ROCHESTER AND THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE
by Larry Carver
Manchester University Press
259 pages. $130.
PREACHING at the funeral of Restoration poet, satirist, and courtier John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), the terminally self-righteous Anglican cleric Robert Parsons lamented that, “so confirmed was he in sin, that he lived, and oftentimes almost died, a martyr for it.” The similarly censorious Samuel Johnson likewise condemned Rochester’s “avowed contempt of all decency and order,” lamenting that he “lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness,” dying at 32 of acute alcohol poisoning and advanced syphilis.
To the casual eye, the biographical evidence supports Parsons’ and Johnson’s view of Rochester as a feckless, self-destructive profligate. He posed wearing his court robes for a portrait in which, rather than crowning a bust of Homer or Aristotle as was the convention in such paintings, he bestows a laurel wreath on a monkey. He managed to offend the generally easygoing and sexually lax King Charles II with a lampoon identifying the king’s phallus as his scepter and claiming that whichever mistress grasped it was the de facto ruler of the country. He posted footmen in the palace hallways to report to him who entered and left which bedroom at night, information he used in his satires. And when banished from court for a particularly egregious transgression, he disguised himself as Dr. Alexander Bendo, a mountebank specializing in curing reproductive maladies, and spent the period of his exile helping barren women become pregnant and impotent men achieve erections. His wit, style, and sexual jouissance made him the model for the rake in Restoration comedy.
Of particular offense to moralists was Rochester’s exuberant celebration of sex with indiscriminate partners. “There’s something generous in mere lust,” he comments in one lyric. Although women must be concerned about their social image (“Thou cunt be not coy, reputation is nice”), he guffawed at the extremes to which one might go in the pursuit of “the juice of lusty men.” Women don’t care “How empty and how dull/ The heads of [their]admirers are—/ So that their cods [codpieces or crotches]be full,” he wryly observed. And, in one of the most daring poems of the period, he praises the dependence on “Signor Dildo” (leather dildoes were a recent innovation imported from Italy) of some of the most nobly born and powerful ladies of the court, all of whom he cites by name.
Rochester likewise exposes to comic derision the extent to which men are dominated by their sex drive. In “Regime de Vivre,” the speaker recounts his daily routine of drinking and pleasure-seeking, concluding with his “bugger[ing]my page” after his mistress abandons him. Similarly, in “Love a woman! You’re an ass,” the speaker renounces intercourse with women altogether but recognizes that when the need arises: “There’s a sweet soft page of mine/ Does the trick worth forty wenches.” Frankly acknowledging in various poems a profligate’s inevitable problems with premature ejaculation and impotence, Rochester even anticipates the time of life when he shall be physically disabled by his constant debauch and reduced to relying on his memories of past pleasures. In “The Disabled Debauchee,” the speaker consoles his mistress: “Nor shall our love-fits, Cloris, be forgot,/ When each the well-looked [handsome]link-boy strove t’enjoy,/ And the best kiss was the deciding lot:/ Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy.” (Linkboys were adolescents with torches who lighted a benefactor’s way through the dark streets at night, a situation that allowed noblemen like Rochester to exercise their sexual droit de seigneur.)
For Rochester, the pursuit of physical sensation provides the only antidote to one’s frustration at living in a hypocritical society, even though constant drinking and intercourse actually dull one’s capacity for arousal: the more one craves stimulation, the less likely one will be able to enjoy it. Such a paradox is at the heart of The Farce of Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery. Having sampled the pleasures of male anal intercourse, King Bolloximian (bollocks are testicles) outlaws heterosexual relations, making sodomy the law of the land. Soon, no masculine rear is safe from assault, and only the gift of “forty striplings” from the neighboring King of Gomorrah saves the sexually insatiable Bolloximian from violating the posterior of his fifteen-year-old son and heir, Prince Prickett. An apocalyptic denouement occurs as women are driven mad by unsated desire and men die in the agonies of venereal disease. But even as fire and brimstone rain down on the kingdom, as in the biblical tale of the cities of the plain, Bolloximian refuses to return to the original sexual order. Instead, in the play’s final lines, he vows to “reign and bugger still,” retreating with his favorite catamite “to some darker cavern” where “on thy buggered ass I will expire.”
“To die” was then a euphemism for achieving orgasm. Bolloximian is in effect hoping to spend the remainder of his life buggering his favorite. His vow is both a parody of Cavalier love lyrics in which the male speaker, going off to war, claims that he wants nothing more than to die in his female beloved’s arms, and the ultimate reaffirmation of the pleasures of anal intercourse: he will sacrifice everything for one last butt-fuck. Rochester’s play is possibly the most emphatic valorization of the male anus in history, and a subtle anticipation of the crisis in American gay culture in the 1980s and ’90s. Gay Liberation fostered a militant resistance to uninspired, socially imposed heterosexuality. Even as the AIDS epidemic spread as a result of this newfound sexual liberation, many gay men resisted the closing of bathhouses and other sites of licentiousness as part of the majority’s attempt to mandate heterosexual conformity. Rochester may have been a martyr for sin in a way that Parsons did not anticipate: a martyr’s crown is the reward in another realm for resisting spirit-deadening conformity in this one. As 19th-century critic William Hazlitt shrewdly commented, Rochester’s “extravagant heedless levity has a sort of passionate enthusiasm in it; his contempt for everything that others respect, almost amounts to sublimity.”
Larry Carver’s Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure is the fifth full-length monograph on Rochester to appear in the past fifty years, and the first to treat The Farce of Sodom as a pivotal work in Rochester’s development as a poet and satirist rather than as a piece of cheap pornography. Carver insists that all of Rochester’s works be read biographically, as the search for identity by a conservatively raised individual forced to negotiate the excesses of the Restoration court. A materialist who believed that physical pleasure was the proper end of nature, Rochester satirized both conservative moralists who preached the sinful nature of desire and libertines who overindulged the sensuous appetites. Carver’s book demonstrates how, in an attempt “to establish an ethical hedonism based on nature,” Rochester frankly confronted his own excesses, making for a poetry in which the satirist is himself satirized.
In a letter written to his wife at the end of his life, Rochester observed sadly that the great crisis of human existence is that there is “so great a disproportion ’twixt our desires and what it [Nature] has ordained to content them.” Mick Jagger was not the first person to complain about trying, trying, and trying, but never getting any satisfaction.
Raymond-Jean Frontain, who has contributed to these pages since 2005, is working on a book about Tennessee Williams’ sexual ethic.
