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.