Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

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Aphra Behn: A Secret Life Page 30

by Janet Todd


  In contrast, Nat Lee provided a pathetic variation, ‘Love’s Opportunity Neglected’, in which the willing mistress was played with until her desire was heightened and ‘her Passion was done’. This gallantry serves the man ill, for he has ‘slighted the Critical Minute of Love’. As for Wycherley, he put his impotence poem on the stage as The Country Wife, making the man in control of his body by feigning impotence. He could thus become a rake by pretending to be a eunuch, or perhaps he merely became what Behn feared men could become: tradesmen with their sperm.

  When she went home after her composition, much amused by what she had read and no doubt giving amusement by what she had written, Behn left a copy with Rochester or another in his circle. When he died a few years later, it was published as his, in the pirated Poems by the Right Honourable the E. or R.22 She made no protest but quietly printed it again under her own name. It was a compliment to have her verses taken for his. After her death, it entered a new context: Sam Briscoe published it in 1718 within a letter supposedly to Hoyle, blaming him for his homosexuality. Whether this is genuine or not—and it seems unlikely given her views—‘The Disappointment’ may have been in part intended for Hoyle, a comic assault where he was most vulnerable. Throughout her works, male failure in performance with women would be in a context of men’s relations with each other, as if she suspected homosexuality as the foe to fulfilment of her heterosexual desires.

  Another poem of Behn’s that passed for Rochester’s, possibly because it began life in a poetic evening, was the sensuous and steamy ‘On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks’. Busks are strips of wood used to stiffen the front of corsets; so they were intimate with the female breasts. The poem describes a voyeuristic tree, the evergreen juniper, leaning over and leering at a shepherdess, again called Cloris, in the throes of love. Like Behn before she met Hoyle, the tree had been self-sufficient, but it was now much aroused by the coupling. The encounter it witnessed was ambiguous: the woman had led the man on by her ‘Languishment’, but, none the less, the shepherd ‘waits no consent’, sex needing that little violence to make it piquant. In this, Behn echoes Rochester, who, likewise, implicates women in rape. But it is no matter in the pastoral world for, unlike in the real, there is no consequence: the woman is pleased to be forced and the man’s love ‘Before and after was the same’. In this happy state, the pair could eroticise the very landscape, including the juniper tree: ‘The Shepherdess my Bark carest, / Whilst he my Root, Love’s Pillow, kist.’ Having been so aroused, the tree could not give up voyeurism or bear to be ‘No more a joyous looker on’. In pity—but with overtones of a more violent and sexually aggressive act—Cloris cut the tree down and turned it into busks of a female corset. The corset became the mask of the female body and its guardian in the real world. In Arcadia there was no need for corsetry.

  By the third quarter of the 1670s, Behn had a wide circle of artistic and intellectual friends, although she was probably never an intimate of Rochester’s aristocratic circle or more than an occasional entertainer of the great.23 More appropriate to her rank and business, she was now close to painters and writers, some met through the theatre, some through her legal friends. She had, for example, become a ‘Mate’ of Thomas Flatman, formerly of the Inner Temple and now a slightly melancholic poet and miniaturist.24 It was easy to grow close to a man who tended to the confessional. Flatman shared Behn’s admiration for Cowley and his Pindarics, though, like her, he had been mocked for his imitations, one of which had been a tribute to Katherine Philips. Rochester labelled them indiscriminately the result of’a jaded muse whipt with loose reins’.

  Flatman, in turn, was connected to the portrait painter Mary Beale, to whom he taught the art of miniature painting. Mary Beale moved to Pall Mall in 1670 and became moderately well known as a portraitist, especially of children. Yet, although the publication of Behn’s racier works was in the future, and Beale possibly did paint Rochester (or at least his image, after Lely), the kindly, pious and married daughter of a Puritan clergyman is unlikely ever to have been intimate with such a woman as Behn. Perhaps, however, she painted Behn and the portrait now hanging in St Hilda’s College, Oxford, is hers. Unfortunately the work, which appears to date from the Interregnum or early Restoration and to be of a generic Cavalier lady, looks like no other portrait of Beale’s, being closer to the hard lines of the Flemish—Dutch school than to the soft focus Beale usually adopted. Nor does it look like any other alleged picture of Aphra Behn. Still, it is a nice idea that the only professional female portraitist of the later Restoration painted the only female playwright.25

  More likely, though again neither artist nor sitter is authenticated, is the portrait allegedly by the luscious court artist, the Dutch Sir Peter Lely, who moved in the sort of literary circles of which Behn inhabited the fringe. In the Interregnum Lely had painted portraits of the Sealed Knot conspirators, with whom her foster-brother Thomas Colepeper and his half-brother had been associated, but his great success came later, when his languishing portraits of the nobility did so much to fix the Restoration’s erotic gaze. The picture of Behn, a standard oval with cartouche, must be dated through the hairstyle to the 1670s. Quite likely it was ordered by the theatre since it was apparently the practice at Dorset Garden to hang up ‘the poets’ pictures’. The portrait is labelled ‘Mrs Behn. The Poetess’ and later was said to have come into the possession of Betterton’s ‘machinist’, the playwright Tom Wright, a move quite feasible if it had been hanging in a dilapidated theatre for some years.26 Despite stressing a solid self-assertion in the face, Lely gave his sitter the conventional soft clothes and skin, the plump chin and lips that were the hallmark of his lazily ‘animated Canvas’.27 This was inevitably so, especially for the drapery, since people of Behn’s status tended to get mass treatment from Lely; that is, they chose a numbered pose which was then executed by artists in the studio, with the master doing the face alone from life. Aphra Behn appears in the fashion of the 1670s from the thick curls down to the full mouth.

  Probably Behn’s closest artist friend was John Greenhill, originally from Salisbury, who may also have known Mary Beale since he lodged with a dealer in her pictures. A former pupil of Lely’s, Greenhill had, by the late 1660s, also become a successful portrait painter with his own practice and he was much in demand by aristocrats and celebrities. He provided likenesses of poets such as Cowley and Davenant, as well as of the Duke of York and the King. He probably also painted Aphra Behn or at least drew her, although no suitable picture has been identified.28 Greenhill liked the bohemian society of literary and theatrical people, and soon his life became dominated by the heavy drinking and irregular hours that were taking their toll on Rochester, Lee and Otway. Like them, he had not the physique for debauchery. In 1676 he died, still in his early thirties, having supposedly got so drunk that he fell into a gutter in Long Acre near Dryden’s home. He shared his mode of death with Nell Gwyn’s mother.

  When Behn wrote his elegy, she saw Greenhill not as a drunk, but as an equivocally erotic man, the sort to whom she was so frequently attracted. He was a person who could, in his painting, copy his own perfections, ‘For he had all that cou’d adorn a Face, / All that cou’d either Sex subdue’—a conventional enough androgynous description, but Behn was especially prone to make it. She remembered him ‘warm’d with Love and Wine’, never abusive like other alcoholics, firm in his friendships and invariably gentle, a sort of man-woman. His art too was androgynous, for he was supremely the painter of Arcadia, with its unregulated pleasure and unthreatening sexuality. Because he was an Arcadian painter, it was right that he should eschew the Christian heaven and inhabit ‘Groves of Everlasting Dawn’.

  It was the death not only of a likable man Behn mourned but of a fellow-artist who could give her and her friends ‘Immortalitie’. His works improved on their human subjects and had a less physical and more refined effect on the viewers than the originals had:

  The Face and Eies, more Darts receiv’d from him,


  Then all the Charms she [Nature] can create.

  The Difference is, his Beauties do beget

  In the inamour’d Soul a Vertuous Heat:

  While Natures Grosser Pieces move,

  In the course road of Common Love.

  Despite its refinement, however, Greenhill’s brush is thoroughly eroticised. Painting and poetry can create a body which exists in three dimensions and responds softly to the touch. The result is baroque metaphysics, with putti floating over cloud-like breasts:

  So bold, yet soft, his touches were;

  So round each [part,] so sweet and fair.

  That as his Pencil mov’d men thought it prest,

  The Lively imitating rising Breast,

  Which yield like Clouds, where little Angels rest.29

  In the end, the vision fades and, though his pictures have preserved others in their prime, they have not preserved the painter.

  Behn probably wrote her elegy for Greenhill in company, even, again, collaboratively. Like ‘The Disappointment’, it was first published as the Earl of Rochester’s.

  The combination of poetic development and libertine excitement resulted in one of Behn’s most successful pastoral poems, ‘The Golden Age’. Like ‘The Disappointment’, it was based on a French original, but was also a greatly expanded—198 lines of pindarics—adaptation of the famous Act I chorus of the pastoral play, Aminta, written in the previous century by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso. In the poem, Behn brought together many of the themes of this period of her life, while providing her own happy resolution to the problem of ‘Disappointment’.

  The myth of the Golden Age to which Behn so constantly refers goes back as far as Hesiod in about 700 BC, but her apprehension seems closest to Ovid’s in Book I of his Metamorphoses. It refers to the period before the Olympian gods seized power, a time when gods and men lived together amicably under the benign rule of Saturn or Cronos and under the influence of the goddess Justice or Astrea, Behn’s own pseudonym. Subsequently, it was imagined as a time of civilization, but without its discontents, an era of fecund plenty without effort, when war, work, property, shame and sexual constraints were unknown. In the pastoral age, agriculture had not been invented, or, as Behn put it, ‘The stubborn Plough had then, / Made no rude Rapes upon the Virgin Earth; / Who yeilded of her own accord her plentious Birth; / Without the Aids of men.’ In the Renaissance, the Golden Age was reimagined with great intensity, especially by Tasso. His poem was made into an English version, which, however, played down the sexual freedom at the heart of Tasso’s lines.30

  Dryden was worried that the Golden Age subverted the Christian myth of Eden, and he sometimes equated it with the Hobbesian state of nature.31 Other consistent monarchists saw that it undercut the Royalist notion that kings owned power from God and that people were born subjects.32 But Behn shared with Tasso, Rochester, Wycherley and Otway a sense of yearning for past innocence, and her time of pleasure was not subverted by Christian considerations. Nor was it undercut by the use she made of it for a common or uncommon seduction—in the most obvious reading ‘The Golden Age’ is an invitation to bed by an ungendered speaker.

  Behn feared that sex had become trammelled with economy, that love was a kind of trade, and that intercourse was physical and mercenary. Desire depended on constructed subterfuges, on clothed nakedness and illicit pleasure, while passion was created by the politics of honour, rights, property and authority. In her imagined Golden Age, here a pre-pastoral time which reached the pastoral world of seduction only at the end, no one hoarded riches for themselves and sex was pleasure not power. Since the male institutions of power, from kingship, religion and property to honour and shame, were absent, ‘Nymphs’ could be ‘free, no nice, no coy disdain, / Deny’d their Joyes, or gave their Lover pain’. ‘Joyes’ were not transitory but ‘everlasting, ever new’. No virginity, no impotence, no satiety. Since there was no shame, there was no need for constricting clothes and all the cumbersome pretence of Restoration fashion which dictated stiff oppressive undergarments and a free-flowing exterior. Woman was not bound in corsets or in repressive sexual codes.

  It was a fantasy world where all were aristocrats; no domestic or agricultural labour was required. As there was no plough to pierce the virgin earth, no sword, so, it is implied, there was no erect penis either. Sexual joys were not dependent on potency. There was no heterosexuality only sexuality and the snake which poor Cloris found so limp had here no ‘spightful Venom’ at all, ‘But to the touch were Soft, and to the sight were Gay’. Ease and sex could both arrive without ‘the Aids of men’. Had Cloris and Lysander strayed into the Golden Age realm, they would not have suffered ‘Disappointment’.

  Much of the power of the utopia in ‘The Golden Age’ comes from the invocation of its opposite, the leaden world of money, war, trade, merchandise and sexuality as commodity. In this world, the false concept of honour has induced shame and made men and women both commodify sex. So the woman herself ties up her hair:

  The Envious Net, and stinted order hold,

  The lovely Curls of Jet and shining Gold,

  No more neglected on the Shoulders hurl’d:

  Now drest to Tempt, not gratify the World,

  Thou Miser Honour hord’st the sacred store,

  And starv’st thy self to keep thy Votaries poor.

  Honour! that put’st our words that should be free

  Into a set Formality

  Thou base Debaucher of the generous heart,

  That teachest all our Looks and Actions Art....33

  The poem ends invoking the lines which Tasso also had invoked, from the Roman poet Catullus: ‘Suns can sink and rise again: for us, when once the brief light has ended, there is a night of perpetual sleep.’ Or as Behn puts it, ‘The Sun and Spring receive but our short Light, / Once sett, a sleep brings an Eternal Night.’

  ‘The Golden Age’ is a felicitous poem, although, wanting to find fault where he could, Pope quoted some lines out of context in his Art of Sinking in Poetry; stopping Behn in mid-sentence, he made her exemplify the florid style. Irritated into even more egregious misreading and misquoting was a contemporary lampoonist who would come to be the scourge of the liberated Mrs Behn, a man with a background not far from her own, the former servant Robert Gould. Immune to the wit of a lethargic Cupid using his bow only when he felt men were ignoring sex, Gould made Behn summon ten thousand ‘wanton Cupids’ scattering ‘lecherous Darts’; Behn had presented only ‘A Thousand Cupids’ fanning their wings, occasionally sending a dart to an ‘uninspir’d’ shepherd. Meanwhile Behn’s amorous swains and shepherdesses became men servicing lusting virgins. The ‘Golden Age’, as rewritten by Gould, argued a want of ‘Chastity’ in its author and outdid the filth of Rome and Greece.34

  The ‘Golden Age’ theme colours another poem of Behn’s probably from this time, in which she portrayed herself as a sort of mythical Astrea, the guardian of the easeful aristocratic realm. The King had reappointed the estimable Duke of Ormonde as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Ormonde had set off in August 1677 with a retinue of two earls, two viscounts ‘and several other noblemen and gentlemen’.35 To one of these gentlemen, just possibly his younger son, the untried and earlier troublesome Earl of Arran, Behn may have addressed her ‘Farewell to Celadon’.

  ‘Celadon’ was one of Behn’s most commonly used pastoral names, the initial association with Scot having long since been broken. Although it was often given to ‘swains’ with whom she, as Astrea, could be associated, it might refer to anyone. The only hint of identity in the poem is that the man is young, rich, noble and loyal.36

  An autonomous and tranquil aristocrat, Celadon had been in a Golden Age by being at home on his estate, where ease, amorousness and pleasure attended his days. Now he was being urged into a debased world in which aristocrats could no longer leave business to the underprivileged and factious; they must become the bulwark of a needy monarchy. Conventionally in pastoral poems, a kind of masculine e
ffort disrupts a feminine peace. Here the King crashes through the poem as the Almighty, Jove and Caesar, responsible for Celadon’s ‘fall’ from ‘easie quietude’. Behn implied no disloyalty, but she was rarely admiring of the acts of Charles II. She no doubt remembered her own experiences when, in the poem, she described the royal service as ‘hurry, noise, and news’. None the less, however much a nobleman might wish to leave politics to the underprivileged, ‘To him to whom forgetful Heaven, / Has no one other vertue given, / But dropt down the unfortunate, / To Toyl, be Dull, and to be Great’, he must be about royal business. The only consolation is that, in his few hours away from ‘Toiles’, Celadon may establish a wistful pastoral world in Ireland and have again his Damon and ‘some dear Shee’ to tumble on the ‘Mossey Beds’.

  Because men tended to write prologues and epilogues and to be recorded more than women, Behn seems largely to move in a masculine literary world during these years. As she gained fame, however, she attracted younger women poets and would-be playwrights. One was the plain, clever, witty (and later scandalous) Elizabeth Taylor, daughter of Sir Thomas Taylor from Maidstone in Kent, whom Behn probably met through the widespread Colepeper family. Although reputedly the lover of Thomas Colepeper of Preston Hall, namesake of Behn’s fosterbrother, this spirited and extravagant lady went on in 1685 to marry the trimming judge, Francis Wythens, possibly in imitation of Behn’s later fortune-hunting girls.37 She seems to have had the same literary Royalist taste in poets as Behn, being a great admirer of Cowley, and she wrote very creditable songs, which had fairly wide manuscript circulation. Later Behn published her work, including her pleas (made ironic by later circumstances) to ‘Virgin Pow’rs’ to defend her from improper love.38 In lampoons Betty Taylor had a hectic sex life and loved the bottle.39

 

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