noble choice and my approbation. To engage you the more in this matter, know, I have laid a plot may very probably betray you to the drinking of it. My Lord ---- will inform you at large.
Dear Savile! as ever thou dost hope to oudo Machiavel, or equal me, send some good wine! So may thy wearied soul at last find rest, no longer hov'ring twixt th' unequal choice of politics and lewdness! Mast thou be admir'd and lov'd for thy domestic wit, belov'd and cherish'd for thy foreign interest and intelligence.
Rochester

Need I say more in defense of Lord Rochester's father against all calumnies?

There's much more to share about Rochester, which I'll do once this too-busy week is concluded.