Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  In The Rover, Angellica, disliking Willmore’s stinking buff, had dressed her man but he had gone off with his new clothes to flirt elsewhere. Encountering her lover in clothes ‘as rotten as if he had been bury’d in ’em’, Philadelphia provides linen, hat, shoes, stockings and sword from a ‘Sale-shop’, but, when he shows proper gratitude, he is measured by ‘the best taylor in Covent-Garden’ and given ‘three of the most modish rich suits made that might become a private Gentleman of a thousand pounds a year’. It sounds like a fantasy of the impecunious Tom Brown’s.

  There are other problems, too. The tone of the story is broken when the narrator says that the widow Philadelphia is besieged by as many suitors ‘as our dear King Charles, whom God grant long to Reign, was lately by the Presbyterians, Independants, Anabaptists, and all those canting Whiggish Brethren’. The list sounds as though it is there to remind any frequenter of the playhouse of the old propagandist playwright, Aphra Behn. But other aspects would not: for example the ending where Philadelphia simply gives a girl to Wilding, as if arranged marriages become satisfactory when organised by matriarchs rather than patriarchs. Then there is the praise of the chapel-going Councillor Fairlaw and his family, more suitable to Tom Brown, a committed Protestant, than to Behn. Fairlaw believes a humble posture only due to God ‘and the King sometimes’ and, as his name suggests, he uses the law, usually maligned by Behn, to right Philadelphia as much as he can. When he, an old man, married her, the marriage is justified by the prudence and sorrow of Philadelphia, who is proposed to Fairlaw by his dying first wife as ‘an excellent Nurse to him’, a woman who will ‘prolong his life by some years’. Young Behn heroines tend to marry old men simply for money, while old men marry for sex, not nursing.19

  Behn was a great ventriloquist. So were Gildon and Brown, who wrote, ‘Those who rob the Modern Writers study to hide their Thefts.’20 Answering a charge of literary fraud, Tom Brown’s imaginary ‘Scriblers’ exclaim, ‘our empty Pockets have Occasion to be Replenish’d.... We dare do any thing for Hunger .... What a God’s Name would you have us do? The Bailiffs are perpetually inquiring for us, the Booksellers Teizing us, our Landlords Persecuting us for Drink, Washing and Lodging; and must we do nothing to deliver us from the Plagues we lye unde.’21 If this is true of Tom Brown, it is hard to see why Behn with her chronic shortage of money failed to publish her entertaining stories in her lifetime—or indeed why Briscoe and Gildon did not do so in 1696 when, also needing money, they entitled their volume of Aphra Behn’s fiction The Histories and Novels... In One Volume.22 (The volume of novels, written by Behn or her ghost, proved initially popular. In 1731 William Twiss was sentenced to transportation for stealing books including ‘one call’d Mrs Behn’s Novels’ while Walter Scott’s grand aunt remembered reading the work with great pleasure when she was a girl. Living on into the more squeamish nineteenth century, the old woman looked again briefly at the first story, then advised that the volume be burnt.)

  The bookseller Tonson’s shop at the Judge’s Head in Chancery Lane on the corner of Fleet Street formed a congenial meeting place, and wine flowed there, no doubt paid for immediately or ultimately by the authors. On one occasion during the Great Frost, Aphra Behn had, by her own admission, become ‘in Wine’. Although she claimed she drank to keep out the intense cold, she felt herself much enhanced, as she wrote later in her comic verse letter to Thomas Creech. She was not self-conscious about a middle-aged person tipsy—indeed it was something of a poetic image, putting her in the literary company of the Ancients such as Horace, and noblemen such as Rochester, who had all fixed the tie of wine and wit:

  ... when ’twixt every sparkling Cup,

  I so much brisker Wit took up;

  Wit, able to inspire a thinking;

  And make one solemn even in Drinking;

  Wit that would charm and stock a Poet...

  I say ’twas most impossible,

  That after that one should be dull.23

  During this pleasant inebriated time she promised to show Creech her latest work. She would leave it at Tonson’s for him.

  Enlivened by shifting intimacies and sherry wine, still the frost went on, as did the activity on the Thames, especially near the Temple stairs. The result of the cold interacting with the fires on the river was a thick fog. ‘London, by reason of the excessive coldnesse of the aire hindring the ascent of the smoke, was so filld with the fuliginous steame of the Sea-Coale, that hardly could one see crosse the streete...& every moment was full of disastrous accidents.’24 Usually much traffic went by water but, with the Thames frozen, it had to go by road and this added to the congestion of private coaches, tradesmen’s wagons, and sedan chairs. No wonder there were so many accidents.

  One happened to Aphra Behn, just as the snow was turning into hazardous slush. She had been to Whitehall to try to squeeze money from the King for her propaganda, noting in passing that Charles was ‘oft in Debt... / For Tory Farce or Doggerell’.25 She then intended to go to Tonson’s to leave her work, a ‘scrap of Nonsense’ for Creech to read. She also hoped to meet him there. She had wanted to introduce Jack Hoyle to him since he was, she said, a great admirer of Lucretius, probably meaning both of the philosopher and of Creech’s translation. But, on her way from Whitehall through Charing Cross to Chancery Lane, as the carriage, perhaps her own coach but more likely a hired hackney, passed the Pope’s Head Tavern and the Temple, it was overturned. Behn was tumbled out on to the ice. She made an unedifying spectacle, soaked to the skin in dirty slush. Since keeping warm simply entailed putting on more and more of the same garments, she was swathed in petticoats, now all sopping. She looked, she moaned, like a discomfited Whig after the discovery of the Rye House Plot, or like one of her male characters in sexual embarrassment after ‘too much fire’:

  Even so look’d I, when Bliss depriving,

  Was caus’d by over-hasty driving,

  Who saw me cou’d not chuse but think,

  I look’d like Brawn in sowsing drink.

  Although the result was an injury to her hand—‘Scribling Fist was out of joynt, / And ev’ry Limb made great complaint’—Behn was most upset to be missing her meeting. She neither delivered her material nor saw Creech at Tonson’s before he left for Oxford.

  What Behn had wanted to show him was probably her first translation from the French: Tallemant’s Voyage to the Island of Love, with which she had taken great pains. When she did get the poem to him, Creech found it very sexy indeed—he said as much in a long commendatory work. Behn was an arousing agent, who led both the chaste and the warm into sexual fantasy: ‘Each languishes for thy Amintas Charms, / Sighs for thy fancied Raptures in her Armes...In the same Trance with the young pair we lie, / And in their amorous Ecstasies we die.’ Later, the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, asserted, ‘the art of the Muse is to stirr up soft thoughts, / Yett to make all hearts beat, without blushes, or faults.’26 This was an enterprise the older poet could not easily have imagined; yet there is some evidence that Creech’s poem calling her ‘Loves great Sultana’ who allows the reader to ‘suck the sweet destruction in’ pleased Behn as little as her original poem on his Lucretius had pleased him. Strange really, since she had said as much of ‘soft’ Cowley, who melted her hero with his erotic poems.27

  The Island of Love was less translated from, than inspired by, Tallemant. Behn’s pastoral poetry had suggested she was fascinated with cartographies of love, the Carte du Tendre.28 So she was, in choosing Tallemant, taking the advice of the Earl of Roscommon, whose Essay on Translated Verse was probably circulating in manuscript at this time. He argued that translators should pick originals partly from sympathy with the author: ‘seek a Poet who your way do’s bend, / And chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend.’ Thoughts and styles should agree so well that the translator is ‘No Longer his Interpreter, but He! ’

  Yet however congenial he was, Tallemant was also clearly judged inadequate by Behn, for her own work is far longer than his. Considering that she
later lamented the embellishments of French writers who took ‘twenty Lines, to express what an English Man would say, with more Ease and Sense in five’, it is ironic that Behn made a 2196-line poem of Tallemant’s slim prose and poetry.29 In fact French of the time was growing more abstract and taut, and English translators, with none of the restraints of reverence that the classics sometimes imposed, tended to add their own concrete examples and specific details—as Behn herself did. Although rococo in style, Behn’s poem was far more erotic than Tallemant’s. The Island of Love was published at much the same time as Love-Letters and, for those accepting her authorship of both, gave a steamy impression of Aphra Behn. Whether this mirrored a sudden promiscuous reality, a middle-aged sexual spree, or a rich imaginative life fed by a mixture of amorousness and sexual restraint was probably as little known to most readers then as now.

  Tallemant’s Voyage to the Island of Love tells of a miserable lover, Tircis, who writes to his friend of his allegorical voyage. Behn turns Tircis into Lysander who encounters the fair Aminta, the name she had used for herself in her poems to Boys and Hoyle: Lysander loves and eventually beds Aminta and then loses her through death. Like ‘The Golden Age’, the work is mostly a long seduction poem of the carpe diem variety. Aminta is urged to forget reputation and esteem,

  Mistaken Virgin, that which pleases me

  I cannot by another tast and see;

  And what’s the complementing of the World to thee?30

  The sex act becomes a strenuous journey in which the lover is accosted by Honour, Respect and Jealousy, until he finds Opportunity. Copulation occurs in the Bower of Bliss, the name used by Edmund Spenser for a dangerous threatening realm in his Renaissance allegory, The Faerie Queen. Behn softens the Bower into a Golden Age place of mutual ecstasy, not quite as indolent as the state in her earlier poem, but more of a realm of gentle pastoral orgy, as lovers’ whispering ‘Is all is heard: Silence and shade the rest’. It seems a more decent version of Rochester’s London, where nightly beneath the trees of St James’s Park ‘Are Buggeries, Rapes, and Incests made’.31

  In The Island of Love, Behn took on a male persona, speaking through the male lover and looking through male eyes. But there are touches that reveal her poetic female narrator, such as—again—the description of a failed love-making even in the Bower of Bliss, as the man suddenly lies ‘all dead’ between the arms of the ‘disappointed Maid’. This time, however, the lady does not run off, and soon ‘vast Seas came rowling on, / Spring-tides of Joy, that the rich neighboring shoar / O’re-flow’d and ravisht all great Natures store.’ (Needless to say there was nothing of this in Tallemant.) Behn is also there in the sense of love as flirtation, foreplay, and anticipation: the ‘Little Arts to please’ are expanded from Tallemant’s fifteen lines to forty-five, and include music, song, dance, gaiety and prodigality.

  The realm of love has the ease of the Golden Age, expressing again something of Behn’s ideal of sexual quietude, her association of arousal and indolence. It lacks the ferocity of Lucretian sex and the busy nature of ordinary life. In this pleasant realm, the melancholic, the politician and the philosopher forget what embitters their days. Evidently fatigued by her own period of subservience to state politics, Behn sees the Island also as a place of poetry not propaganda: ‘Eternal Musick, Gladness, Smiles and Sport, / Make all the business of this Little Court.’

  The Island of Love is delicately saturated with sex; the poem is far more suggestive than Tallemant’s, with even nature having sexual resonance, and the prude and the slut exposed as equally sexually obsessed. With his checked but constant desire for consummation, Lysander has wet dreams in which he tastes ‘the last Mystery of Love’ before waking or, after heavy petting, ends ‘fainting on the sacred floor’. Surrounded with Honour and Respect, Aminta is yet overcome by lust at the end, and she yields with the breathless punctuation of Cloris in ‘The Disappointment’: ‘I am—disarm’d—of all resistance now.’ When Behn gets to Love itself as a creative agent, it is not the Christian but the Lucretian concept she expresses:

  Whilst yet ’twas Chaos, e’re the World was made,

  And nothing was compos’d without his Aid.

  Agreeing Attoms by his pow’r were hurl’d,

  And Love and Harmony compos’d the World.

  For the woman, however, it may be discomposing as well: by the end of the work, Aminta, sexually fulfilled, is dead in the Bower, decomposing into a ‘stiffening Face’.

  Although the poem stays mainly in the allegorical realm, the coaches and liveries of Restoration London peep through, the jilts, politicians and whores, the cabals and mobs. When the lover is distracted, he becomes like ‘a new Religion, / As full of Error, and false Notion too’. As in ‘The Golden Age’, religion is the enemy of nature and love, Lucretian ‘Holy Cheats’ that spread ‘infection’ to the healthy.

  Shadowing the progress of the lover is a progress of a politician. The Princess Hope does not keep promises to lovers nor, it is implied, to ambitious men:

  Her Promises like those of Princes are,

  Made in Necessity and War,

  Cancell’d without remorse, at ease,

  In the voluptuous time of Peace.

  In the presumptuous lover who disdains ‘common Mistresses’ may be something of the presumptuous politician Mulgrave, who had aimed as high as the Princess Anne, and may have used Behn to help make his peace; but above all he is the Duke of Monmouth, ‘The Peoples Darling’, always pushed on by a ‘Politick throng, / The Rabble Shouting as he passed along’. Behn has, however, learnt not to be quite as harsh as she had been in the epilogue to Romulus: Monmouth is not now a criminal but a fool.32

  The length of Behn’s poem suggests both inclination and commercial need. It was a dire financial time for playwrights. Nat Lee had gone mad under the strain and was, following current treatment, being whipped, starved and exhibited into sanity in Bedlam. Wycherley mocked the paradox: ‘You, but because you starved, fell mad before, / Now starving does your wits to you restore.’ Failing to prise £20 out of his publisher, Wycherley too was locked up in debtors’ prison.33 Dryden was begging an advance on his government salary, and Otway, ‘tho he’s very fat, he’s like to starve.’ When she visited the latter, reputedly to ‘lend’ him £5, Behn was probably reminded of the horror to which poverty could lead.

  In The Luckey Chance a couple of years on, she gave a graphic picture of her hero, an old soldier like Otway, at the lodgings of a ‘poor woman’, disturbed by the Billingsgate voice of the stinking landlady and by a blacksmith’s hammer. His room is the size of a tub:

  He may lie along in’t, there’s just room for an old Joyn’d Stool besides the Bed, which one cannot call a Cabin, about the largeness of a Pantry Bin, or a Usurer’s Trunk, there had been Dornex Curtains to’t in the Days of Yore; but they were now annihilated, and nothing left to save his Eyes from the Light, but my Land-ladies Blew Apron, ty’d by the strings before the Window, in which stood a broken sixpenny Looking-Glass... which could but just stand upright, and then the Comb-Case fill’d it.34

  (As ever in the Restoration one should not be too affected by seemingly realistic touches, since the passage is also based on a description of a garret in Dryden’s first comedy The Wild Gallant, which also compares the space to the size of a usurer’s iron chest and notes that a ‘penny Looking-glass cannot stand upright in the Window’. Dryden adds the even more unpalatable detail of a chamber-pot which, if spilled, would completely inundate the room.)

  Behn’s hero was attended in his garret by one unpaid footman who has become a familiar companion rather than a servant. Money is owed everywhere, to the landlady, to taverns, alehouses, chandlers, and laundresses, while the hero—for whom the amorous landlady has pawned her best petticoat, her new Norwich Mantua, and her apostle spoons—has only a cloak to skulk out in at night and ‘a pair of piss-burn’d shammy Breeches’.

  Although only thirty-three like Rochester at his death, Otway was now beyond skulking o
ut.35 He had reputedly written four acts of an affecting tragedy, superior in Behn’s view to anything he had written before. She told him to show it to Betterton, but Otway wanted to finish before taking this step. Behn then ‘acquainted Mr. Betterton with this interview, who immediately made all possible enquiry after him, till about a month afterwards he was informed of his death on Tower Hill’.36

  To avoid such a plight herself, Behn packaged The Island of Love with some of her old poems and, unadventurously, entitled the whole Poems upon Several Occasions.37 She then tried to persuade Tonson to increase her fee:

  As for the verses of mine, I shou’d really have thought ’em worth thirty pound; and I hope you will find it worth twenty-five; not that I shou’d dispute at any other time for 5 pound wher I am so obleeged; but you can not think what a preety thing the Island will be, and what a deal of labor I shall have yet with it... pray speake to your Brother to advance the price to one five pound more, ’twill at this time be more then given me, and I vow I wou’d not loose my time in such low gettings, but only since I am about it I am resolv’d to go throw with it tho I shou’d give it. I pray go about it as soone as you please, for I shall finish as fast as you can go on. Methinks the Voyage should com last, as being the largest volume.... I wish I had more time, I wou’d ad something to the verses that I have a mind to, but, good deare Mr. Tonson, let it be 5 pound more, for I may safly swere I have lost the getting of 50 pounds by it, tho that’s nothing to you, or to my satisfaction and humour; but I have been without getting so long that I am just on the poynt of breaking, especially since a body has no creditt at the Playhouse as we used to have, fifty or 60 deepe, or more; I want extreamly or I wo’d not urge this.