Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Byron’s Women
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://alexanderlarman.com/
CITY: Sussex
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2014146849
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Larman, Alexander, 1981-
Associated country:
Great Britain
Associated place: London (England) Oxford (England)
Birth date: 1981
Field of activity: Literature Arts English literature
Affiliation: University of Oxford
Found in: Blazing star, 2014: title page (Alexander Larman) back flap
of jacket (Alex Larman has written extensively about
literature and the arts for publications including the
Guardian, New Statesman, The Spectator, the Daily
telegraph, the Erotic Review and the Observer, and has
written a radio play, Jack and Archie, about the
relationship between C.S. Lewis and John Betjeman.
Blazing Star is his first book. He was born in 1981 and
was educated at Winchester and Oxford, where he read
English and graduated with a First. He lives in London
with his fiancée Nancy, and can be followed on twitter
@alexlarman)
Associated language:
eng
================================================================================
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PERSONAL
Born 1981; married; wife’s name Nancy; children: Rose.
EDUCATION:Winchester University; Oxford University (literature arts English literature), graduated with a First.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian and journalist.
WRITINGS
Contributor of essays about literature and the arts for various publications, including Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator, Daily Telegraph, Five Dials, Times Literary Supplement, Erotic Review, and Observer; wrote the radio play, Jack and Archie. Writes about restaurants and hotels for Arbuturian, Resident, Quintessentially Insider, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Edited and ghostwrote various titles, including the memoir Richard [Whiteley] by Kathryn Apanowicz and the bestselling memoir Dandy in the Underworld by Sebastian Horsley.
SIDELIGHTS
British historian and journalist Alexander Larman writes historical books and biographies. He has written about literature and the arts for such publications as the Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator, and Daily Telegraph and reviews for restaurants and luxury hotels for the Resident, Quintessentially Insider, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Larman also edited and ghostwrote various titles, including the memoir Richard [Whiteley] by Kathryn Apanowicz, and the bestselling memoir Dandy in the Underworld by Sebastian Horsley.
Blazing Star
In 2014 Larman published Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), an account of the short but outrageous life of a poet and rogue called “the wickedest man alive” and English history’s first celebrity. Because Rochester’s father served Charles II in exile, the king granted him and his young son latitude in the court after the Restoration. Rochester attended Oxford University at age twelve, slept with his first prostitute at age thirteen, was an alcoholic at fourteen, was imprisoned in the Tower at eighteen, and died of syphilis at thirty-three. “Larman does sense the depths in Rochester’s libertinism but is right to worry that he has not revealed them. His journalistic style, unpompous and eagerly communicative, has its virtues but the commonsensical assertions too often seem like simplifications,” according to London Evening Standard reviewer John Mullan.
In an interview with Alicia Pollett online at Corner, Larman explained why he enjoys writing nonfiction: “Fact is stranger than fiction, and a good deal more fun to write. Some of the more outrageous details would probably have been rejected by a publisher on the grounds of incredulity. I also think that nonfiction is often more interesting and exciting than fiction.” Philip Hensher noted in Spectator that Larman committed errors in knowledge about Rochester’s reputation, admitting: “Rochester is of great interest, but it would be good to see him reexamined by a more alert and experienced writer.”
Byron's Women
Larman followed up with the 2016 Byron’s Women. The work profiles nine women in the orbit of romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), including his mother, his sister, his wife, and his daughters. His mother Catherine was widowed early; he slept with his own half-sister Augusta, which produced daughter Elizabeth Medora Leigh; he raped and sodomized his wife Annabella; and he slept with his friend Shelley’s wife Mary, who avoided him from then on and invented science fiction with her book Frankenstein.
Called “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” by one of his many lovers, Caroline Lamb, Byron was notorious for his behavior, which included lovers of both sexes. In this captivating biographical history, “Larman has created a well-researched, fascinating look at Byron’s life and times,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly, who added that learning about Byron’s life makes the reader realize he could not have been anything but the rogue he was.
Restoration
Larman’s 2016 Restoration: The Year of the Great Fire examines politics, sexuality, religion, and everyday life of Restoration England. Focusing on the people of the times, Larman presents an England recovering after the joyless years of Cromwell’s Protectorate, the end of the plague, and naval defeat by the Dutch, until the Great Fire of 1666 reduced London to ashes and changed the city and England forever. He explores the England of Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, John Dryden, Thomas Hobbes, and the young Isaac Newton, with Charles II as king. In short chapters, Larman addresses the court, religion, science, disease, entertainment, fashion and taste, crime, and international relations.
Writing in Spectator, reviewer Marcus Nevitt took issue with some of Larman’s historical claims concerning the plague, prostitution, women’s fashion, and Pepys’ extramarital activities. Nevitt observed: “The absence of footnotes and endnotes in Larman’s book, and its very slender bibliography, invite scepticism about the claims he makes. The breeziness of Larman’s prose means that some of those claims are unhelpful or misleading.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
London Evening Standard (London, England), July 24, 2014, John Mullan, review of Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, p. 38.
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of Byron’s Women, p. 66.
Spectator (London, England), June 28, 2014, Philip Hensher, review of Blazing Star, p. 36; September 3, 2016, Marcus Nevitt, review of Restoration: The Year of the Great Fire, p. 38.
ONLINE
Alexander Larman Website, http://alexanderlarman.com (July 9, 2018).
Corner, http://www.cornermag.com/ (June 26, 2014), Alicia Pollett, author interview.
Alexander Larman read English at Oxford and graduated with a First. He writes regularly about literature and the arts for publications including The Guardian, TLS, New Statesman, Spectator, Telegraph, Five Dials, the Erotic Review and the Observer. He also reviews restaurants and hotels for luxury titles such as The Arbuturian, The Resident, Quintessentially Insider and Mr and Mrs Smith.
He has worked on editing and ghostwriting various titles in the past, including Kathryn Apanowicz’s memoir of Richard Whiteley, Richard by Kathryn, and the late Sebastian Horsley’s bestselling memoir Dandy in the Underworld, which led Horsley to comment ‘There is nobody in London more capable of genius – or a flop – than Alexander Larman.’ He also contributed a selection of profiles of iconoclastic and notable figures including Quentin Crisp, Morrissey and Ayrton Senna to the designer and presenter Patrick Grant’s first book, Original Man, and a chapter of counterfactual political history to Iain Dale’s forthcoming book Prime Minister Corbyn.
His first book, Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, for which he was awarded an Elizabeth Longford grant by the Society of Authors, is published by Head of Zeus, and his second, Restoration, a social history of the year 1666, was published in April 2016. His third, Byron’s Women, came out in September 2016.
He lives in Sussex with his wife Nancy and daughter Rose.
Copywriting
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I pride myself on offering a friendly, courteous and efficient service for my clients, at competitive rates, and am willing to consider jobs of any size, from coming up with a catchy slogan for a company to working on full-scale publications. Please email me for requests and details.
FAQs
Who are you?
Good question. I can point you in the direction of the ‘About Me’ section, which answers the basic questions, such as who I write for, where I was educated, what books I’ve written and so forth. Thereafter, we get into the realms of the philosophical, and I’m not too sure we need to go there.
How did you begin writing?
I’ve always loved it. At school the only subject that I was ever really any good at was English, because it allowed an outlet for an expression that just didn’t get an airing in, say, Chemistry. So I spent all my time specialising on that, which started to bear fruit at A-level.
How did your career start?
University was a very important time, because I got involved in student journalism as well as doing my degree, editing various arts sections of papers and magazines, and I loved all that as well. I had lots of fun meeting and interviewing people I admired – everyone from Bill Nighy to Julian Fellowes – and thought that it was something I could hopefully make a living from. So when I left in 2005, I did various internships at places like the Observer and the New Statesman and generally made a nuisance of myself at publications that I liked until they commissioned articles from me. Then I went to work at Conde Nast in 2006 at GQ Online on a maternity contract, and it all started from there. I worked in journalism for about 6 years full time, and then decided that I’d rather write books and work as a freelancer.
Why did you choose to write about Rochester for your first book?
I got very interested in him when I was about 21, because he seemed to be this odd mixture of entirely contemporary and very much of his time. On the one hand, you’ve got poems of his like ‘Timon’, which could have been written by Philip Larkin, and on the other you’ve got ‘A Satire Against Reason And Mankind’, which is his masterpieces and is probably the best satirical account of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the court of Charles II. But he also led a fascinating life – he served his country with honour at sea, abducted an heiress, impersonated an Italian quack doctor, was involved in all manner of sexual, political and literary skulduggery, and was a brilliant writer. And all this before dying of syphilis at 33. I always wanted to read a really good book about his life, and waited…and then waited a bit more. And then thought that I was probably about as well placed as anyone else to give it a go, and so emerged Blazing Star, which you can buy here, and judge for yourselves.
And for your second?
It made sense to revisit the historical side of the Restoration at much greater length and in finer detail, and so Restoration was my attempt to write a social history. It seems incredible that a single year would begin with the end of the Plague and finish with London burning to ashes, but that was the case, to say nothing of a messy and embarrassing naval conflict, scandal, mass bloodshed for regicides and sexual misbehaviour. It would have been a good time to live – but only for the Restoration equivalent of the 1%. Anyway, judge for yourselves here.
What about book three?
Lord Byron, from the perspective of the nine key women in his life. Thus, Byron’s Women. To call him ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ is probably an understatement. I wanted to write a feminist account of the emotional (and possibly physical) damage that he caused them, but also to explore the psyche and outlook of a remarkable series of people.
What’s next?
I’d like to write about Peter O’Toole, who I think is a much-misunderstood and remarkable figure. In fact, I gave an interview to the Guardian about my plans for the book, which can be read here. And I’m planning to co-write a book about rakes, which should be both thrilling and revelatory.
What else do you do apart from write about literature?
I’ve had a fairly eclectic career. I’ve written quite a lot about food and drink, partly because I enjoy them and also because I find the British renaissance of both almost ridiculously exciting. It’s amazing to think how much better pubs and restaurants are now than even 20 years ago, because people care a lot more and are better informed about how they ought to spend their money. I’ve also done a lot of copywriting, most recently for the TV company Freesat, but my career has encompassed everything from working as a quizmaster for a Dutch media company to working in a couple of start-ups dealing with everything from property to cultural trends, and recently I’ve started doing obituaries for The Times. You can see some of my critical and feature writing here.
Will you come and talk about your book to my school/book group/university/literary symposium?
Probably. Depends where it is, and when, but I enjoy talking with people about what I’ve written and am always up for a good chat.
Will you speak at our literary festival?
Again, probably. Please contact my excellent agent Andrew Lownie in both cases for details.
Will you come and do a book signing at my shop?
I refer you to the earlier answers.
Alexander Larman Biography
Alexander Larman is an author and journalist. After studying English at Oxford, from where he graduated with a First, he began a career that included work on titles such as the Observer, New Statesman and GQ, before he made the leap to being a full-time writer in 2012. Since then, he has published three books to date. His debut, Blazing Star, a biography of the decadent poet and courtier Lord Rochester, was published in 2014, to critical acclaim. It was followed by Restoration, a social and narrative history of the year 1666, and Byron’s Women, an ‘anti-biography’ of the famous poet that focused on nine of the key women in his life. Both of the latter books were released in 2016.
As a contributor, editor and ghostwriter, Alexander has worked on a variety of publications, some governed by stricter NDAs than others. Those that he can discuss publicly include Francis I: Maker of Modern France (Leonie Frieda, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), Prime Minister Corbyn (ed Iain Dale and Duncan Brack, Biteback, 2016), Original Man (ed Patrick Grant, Gestalten, 2014), Dandy In The Underworld (Sebastian Horsley, Sceptre, 2007) and Richard by Kathyn (Kathryn Apanowicz, Virgin 2007).
As a freelance journalist, Alexander has written for a wide range of publications including the TLS, Telegraph, History Today, BBC History Magazine, The Spectator and The Amorist. He regularly reviews books for The Observer and is a freelance obituarist for The Times.
Alexander regularly appears at a variety of literary festivals and public events, most recently at the National Portrait Gallery to discuss Byron. He lives in Sussex with his wife Nancy and daughter Rose.
How I Found the Agency
After I felt that I had reached the end of the road with a former agent, a mutual friend introduced me to Andrew with the promise that ‘there’s nothing better than an agent who writes as well, because he can offer you the sort of in-depth advice and feedback that publishers can’t – or won’t – give you these days.’ His suggestion has proved an invaluable one. Andrew’s patience, good humour, carefully considered advice and unrivalled knowledge of all aspects of the publishing trade have been very useful from a career perspective, and make him an agent that one is delighted to work alongside.
ALEXANDER LARMAN is a historian and journalist. He is the author of Blazing Star (2014), the life of Lord Rochester, and writes for the Observer, the Telegraph>/i> and the Guardian, as well as the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement.
Reason And Mankind: Author Alexander Larman On The Original Libertine, Lord Rochester
Alicia Pollett on June 26, 2014
Lord Rochester’s licentious ways and reputation for debauchery spawned gossip in the court of Charles II, a raft of imitators – and even a film starring Johnny Depp. Corner catches up with Alexander Larman as he launches Blazing Star, a compelling new book on the life of the wicked lord which casts the protagonist in a thrilling new light…
Your first book, Blazing Star, is about the libertine poet Lord Rochester. What made you want to write a biography of him?
I first became interested in Rochester when I was reading English at university. He seemed to be a middle ground between two of my favourite poets, Donne and Larkin – albeit with a good deal more swearing and sex. And then I found out some more about his life, and it threw up all these amazing stories – for instance he was a war hero in his teens, after he’d been imprisoned in the Tower for trying to abduct the woman who eventually became his wife. And so I discovered that there was a good deal more to him than just being a ‘smutty poet’. I wanted to read a really captivating, popular biography of Rochester, and none appeared, and so about three years ago I thought I’d have a crack myself. Blazing Star is the result.
Did you find out any particularly shocking or amazing stories while doing your research?
Not really – most of the especially ‘shocking’ things Rochester did are a matter of record already. In fact, I was more interested in disproving many of the more scurrilous stories about him. But then fact and fiction have always been closely interlinked when it comes to Rochester – for instance, we’re still not entirely sure which poems attributed to him were actually written by him. We’ve got a canon of about 60-70, and then there are still a couple of dozen of uncertain origin. I was a bit disappointed to find out that one of my favourites, ‘Regime de Vivre’, almost certainly isn’t by him – but I included it in the book anyway so people can make up their minds.
Have you always been interested in the period?
Yes, I think that the Restoration is one of the most overlooked parts of English history. Most people thinking about it believe that it comes down to dandies poncing about in big wigs and the Great Fire, but it’s so much more than that. It was a time of enormous social and religious upheaval, after the uncertainties of the Civil War and the all too certain views of Cromwell and the Commonwealth, and Rochester epitomised the age. My second book’s actually a social history of 1666, and hopefully will focus on what everyday life was like that turbulent year.
What were the challenges that you faced writing the book?
As I mentioned before, Rochester’s a difficult man to pin down, because there’s enormous doubt about many of the aspects of both the life and the poetry. He was a controversial character in his day, and has remained so since, and so it was necessary to make lots of editorial decisions in attributing things to him – or deciding not to. Plus of course writing a 100,000 word book is always a challenge of sorts, although it was a huge amount of fun – much more so than I was expecting!
Do you think that there are any present-day incarnations of Rochester?
Johnny Depp played him in the film of his life, The Libertine, a few years ago, and although I don’t like the film very much, he’s a pretty decent representation. If we’re looking for younger people who epitomise some of the spirit of Rochester, then Russell Brand is an obvious comparison – he’s witty, opinionated, distrustful of politicians and always in trouble with the establishment. If we were looking for an actor to play Rochester in a new film, then I think Tom Hardy would do a magnificent job.
Where did you get the idea for the title from?
It’s actually an extract from one of his poems, ‘A Very Heroical Epistle In Answer To Ephelia’. The full quotation is ‘No glorious thing was ever made to stay/My Blazing-Star but visits, and away’. It’s got an especially nice resonance because when Rochester first arrived at court in December 1664, a comet was seen overhead, which was believed to be an omen. Like many a rock star since, he lived fast, in a blaze of glory, and died far too young at 33.
Why did you decide to start writing non-fiction rather than fiction?
It wasn’t a conscious choice – in fact, I even toyed with the idea of writing a fictionalised account of Rochester’s life. But fact is stranger than fiction, and a good deal more fun to write. Some of the more outrageous details would probably have been rejected by a publisher on the grounds of incredulity. I also think that non-fiction is often more interesting and exciting than fiction – it takes real skill to go inside a historical or social period and make it come alive again, although of course someone like William Boyd does a brilliant job of that in his novels.
What writers have inspired you?
Too many to list, but any biographer has to acknowledge Peter Ackroyd’s enormous influence on the field, along with Claire Tomalin and Fiona McCarthy. I’ve also enjoyed Ian Kelly’s offbeat biographies of Casanova and Samuel Foote, and there are some superb young historians writing today, such as Dan Jones and Ben Wilson.
You also work as a journalist and book critic. Do you find that this has informed your work or do you keep the two sides separate?
I hope that my experience as a journalist has helped me to keep my writing as concise and interesting as possible, and to remember that nobody needs to read your stuff – the trick is to keep it compelling and lively from the first word to the last. As for reviewing books, thankfully most of the ones I’ve written about have been of a very high standard indeed.
Are you working on any future books at the moment?
I’m just in the process of editing my book about the year 1666 in England at the moment, for publication next autumn. And I’ve got a really nice idea for the book after that as well, so I’m hoping that I can start work on that later in the year.
What’s the best thing that you’ve read recently?
The outstanding series I’ve read in recent years is Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, which ought to be given to anyone who wants to write prose, whether fiction or non-fiction. Otherwise, there’s so much good writing out there that it’s unfair to start selecting specific examples, though I’m looking forward to Dan’s forthcoming book about the Wars of the Roses.
And the worst?
I’m allergic to Philip Hensher. Anything he writes sends me to sleep straight away. He’s the epitome of the bien-pensant metropolitan who writes turgid, overwrought and wildly overlong novels.
What would your advice be to any would-be biographers?
Have an opinion on your subject before you start, but don’t be afraid to change it as you go along. I probably liked Rochester a good deal more when I finished the book than when I started it, and I hope that my approach to him is a sufficiently compassionate and open-minded one, without seeking to whitewash the more unsavoury sides of his character. But he was a man of his time, illuminating it in miniature, and it would be wrong to try and dismiss his enormous cultural and social influence, then and now.
Byron's Women
Publishers Weekly. 265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p66.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Byron's Women
Alexander Larman. Head of Zeus, $35 (416p)
ISBN 978-1-78408-202-4
In this captivating biographical history, Larman (Restoration: The Year of the Great Fire) investigates nine women entangled with the brooding, handsome Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Noted for his words and notorious for his behavior, Byron loved many, both men and women. The author begins with the poet's mother, Catherine, who was married and widowed young by Byron's profligate, gambling father. He then profiles several of Byron's lovers, including Claire Clairmont, Teresa Guiccioli, Caroline Lamb, and Mary Shelley, as well as Byron's daughters, Ada Lovelace, by his wife, Annabella (whom he raped upon marrying), and Elizabeth Medora Leigh, infamously by his half-sister Augusta. Larman chose to focus on these women, he tells the reader, in part because they had to deal with one another, and those dealings elicited both allegiance and enmity. Each is a fascinating figure deserving of her own biography; Ada, for instance, became a pioneer in the early development of computers and in the sciences. Caroline Lamb called Byron, "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know," and reading these pages brings home this truth. Yet learning about Byron's milieu causes the reader to wonder how he could have been otherwise. Larman has created a well-researched, fascinating look at Byron's life and times. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Byron's Women." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357557/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b5e3eefc. Accessed 31 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357557
A rake's progress: Philip Hensher on the scandalous 17th-century courtier whose hellfire reputation has overshadowed his fine satirical poetry
Philip Hensher
Spectator. 325.9696 (June 28, 2014): p36+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
by Alexander Larman
Head of Zeus, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 352, ISBN 9781781851098 Spectator Bookshop, 20 [pounds sterling]
Despite being an earl, Rochester is very nearly a major poet. His poems and letters were torn up by a zealous mother after his death, bent on destroying anything obscene or scandalous. A good deal was lost, but a lot was passed from hand to hand, copied and recopied (it was never printed in Rochester's lifetime). His full development as a poet cannot be traced, but some of what survives is tantalisingly rich, and has fascinated many subsequent writers.
He is one of those rare poets who come to mean much more to later generations. 'Upon Nothing' bears a bleak relationship to the end of Pope's 'Dunciad', and, very powerfully, to Hardy's poem on the sinking of the Titanic, 'The Convergence of the Twain'. The despairing lines from 'A Satire against Reason and Mankind' were much quoted by Tennyson, and had a definite influence on 'In Memoriam':
... make him understand
After a search so painful, and so long
That all his life he has been in the wrong.
Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies
Who was so proud, so witty and so wise.
'Huddled' is one of those specific, painfully physical but transfiguring words, full of emotion. Henry James borrowed it when Mrs Wix and Maisie visit Clara Matilda's 'little huddled grave' in What Maisie Knew.
There is, too, the obscene poetry, which refuses to be put aside as unworthy or undignified. Rochester's reputation meant that any old filth was regularly ascribed to him after his death. When looking at the false Rochester ascriptions, it doesn't take long to see that the wit, variety and disgust of his genuine poems were unique. The court play Sodom is a good example; gleefully obscene, with characters called Buggeranthus and Fuckadilla, it grows tedious after 30 lines, and most of it couldn't be by Rochester. His authentic voice is sprightly, lewd and weirdly visionary. The long poem 'A Ramble in St James's Park' views the elegant landscape in terms of the licentious behaviour seen there at night:
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming
earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother's face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine ...
Such poems can always surprise, as in the light-hearted turn at the end of 'Love a woman? Y'are an ass!', when the 'sweet soft page of mine/does the trick worth forty wenches'. Rochester's best poem may be 'The Imperfect Enjoyment', a curious sort of companion piece to Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', in which premature ejaculation is followed by impotence, with a long and wonderfully inventive passage of flyting, insulting his own penis--'What oyster-cinder-beggar-common-whore/Didst thou e'er fail in thy life before?'
His most surprising may be the undeniably disgusting 'Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay', where romantic dreams come down to this: 'In dreams raised by her murmuring pigs/ And her own thumb between her legs/She's innocent and pleased.' The tone of visionary strangeness and disgust is entirely characteristic, and obscene--a quality not incompatible with artistic invention--rather than pornographic--which must always remain conventional.
Rochester has not lacked for biographers. After reading any of them, one concludes that one would certainly not have liked him as a person. His father was of great service to Charles II in exile, and for that reason the son was granted much licence at court after the Restoration. He was banished a couple of times for overstepping the mark in dramatic fashion--abducting an heiress, handing to the King himself an obscene assault on him, and smashing up a priceless glass astronomical instrument when drunk.
Evidently, he was amusing and fast on his feet, and liked playing cruel practical jokes, once going into hiding under the disguise of an Italian physician. His long-suffering wife and his mother tried their best to salvage his reputation after his death, with only partial success; many tales were told subsequently of his hellfire reputation, and even of a upposed deathbed recantation, at the age of 33.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The rest of it is drunkenness, beating up the poor, raping lower-class girls and running away when his best friend got a knife in his side, which one finds amusing or not as the case may be. The one interesting feature about Rochester's personality was his intellectual curiosity, which took surprising forms. When about to fight in a sea battle, he made his friends promise that if any of them were killed, they would return as ghosts and report on life after death.
I don't think we really need bother with Alexander Larman's addition to the previous Rochester biographies. It isn't well written, which is a disadvantage if your subject himself is such an elegant writer. Italy is 'the country that had produced Machiavelli, Caravaggio and the Borgias'. We hear about 'the wheel of fortune' and of Fate; and the word 'coruscating' is used for 'excoriating'.
Satire is a very intricate genre, with many carefully distinguished sub-genres. Larman makes complete hay of it. Careful analysis distinguishes between satire and flyting, parody and pastiche, burlesque (high figures in low discourse) and mock-heroic (vice-versa) and many other sub-divisions. When Larman refers to 'The Disabled Debauchee' having a 'parody of the form of the heroic stanza', one needs to ask how this 'parody' differs from a heroic stanza. Can one parody a form at all? Or does he mean the standard mock-heroic use of a high form for low material, in which case 'parody' isn't the word? It may seem a small distinction, but satire, after all, is Larman's subject, and he ought to have it clear in his mind.
There is, too, a problem with his larger knowledge, and even very well-known writers get garbled in the retelling. A low point is this, about Rochester's reputation in the 18th century:
Pope's poem 'On Silence' is a clear homage to
'Upon Nothing', and his late poem 'The Imitations
of Horace' alludes to Rochester, indicating
that the latter's poetry grew on him
throughout his life.
It is hard to beat this for misapprehension and error. 'On Silence' is not just a homage to Rochester, but a declared pastiche of him, in a sequence of pastiches of Chaucer, Spenser and other classic English poets. 'The Imitations of Horace' are a loose collection of free translations rather than a poem. The Rochester referred to in the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot' that prefaces the 'Imitations' is not the earl but Pope's friend Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester, as 'Mitred Rochester' indicates. There might be suggestions in the brilliantly obscene 'Sober Advice from Horace' and the despairingly destructive last page of 'The Dunciad' that the Earl of Rochester was on Pope's mind, but these apparently remain unknown to Larman.
It is unusual to see books published these days that contain much in the way of readings of classic authors. Rochester is of great interest, but it would be good to see him re-examined by a more alert and experienced writer.
Hensher, Philip
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hensher, Philip. "A rake's progress: Philip Hensher on the scandalous 17th-century courtier whose hellfire reputation has overshadowed his fine satirical poetry." Spectator, 28 June 2014, p. 36+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A373476900/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=69780935. Accessed 31 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A373476900
In an ocean of Elizabeths
Terry Eagleton
London Review of Books. 36.20 (Oct. 23, 2014): p29+.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eagleton, Terry. "In an ocean of Elizabeths." London Review of Books, 23 Oct. 2014, p. 29+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A390911345/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3549cd3. Accessed 31 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A390911345
One scorching summer long ago
Marcus Nevitt
Spectator. 332.9810 (Sept. 3, 2016): p38+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
1666: Plague, War and Hellfire
by Rebecca Rideal
John Murray, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 352
Restoration: The Year of the Great Fire
by Alexander Larman
Head of Zeus, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 285
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It was the brightest of futures; it was the End of Days. Three hundred and fifty years before Brexit, England experienced a series of epochal events which forced subjects to rethink their relationships with each other, their political leaders and their European neighbours. In the space of a tumultuous 12 months England endured the devastation of plague, the most humiliating of naval defeats at the hands of the Dutch, and the catastrophe of a Great Fire which transformed its capital city forever. Where there was a commonly held view, espoused by humble parish clerks and vociferous dissenters like George Fox alike, that the cataclysms revealed God's wrathful judgment upon a sinful nation, there were others who saw in catastrophe an opportunity to build afresh: Andrew Marvell repurposed satire in his 'Advice to a Painter' poems; Christopher Wren reimagined the very basis of London itself.
Rebecca Rideal and Alexander Larman both offer accessible and entertaining commemorations of this historical moment in their new books. While their accounts have many affinities--chiefly a narrative emphasis on individual historical characters--they frame the central event of the Great Fire in different ways. Rideal offers a chronological survey, beginning with the explosion of a ship forebodingly called The London in the Thames estuary in March 1665, before moving through a series of historical snapshots: the onset of plague and the exodus of about 30,000 people from the capital in July 1665; the Second Anglo-Dutch war and the Dutch naval victory in the Four Days' Fight in June 1666; the start of the Great Fire in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane in September 1666.
Larman covers much the same ground but arranges his material into short chapters on the court, religion, science, disease, entertainment, fashion and taste, crime and international relations as a means of taking the temperature of London before it burst into flames in 1666.
Both authors share a keen eye for engaging anecdote and historical personality. Larman reminds us that Pepys was particularly keen to salvage his parmesan cheese as the flames burned on 4 September (parmesan, as a luxury commodity, was then well worth saving). He examines Restoration sexual mores with a thumbnail sketch of the brothel-keeper, prostitute and entrepreneur Damaris Page, so successful at meeting the needs of London's seamen that she became the subject of several Grub Street pamphlets.
Rideal, likewise, enlivens her description of the religious paranoia engulfing London after the Great Fire with a grim anecdote about an anonymous Frenchwoman in Moorfields who had her breasts cut off after the chickens she was carrying under her apron were mistaken for fireballs. (Foreign nationals living in the capital were at risk from mob violence in the immediate aftermath of the fire because of rumours that the French or the Dutch had deliberately started the blaze to destabilise the regime.)
For all such narrative colour, however, readers hoping to encounter a radical reassessment of the events of 1666 in these books will be disappointed: despite the xenophobia and religious intolerance, the fire was started accidentally; it was stoked by a very hot summer, timber building materials and some ineptitude on the part of Sir Thomas Bludworth, Lord Mayor of London; casualty numbers were, officially, astonishingly low, at six or eight people, but are impossible to fix with certainty given the fire's likely destruction of the evidence.
There is nothing here to disturb the authoritative accounts of these events offered by Adrian Tinniswood's By Permission of Heaven (2004), Stephen Porter's The Great Fire of London (1996) or Walter George Bell's magisterial diptych The Great Fire of London (1920) and The Great Plague of London (1924). Rideal uses her sources carefully, always citing the latest research and providing footnotes for all citations and statistics. She has a lengthy persuasive note, for example, on the epidemiology of 17th-century plague, discounting recent suggestions that it was Ebola, anthrax, typhus or an extinct disease in favour of the mainstream view that it was 'a virulent strain of bubonic plague with rat fleas as the primary vector'. By contrast, the absence of footnotes and endnotes in Larman's book, and its very slender bibliography, invite scepticism about the claims he makes.
The breeziness of Larman's prose means that some of those claims are unhelpful or misleading. Hull is described as the 'northeastern neighbour' of Liverpool, which is almost as absurd now as it was before the advent of the M62. 'Other than drama,' Larman contends, 'the most common form of entertainment in 1666 was prostitution.' This is a silly assertion to make about a deeply religious society like early modern England, of course. But it's particularly problematic when we recall that Pepys, lover of all things extramarital, never once retained the services of a prostitute, according to his diary, even if he enjoyed watching and flirting with the sex workers of Fleet Alley. A similar problem occurs where Larman uses a civil-war source--Henry Peacham's The Art of Living in London (1642)--to describe women's fashions in post-Restoration London, which is a bit like trying to capture contemporary sartorial trends by consulting a heritage issue of Marie Claire.
Given the climactic nature of 1666 as a year in which London was reduced to ashes, re-planned and reborn, both books might have done more to nuance an outdated image of Charles II as a 'merry monarch', swiving his way around his kingdom as his libido dictated. The king was, for all his prodigious sexual appetite, keenly involved in the grand building plans for post-fire London and had been a fan of Christopher Wren's architectural ideas long before he appointed him surveyor of the king's works in 1669. Even though Wren's grand plans for a new London were not adopted due to financial constraints, the king's interest in the capital's religious and civic architecture helped redefine the tense relationships between city, church and crown in this most fascinating of periods.
Among many exhibitions marking the 350th anniversary are To Fetch out the Fire at the Royal College of Physicians (until 16 December) and Fire! Fire! at the Museum of London until April 2017.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Nevitt, Marcus. "One scorching summer long ago." Spectator, 3 Sept. 2016, p. 38+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A462228741/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9db39ca2. Accessed 31 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462228741
A libertine with learning
The London Evening Standard (London, England). (July 24, 2014): News: p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Evening Standard Limited
http://www.standard.co.uk/
Full Text:
Byline: JOHN MULLAN
BLAZING STAR: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER by Alexander Larman (Head of Zeus, PS25) THREE-QUARTERS of the way through his biography of the aristocratic poet and notorious rake John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Alexander Larman pauses to wonder whether his poetry is any good. He finds it easy to list his faults but harder to explain why, in an age when a gentleman was expected to scribble verses, Rochester "stands poles apart from his contemporaries". (The cliche is unfortunately characteristic of Larman's style.) It is a perilous moment of self-doubt, for Larman has been trying jolly hard to tell us why we should still relish the literary output of this dedicated debauchee, who died of syphilis at the age of only 31. It is as if he fears, with some reason, that he has not quite managed it.
In his own short lifetime Rochester was infamous for his wantonness and admired for his wit. His father Henry Wilmot had been Charles II's companion in his hair's-breadth escape to France after defeat by Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester. After his Restoration to the throne in 1660, Charles looked kindly on his old comrade's brilliant son, inviting him into a court where hedonism prevailed and the only sin was dullness.
Rochester cavorted with the mob of gentlemen, enjoyed affairs with ladies at court and leading actresses (Nell Gwynn probably left his bed for the King's), and whored and drank and sometime fought. In between, including on visits to his stoical wife in Oxfordshire, he wrote poems.
Life and art were not separate. Rochester's libertinism shaped his poetry, which was circulated in manuscript to select readers (he would never do anything as vulgar as print it). His lyrical poems are often spoken by an arch-seducer. His satires are sexually candid and sometimes obscene. They mock piety and challenge morality. Yet his sexiness is not sexist: women in his poems are equal partners, as intelligent and as pleasure-loving as the amorous poet. (Oddly, Larman omits even to mention the brilliant Letter from Artemiza, written in the voice of a sophisticated woman.) Rochester's libertinism was intellectual as well as sexual, leading him to doubt every moral certainty. He even doubted his own code of pleasure. Larman squeezes the short lyrics for autobiographical content without quite realising that the accomplished sensualist is fending off nothingness. "Then bring my bath, and strew my bed, / As each kind night returns: / I'll change a mistress till I'm dead, / And fate change me to worms." The easy sensuality of the aristocratic lover (with servants to wash him and to throw sweet herbs on his clean sheets) turns to something unsettling with that double use of "change": the same word for promiscuity and for death. The hedonism is almost desperate.
Even the obscenity that once made his poetry a clandestine pleasure can have a profundity that his fellow rakehell versifiers never touched. A poem about premature ejaculation, The Imperfect Enjoyment, can combine fury at the unpredictability of desire with St Augustine's excoriation of sexuality (if a virtuous man cannot control his erections, sex must be sinful). It can include some of the most disgusted lines in English literature (unquotable here) with wittily memorable ones (his disappointed mistress cries, "All this to love, and rapture's due/ Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"). It is cheering to see an avowedly populist book about a writer too often confined to the seminar room.
Larman does sense the depths in Rochester's libertinism but is right to worry that he has not revealed them. His journalistic style, unpompous and eagerly communicative, has its virtues but the commonsensical assertions too often seem like simplifications. Rochester dealt in uncommon sense and gave English literature its first taste of eloquent nihilism. When Larman misdescribes his hilarious yet frightening poem Upon Nothing as "portentous" you know that he has not looked the bad Earl in his eye.
CAPTION(S):
Infamous for his wantonness and admired for his wit: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, painted by an unknown artist
JOHN MULLAN
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A libertine with learning." London Evening Standard [London, England], 24 July 2014, p. 38. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A375936607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=25f251bc. Accessed 31 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A375936607
Blazing Star: The Life & Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester by Alexander Larman, review: 'wallows in cliché'
The stormy life story of a Restoration rake deserves a better telling than this
1 out of 5 stars
Circulated at court in manuscript, Lord Rochester's poetry was unpublished during his lifetime
Circulated at court in manuscript, Lord Rochester's poetry was unpublished during his lifetime Photo: Moviestore Collection/REX
By Lewis Jones
7:00AM BST 23 Jul 2014
A biographer could hardly wish for a more lively subject than John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Courtier, wit and war hero, libertine and drunkard – one binge lasted five years – he was the archetype of the Restoration rake. Charles II doted on him, initially out of gratitude to his father, who had been his companion in exile and whom he had created an earl, and later as a friend, forgiving him quite serious offences, such as smashing up a treasured glass sundial.
Rochester was also, of course, a highly accomplished poet, whether of extempore squibs (“God bless our good and gracious King, / Whose promise none relies on; / Who never said a foolish thing, / Nor ever did a wise one”), or tender, weirdly obscene lyrics (“Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay”), or philosophical, fantastically obscene satires (“A Ramble in St James’s Park”). A Hobbesian atheist in his heyday, he is best known for a bleak couplet from “A Satire against Reason and Mankind”: “Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, / Who was so proud, so witty and so wise.”
Circulated at court in manuscript, his poetry was unpublished during his lifetime, and thanks to its obscenity a good deal of it remained so until quite recently. Much of it was lost. As he lay dying of syphilis in 1680, aged 33, Rochester repented of his many sins – thereby ensuring his posthumous career as an evangelical poster boy – and, according to an attendant priest, ordered “all his profane and lewd Writings… and all his obscene and filthy Pictures, to be burned”. And because of his fame – he was the model for the heroes of plays by George Etherege and Thomas Shadwell – all sorts of filthy rubbish by other writers was attributed to him.
READ: The 20 books they tried to ban
Still, nearly 80 of his poems survive. They were admired by Marvell and Voltaire, and also by Dryden – at least until he was beaten up in an alley by bravos supposedly hired by Rochester (his new biographer argues that the real culprit was the king’s mistress Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth). In the 18th century he fell out of fashion – Dr Johnson objected to his “gross sensuality” – and he was naturally depreciated by the Victorians, and later by F R Leavis.
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Rochester’s reputation was revived by Ezra Pound and Graham Greene, among others. In 1994 the Royal Court Theatre staged The Libertine, a play about him by Stephen Jeffreys, and 10 years later Laurence Dunmore made a film of it, with John Malkovich as Charles II, Johnny Depp as Rochester, and Johnny Vegas as his friend Lord Sackville. Alexander Larman takes this as his starting point, which is fair enough, but he goes on to be rude about it, which is quite uncalled for, in my view, as I remember it as excellent. Then he compares Rochester to Russell Brand, which is just silly.
Larman’s book is inevitably informative, but not always reliable, and he is too excited by the naughtiness of his subject. He tends to combine the pseudo-judicious formulas of academic writing (“It is impossible to say… but it is unlikely that… It is probable, however…”) with a queasy prurience. When the young Wilmot begins to learn Latin, for instance, Larman looks forward to the influence on him of such authors as Catullus, while conceding, “It is likely that an innocent seven-year-old boy was not exposed to the bawdier side of the ancients’ more scatological sallies…” Quite.
Larman often contradicts himself, as when he introduces Rochester’s poetry as “displaying little obvious literary worth”, and in the next paragraph praises its “witty sophistication and original thought”. At Oxford, he writes, “gambling and fornication were punished extremely severely”, but then adds that the undergraduate Rochester “was free for the first time to drink, whore and gamble with abandon”. And so on.
Blazing Star is Larman’s first book, and one does not want to be harsh, but he could have done with a lot more editorial help. He wallows in cliché and tautology, misuses “propagation” and “grandiloquent”, and subjects his readers to such unappetising turns of phrase as “a carefully choreographed hysteria whipped up by a few cynical parties had turned into a smorgasbord”.
He is also uncommonly pleased with himself, speculating, for example, that on his deathbed the poet “might have pictured some future biographer trying to reconstruct the final few minutes of his life in imaginative terms”. We are told that Rochester died in mortal fear of hell. However terrible his sins, he deserves better than this.
Blazing Star: The Life & Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester by Alexander Larman
Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Alexander Larman
Head of Zeus, hardback, 408 pages,
£17, 978-1781851098
Thom Cuell
‘Can you tell a peerless peer the readiest way to hell?’
‘The readiest way, my lord’s by Rochester’
John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, was a poet, playwright, wit and libertine at the court of Charles II, who scandalised society before dying at thirty-three from the effects of a cocktail of STIs and alcohol abuse. Along the way, he managed to inspire Aphra Benn, Goethe, Voltaire, a disappointing Johnny Depp film, Graham Greene and one of Axl Rose’s better lyrics (possibly). His life story also sheds light on many of the political and religious controversies surrounding the commonwealth and restoration, one of the most turbulent periods of British history.
So, which element of the life does Alexander Larman focus on, in his handsome new biography; Rochester the poet, the drunk, the deathbed convert, or the rake? Larman acknowledges all of these personas, and also seeks to add to our understanding of the young Earl as a ‘heroic naval officer’ in the Anglo-Dutch war, and as a man of ‘enormous intellectual and artistic curiosity’ who ‘never lost the common touch’. Mostly though, he seeks to capture the spirit of the man:
‘Writing this while listening to the stultifying drone of Prime Minister’s Questions in the background, I am reminded that we still need a man, or woman, who can stand up, expose the bland and cynical hypocrisies of politicians and self-appointed opinion formers for what they are and refuse to place themselves on a pedestal of virtue, and instead argue that by embracing our flaws, contradictions and baser desires that we are set free from the dull and oppressive orthodoxies of everyday life.’
In The Road Not Taken, Frank McLynn speculated that one effect of the Reformation was to focus English creative energies on the written word, rather than the visual arts, or music; certainly, the Tudor and Stuart periods didn’t produce any painters or composers to compare with the stature of Marlowe, Shakespeare or Jonson. If we compare English writers and continental painters, then John Wilmot would be Caravaggio – a brilliant, scandalous iconoclast, who died young after alienating his influential supporters through his uncontrolled behaviour. Much of Rochester’s fame is down to the wealth of anecdotes relating to his personal life, but the closer examination of his work, which Larman provides, reveals him to be more penetrating thinker than unthinking penetrator.
Although Rochester’s life has been picked over by numerous biographers, Larman skilfully teases out fresh details. For example, discussing the young Earl’s education at Wadham College, Oxford, where Puritanism had never really taken hold (‘cross-dressing, lewdness, bisexuality and sodomy were rumoured to be rife, as was drunkenness’) Larman brings out the character of Rochester’s tutor Robert Whitehall, ‘a rambunctious, Falstaffian figure, not especially witty in himself, but certainly the cause of wit in others’. Incidentally, some reviews have argued that the word ‘Falstaffian’ is overused in Blazing Star; I would counter that other books don’t use it enough.
From here, Rochester progressed to court, where life was a constant performance, with courtiers expected to be drunk and amusing at all times. The King was willing to forgive almost any level of bad behaviour provided it was done with style. Rochester would test the limits of the King’s benevolence throughout his life. For a glimpse of Rochester’s lifestyle at this time, we can look at ‘The Debauchee’, often attributed to the Earl, but more likely in Larman’s view to be an anonymous satire by one of his enemies. Certainly, the poem is ragingly obscene, even by Rochester’s standards. Like Axl Rose in Mr Brownstone, Rochester describes his day, which begins thus:
I rise at eleven; I dine about two
Get drunk before seven and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when in fear of the clap
I dally around her and spew in her lap
The poem goes on to reference the subject’s sexual inadequacy and penchant for sodomy, which would indicate the work of another hand, but, as Larman acknowledges, both subjects were actually broached by Rochester in verse (‘The Disabled Debauchee’, for example, includes the line ‘the best kiss was the deciding lot / Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy’).
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester by Robert White, after Sir Peter Lely © National Portrait Gallery, London
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
by Robert White, after Sir Peter Lely © National Portrait Gallery, London
It is a tricky business to pathologise figures from such distant history, but maybe some of Rochester’s more unbounded actions were those of an alcoholic, rather than a libertine – his humorous escapades were interspersed with serious breaches of protocol, such as beating the King’s jester at a diplomatic reception, which elicited benign indulgence from Charles, but disgusted foreign royals who heard of it. Larman downplays this interpretation, which was argued strongly in Jeremy Lamb’s So Idle a Rogue, arguing that there were plenty of rakes at court who matched Rochester’s consumption.
Larman’s biography is strong when describing Rochester’s ‘rancorous poetic muse’. Passages of deep literary criticism reveal the elegiac and self-aware qualities of Rochester’s verse, as demonstrated by the likes of ‘The Disabled Debauchee’, in which the Earl compares himself to ‘some brave admiral, in former war, deprived of force but pressed with courage still’, observing the sexual battleground of Restoration London from afar and urging the combatants by ‘telling what I did when I was strong and able to bear arms’. ‘A Satire Against Reason and Mankind’, possibly Rochester’s most powerful work, sums up the Hobbesian philosophy of many at Charles’ court, damning civilisation, and criticising the perceived hypocrisy of those who deny the animal nature of humankind: ‘All men would be cowards if they durst’.
Assessing the authenticity of poems attributed to Rochester is deeply subjective, and Larman dismisses ‘Tunbridge Wells’, a narrative of a daytrip to Kent the quickly descends into a bilious outpouring of rage against the ‘bawling fops’ and ‘would-be-wits’ he encounters. The doubts Larman casts are valid, but he is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater; the poet who is moved to ‘spew’ by the sudden appearance of a young fop is surely Rochester, and the poem’s misanthropic summation also has an authentic air to it:
What thing is man, that thus,
In all his shapes, he is ridiculous?
Ourselves with noise of reason we do please
In vain; humanity’s our worst disease
While there is a natural tendency for biographers to focus on the outrageous anecdotes from Rochester’s early life, and the controversy of his supposed deathbed conversion, Larman is also able to talk authoritatively about lesser known incidents, such as Rochester’s attempts to negotiate the stormy waters of the Popish Plot, a vast conspiracy theory concocted by the ‘snot-faced voice of doom’, Titus Oates. In a surviving letter quoted in Blazing Star, Rochester summed up the spirit of London in the midst of a witch hunt, capturing his political savvy as well as his wit: ‘Things are now reduced to that extremity on all sides that a man does not turn his back for fear of being hanged – an ill accident to be avoided by all prudent persons’.
Around this time, Rochester was also implicated in one of the mysteries of the age – an attack on the poet laureate Dryden, who was seriously injured, but not robbed. A reward of £50 was offered for information, but no-one came forward. As Rochester and Dryden had feuded in verse, historians have speculated that it may have been an escalation of their hostilities. While it may or may not be true, historians’ willingness to believe it is a further indication of a similarity between Rochester and Caravaggio, who was also notoriously involved in violent incidents. Larman queries the received wisdom, instead blaming Charles’ mistress, Louise de Kerouaille, who had also been insulted by Dryden, noting with amusement that Dryden remained the poet laureate after the event: ‘it seems an act of severe literary criticism, in the case of one’s court poet, to tacitly support having him brutally beaten’ (although some modern authors may benefit from this sort of approach in the long run).
Rochester remained a deeply controversial figure to the end. As he lapsed into syphilis-induced madness, a desperate effort was made to redeem his soul, and various meddlesome parsons vied to get the credit for a miraculous deathbed conversion. Larman, once again querying the commonly-accepted verdict, argues that any change of heart regarding religion was the product of ‘fear and sustained indoctrination’ – he notes that all the positive reports come from parties with a vested interest in his conversion, and his supposed repentance is wildly different in tone from his other writings.
9780300097139Rochester’s work continued to be popular after his death, with playwrights such as Aphra Behn modelling characters on him, and Elizabeth Barry, the leading actress of her time (whose career had been nurtured by Rochester), delivering an epigraph for him. Unsurprisingly, the author of lines such as ‘The Isle of Britain, long since known, for breeding the best cunts in Christendom’ fared poorly during the Victorian era, but in more recent times, he has been the subject of a Graham Greene book (Lord Rochester’s Monkey, which deals largely with his Catholicism), a number of biographies, and a fine, filthy novel by Christopher Peachment, The Green and the Gold. His poems remain in print, and he was afforded the signal honour of being played on screen by Johnny Depp.
But what drove Rochester and his bizarre excesses? As we have seen, Jeremy Lamb attributed Rochester’s anarchic behaviour to the classic symptoms of alcoholism, while Cephas Gulworthy in The Satyr described Rochester as a nihilist, influenced by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Larman’s biography is very bracing, combines thorough research with insightful criticism of the works, and overall probably offers the best account of the ‘life’, but engages less deeply with the psychology and philosophy that drove the Earl. There is an early hint that Larman is setting Rochester up as an early libertarian, and he does remark that the libertine ideas espoused by the likes of Moliere and Montaigne are ‘admirably far-sighted’, but this strand of thought isn’t really developed. Likewise, his attempts to show Rochester as a military hero are supported by the evidence when it comes to the Anglo-Dutch war, but are undercut by repeated examples of the Earl’s cowardice in later life, when alcohol-induced feebleness caused him to repeatedly flee from confrontations.
I am sympathetic, though, to Larman’s portrayal of Rochester as an iconoclastic one-off, a tragic figure who still possessed the wit and character to set up as a burlesque physician under the name ‘Dr Alexander Bendo’ in the centre of London, drawing huge crowds, while wanted for murder. Blazing Star demonstrates that the violent moodswings and invective of Rochester’s poetry retain their power today, and Larman also showcases Rochester’s wit, charm and surprising capacity for tenderness, revealing a complex and fascinating character. More than anything, Rochester emerges as a man who truly believed in the carpe diem spirit of Restoration England, allowing himself to be governed entirely by his passions, and living absolutely in the moment:
Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts and broken vows.
If I, by miracle can be
This livelong moment true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows