A Sort of Life

In a book called Why Do I Write?, published in 1948, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett exchanged views on the writer's relation to society, and came to the conclusion that there were no hard and fast rules to follow, beyond their own personal interpretations of a writer's social obligations. Greene came off a little more preachy in these letters than even a Catholic novelist can pretend to be. And in his new book, Greene betrays some of the very obligations he believes a writer owes to society.

Lord Rochester's Monkey is the biography of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680). The book was finished in 1934, but Greene's publisher rejected his manuscript and he just forgot about it. With all due respect for Greene's talents as a novelist, he should have left the manuscript in the library at Texas University, or better yet, he should have burned it. It's an interesting biography, but only insofar as Rochester is an intriguing character; Greene's style and his organizing abilities aren't capable of sustaining a work that brings together Rochester's life and his poetry. The new biography certainly doesn't surpass V. Pinto s work, Enthusiast in Wit.

John Wilmot was one of the most clever Court poets during the reign of Charles II, and in many ways he represents the very nature of the Restoration: he was lewd, selfish, disdainful and he had no sense whatsoever of right and wrong. In that era Hobbes made it fashionable to have a rational disregard for religion, the only binding force for an otherwise criminal aristocracy. Any power Parliament had gained during Cromwell's Commonwealth dissipated with the return of Charles II, for whom Rochester saved some of the most vicious barbs--as in this epitaph:

Here lies a great and mighty king,

Whose promise none relies on;

He never said a foolish thing,

Nor ever did a wise one.

Apparently the greatest accomplishment of the Restoration was the first England-grown pineapple, a feat absurdly celebrated by this book in a two page color illustration of the royal gardener presenting Charles II with the fruits of his endeavors.

Rochester seems to have had the best of all possible worlds during his short life. His father, Henry Wilmot, was a royalist exiled to France during the Commonwealth, while his mother was the former wife to an important Parliamentary figure. Between the two, young John Wilmot was able to enjoy a relatively unscathed youth reading the classics, going to Oxford when he was only thirteen and graduating the following year with a Master of Arts. But whatever favors Rochester might have received because of his family's dual politics, his sharp wit and merciless opinions garnered him plenty of attention too.

Wilmot graduated from Oxford in 1661, travelled in Europe for a few years and was immediately received into the king's Court upon his return in 1664. By the following spring he had already begun to make an infamous name for himself: he kidnapped Elizabeth Mallet, an heiress whom he was courting. Charles II sent Rochester to the Tower for this, his earliest offense, although it took only three weeks to appease the king and set the prankster free until his trial came up. War broke out with the Dutch, Rochester volunteered, and soon released himself from further punishment by proving his courage in two sea-battles.

For the next year or so Rochester enjoyed what Greene calls "the most creditable period" of his life, when he was able to watch the frivolous Court without sharing its decadence. But after his marriage to Elizabeth Mallet in 1667, he fast became the hellish rake at Court--the king's jester who was banished at least three times for poems about the king and his mistresses, such as "The History of Insipids":

Restless he rolls form whore to whore,

A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

Nor are his high desires above his strength;

His sceptre and his ---- are of a length.

Greene explains the lasting friendship between the king and Rochester as one of shared cynicism, but he also sees a hidden idealism in the Earl that doesn't really seem to be there.

Rochester was indirectly responsible for at least three deaths. Once, when he and some friends went whoring and mistakenly ended up at the door of a local constable, Rochester drew his sword, but then ran off and let his unarmed companion be killed. Greene says simply, "by the time he returned to Court, he had earned his forgiveness from the king." Later, during a paranoid inquisition following the revelation of the Popish Plot, his testimony led to the execution of an innocent man accused of being Catholic. And yet another time he and a friend seduced a country gentleman's young wife and then carried her off to London--the cuckold hanged himself. Again, when brought to the attention of the king, "their story atoned for their offence."

A strange echo introduces the final portion of Rochester's life: "In the sixties there had been a time for mirth; now in the seventies was a time for seriousness." Rochester's satires had earned him the reputation of, as he wrote, "a man whom it is the great mode to hate." His two great loves, wine and women, finally turned on him so that by 1677 he was almost blind. In 1680 he died--either of tertiary syphilis or delirium tremens--disgraced for alleged cowardice on the dueling field, and accused of having thugs beat up Dryden, England's poet laureate (there is still no conclusive evidence about the latter charge).

Greene compares Rochester's poetry to that of Donne, and in at least one respect he's right: "Both poets were driven by the circumstances of their lives to be satirists." But Lord Rochester's Monkey goes too far in ascribing to Rochester (based mostly on his death-bed return to Christianity) a metaphysical resonance that just isn't there. Rochester was a bold and cunning contriver and his redemption for enjoying all the pleasures of a decadent age lies in his contempt for that age, expressed in poems like "Upon Nothing," and "A Satyr Against Man":

Were I, who to my Cost already am,

One of those strange, prodigious creatures Man,

A Spirit free, to choose for my own Share,

What sort of Flesh and Blood I pleas'd to wear,

I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear,

Anything, but that vain Animal

Who is so proud of being Rational.

In his letters to Pritchett, Greene said, "one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy." He demonstrates that same kind of sympathy in Lord Rochester's Monkey but it is overbearing. And as Leon Edel says in his book Literary Biography, "There enters into the process a quality of sympathy with the subject which is neither forbearance nor adulation." Edel describes a certain form of the biographical genre that, in its rejection of chronological order, can "borrow from the methods of the novelist without, however, being fiction." Here again Greene aims for that but fails. He avoids a two-dimensional portrait, yet in his attempts to give this third dimension to Rochester's life he misses. His book is like a holograph that has jumbled up the diffraction pattern from which a three dimensional image of Rochester might have been projected. All that's left are a few juicy slices of life plus a lot of silly pictures.

There's nothing wrong with this, except that Greene supposedly wrote the book for the common reader. One of the few obligations he claims a writer has to society is "of not robbing the poor, the blind, the widow or the orphan...if we do less than these we are so much the less human beings and therefore so much less likely to be artists." In this deluxe coffee-table edition he has certainly robbed the poor, he has wasted paper, and most disgraceful of all, he's even robbed the blind, who cannot see his profusely illustrated money-maker.