An Imperfect Novel Worth Reading

 

Thomas Nast

 

     What better time to have a look at The Gilded Age than when the American president seeks to gild everything about him while exhibiting unprecedented greed, fraud, and corruption?

 

     The collaborative authorship of The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain and his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner [1], is doubtless responsible for the narrative’s uneven plot line and style.  The shift between Twain’s colorful characters and vigorous dialect and Warner’s smooth and bland sentiments makes the reader feel the work is two different novels, braided together in a way that is never quite integrated. 

     The cast of characters is largely familiar from the melodramas of the day: a distressed woman, a cad, the virtuous and the avaricious.  Critics judge that the authors were satirizing popular plot-lines, but it seems more accurate to say that they were reproducing popular stories in part to ensure themselves a market while reserving the right to make a bit of fun now and then.  For the first two-thirds of the novel the emphasis is on comedy and a devastating attack on the government and the economic system with the love interests kept in the background, though romance does eventually emerge, a concession to the taste of the masses like Kitty Carlisle and Alan Jones in Night at the Opera.  Laura’s murder of Col. Selby (which to many readers comes as a surprise) alters the tone, adding notes of pathos and tragedy while the satiric onslaught continues unabated.

     Though he had published travel sketches and short stories, The Gilded Age is Twain’s first attempt at a full-length novel which may in part explain his willingness to work with a co-author.  The combination of his and Warner’s inexperience in the form (Warner was a distinguished editor but he had written only books on travel and gardening) makes it unsurprising that they produced a formally imperfect volume.  This factor and their shared authorship were not lost on the book’s earliest reviewers, one of whom wrote that “Neither of them has yet given evidence that he could command an interesting plot, the conduct of which would develop interesting characters.”  Another found the narration “jerky and jolty” exhibiting an “abruptness and unexpectedness” in the development as a result of the fact that “two hands did fashion the work,” while a third concluded more severely, “The Gilded Age is a failure.  It is rather a simply incoherent series of sketches.” [2]

     Further, though each wrote an initial section, they later came to do alternate chapters and to rewrite each other’s contributions.  Their wives, who had originally challenged them to attempt the work, may have offered opinions on its progress as well, and the result is inevitably uneven.

     Whatever its faults, The Gilded Age presents an uncompromising, even devastating critique of America.  The government is portrayed not as simply harboring corruption but as being altogether rotten.  When one senator exposes the bribe another has offered him, there are calls to investigate not the miscreant but the whistle-blower.  A politician who refuses to buy votes is considered the unethical one.  The public good cannot survive in an environment where everyone is looking out for the main chance.  And the legislators’ rapacity is only a special case of the general greed that reigns under capitalism.  While Philip’s Ilium coal mine does finally deliver on its early promise, virtually every other investment scheme mentioned is wholly fraudulent. 

     For a contemporary American reader, this picture of crooked profiteering in public life will seem only slightly exaggerated.  The current president is openly selling pardons and appointments, making subservience (and its material form of donations) far more important than expertise for influence in his administration.  And we have seen speculative bubbles in technology stocks as well as the birth of explicitly fraudulent investments like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, encouraged by politicians more interested in advancing their own wealth than the good of the country.  The present day has at least matched the single-minded pursuit of money in the nineteenth century, when American presidents would at least never have considered hawking trashy merchandise while in office. 

     Apart from this general critique of the political and economic system, The Gilded Age makes significant comment on the role of women.  Laura and Ruth are arguably the most important characters, as most of the others are either caricatures or very thinly portrayed.  Furthermore, the book is clear about the unfairness of the limited life choices available to women and goes so far as to suggest that women’s suffrage might bring reform to the legislative halls. 

     Yet a feminist today would surely complain that both of these women, who possess unusual ambition and initiative, not only fail, they fail because of the very female characteristics typically cited by male chauvinists.  Laura is clever and effective in her machinations, but comes to grief after being deceitfully betrayed by a lover.  She becomes very close at least to legally insane before killing Selby, highlighting the double sexual standard and women’s dependance on men, but also suggesting that she is overemotional, the victim, perhaps of hormones.  Though Twain referred to her as the “heroine” [3] of the book, she is as well a villain, a femme fatale, in her lobbying in which her trading on her good looks is yet another gender stereotype.  Ruth, while guilty only of the laudable desire to practiced medicine, proves not quite up the demands the profession placed on her, nearly dying from overwork, thus implying that those who wished to bar women from the professions for their own good did so for good reason. 

     The novel contains numerous loose ends.  The appended note with its ironic apology for raising curiosity about Laura’s father without satisfying it, is itself sufficient evidence that the story had not been thoroughly planned.  The epigraphs, selected not just from European languages, but also from Hawaiian, Quiché, Sanskrit, Yoruba, and the like, may be a good enough gag the first time, but rapidly becomes annoying before the reader simply ignores them.  The fact that the first edition left them untranslated proves that readers were not expected to understand them.

     Yet, for all its shortcomings, the book hits its mark squarely with its depiction of most politicians and businessmen as self-interested and capable of any deceit.  At the same time it shows the hopeful optimism of Americans in general, never sufficiently disillusioned to turn away the next sure thing when pitched by a glib salesman.  One finds in The Gilded Age only sparks of Mark Twain’s brilliance and a few sonorous if platitudinous lines of Charles Dudley Warner, but, considered as a whole, it is an important American political novel and a well-observed portrait of the United States revealing the national faults: an obsession with money-making, the dialectic of hucksterism and naivete, the oppression of women, but also allowing room for a saving remnant of ambitious individuals whose dreams, unavailable in some other nations, may in the United States, at least in part, come true.   

 

  

 

1.  Twain later said that both authors’ wives also contributed to the book.  It was not Twain’s only attempt at collaboration.  He wrote Ah Sin with Bret Harte, a play that ran for five weeks and the unperformed Colonel Sellers as a Scientist with William Dean Howells but withdrawn before its first performance.  He later contemplated two collaborations with the Austrian playwright Siegmund Schlesinger.

2. Quotations are, in order, from “American Satire,” New York Herald, Dec. 22, 1873; “The New Book by ‘Twain” and Warner,” Hartford Times, December 23, 1873; and “Literary Notes,” The New York Graphic, December 23, 1873.

3.  April 16, 1873 letter to Mary Fairbanks.

Misogyny in Heywood’s The Four PP

 

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of the text.

 

     Though it is never produced (apart from a few times in academic settings), Thomas Heywood’s comic interlude The Four PP (ca. 1530) retains some comic appeal yet today.  Its lively tetrameter couplets move briskly along and a bit of earthy humor revives the reader (or viewer) whose interest might be flagging.  In spite of this apparent popular appeal, Heywood was a courtier and the piece was most likely performed for Henry VIII.  All of its characters, the four Ps of the title (normally pronounced "four pees"– a palmer, a pardoner, a peddler, and a “pothecary” (medical practitioner) – are satirized as professionals who all excel in lying.

     Each of these groups has, of course, long been subject to suspicion and wit.   Heywood’s reservations about the physicians of his day recalls Montaigne’s remark that “I see no kinde of men so soone sicke, nor so late cured, as those who are under the jurisdiction of Physicke” (Bk. II, 37, “Of the resemblance betweene children and fathers”).   This attitude is surely understandable given the state of science during the Renaissance and indeed persists in many  people’s distrust of conventional medical treatments even today.  Before the development of experimental science and the professionalization of the practice of medicine, a great many medical practitioners were out-and-out charlatans, and, for good reason, even the university men enjoyed little confidence from their patients.

     Doubting the spiritual benefits of pardons, relics, and pilgrimages, all practices sanctioned and encouraged by the church, might seem to make Heywood seem a partisan of the Reformation, did we not know that he clung to the Roman church when it became disadvantageous, even dangerous, to do so.  His interlude was written very close to the times that religious controversies led to the Schism of 1531 and Henry VIII’s foundation of the Church of England a few years later, so the issues were certainly part of public discourse, but his criticism of Catholic practices surely follows in the tradition of fundamentally orthodox reformers such as Chaucer, Dante, and Rabelais rather than of schismatics. 

     The peddler, asked to judge among the other three, notes that he himself is a skilled liar (one might think of the popular image of a used car salesman) and thereby something of an expert on deceit, so he asks the others to compete to see who might be judged the greatest liar.  Contemporaries accustomed to today’s onslaught of advertising claims will need no convincing that those in the retail trade are often accomplished at misrepresentation. 

      Yet another unrelated theme runs alongside the ridicule of religion and science.  The palmer, the pardoner, the peddler, and the apothecary are all mendacious, but they are also all  misogynists.  This commonality is unsurprising as denigrating women and limiting their power is surely the most widespread and enduring form of prejudice.  Since the Bronze Age, at any rate, women have been subordinated socially and, like other targets of discrimination, assigned characteristics that justify their oppression.  From Semonides in archaic Greece through Tertullian to Jean de Meun to Donne’s inability to imagine a woman both “true, and fair” and consistently in the centuries since, women have been subject to sexist slanders. 

     The first sustained reference to women in The Four PP occurs in the peddler’s introduction of himself as he lists his wares just as he would have done when approaching prospective customers.  His inventory is heavily slanted toward “women’ triflings” (219) such as “gloves, pins,combs . . . “

 

Pomanders, hooks, and laces knotted,

Brooches, rings, and all manner beads,

Lace, round and flat, for women’s heads,

Needles, thread, thimbles, shears, and all such knacks

                                                          (236-239)

 

The pardoner then refers to another female trait that remains today the theme of jocular criticism, the time spent in toilette and dressing.  This leads the apothecary to dilate on women’s “trimming and pinning up their gear” (266).  He notes that they have particular difficulty “fiddling with the tail-pin” (267), an anticipation of the apothecary’s ribald story, soon to come.  The peddler, anxious to make his pitch, says, “let women’s matters pass” (279), but the theme soon returns. 

     As the men set to arguing about who should have mastery, the peddler suggests that since “all three can lie as well/ As can the falsest devil in hell” (442-443), their leader should be the one who can tell the single biggest lie.  The peddler is competent to judge such a competition as he boasts “some skill” (446) in fraud.

     Each contestant then offers a sample of his self-praise, including a certain amount of scatological humor, first about the musty relics; one is a “buttock-bone of Pentecost” (521) while another “relic hath beshitten the roast” (523).  This vein intensifies and focuses on the female body in the apothecary’s tall tale about inserting an anal plug which the female patient expels with such force that it razes a castle ten miles away (710-767). 

     Not to be outdone, the pardoner responds with a story of his fetching a woman out of hell (776-976) to the great relief of the devils to whom she had been a constant trial.  They ask the pardoner to divert other such impossible creatures from their realm and “roar” with joy at her departure (964).  Women are such monsters, it seems, that even devils cannot bear their company. 

     After these flights of fancy, the palmer delivers the interlude’s punch line.  In the vast number of women whom he has encountered he has never, he maintains, met a single one “out of patience” (1004).  The four instantly agree that this is surely the greatest lie possible.  All find then that they are in complete agreement, and the losers are released from “their bond” (1134) in an act of masculine solidarity.

     Having reinforced received opinion in this way, the play turns to a pious conclusion (not sufficiently pious, however, to prevent some play with the word “virtue” [1182-1190]), ending in their embrace of “the Church Universal.” (1236)  Male chauvinism seems the vehicle for their unanimity even more than Jesus Christ.  Like locker-room vulgarity, attacks on women provide reassurance of male power as well as timeless humor, enjoyed by Henry VIII as well as by commoners.  The “war of the sexes” is in some ways perennial, but, because of the male domination of education and literature, only one side of the propaganda is preserved.   

 

 

Is Martin Chuzzlewit a “Great Bad Book”?

 

     Martin Chuzzlewit can look a bit imposing to a twenty-first century reader with nearly a thousand pages, but it is, after all, a Dickens novel with a solid plot, clear-cut morality, and characters with funny names like Mrs. Gamp (“Sairey”) and Chevy Slyme.  American readers have long been particularly interested in the episodes of the younger Martin’s experiences in the United States, which generated considerable controversy upon publication.  Though Dickens himself had said thought the book “in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories,” [1] not all readers since have agreed. 

     In fact many critics have complained about the looseness of the narrative structure and the chapters concerning America have attracted particular criticism.  Even many of those who appreciated the book consider it to lack sufficient formal organization.  George Gissing, who thought Chuzzlewit “in some respects, the greatest of [Dickens’] novels” nonetheless felt himself “lost” in its plot.  “Repeated readings avail not to fix in one’s mind as a sequence of events; we know the persons, we remember many a scene, but beyond that all is a vague reminiscence.”  Gissing wondered at the great author’s “inability” to build a stronger plot line and wished he had “but trusted to some lucid story, however slight.” [2]  To Leslie Fiedler it was “a great bad book” with an “involved and cumbersome” story-line. [3]  According to Robert Polhemus Chuzzlewit is a “hodge-podge,” lacking “wholeness and order.”  He quotes Barbara Hardy with approval when she finds in the book a “failure” with “disintegrated form.” [4]

     Many have found the American chapters an adventitious addition.  Not only did they offend American sensibilities; they seemed out of place on formal grounds to such an extent that at least two British reviewers at the time of the book’s publication called the American episodes an “excrescence.”  To a modern critic they were neither “preconceived nor even well conceived,” but rather seemed “to be a spontaneous and indiscriminate eruption of hatred against everything American that had been seething in him for some time.” [5]

     Two motives seem to have motivated what seems to some an artistic faux pas.  Dickens had just completed his first visit to the United States which he had undertaken in large part with the goal of gaining legal copyright protection for his writing.  Considering himself, very likely correctly, to be the biggest financial victim  of pirated editions, he had hoped to convince the American Congress to make a new copyright law to protect writers.  Having failed to bring about that change, he felt an animated anger against the young country which he expressed first in an open letter of protest, then in his American Notes in which the very faults dramatically highlighted in Martin Chuzzlewit are detailed: slavery, violence, extreme individualism, an exclusive focus on money, and, as the physical corollary of these distasteful traits, personal slovenliness and foul habits, foremost among them the spitting of tobacco. 

     Apart from his annoyance at failing in his legislative objective and his desire to set down his impressions of the rather raw new country, Dickens may have thought he could increase the sagging sales of the serial publication with scenes in the New World.  His sales were scarcely half (or less) what they had been for Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, and below of third of the sales for Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop. Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans had been very popular twelve years earlier, but, if he and his publisher had thought they could boost sales with this turn of the plot, they were mistaken.  Chapman & Sons was sufficiently displeased that they required him to repay money they had given him as an advance to be certain that their costs at least were covered. 

     Further, Martin Chuzzlewit seemed to many readers not only to lack the effervescent humor of some of his earlier work  but even, according to Polhemus, any sense of a “relatively optimistic vision.”  His comedy is hamstrung by his uncertainty about the “possibilities of human communion and the goodness of life.” [6]  The fact is that, apart from the feckless Tom Pinch, the eccentric Mark Tapley, the highly compromised Mr. Chuffey, and the incidental Mr. Bevan, there are few really admirable characters, and none with the warm-heartedness of his most beloved characters like Micawber or Joe Gargery.  The novel focuses on petty self-interest and Pecksniff is hardly the only character to exemplify the theme.  Ruth and John Westlock are decent people, though not extraordinary, and old Martin turns out (rather incredibly) to be well-meaning in the end.  Even the redoubtable Mrs. Gamp, who plays a considerable role in the book’s comedy, is an ambiguous figure, a heavy drinker who looks after her main chance. 

     The thinness of any sense of attractive human potential is what makes the book wearing for some readers who feel as though they are treading water in a sort of endless purgatory.  The best way to read the book is probably as it was written, in instalments with little concern for over-arching structure or a reassuring affirmation of our species.  If Martin Chuzzlewit lacks the dazzling image clusters of Bleak House and the satisfying overall form of David Copperfield, it has its own rewards.  Here his amusing eccentrics such as Mark Tapley, who seeks suffering to ennoble his jollity, and Mrs. Gamp, who never lacks a few pungent words of commentary, operate in a world defined by a fierce, almost Swiftian, denunciation of human character, allowing Dickens to avoid the mawkishness of which he was capable, but at the sacrifice of a milder warmth.  The reader would be well advised to drift with the plot, unconcerned about literary theory or rules of good practice.  Dickens was an entertainer and, even on an off night, he has first-rate material to offer.  Even if Martin Chuzzlewit is not a "great bad book," it is assuredly a "good bad book."

 

 

1.  Letter to John Forster of Nov 2, 1843.  Dickens went on to add “I feel my power now more than I ever did . . . I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had.” 

2.  Gissing, George, Charles Dickens, a critical study, 50-51.

3.  Fiedler likes to position himself as a contrarian.  In A Centre of excellence : essays presented to Seymour Betsky (ed. Robert Druce), Fiedler calls the plot “involved and cumbersome” and complains of the novel’s “unremitting bitter tone.”  He finds it “unpleasant,” “disgusting,” “mean,” and “without real tenderness or love.”

4.  Robert Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, 90. 

5.  The word appeared in both the Athenaeum and the North British Review.  See a fuller account in Jerome Meckier’s “Dickens and the Newspaper Conspiracy of 1842,” Dickens Quarterly, V:1 (March 988) and Sidney P. Moss, “The American Episode of ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’: The Culmination of Dickens' Quarrel with the American Press,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1983), pp. 223-243.

6.  Polhemus 90 

A Shelf of Imaginary Books

 

    My home having limited space, I have found it convenient to house a portion of my library within my mind.  The shelves there of imaginary books never need dusting, and their contents are besides all mine, as opposed to the clunky palpable volumes I must share with their authors, and even, in a way, with previous readers.  This single parentage leaves the unreal titles with a certain simplicity, but it lends them as well a kind of lightness due to their airy conception.  Should these titles evanesce tomorrow, they are easily replaceable by a functioning fancy, in which case yours will do as well as mine. 

     Though secondary sources for many of these authors are elusive, the reader might always find a good account in the literary history of St. John Landers-Hoopes (who never objected to the public addressing him by his school nickname “Skoochy”).  His compendious if dated survey The Long Landscape of Literature treats every author here mentioned, and a select few are discussed in the more familiar and impressionistic essays of his Languors in the Library.

     On the shelf’s left side, claiming chronological precedence, is a collection of Old English poetry, including the “Song of the Swab” (“in scudding storms I swept the decks”) and the devotional “Mariner Christ” (“o steer, my son, by highest star”) as well as a fragment of The Battle of Buldkippen (“then came skirmish and slash, spar and set-to”).  Awash in sibilant alliteration, the browser will turn with relief to gossipy revelations of Beowulf’s character flaws in “Unferths Giedd.”

     The Middle English section includes the rollicking mystery plays treating The Likerish King Solomon and Noah Atþe Tauerne once performed as part of the observance of Corpus Christi by the people of Pucklechurch in South Gloucestershire.  Of interest to students of intellectual history is Gregory Grosseteste’s De philosophia mundi and his Tractatus Concerning the Revision of Ptolemy’s Geography based on Arabic sources and bound with his equally erroneous works on optics, algebra, and bee-keeping. 

     Next is a fat volume from the towering figure of the later medieval period Laurence Lemman including his Bouquet of Lovers’ Laments, recounting Biblical and Classical tales, replete with pathos and love-longing, and the dream allegory The Battle Between the Scorpions and the Nightingales which allegorically represents factions in the court of Richard II, the movements of the planets in the night sky, and a soap opera-like love triangle.  On a lighter theme Lemman also retold fabliaux such as the “Tale of Priscilla’s Handy-Man” and “Thieving Tom Scores Again.”      

     A charming if more obscure work possesses the space next to Lemman’s fat volume: the graceful tail-rhyme romance of “The Knight of the Dolorous Tooth.”  Likewise anonymous and inspired by similarly unmerited suffering, The Narrative of the Life of St Swithun details the bishop’s mortification by providential bunions while making his diocesan rounds.  Not included in the saint’s hagiography are two songs discovered in the faintest notation In the margin of his copy of St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: “Herkne to mine wonges wan” and “Bryng vs in an ocean of ale,” the latter sung yet today at the High Table of Oxford.

     The shelf’s Elizabethan section incudes Devereux Cholmondeley’s sonnet sequence Frumentum and Solitia, the delightful Latin lyric “Thōmâs, Thōmâs, filius tibicine,” and a selection of his drama containing the comic Never Too Much, a tragedy relating The Lamentable Reign of King Ooboo, and the unclassifiable Seasonable as Snow in Summer.  (Regrettably, none of these plays has ever been brought to the stage, and the only historical records of their author concern his numerous prosecutions for debt and disorderly conduct.)

     There follows a slim but complete book of the poems of the seventeenth century Cavalier Sir John Cribbage, known for such delicate and melodious lyrics as “Snipping the Tulips of Youth,” “A Meeting with the Milkmaid of Devon,” and “The Rose that is Most Ravishing.”  His more spiritual poems include “Sunk in a Cesspool of Sin” and one written in a more passionately mystical moment, “Licking the Wounds of my Lord” of which Buxtehude made a moving chorale.

     There follows a volume of essays by Denis Mowbray first published in the periodical Chit-Chat under the name Scriptor Stultus.  The author, descended from six generations of younger sons and finding himself on Grub Street, wrote such familiar favorites as “The Cavalier Who Could Not Ride,” “Boiled Beef and Grey Peas,” and “A Late Stroll on Pall Mall.”  These appear in an edition along with a selection of pieces by his colleague Timothy Toff using the name Jackanapes, including “Dozing on Chevy Chase,” “Advice Better Given Than Taken,” and “The Most Picturesque Beggar in Covent Garden.”

     With the arrival of neo-Classicism and the reign of heroic couplets came Jonas Dryasdust, writer of the literary satire Doctor Asinus and his Disciples, the philosophical musings of The Nature of Things, as well as such brief occasional pieces as “Mrs. Lovejoy’s Nosegay” and “On Tossing a Bone to Flora’s Fido.”  His essay “On the Poet’s Profession” stresses his concern with craft: “just as a fool may be shown to advantage, with sufficient polish even the dullest of sententiae can be brought to sparkle anew.”  

     Oliver Wickham, “the melodious finch of Staffordshire,” was an early suicide, but first composed a revealing allegory, The Palace of Indulgence, the topographical survey “The Potteries,” and short pieces such as “A Lofty View of Stoke-on-Trent” and “An Ode on Desuetude.”

    Toward the eighteenth century’s end came the chilling mysteries of Mrs. Cudworthy’s Lost in Italian Mists and The Jesuitical Pirate, as well as several anonymous novels from the Athena Press: The Convent Ruins and Cries from the Old Castle.

     The Collected Poetry of Miles Warnham marks a turn in poetic taste.  Warnham is remembered for such favorites as his “Expostulation to a Clod,” “A Distant View of Lincoln Minster,” and “On Peckishness.”  He boldly announced his dissent from the prevailing style with the influential preface “The Harp with Fancy Freed,” which advocated “uplifting the mundane with a steam-engine’s afflatus.”  Later, in less energetic terms, Warnham described the process as “tossing upon my subject a water-color wash of tastefully dilute genius.”

     For much of the nineteenth century, the influential poet laureate Lord Timothy Wiggins enjoyed a popularity (now long vanished) based on early lyrics that appeared in Posies, an Annual such as “Robin Hood’s Gambit” and “The Nasturtiums Speak.”  His metrical retelling of the life of Henry VIII, The Giant of England’s Destiny, which suppresses all but the first of the monarch’s marriages, has likewise aged poorly.  His poems celebrating the queen and her relatives and their many birthdays have yet to inspire even a dissertation.    

     Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, one finds the works of the notorious Geoffrey Greville, better known by his nom de plume Sylvester Sybaris, including the scandalous novels Ganymede in Soho and Lost in Lethe as well as his little chapbook, a pamphlet really, Lavender Lyrics, the composition of which exhausted the author so that he was obliged to spend the year 1897 receiving visitors from a bed trimmed in peacock feathers.

     The collector of imaginary books has little taste for the present, so the last book, were it real, would have been published slightly over a hundred years ago: T. L. Cosgrove’s dark Modernist epic, The Cursed City (“the dark, dank nectar of the gutter/ has dripped upon my spats”).

     Perhaps one day one of the works from this shelf will be committed to paper, but not by me.  These days, it is all I can do of a summer afternoon to recline on my sofa, having selected a volume from the conceptual shelf for review.  My book will have the advantage of weightlessness, which facilitates reading supine and, when I do not fall into a doze, I find myself lifted into the aether by the author’s precious turns of phrase and profound insights.  I almost hear the snorts of Pegasus sounding rather hexametric.  Like dreams, however, these impressions are composed of gossamer and are all but instantly blown away by the breeze of time.  The remainder of one’s memories, knowledge, and taste, of course, last only a short while longer, but we each have a turn at playing the part of homo ludens and we can rejoice that among our toys are marvelous words and curious books, almost aglow, prickly with palpable meaning.

Every Reader’s Dryden

 

This is the seventeenth in the Every Reader’s Poets series, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In these I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.  For a complete list, see section 5G of the Index which is always posted among the current month’s essays in the archive on the right of the page. 

 

 

     John Dryden dominated the literary scene of his day.  He was the first poet laureate officially named by the crown (in spite of his youthful adherence to Cromwell’s Protectorate) and he, along with Pope, somewhat later, exemplified the era’s neo-Classical taste.  Like Shakespeare he had a financial interest in a theater, the King’s Company, for which he agreed to produce three plays a year, and he supported himself for decades with income from the stage, composing twenty-nine plays, both comedies and tragedies, once popular, but rarely performed today.  His theatrical reputation  is not aided by the fact that he took it upon himself to improve a number of Shakespeare’s plays. 

     He wrote important critical works such as An Essay of Dramatick Poesy and The Art of Satire as well as doing significant work in translation, producing versions of Vergil, Persius, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Homer that were widely read and praised.

      Though  he once magisterially dictated taste, as literary standards evolved the appeal  of his own poetry diminished considerably.  A couple of generations after his death, Samuel Johnson, an excellent critic, anticipated many readers since when he found Dryden “not often pathetick,” with little skill in “exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart,” a poet more “of strong reason than quick sensibility.”  This impression has since strengthened, magnified by the Romantic prejudices many literati retain that view his sensibility as lacking in passion, and his style as pedantic and artificial. 

     In addition, the intellectual controversies, political and artistic, that excited his day now arouse only antiquarian interest, and many of his strongest works are long polemical poems that today require a quantity of footnotes intolerable for impatient twenty-first century readers.  The satires for which he is best-known represent a genre almost altogether absent in today’s poetry.

     When Dryden was writing, readers relished lengthy symbolic exercises in wit, even when these were composed in poetry, fueling constant sallies back and forth between controversialists with every exchange sold to the public in what are called “pamphlet wars.”  The topics might be political, theological, or  aesthetic.  Late seventeenth century authors could depend on the common reader’s familiarity with Classical literature, since Greek and Latin were fundamental to the educational system until quite recently.  Most of today’s readers know little either of Dryden’s topical interests or his Classical lore.

     Though the passing of centuries and the variation in taste may have made some of Dryden’s poetry an acquired taste, his masterful skill can still impress and even amuse a modern reader.  One piece that requires no annotation is a passage from Dryden’s translation of Book IV of Lucretius dealing with sexual positions, often reprinted under the title “The Posture.” 

 

Of like importance is the posture too,

In which the genial feat of Love we do:

For as the females of the four foot kind,

Receive the leapings of their Males behind;

So the good Wives, with loins uplifted high,

And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try:

For in that posture will they best conceive:

Not when supinely laid they frisk and heave;

For active motions only break the blow,

And more of Strumpets than of Wives they show;

When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow.

Endearments eager, and too brisk a bound,

Throws off the Plow-share from the furrow’d ground.

But common Harlots in conjunction heave,

Because ’tis less their business to conceive

Than to delight, and to provoke the deed;

A trick which honest Wives but little need.

 

     The notion of Dryden as Dryasdust is hardly compatible with this bit of advice in spite of its Latin source.  Lucretius maintains that making love face to face is typical of “Strumpets,” as it is said to be less likely to lead to conception than when women “Receive the leapings of their Males behind,” making this the appropriate position for married couples.  The putative interest in family planning covers an explicitly lubricious tone (“leapings,” “frisk and heave,” “mingled liquors”) as the artfully turned couplets tumble one after another toward the passage’s conclusion.  Its wit does not suffer from the fact that the reader may well think that even “honest Wives” may wish to employ “delight,” for their own sake as well as for their mates. 

     The background rhythm of iambic pentameter allows subtle variations to contribute significant sound effects.  For instance, the extra syllable in “genial” sounds like a grace note celebrating the joys of the bed.  The extra foot in “And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try” recalls in sonic cadence the physical movements of love-making.  (The device occurs again a few lines later in “When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow, where again the prolongation is palpable.)

     Absalom and Achitophel, a satire of over a thousand lines, is a prominent example of Dryden’s topical work, today much praised by specialists and little scanned by anyone else.  Readers wishing to understand the poem today must not only be more familiar than most moderns with the story from Samuel II of Absalom’s ill-considered rebellion against David, but also with the details of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-1681 when some parliamentarians sought to exclude Charles II’s brother James from succession because of his Roman Catholicism.  The bills failed and James took the throne only to be deposed (after suspending Parliament and ruling for three years by decree) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 

    Understanding Dryden’s own politics is complicated by the fact that, when the Protectorate was in the ascendance, he worked for Cromwell’s government (as Milton and Marvell did) and wrote “Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell” in the praise of its leader in which he depicted the overthrow of Charles I as the founding of a new and better age.  Yet after the Restoration he scrambled to praise Charles II with equal enthusiasm. 

     Perhaps he was primarily a defender of the status quo. In one passage from Absalom and Achitophel he argues that any socio-political change will be for the worse, and therefore defends reaction as a general principle. 

 

If they may Give and Take when e'r they please,

Not Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)

But Government it self at length must fall

To Natures state; where all have Right to all.

Yet, grant our Lords the People Kings can make,

What Prudent men a setled Throne would shake?

For whatsoe'r their Sufferings were before,

That Change they Covet makes them suffer more.

All other Errors but disturb a State,

But Innovation is the Blow of Fate.

If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,

To Patch the Flows, and Buttress up the Wall,

Thus far 'tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:

For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.

To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,

Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue:

At once Divine and Humane Laws controul;

And mend the Parts by ruine of the Whole.

The Tampering World is subject to this Curse,

To Physick their Disease into a worse.

 

     Thus, while no moralistic pedant, he was definitely conservative politically.  One must imagine a vision of an ignorant mob behind the “they” of the first line of this passage describing those who wish to arbitrarily alter the order of things, though in doing so they are very nearly blasphemous (as the king is the “image” of Godhead).  Radicals are, like Lucifer, rebels against both “Divine and Humane Laws.”   For some this preference for avoiding change is an adequate explanation of his shifting loyalties, and the fear of disorder conveniently conflates with a writer’s appeals for the patronage of the powerful.  The image of reformers as quack doctors who increase rather than relieve suffering must have had resonance for seventeenth century patients.

     A passage from the mock-heroic epic Mac Flecknoe exemplifies Dryden’s vituperative polemical style.  The entire work is devoted to ridiculing Thomas Shadwell, a rival playwright and political opponent whom Dryden considers the Emperor of “all the realms of Non-sense.”   The tone of the work is suggested by the fact that Dryden, by suppressing Shadwell’s name and writing instead “Sh----,” a convention that allows the reader to take the word to be shit as in “But loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.”  In the following passage Dryden describes the devolution of drama since Elizabethan times, paralleled by the decline in a neighborhood which once included defensive fortifications implying an age of heroism, but which has since become a red-light district.  “Augusta” in  the first line is simply a name for London.  

 

Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind,

(The fair Augusta much to fears inclin’d)

An ancient fabrick, rais’d t’inform the sight,

There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight:

A watch Tower once; but now, so fate ordains,

Of all the pile an empty name remains.

From its old Ruins Brothel-houses rise,

Scenes of lewd loves, and of polluted joys.

Where their vast Courts, the Mother-Strumpets keep,

And, undisturb’d by Watch, in silence sleep.

Near these a Nursery erects its head,

Where queens are form’d, and future heroes bred;

Where unfledg’d actors learn to laugh and cry,

Where infant punks their tender voices try,

And little Maximins the gods defy.

Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here,

Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear;

But gentle Simkin just reception finds

Amidst this Monument of vanisht minds:

Pure Clinches, the suburbian Muse affords;

And Panton waging harmless war with words.

Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known,

Ambitiously design’d his Sh—–‘s throne.

 

     In this scene the urban decay is apparent in the “Ruins” of old buildings, moral decline in the proliferation of prostitution, and aesthetic weakness in the popularity of clownish characters like Simkin and Panton.  The scene is for Dryden a “Monument of vanish’d minds.” 

     A song from one of Dryden’s plays provides relief from the rolling pentameters of the preceding three poems.   This piece from Marriage à la Mode was popular enough to have been included in the 1673 book Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce, so we can imagine people singing it at home after hearing it in the theater.

 

I

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now,

When passion is decayed?

We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,

Till our love was loved out in us both;

But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:

’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

 

II

If I have pleasures for a friend,

And further love in store,

What wrong has he, whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,

Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

 

     The Puritans had closed the theaters in 1642 and, in reaction, when drama returned in 1660 following Charles II’s taking the throne, the stage, only just free from several decades of prohibition, filled with libertines and loose women.  Reminiscent of the sophisticated hedonism of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and familiar enough in an age when some espouse polyamory, this song must have offered audiences the thrill of transgression in the late seventeenth century. 

     Perhaps Dryden might object that this selection has leaned on his slightly improper poems.  If so, the intention  has simply been to challenge his reputation as dull and to make him accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work or with the period.  It is not, however, altogether inaccurate. Pepys, after all, hardly a prude himself, objected to Dryden’s play An Evening’s Love as “too smutty.”  Dryden was one of the last who could write of most any topic in verse with a poised and witty tone, constructing elaborate  rhetorical periods well-shaped and balanced, juggling abstractions often, it seems, simply for the fun of it.  At the same time in his own way he assumed the laureateship quite seriously, speaking for the nation in celebrations of royalty in poems like Britannia Rediviva and Threnodia Augustalis. 

     Like his contemporary Milton, Dryden does not enjoy the favor of modern taste.  This may be all the more reason that the reader may find in him something unexpected and once again new.  His craftsmanship and ingenuity remain exemplary in an age when the sound of poetry is largely neglected and rhetoric, long the heart of literary theory, has acquired a bad name.  Dryden’s mastery of the poetic line is evident throughout his work.  His poetry as well as his plays are at their best when read aloud. 

Rereading the Classics [Rochester]

I quote from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth ( New Haven: Yale, 1968). Vieth modernizes spelling and punctuation for reasons that to me are unconvincing but that pose no problems for the understanding of the texts.


     The work of James Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, is perhaps less well-known than his reputation. This is unsurprising for an individual for whom, as for Wilde, life was itself a work of art. In his own day, while his poetry was highly regarded, his behavior attracted even more attention. He was on the one hand an exemplary wit whose company, even in his youth, delighted Charles II and those about him with his ability to extemporaneously compose ironic comment on courtly life even as it unfolded. At the same time, even in the licentious context of Restoration mores, he was considered a notorious rakehell who engaged in scandalous and riotous behavior time and again. A confessed libertine and likely atheist who experienced an apparent deathbed conversion, he was posthumously again an exemplary figure, though of an altogether different sort than he had been at the outset of his brief and spectacular career.
     In spite of the occasional character of much of his verse and the fact that it was circulated largely in manuscript, he was highly regarded in his own day. Marvell according to Aubrey “was wont to call him the best English satyrist,” and, though they later fell out [1], Dryden dedicated Marriage à l la Mode to Rochester in the most fulsome terms, referring to himself as the nobler man’s “slave” and thanking him for assistance in the play’s composition, suggesting further that Rochester could far outdo him in playwriting. Dryden describes himself as “of an inferior wit and quality to you” and lauds “the excellency of your natural parts.”
     Dr. Johnson in the following century is torn between acknowledging the excellence of his writing and denouncing the immorality – worse, the blasphemy – of his views. Though his writing displays “genius” and “splendor,” according to Johnson, he was led by “dissolute and vitious company” into corruption and depravity. Constrained by these extra-literary considerations, Johnson balances his every comment. Rochester, he says, had “an active and inquisitive mind” and had a reputation as “the greatest scholar of all the nobility,” but only when he was not in the throes of one of “his paroxysms of intemperance.” His writing Johnson finds “smooth and easy,” exhibiting “sprightliness and vigour” though his achievement is circumscribed by his “ostentatious contempt of regularity.” “In all his works, Johnson concludes, “may be found tokens of a mind, which study might have carried to excellence.” [2]
     The same tokens of ambivalence persist in the rhetoric of Hazlitt’s discussion of Rochester whose work he characterizes as “the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness.” Finding in the poet “passionate enthusiasm” and even a sort of “sublimity,” he attributes this afflatus to the “extravagant heedless levity” reflecting a “contempt for everything that others respect.” Hazlitt does allow that “his epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written” and, in the wary tones of one risking approval of a monster, allows that “his poem upon Nothing is itself no trifling work.” [3]
     It is worth noting, perhaps, that, though we may have shed much of the prescriptive morality and insistent orthodoxy that was meaningful to Dr. Johnson, even a twenty-first century judge is likely to find Rochester a bit of a rotter. We can perhaps accept his advocacy of free love, but we are likely to grimace when he goes on to encourage incest and confess rape. The question of whether he was being candid or merely provocative is fortunately irrelevant as the issue of whether Rochester was a good man is entirely separate from that of his value as a writer.
     He compels our attention because, apart from composing the most scabrous poems of his era, he wrote epigrams as good as Jonson’s, songs as light as Herrick’s, philosophical and satirical poems to rival Swift or Pope, and a few love elegies as tender as Cowley or Donne as well.
     The issue of obscenity might well be treated first with the intention that it detract as little as possible from other inquiries. Rochester had a double motive for his vernacular and explicit sexual themes. First, to him the imperatives of eros were so powerful that he felt compelled to use the strongest possible language to accurately portray his experience. Equally significant was the use of transgressive language to strike a generally counter-cultural stance, odd though the term may seem when describing a courtier enjoying the confidence of the crown. Breaking with the conventions of his day not in morality alone, but also in philosophy and religion, Rochester found the aggressive language of obscenity a powerful signifier of his dissent.
     Still, the reader of his most infamous composition Sodom is likely to find it tiresome once past the amusement of noting which vulgar terms have survived the centuries and which have vanished entirely has subsided. The best one can say of Sodom is that it is less obsessive than de Sade and less mechanical than Aretino. Turns of wit here and there keep the reader going, but it is not surprising that the play has only been performed only a very few times. [4]
     The “Song” beginning “My dear mistress has a heart” is an early piece, melodious enough for a musical setting with a texture of complaint and paradox familiar from many courtly love poems. The poet is the mistress’ slave, his love-service captured through her eyes, yet she remains in the verse’s alternately extreme and tender language “wild, and apt to wander.” Fearing separation, which apparently has not even occurred, he appreciates his own love-intoxication the more, feeling “melting joys,” and “killing pleasures, wounding blisses.” His compliments are grandly hyperbolic: angels listen when she speaks,” and she is “all mankind’s wonder.” Only in the quiet violence of the language – words like “wild,” “killing,” and “wounding” are used – does Rochester betray the intensity of his passion.
     A number of other songs combine courtly elements with their antithesis, a deflating comic physicality bearing hints of vulnerability, mortality, and despair. The fact that pastoral heroines were rural does not lessen the surprise of an opening line like “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay.” More shockingly, while pastourelles sometimes described what looks very much like rape, the treatment was typically aestheticized, artificial, and muted. Rochester is willfully outlandish. Roused to “rescue your bosom pig from fate” at the Freudian entrance to Flora’s cave, Chloris is graphically taken: “Now piercéd is her virgin zone.” Unsatisfied with this lurid account, the poet pushes his possibilities. Chloris wakes to find that her rape was a dream. Aroused, she masturbates and at the end with “her own thumb between her legs,/ She’s innocent and pleased.” Lying among the grunting animals, she finds that sexual satisfaction has restored a sort of Edenic purity and joy. Rochester has shamelessly repackaged sexual assault as a female fantasy. If we are disturbed, we are likely responding as the author wished.
     The poet excelled in epigrammatic improvisations, virtually all of which are sharply satiric .[5] He ridicules the translators of the Psalms in “Spoken Extempore to a Country Clerk after Having Hears Him Sing Psalms,” Louis XIV in “Impromptu on Louis XIV,” Charles’s mistresses in “On Cary Frazier,” and “On Mrs. Willis,” and the king himself in the “Impromptu on Charles II” that says the king “never said a foolish thing,/ Nor ever did a wise one.” Often by implication, and explicitly in “Rochester Extempore,” he includes himself as a target, declaring himself a “rascal.”
     Among the best of Rochester’s longer satirical pieces is “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” a location which, the poet says, while St. James “has the honor on’t,” “tis consecrate to prick and cunt.” The landscape is dream-like: “rows of mandrakes tall did rise,/ Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.” As though in a seventies bathhouse, he describes dark figures representing all levels of society passing intent on sexual encounters. Suddenly he sees his beloved Corinna cruising, receptive to the advances of three men at once. Claiming that he is indifferent to her seeking sexual pleasure but only disapproves of her becoming “a passive pot for men to spend in” and wishes she would seek out a worthier replacement for him. He concludes by cursing her in words of disgusted vituperation: “May stinking vapors choke your womb.”
     “Tunbridge Wells” is equally fierce and more universal in its indictment finding of man that “in all his shapes he is ridiculous” with our vaunted reason in fact “humanity’s worst disease.” In contrast the author’s horse “doing things fit for his nature,/ Did seem to me by far the wiser creature.” Among his other longer comic pieces “Signior Dildo” is outstanding for its sustained wit, developing one variation after another of the ladies’ affection for the eponymous object.
     “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” was probably Rochester’s most widely circulated poem during his lifetime and it has maintained its prominence perhaps because of its weight and wit, but its ambitious and provocative title is sufficiently intriguing to attract attention. As the skill of manipulating symbols is the definitive characteristic of humanity the poem promises to condemn itself doubly. A man attacking mankind, using reasons to condemn reason promises to be an ingenious paradox, if nothing else, though wit and not logic is the real attraction. After parenthetically identifying himself as “one of those strange, prodigious creatures, man,” he supports both adjectives by saying he would prefer to be anything but a man. It is certainly odd to reject oneself, yet the very seriousness, the honesty, even, of the impulse is an impressive assumption of responsibility, even noble.
     In heroic couplets, carved as though of stone, yet sounding like the table talk of a raconteur, Rochester places himself squarely among the skeptics by describing reason as an illusion, in one of the poem’s memorable metaphors, an “ignis fatuus” of the mind. This false light leads the persona through “error’s fenny bogs” only to come at last to the indeterminacy of “doubt’s boundless sea” where he paddles about until defeated by mortality, finally realizing that “all his life he has been in the wrong,” and that “his wisdom did his happiness destroy.” “Wit” (meaning not cleverness but ratiocination) turns out to have been a mere “frivolous pretence.”
     Should a stern superego, with “some formal band and beard,” scold him with pious commonplaces, arguing that man’s reason is evidence of divinity, giving “the world true grounds of hope and fear,” Rochester responds that it is specifically this delusion that he “despise[s],” , that “each heavy sot can pierce/ The limits of the boundless universe.” Though one would expect Rochester the skeptic to be very close to cynicism, he makes Diogenes the image of a fool, taking to his tub and to asceticism. The only person who would spend his time in thought must surely be he who has “nought to do.”
     In fact the sole use of thought is to determine action, and “our sphere of action is life’s happiness,/ And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an ass.” On the other hand, reason employed to make choices based on sense impressions is useful, “right reason.” Humankind, however, remains for him detestable, far less efficient than beasts at knowing and attaining their proper ends. Humans are perverse, vicious for no good reason, excelling only at “wantonness.”
     The evils of people arise out of their fear and confusion, a thought in curious harmony with Buddhist ethics, though Rochester goes on to declare that, in this moral wasteland, one has no choice but to be unscrupulous. “Men must be knaves, ‘tis in their own defence;” therefore, life amounts to a grand competition to be “the greatest knave.”
     The poem concludes with a final turn of wit. There is unlikely to be a single exception to the rule that people act out of fear and ignorance. Every individual in court is jostling for personal advantage, and every churchman a hypocrite. Should there, however, be such a prodigy as an honest man, it would be the exception that proves the rule, demonstrating only that “man differs more from man, than man from beast.”
     Even more metaphysically daring, “Upon Nothing” [6] begins with familiar notions but builds into a grand contemplation of its extraordinary subject, interrogating every duality in the height of the empyrean before returning to the phenomenal world in a satiric conclusion. The triplets of the verse generally present a problem in the first two lines, resolved in the third, while the consistent rhyme in each stanza reinforces the sense of order, of something within nothing.
     The opening stanza names the topic and implies the motive for the inquiry by noting that only nothing is “not afraid” of mortality. The next triplet paraphrases the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, saying “all proceeded from a great united What.” His customary ambivalence toward the world of lived experience is evident in his rather Gnostic reference to matter as “the wicked’st offspring of thy race.” He suggests that in the mystery of nothingness “the truth in private lies.” People are “blind” before the “great Negative.”
     Here he engages the heart of duality.


Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate,
And True or False, the subject of debate,
That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state—


     In his third line, as though triggered by the word debate (and Rochester did take part in debates in the House of Lords), his philosophic superstructure gives way and, from questioning the nature of reality, he satisfies himself with the simpler task of making fun of Parliament. This social critique then expands to cover governments and nobility more generally and to touch on a series of national stereotypes before equating gratitude, kings’ promises, and whores’ vows all as equally empty. [7] It is as though the text dramatically enacts before the reader’s eyes the dizzying unsustainable heights of skepticism only to take refuge the easier targets available on every side in a fallen world.
     “The Mistress” strikes me as wholly earnest, a love poem to set beside Propertius and Tibullus, suggesting no shock but rather tender, attached, slightly melancholy reflection. The opening indicates the equally irresistible power of love and the passage of time.


An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter’s day,
Where life and love with envious haste
Are torn and snatched away


     The joys of his mistress are clearly ambivalent: his soul is “the living tomb” of love, “lovesick,” he feels her “wounding eyes.” He and she “sigh and lament, com plain and grieve.” Their passion is invested in “fantastic fancies,” and “frail joys;” he is in a sense dead, “:no more a soul, but shade.” The conclusion is one of these “fancies,” as the poet hopes for an affection “fixed and dear” “to make us blest at last.” To him his agony is nothing but “love raised to an extreme.” He hopes yet to be “blest at last,” to experience a felicity which can only arrive with love, but which seems always in practice elusive.
     The hedonist Rochester, in search of the highest pleasure, the perfect orgasm, the most ravishing beauty, writes most commonly of imperfect love. He can imagine in “The Fall” a prelapsarian sexual paradise free of frustration, but he cannot find it. Wishing always to “raise pleasure to the top” (“To a Lady in a Letter”), he writes of impotence (“The Imperfect Enjoyment”),near-impotence (“A Satyr on Charles II”), and voyeurism (“The Disabled Debauchee”). Even successful completion of a sexual act can bring only indifference in its train (“The Platonic Lady”). Several poems suggest a homosexual preference (“Upon His Drinking a Bowl”) or that the persona would prefer alcoholic intoxication to sex (Song “How happy, Chloris, were they free”).
     The slide into disgust with sexuality and the body that has appeared already in “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay” and “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” is reinforced by numerous other negative archetypes of the feminine such as the superannuated slut with “old blear eyes” in “Timon” and Mrs. Willis (“On Mrs. Willis”) whose “belly is a bag of turds,/ And her cunt a common shore,” yet “ballocks” make men her slaves. Only Swift, whose poetic line was sometimes similar, was equally receptive to the flesh and horrified by it.
     Thus for Rochester wit becomes a fall-back position. If humans find themselves in an intolerable existential void, they are able yet to generate sparks of wit containing sufficient bright genius to maintain balance while illuminating the tragedy of life. The suddenness and surprise of wit exercises to the full humankind’s prodigious cognitive powers (which Rochester finds more often a handicap than an advantage), flinging a sort of desperate joy in the face of circumstance.
     Perhaps the most poignant expression of his undying desire to seize a beautiful moment from the passing parade of vanities is the lyric “Love and Life.” After noting that one possesses neither the past nor the future, and that even the present flows rapidly by, he takes refuge in the sincerest love, committing that moment to his beloved. “Talk not of inconstancy,/ False hearts, and broken vows,” he says, since “all that heaven allows” is “this livelong minute,” but that can itself be “a miracle.” Rochester’s oeuvre is centered on his path through the absurd spectacles her saw all about him, beckoned always onward by that vision of paradise promised by the notoriously transitory bliss of sexual pleasure.



1. Indeed, their hostility reached such a point that Rochester seems to have been guilty of arranging with thugs to waylay and beat Dryden.

2. Lives of the English Poets.

3. In Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, “On Dryden and Pope.”

4. Some dispute the authorship of the play. It was performed in 1986 at Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1999 by the Dysfunctional Theatre Company in New York, and 2011 by the Movement Theatre Company for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Portions are performed in the 2004 movie The Libertine.

5. “To My More Than Meritorious Wife” is an exception. The abandoned libertine seems to have been a devoted husband at the same time.

6. Cf. William IX’s poem on nothing in which unreturned love is the decentering energy.

7. The reader will be reminded of Donne’s Song “Goe and catch a falling star.”

Annual Report

The following is a routine composed for a Council of (Poetic) Experimentation event marking the centenary year of the birth of William Burroughs and scheduled close to the seventeenth anniversary of his death. CO(P)E has proven the most productive venue of cutting-edge performance in this region, staging new as well as older avant-garde work thanks to the work of Steve Roe, Dan Andreana, Al Margolis, Kevin Geraghty, and Detta Andreana.


     I am pleased to address the members of the board of directors, our corporate executives, and even you small fry shareholders and hangers-on, and to announce to you another banner year for the Amalgamated Consolidated Holding Company, the ever-swelling big daddy of the NYSE, compared to which yesterday’s multinationals are mere pikers. Our prodigious growth has been continuous since we decided to cut out the middle term in merchandising. Why sell people a product promising pleasure when we might instead market pleasure itself? We realized that the Christers had been making millions for millennia with a simple verbal promise of eternal bliss marketed with just enough mumbo-jumbo to hook the chumps. What would the profit be for the provider that could actually deliver bliss metered and invoiced? Advertisers had used hit-and-miss psychology crap – we went straight to the far more dependable biology.
     A bit of history may be useful for new employees. We proceeded from the historic experiments of Olds and Milner which established the territory of the pleasure center in the hitherto untracked regions of the nucleus accumbens. Inspired by the image of their rats frantically pressing the neural reward bar Delgado, Heath and others then extended that work to human subjects. Using prisoners at first, they moved fearlessly into new frontiers, the ventral pallidum and the orbitofrontal cortex, leading to the culminating stage of science, the very jewel of civilization and crown of creation: the hugely profit-making corporation. Our patented process implants neural electrodes into customers adjudged Class B material by our underwriters who have discovered either approved credit lines or exploitable productive capacity and then who then provide first-rate medical supervision for our clients’ twilight years.
     Many Class Bs, of course, proved weak-minded, “auto-culls” we call them. Having thought they could joy-pop along for a spell, just taking a week-end zap or two and maybe an extra when feeling low, but before long they were stretched out in one of our hostels, paying hotel rates for a shelf in a room with thousands of their fellows, catheterized, with IVs and bags of various organic fluids, both intake and outgo, hanging all over the place. The minimum wage workers we hire, those, that is, from Class D, without sufficient economic resources to be our customers become our agents in what is popularly called The House of the Lame-os, but unfortunately they can’t possibly cope. The more enterprising, dubbing themselves “forty-niners,” specialize in digging out gold dental work, for they know we can’t be bothered about such petty pilferage. Eventually they wheel the corpses to the back wall where the stench never stops. But we need to keep a heartbeat going until the assets and credit are maxed out.
     We have overcome the looming problem of a labor shortage for the production of our own commodities. After years of research by our own Dr. Ungeheuer we developed the precise balance of positive and negative stimulation needed to maintain a functioning production worker. This proprietary algorithm for managing Class C individuals is presently our most valuable intellectual asset. A stream of stimuli, mixing shocks of pain with waves of bliss will keep the subject functioning for a sixteen-hour workday. At a stroke we have eliminated much of the unnecessary cost of labor. Our industrial employees need no clothing or home. Seated on a chamber pot, they are nourished by a wholesome vegan diet administered with computer-controlled technology purchased from the foie gras folks.
     We do face challenges in the coming fiscal year. They are pesky bands of hooligans throwing monkey wrenches in sectors 19 and 24, pestilence has swept sectors 9 through 12 to the extent that their territory must be quarantined from all decent society, and the vicious and godless Chinese conglomerate is expected next to turn against us, having already transformed the U.K. into an island of their own drones following the karmically inevitable second Opium War in which daily doses of the drug were forced into every Briton until they capitulated begging for more. We shall rise to meet these difficulties as we have done in the past, using any means necessary to accomplish our mission, for we are the defenders of civilization. You may rest assured that, were Jesus, the real Jesus, not a turn-your-cheek namby-pamby, alive today, he would be a shareholder, a major shareholder, I have no doubt.
     And now, I see the hors d’oeuvres are coming – I invite you all to enjoy your dinners, in the confident knowledge that these luxurious dishes are an alchemical transmutation, compounded of the blood, sweat, and tears of our natural inferiors according to God’s holy plan. Our success is the proof that Providence stands with us in the tireless pursuit of profit.