The Debt to Pleasure: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: In the Eyes of His Contemporaries and in His Own Poetry and Prose (Fyfield Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is what you might call a shorthand biography of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. There is no narrative offered here just a collection of writings from Rochester himself (poems, letters) and the writings of those who knew him and/or the social world that he frequented. So next to Rochester's poems (and all the major ones are included here) you get excerpts from Pepys' diaries, letters from people who knew Rochester or knew of Rochester exchanging gossip about him (including his servant Alcock's account of Rochester fondness for disguise) , and excerpts from Burnett's biography; all of which allow the reader a glimpse of the artist through the eyes of those who actually knew him.
If you have read a longer biography, and there are several out there, about Rochester you will already be familiar with this material. But what you get with a biography written by someone who didn't know Rochester is a lot of attempts to fill in the blanks that the letters and poems leave unfilled and to tell the life as if it were a narrative; but this kind of biography forces the biographer to do a lot of sepculating and interpreting of the letters and the poems. The advantage of DEBT TO PLEASURE is that the poems and letters are presented alone and are thus allowed to speak for themselves.
I have read two other Rochester biographies. I read Graham Greene's LORD ROCHESTER'S MONKEY as well as James William Johnson's A PROFANE WIT. The Graham Greene was written in the 1930's (though not published until 1974) and is a very creative look at the poet but its full of Greene's interpretation of the poems and the affairs and the religious conversion. Johnson's biography, (written in 2004) is more scholarly but Johnson cannot curb his psychoanalytic tendencies and so you get an interpretation, not so much of the poems, but of the Rochester psyche. These approaches have thier merits but each biography offers a version of Rochester (and not necessarily an accurate one). But since everything in it was written by those living in the same age as Rochester THE DEBT TO PLEASURE has the advantage of being an indisturbed artifact or a time capsule and opening this book allows us a glimpse not only of Rochester but of the age he lived in as it existed in the minds of those living in it.
In other words while most biographies are forced to fictionalize in order to lend coherence to the fragments of a life. DEBT TO PLEASURE simply allows those fragments to be just what they are; it does not treat the poems and letters like pieces of a puzzle that all fit together and reveal various things about their authors, but allows them to simply say what they have to say. Thus this short collection of fragments has an integrity that the longer biographical studies do not.
This is a valuable resource for scholars and an excellent introduction to Rochester for those who want to know more.


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Rochester, incontestably the greatest of the Restoratoin Poets and reprobrates, is presented in Debt to Pleasure both in his own words and in the words of those who loved and loathed him.The book is a mosaic in which the poet's voice and the voice of his age sound with a startling, ribald and riotous clarity.

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