The Readyest Way to Hell

Creative​ and destructive drives can be hard to tell apart. In Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, a poem about premature ejaculation, the speaker blusters about his penis’s usual prowess:

Stiffly Resolv’d t’would Carelesly invade
Woman, nor Man, nor ought its fury stayd –
Where ere it pierc’d a Cunt it found or made –

Making and wrecking, in these lines, are one and the same: either the penis gets its way or it forces a new way through. Rochester, who wrote in couplets, used triplets when he wanted to push an idea to breaking point. The final line here, ‘Where ere it pierc’d a Cunt it found or made’, is so macho that three of its ten words are verbs, which seems as if it ought to be grammatically impossible. It reads as both nasty and silly, tilting the mock-heroic into hyperbole: it’s the poetic equivalent of kicking over a chair because you aren’t getting what you want.

Rochester could ruin anything. ‘Even his most elegant verse often resounds with the crash of breaking glass,’ Barbara Everett wrote. Germaine Greer called him ‘a poet against his better judgment’, drawn time and again to commit ‘catastrophic indiscretions’ in verse. (Sometimes there was actual broken glass: in the summer of 1675, with a group of friends, he smashed up a priceless sundial in the Whitehall Privy Gardens bearing glass portraits of the king and the royal family.) Aggravated disturbances, big and small, give his poetry its character. The opening lines of ‘Tunbridge Wells’, a satire on the ‘fooles’ who flock to the spa town, are casually respectable but unmistakably dirty: ‘Att five this Morn: when Phoebus rais’d his head/From Thetis Lapp …’ What has Phoebus been up to? In ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, a crazed assault on a mistress who has been unfaithful, there is a comparison between the speaker’s ejaculate and the drink passed around after grace has been said: ‘I was content to serve you up,/My Ballock full, for your Grace Cup.’ The ‘Answer’, a parody of a conventional love lyric, is a piece of pure vandalism. The original address by Sir Carr Scroope, one of Rochester’s enemies at court, ends: ‘For such a faithfull tender heart/Can never break, can never break, in vain.’ Rochester’s ending, aping the syntax of Scroope’s but nothing else, imagines what his oversexed mistress might say back:

While yet alone my eies were free
My heart wou’d never doubt
In amorous Rage and extasie
To wish those eies, to wish those eies, Fuckt out.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have full control of his effects. The impersonations in his poems, of female voices in particular, are near-perfect. ‘Pray, who are the Men most worne of late?’ demands a garrulous ‘fine Lady’ in the satire ‘Artemiza to Chloe’. ‘When I was marry’d, Fooles were a la mode.’ On occasion he could be fastidious about stylistic decorum. ‘The lousiness of affairs in this place,’ he wrote to his friend Henry Savile in 1679, ‘is such (forgive the unmannerly phrase! Expressions must descend to the nature of things expressed) ’tis not fit to entertain a private gentleman.’ (‘Lousiness’ is about as tame as it gets in the Rochester lexicon.) One way to understand the rampant unmannerliness of his style in the poetry is as a matter of genre. Rochester wrote as he did because he was shuttling between a decorous, traditional framework and a modern, irreverent one – translating ‘out of … a neoclassical mode of satiric discourse into the reigning native mode, lampoon’, as his editor Harold Love has argued. Lampooning demanded a certain degree of obscenity; court satirists who wanted their manuscripts to be read had to play the game.

There are also biographical explanations for the problem of his style. In Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Larry Carver points out that biographical reading is a risky business. The fallacies that can result from drawing art and artist together, extrapolating the life from the work or taking the work as a pattern of the life, are obvious in Rochester’s case. Many of the things that we think we know about him have a basis in unreliable posthumous accounts, or in the libertine speakers of his poetry, who can seem like trick-mirror versions of Rochester himself. Several of the poems that have traditionally been taken to be his – such as ‘Signior Dildo’, a ballad about a mysterious priapic Italian, beloved of the court ladies – have been shown to be the work of someone else, or of various hands. Nonetheless, Carver argues, there are insights we are liable to miss if we decline to use the evidence that biography provides. Taking Rochester’s ‘emotional, religious and intellectual life’ to have shaped his writing, and his poetry to be reflective of his preoccupations, provides inroads into poems that often seem stylistically at odds with themselves. So much in Rochester is a matter of tone: the way you read something, which voice you consider authoritative. ‘Experiential knowledge’ – an understanding of the poet’s character, intellectual formation, friendships, enmities, the court environment he inhabited – helps us to grasp his work’s ‘private grammar’, its possible ‘intended’ meanings.

What may account for its wrecking tendencies is the gap between the kind of life Rochester expected to have and the role he found himself playing at court. He spent his childhood at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where he was given a thorough Anglican education by his pious mother and clergyman tutor. His father, the first earl of Rochester, was a royalist general who had fought and spied for Charles I and Charles II and died in exile in 1658. At the Restoration court, where Rochester fils appeared as an impoverished 17-year-old on Christmas Day 1664, neither his mother’s piety nor his father’s courage were of much use. An early favourite, in the spring of 1666 he was appointed to the ranks of the king’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, charged with various intimate duties: serving Charles his meals, dressing and undressing him, facilitating his nightly pleasures (effectively, acting as his pimp). He would remain a courtier, tied to Whitehall even during his periods of rebellion and banishment, until his death fourteen years later.

Rochester was conscious, Carver suggests, of being fundamentally ‘underemployed’ at Charles’s court, possessed of old-fashioned capabilities and values that were wrong for it. The world that he had been bred up for was passing. He and his friends, Cavaliers’ sons whose families had sacrificed and suffered during the war years and the Interregnum, were united in feeling that their loyalty had been insufficiently recognised by the king’s settlement. Disaffected, they drifted into cynicism and self-interest. There were things owing, promised, missing. Liars and opportunists had flourished during the years of upheaval, like the old royalist colonel in the satire ‘Timon’ (probably by Rochester), who brags about his supposed Interregnum martyrdoms: ‘Wee must heare him boast … [of] an Estate he lost,/For the Kings service; which indeed he spent,/Whoreing and drinking.’ Why bother to tell the truth or stick to your principles, if those who didn’t got ahead?

Lying ran deep at Charles’s court. Credulity made you a fool; the only faith you could afford to have was in others’ faithlessness. The culture of dissimulation began at the top. The king, according to Gilbert Burnet, Rochester’s deathbed confessor, ‘thought no man sincere, nor woman honest, out of principle’, and dealt with his subordinates in that light – dissembling, manipulating, ‘hearing every body against any body’. Personality necessarily became something performed, unstable. Burnet wrote that Charles ‘loved [Rochester’s] company for the diversion it afforded better than his person’, with the suggestion that the way Rochester behaved in company and the way he really was (‘his person’) were different things. Play-acting of various kinds was encouraged. The king’s occasional trick of disguising himself, going incognito when it suited him, gave licence to his courtiers. When Rochester set up shop on Tower Bridge in the guise of an imaginary quack doctor, Dr Alexander Bendo, or when he ‘vanished … among the citizens of London’ dressed as a puritanical merchant (two of his wilder escapades), he was taking the prevailing culture of disguise to its camped-up extreme.

The lying and deceiving leaked into his poetry. The speakers of his lyrics, satires and dramatic works operate in a network of fabrications, both their own and other people’s: they are forever cozening others or trying to sniff out the ways in which the world has cozened them. In places, this has a political inflection. Society is built on knavery, the speaker of ‘A Satyre against Reason and Mankind’ protests; to ‘tyrannise’ their ‘fellow Slaves’, politicians, churchmen and scholars invent ‘False Freedomes, Holy Cheats and formal Lyes’, mysticisms and confusions. In statesmen’s hands, ‘true or false’ are slippery, up for grabs, ‘the subject of debate’. (‘So you see the Politician is, and must be, a Mountebank in State Affairs,’ Rochester announced as Dr Bendo, adopting the ‘it takes one to know one’ approach.)

Things are not much better between men and women. Promises and fine words prove to be deceitful tokens, which, once spent, have no further use. In a scene that Rochester wrote for an unstaged heroic tragedy, the empress of China declares that patriarchal relations are a cheat, built on a rhetoric of flattery. ‘Treacherous man … misguides’ the opposite sex, ‘Makes her believe that all her Glories lye/In dull obedience, Truth and Modesty,/That to bee Beautifull is to bee Brave’. Women have their treacheries too. The more sophisticated female figures win their way by manipulating the interests and weaknesses of others. In Lucina’s Rape, Rochester’s adaptation of John Fletcher’s tragedy Valentinian (c.1610-14), Marcellina, a lady in waiting, shows her worldliness by parroting typical male arguments against women’s chastity: ‘This Honour is the veriest Mountebanke … what a cheate must that bee/Which robbs our lives of all their softer howres?’ (Dr Bendo and his false claims were never far from Rochester’s imagination.) Corinna, ‘that wretched thinge’, the young woman who is the subject of an inset narrative in ‘Artemiza to Chloe’, finds herself ‘Couzen’d att first by Love’, taken in by false romantic promises; she learns to survive by ‘turning the too-deare-bought trick on Men’. Her victim, a credulous ‘unbred puppy’ from the country, ‘Beleaves, then falls in Love, and then in Debt’, in that order.

The most complex deceptions are those that Rochester’s figures practise on themselves. In Lucina’s Rape, the lustful Roman emperor Valentinian has his eye on Lucina, the virtuous wife of one of his generals. Early in the play, he dispatches his snaky band of courtiers to induce her to be unfaithful to her husband: ‘Prepare/To tempt, dissemble, promise, fawne and sweare.’ When they return, he grows suddenly horrified by the thought that they may have succeeded:

Is that an object fitt for my desires
Which lies within the reach of your perswasions?
Had you by your infectious Industry
Shew’d my Lucina frayle to that degree,
You had been damn’d for undeceiving mee.

You can tell that these are Rochester’s lines and not Fletcher’s thanks to the characteristic triplet (‘Industry/degree/mee’). As before, it’s used to stretch a thought to breaking point. ‘You had been damn’d for undeceiving mee’ is a tortuous piece of reasoning, but it means something like: if Lucina were to prove as ‘frayle’ (that is, corruptible) as other women, Valentinian would be ‘undeceiv[ed]’, which is to say that he has had to lie to himself until this point in order to think her exceptional. To his mind, all women are ‘frayle’; it has taken self-deception to believe that this one isn’t, but his courtiers cannot be allowed to destroy the fiction, ruin the innocence that you can only enjoy if you are deceived. The irony is that his ethical starting point is the opposite of innocence. By insisting that a belief in virtue makes you a dupe, if a willing one, Valentinian betrays a totalising cynicism about the ability of human beings to act contrary to their interests. What one character in ‘Artemiza to Chloe’ calls, mockingly, ‘the perfect Joy of being well deceaved’ is inaccessible to him; he has radically undeceived himself.

Anatomising people, reducing them to their basest motivations, was what Restoration satire did best. Lampoon-writers represented public figures – the monarch, his mistresses, his courtiers – by means of a somatic shorthand, a synecdoche of body parts. ‘Why art thou poor, O King? Embezzling cunt,/That wide-mouthed, greedy monster, that has done’t,’ one lampoon declared in 1681, smearing Charles’s hated French mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth, for both sexual and financial greed. Rochester used this method extensively. One of his nastiest images is of an anonymous ‘Whore’ who is all vagina: ‘You might find in every pore/A well stuck standing Prick.’ A satire on Charles centres on the royal penis, ‘the prowdest peremptory Prick alive’, which governs him and, in turn, via his mistresses, the whole nation: ‘His Scepter and his Prick were of a length,/And she may sway the one who plays with t’other.’ Anxieties about agency run through these images. Rochester was committed to the libertine idea that bodies, with their natural, instinctive desires, were more to be trusted than minds, but occasionally he seems to have doubts. Corinna, the disloyal mistress in ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, has no more volition than a sexualised ventriloquist’s dummy: ‘At her Mouth her Cunt says yes.’ In ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, the speaker’s penis, ‘Worst part of me and henceforth hated most’, is a passive, automatic appendage – in charge of him but in thrall to just about everyone else: ‘Through all the Town a Common Fucking Post,/On whom each Whore Relieves her tingling Cunt.’

When he satirised his enemies, Rochester pictured them as human assemblages. In ‘On the Suppos’d Author of a Late Poem in Defence of SATYR’, an attack on Scroope, his subject appears as a mess of a man, a kind of unsolved Rubik’s Cube: ‘In Thee are all those Contradictions Joyn’d/That make an Ass prodigious and refin’d;/A Lump deform’d, and shapeless wert thou born.’ Scroope, Rochester suggests, is a mathematical impossibility, a collection of human ‘halves’ that refuse to add up to a human whole:

But thy halfe witt will ne’re let Thee be wise:
Halfe witty, and halfe mad, and scarce halfe brave,
Halfe honest, which is very much a knave;
Made up of all these halves, thou cans’t not pass
For any thing entirely but an Asse.

In ‘Artemiza to Chloe’, the ‘fine Lady’ is a similar jumble or puzzle: ‘this mixt thinge’, as Artemiza calls her, ‘Soe very wise, yet soe impertinent’. Fashionable fops, in another poem, are ‘Poore broaken Propertyes’: fragments of men, not wholes. In the final, vicious section of ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, Corinna seems almost to break apart under the pressure of the speaker’s hatred. As he curses her and threatens vengeance, she disintegrates, becoming a succession of ruined bits and pieces: ‘Womb’; ‘Appetite’; ‘Mind’; ‘Cunt’; ‘Arse’.

Swift, who also imagined people as assemblages, used the trope exclusively for misogynist purposes. In ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ (1731), his speaker observes (another) Corinna performing her bedtime routine, dismantling herself bit by bit: ‘Now, picking out a crystal eye,/She wipes it clean, and lays it by … Untwists a wire; and from her gums/A set of teeth completely comes.’ In the morning, she must ‘recollect’ her ‘scattered parts’, gather ‘up herself again’ to face the world. Rochester’s visions of people as bits and pieces are similar, but they have an additional satirical function. The figures he attacks are selected because they embody, in miniature, a kind of mixing or jumble that he saw in the fashionable world at large: they are disordered and contradictory because society has let them become so, or because it has itself become disorderly. In ‘Tunbridge Wells’, the satire on the ‘Buffoons’ who flock to take the waters, the speaker is apoplectic at the mishmash of classes and types he sees around him:

But ne’re could conventicle, play, or faire
For a true Medley with this herd Compare:
Here Lords, Knights, Squires, ladyes and Countesses,
Chandlers, mum-bacon women, semptresses
Were mixt together

‘Countesses’ and ‘semptresses’ (seamstresses), these lines suggest, aren’t supposed to belong together any more than they are supposed to rhyme. ‘Lords’ and ‘Knights’ may mix with one another, and with ‘Squires’ at a push, but none of them should have anything to do with ordinary tradesmen and women (‘Chandlers’, ‘semptresses’); let alone with ‘mum-bacon women’, the peripatetic figures selling bacon and beer at fairs. The social order that Rochester had been brought up to believe in, Carver argues, was hierarchical, fixed, supposedly inviolable. The society he actually lived in was ‘rapidly becoming pluralistic’, its new shapes and combinations registered in the poems’ images of confusion, mixture, indiscriminacy. Corinna, the unfaithful mistress, who comes ‘spewing home/Drencht with the Seed of half the Town’, is an emblem of promiscuity in more than one sense.

Rochester​ ran risks with his satires. Over Christmas in 1673, by accident and probably while drunk, he handed the king a copy of his lampoon about pricks and sceptres. (‘My Lord Rochester is out of Fauour againe about a coppy of Witty, spightfull verses,’ Ralph Verney wrote from Whitehall on New Year’s Day.) Lucina’s Rape, had it been staged, could have landed him in greater trouble. To anyone with eyes, Charles, with his faithlessness and reputation for pleasure-seeking, would have looked suspiciously like Valentinian. The play was also a risky prospect because of its serious critique of a way of life, libertinism, to which Rochester and the court were supposed to be committed. Embodied in its tragic villain, libertinism seems less an exciting proposition than an exhausting one. What Valentinian calls ‘That great preservative Variety’ – the libertine principle that new pleasures must always be sought to take the place of old ones, that novelty keeps you going – ruins him. Variety can only ‘preserve’ you so far. In Act V, when Lucina is dead and the implications of relentless pleasure-seeking have become clear, he despairs of what life lived on libertine assumptions boils down to: ‘Solid paines succeed our sensless joyes/And short liv’d pleasures fleet like passing dreames.’

There are less explicit critiques in Rochester’s earlier lyrics and satires. A song that begins ‘Tell mee noe more of Constancy’ appears to make a brave case for rapacious self-gratification. Fidelity is a ‘pretence’, the speaker claims; the only ‘constant Lovers’ you will find are those who are too old or diseased or foolish to be otherwise. By contrast, he says, ‘wee’ who ‘in Love excell,/Long, to bee often try’d’. But something else rears its head in the final lines:

Then bring my Bath, and strew my Bed,
As each kind Night returnes.
I’le change a Mistresse, till I’me dead,
And Fate change mee to Wormes.

An attitude that looked poised and assured reveals itself to be compensatory, mechanical. Libertinism, here, is less a choice than a ‘hedonistic repetition-compulsion’, in Christopher Tilmouth’s words: ‘each kind Night returnes’ and with it the speaker and his roll-call of mistresses, until, one day, they don’t. No one, especially not the libertine, is getting out alive. The double use of the verb ‘change’ reveals who is really in charge. Subject becomes object: the speaker may ‘change’ his mistress, but eventually it is he who will be ‘change[d]’, and irrevocably. If you are this devoted to your fleshly pleasures, the thought that the worms will come at last must be terrifying.

Libertinism, by parading its heterodoxy, its independence of the rules, risks being just a parade: a firework display that fizzles into nothing. In Rochester’s mock-heroic poems, his speakers make claims that read as both chest-thumpingly exaggerated and somehow a bit limp. In ‘The Disabled Debauchee’, a broken old sinner imagines inspiring a younger rake with tales of his exploits:

I’ll tell of Whores attack’d, their Lords at home;
Bauds Quarters beaten up, and Fortress won:
Windows demolish’d, Watches overcome;
And handsome Ills, by my contrivance, done.

There are several things wrong with this. Women are hardly ‘Whores’ if they have husbands and need to be ‘attack’d’; a brothel is not the same thing as a ‘Fortress’; anyone can smash a window. ‘Handsome Ills, by my contrivance, done’, with its pedantic grammar, sounds a bit like something Malvolio might have said if he’d been interested in rule-breaking. A lot of this, Rochester suggests, is talk. The frustrated lover in ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ claims to have ‘dy’de’ his ‘Dart of Love’ in the ‘Virgin blood’ of ‘Ten Thowsand Mayds’: fine, but if you’re going to invent a number, why stop at ten thousand? In ‘To the Post Boy’, a satire in which a speaker with Rochester’s biography accosts an alarmed child and demands to know ‘the Readyest way to Hell’, there is more dubious mental accounting. The speaker has drunk so much that he has ‘out swilld Bacchus’, he claims; he has sworn oaths so terrifying that they would ‘make Pluto quake’; and, as far as sexual prowess goes, he has ‘swiv’d more whores more ways than sodoms walls/E’re knew or the Colledge of Romes Cardinalls’. Forget the details: libertinism is just ‘more’, ‘more whores more ways’, more drinking, more virulence. The post boy, accustomed to dealing with horses, almost bolts when he is instructed to look at the speaker’s poxed body up close: ‘Witness Heroick Scarrs – look here – nere goe –’

If this is meant to be taken as Rochester’s self-portrait, it is hardly flattering. Ulcered, frothing, recriminatory: he wrote kinder things about his worst enemy. ‘To write a lampoon on oneself is not exactly unique,’ Anne Barton has pointed out; ‘it is, however, fundamentally paradoxical.’ Love suggests that ‘To the Post Boy’ may have been a pre-emptive strike on Rochester’s part,an attempt to silence his enemies ‘by flaunting a brilliance in invective they had no hope of matching’. Certainly, he had a talent for turning on himself. ‘[His] excoriations of self were notorious,’ Carver writes, and quotes Burnet: ‘He would often break forth into such hard Expressions concerning himself, as would be indecent for another to repeat.’ In his letters, he took his own measure wryly. ‘To bee kind is very easy,’ he wrote to his long-suffering wife, Elizabeth, in 1679. ‘I say nott this to putt you in mind of being kind to mee … but to show that I myself have a sence of what the methods of my Life seeme soe utterly to contradict.’ To say more was impossible: ‘I must not bee too wise about my own follyes, or els this Letter had bin a booke.’

Rochester’s satires contain hard self-reflections. ‘Witts are treated just like common Whores,/First they’re enjoy’d and then kickt out of doors,’ the speaker of ‘A Satyre against Reason and Mankind’ remarks, with a glance at courtiers who are banished if they don’t please. In ‘Artemiza to Chloe’, the careless ‘Man of Witt’ who dallies with Corinna and then breaks her heart is surely a version of self: ‘[He] found, ’t was dull, to love above a day,/Made his ill-natur’d Jest, and went his way.’ There are critical self-allusions that put earlier thoughts or assumptions into question. The speeches Rochester gives to the empress of China, in the abortive heroic tragedy, mock the rhetoric he occasionally used in his own love lyrics. ‘Woman henceforth by my Example taught/To vaster heights of vertue shall bee wrought,’ the empress announces. ‘Train’d up in Warre and Armes she shall despise/The mean pretended Conquests of her Eyes.’ On more than one occasion, Rochester had sworn himself ‘the slave’ of some mistress’s captivating ‘Eyes’.

The darkest reflections on self appear in Lucina’s Rape. The play’s satire on Valentinian’s courtiers is of a particularly vicious kind, Carver shows, because it involves self-recognition and self-loathing: ‘Rochester is lashing what he himself had practised.’ His adaptation from Fletcher focuses on the scenes involving the men and women whom the emperor retains to do his dirty work. Much of their cozening and negotiating takes place close to home, in a court environment that looks more like Whitehall than your average Roman palace: there is the emperor’s intimate ‘Closett’, the ‘great Chamber’, the ‘old hall’, the ‘garden gate’. Lucina is raped in the ‘Appartment … That lies upon the Garden’, Rochester’s real Whitehall bedroom.

The courtiers in the play, Chilax, Proculus, Balbus and Licinius (in cahoots with their professional ‘wives’, Ardelia and Phorba), are there to ‘fetch and carry’, as one of them puts it: to flatter, sweeten up, corrupt, pimp out. At Valentinian’s command, they arrange the provision of musicians, dancers, singing eunuchs and women of all kinds, ‘Maids, Widdows, Wives of what degree or Calling’. (A letter of Rochester’s to Savile in 1677 recommends the bearer, a young French musician, to the king as ‘the best present I can make at this time’.) In Act III, Proculus summons a pliable eunuch, Lycias, to the palace to await the emperor’s pleasure:

The Emperour Lov’s thee, Longs for thy company, will delight in thee and trust thee. What an Opportunity hast thou to destroy thy enemyes, delude thy friends, enrich thy self, enslave the World, raise thy kindred, humble thy Master and Governe him. Hee expects thee about the ev’ning in his Closett, faile not!

This is the definition of saying the quiet part out loud. Good manners and complaisant behaviour were critical at the Restoration court because they allowed you to make your intentions known without having to articulate them. ‘What seemed charming,’ Tilmouth writes, ‘might really be at bottom aggressive or malicious.’ In Proculus’s radical honesty, it is as if something has been decoded. If Lycias submits to the emperor, he will get it all: riches, power, the whole amoral libertine catalogue, and no one will bother to pretend that it’s anything other than what it is.