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(More customer reviews)In taking on the Rochester legend Greene has set himself a formidable task because Rochester exists primarily by virtue of his very unvirtuous reputation. At the time Greene set about researching Rochester his lyrics were virtually unread by all but Rochester and Restoration scholars because no general collection (let alone a scholarly edition) of his works existed in the 1930's. His poems were not readily available to the public and even students and scholars had to search the archives to find them (at Oxford his verses were kept in a special file that scholars had to ask for). And at the time Greene is writing his biography no one really wants anything to do with it; thus it went unpublished for forty years.
This is not the first Rochester biography I have read. I've also read James William Johnson's A PROFANE WIT: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (2004). But each biographer, though dealing with the same bundle of anecdotes, letters, and texts really puts those things together in their own way. Each biographer chooses which episodes to stress and exactly how to stress them. Facts alone really do not tell us that much. A biography is really a chance for a scholar, or novelist in this case, to offer their version of a famous, or infamous, life. Johnson's biography has the benefit of having been written in a time when a considerable amount of research has been done on the life and writings of Rochester and so his own works builds upon that. Greene, however, is really starting from scratch and building from a very scant pile of Rochester research. As a result Johnsons life of Rochester is heavy on dates and facts (the research is impressive and exaustive) while Graham Green's life of Rochester is more intuitive. Johnson is the adamant and assiduous scholar and Greene the literary gentleman. Nonetheless Johnson does leave shcolarship behind at times when he ventures into the psychoanalytic which the author admits is highly speculative. This is where we find the advantage of Greene. Greene wrote his biography before the dogmas of Freud were readily accepted as fact. Thus with Greene you do not get the psychobabble, rather you get a very classic no-frills literary portrait. After reading both I find I prefer the Greene version of Rochester's life.
Graham Greene offers a conflicted Rochester: a man that is in many ways both a product of his age and one of his age's greatest critics. Perhaps the most interesting conflict within the age and within Rochester himself was the one between Hobbist rationalism (which led to much of the cynicism in the poetry and drama of the time) and a continued interest in religion. Greene's Rochester is a man within whom the religious and philosophical battles of the day rage. And ultimately the victory goes to religion (though it might be more accurate to say that Rochester fought the battle to a draw). Rochester's death bed conversion is well known but what has not been examined is how thoroughly religious sentiment and language saturates even his most bawdy and cynical lyrics. Greene does an excellent job of showing that the church never really left Rochester and that rationalism never wholly replaced the religious mysticism that played a part in his conception of the universe his entire life. Neither regime of knowledge/belief really dominated, rather each system competed with the other in an unresolved and creative tension. The most telling anecdote is of Rochester's pact with a fellow soldier in the heat of a naval battle: Rochester and his fellow soldier had premonitions of death before the naval battle was to begin and so they promised each other that if either of them should die they would appear to the other after death. The other soldier did die within a few feet of him and Rochester apparently was haunted by this his entire life. Knowledge of the horror of battle that he experienced firsthand always made it difficult for Rochester to accept that there was any kind of divinity looking out for men. Rochester would later regret the part that his actions and his poetry had in leading others astray and he always admired moral men but his own beliefs wavered even at the end.
Greene's own war time experience, his battles with cynicism and liquor, his literary sensibility (he is espcially good at picking out choice quotes from Rochester's poetry to illustrate states of mind and moods), and his Catholicism make him an especially qualified biographer.
The full-color paintings, illustrations, maps and other period paraphenalia make this an especially attractive volume to own.
All of the usual Restoration suspects are here: Charles II, Lady Castelmaine, Nell Gwynn, Elizabeth Barry (Greene devotes quite a bit of space to an analysis of the love letters Rochester wrote to Barry), Etherege and other rakehells....as well as the long list of Rochester's enemies: including Dryden and Mulgrave...
What was perhaps most surprising to me was the fact that the Rochester that most people know( the one that is always drunk, always spinning new profane and seditious lyrics, and always after a new lady) is simply one of Rochester's many personas. This is a legend that Rochester's own friends helped create and perpetuate, but this is not the only Rochester that Greene is interested in. In fact Greene is much more interested in revealing that even though Rochester seems to have embodied the age more than any other figure, he also despised the age more than anyone. And it is the unresolvedness of his divided vision that drives Rochester to antagonisms with others and that compels him to write. It is the poet not the riotous court fool that fascinates Greene the most.
Greene is thus presenting us with a Rochester that has perhaps unfairly been labeled a profane wit. Rochester could play the profane wit when in his cups better than anyone else but Rochester played many roles, and "profane wit" is only one masque that this myriad voiced personality wore. Greene's immensely well written and pleasurable biography reads not like a dry scholarly exercise for it is not an endless iteration of inane facts and dates. Nor does Greene try to wow you with his own detective work (the pitfall of many a literary biography), rather this reads like the work of a gentleman scholar, albeit one more sensitive and receptive to literary exploration than to scandalous misdeed, and as a result he stresses the former over the latter.
Other Rochester biographies have the advantage of being written by experts in this literary period, but this kind of expertise is often dry and lacks imaginative spark. As thorough as Johnson's biography is I found it crowded with too many dates and too much peripheral information about relatives and family politics. Greene is not only a competent researcher but also a literary man with a literary sensibility and genius of his own and this allows Greene the kind of insights the fact checkers and experts often miss. Greene may have far fewer original sources at his disposal than Johnson did but I much prefer and value Greene's literary virtues (and intuition) over Johnson's merely academic virtues.
One of the best literary biographies I've encountered.
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