Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  An hungry Viper neare a Black Smiths forge,

  Snatcht at a file his eager maw to gorge,

  But the tough steele his feebler teeth repells,

  Its dinted force his jaws with anguish fills.

  As with parts of Seneca Unmasqued, Behn set the fables in the present English culture of debauchees, fops, sparks, aged lovers, and gilded equipages. The toad exploding with venom became the would-be wit. Ageing herself, she was preoccupied with horrific age, the old man pressing himself on the young girl, the old ‘worn out Beauty’ trying to pass ‘for eighteen’.

  Religion, important to Philipott, was largely abandoned and Barlow asked Behn to replace it with politics. Fables were famously used for political purposes and the addition would be a selling point. Clearly selling was the purpose for the flexible Barlow, since, on the analogy of cardgames and games of state, he had already produced series of playing-cards with cartoons that adapted to changing times: his one on the Popish Plot from a Whiggish point of view was, when the Titus Oates stories collapsed, redone to reveal Whig corruption instead.

  Behn of course had no difficulty with the commission. Monmouth had been dead for two years, although his cause of a Protestant alternative was alive. He became a youth misled and his mistaken ambition was set in a context of opposition corruption, plots and sham trials. As ever, Behn avoided sympathy for the underdog, whether the victim of royal anger or the poor. Everyone, illegitimate son or poor man, would be better if he stayed in place. As for democracy, it should be roundly resisted: no inch should be given to the rabble, lest they take all. Where Philipott, who had just survived the Civil War, reflected on the damage of civil strife, Behn pushed the Stuart Royalist message of strong central government—so much so that she sometimes ignored the fable and tacked on a quite different, clashing moral. In Fable XXII, Philipott’s appropriate conclusion was that the poor often did not get their rightful share, squeezed as they were by the rich and powerful. Perhaps revealing herself the daughter of an Overseer of the Poor in her attitudes, Behn omitted the compassion and made this into ‘Proud Senatts thus by easy Monarchs thrive / Incroaching on their whole prerogative.’12

  Despite all this philosophical and political work, Behn knew her reputation in translating was for amorous writing. She was fluent and skilful there, where she could be awkward and tired in other modes. So, despite her feeling that she had been insufficiently rewarded for The Island of Love, it was her fluency that made her take up the French allegory La Montre by de Bonnecorse, as well as the second part of de Tallemant’s Voyages, which she had begun to translate before Charles II’s death. Both were long and there were times over the next months when Behn must have rued the day she had set up as an authority on love. Earlier on in her poetic career, she had expressed earthy sentiments in pastoral mode. These translation-imitations were more simply elegant, more précieuse, more French. She made no great claim for them, as she was doing by now for her plays and original poetry, perhaps knowing they were in a style that would not survive her time.

  Published in 1686, La Montre was not a ‘servile’ translation. Closer to Behn’s habits in The Island of Love than in Seneca Unmasqued, it formed one in a line of interlocking pastoral works, different from the tone and tenor of her contemporary plays. As in Seneca Unmasqued, Behn again revealed her increasing need to surround herself with a fictive world in which characters travelled from one book to another, while an image of herself flitted in and out. Its hero was actually a friend of the character, Lysidas, from The Voyage to the Island of Love and the talkative author made a guest appearance, as she had in the dedication to Lysander in Seneca Unmasqued.

  Balthazar de Bonnecorse’s original work of 1664 was a fantastic account of the lover Damon’s day, organised by his demanding mistress Iris and regulated through a watch, the centre of which is a Cupid indicating hours and duties.13 In 1671 de Bonnecorse had allowed the man to make a gallant reply. Behn combined both works in a mixture of prose and poetry, freely translated into the English language and, occasionally, culture—Damon walks in St James’s Park and the Mall—although, in the main, it still breathes of Parisian salons more than London taverns. Damon’s wonderfully leisurely day begins with his lying in bed for an hour and dressing for another, as he languidly tells his valet to spare the perfume and let him be negligent in dress because his love is absent. At the end of the instructions and the day, Damon responds by providing an allegorical heart-shaped watch case, decorated with cyphers encoding love, and a looking-glass which hourly tells Iris of her charms. This allows Damon to write the kind of amorous catalogue of complexion, hair, eyes, mouth, neck, and hands more sensually enjoyed by Philander in Love-Letters. The picture of the lovers, only occasionally veering towards the erotic, is far more static and playful than anything in The Island of Love.

  Now and again Behn grew inspired to write originally. For example, she expanded the short section on visits of friends into a discussion of how a woman might be fooled by seductive men. Armed with La Rochefoucauld’s maxims about self-love, she wrote: ‘I have seen a Man dress, and trick, and adjust his Looks and Meen, to make a Visit to a Woman he lov’d not, nor ever cou’d love...and only for the Vanity of making a Conquest upon a Heart, even unworthy of the little Pains he has taken about it.’ Undoubtedly she herself had suffered from such company, especially in her time of relative fame. Again, Behn suggested her continued susceptibility when she deplored the man who ‘lies in his Looks, he deceives with his Meen and fashion, and cheats with every Motion, and every Grace he puts on: He cozens when he sings or dances, he dissembles when he sighs; and every thing he does, that wilfuly gains upon her, is Malice propense’. Yet the lady in the scene admits vanity is universal and that she herself sometimes finds ‘a secret Joy in being Ador’d, though I even hate my Worshipper’. Nothing is simple where sexuality is invoked.

  Then Behn herself, Behn as Aminta, Behn as author-lover, Behn as talker and mocker of silent men, made her unscheduled appearance. It was as if, knowing her own notoriety, she could not resist putting in a coded signature. So the ‘angry Aminta’ lambasted a self-assured flatterer and, when Damon is urged not to have an ‘unnecessary, and uncomplaisant Sullenness’, Behn inserted her own poem to Alexis, in which she is accused of ‘Loving a Talker’.14

  Her customary themes peeped through as well, lovers as gamesters throwing dice or the erotic charm in gossip, news and scandal:

  When I hear a Swain enquire

  What Gay Melinda does to live,

  I conclude, there is some Fire

  In a Heart Inquisitive:

  Or ’tis, at least, the Bill, that’s set,

  To shew, The Heart is to be Let.15

  In another place, Behn swerved off to praise Windsor Castle—and the new waterworks made by her old inventor friend, Samuel Morland.16 (Poor Sir Samuel needed some support these days since, having abandoned marrying impecunious young women—like Carola Harsnett—who invariably died, he had decided in 1687 to improve his own sorry financial position by wedding an heiress—only to find himself as thoroughly duped as the Carletons by their supposed ‘German Princess’.) Although Behn had obviously received no house and garden for her sycophancy in her Pindarics, it sounds as if she had at least been invited inside a royal palace: in the passage she stressed she was looking at the ‘In-side of this magnificent Structure’ as well as the outside. She had not been there before and the splendour of Charles II’s refurbishment astonished her. Always moved by opulent art, she was enthralled by the carvings of Grinling Gibbons and the wall paintings of Antonio Verrio; she thought it all a fitting setting for ‘the most Fair, and most Charming of Queens, and the most Heroick, Good, and Just of Kings...such Earthly Gods’.17 Evidently Behn was preparing for another panegyric assault on the court.

  La Montre was a huge work which, following habit and convention, she called ‘this little unlaboured Piece’ when she dedicated it to the young lawyer, Peter Weston. He was chosen because he was not one of th
e young men she had formerly honoured, but instead a beautiful, witty, modest and religious youth, a rare combination. Anxious about the public reputation for erotic writing she had gained from The Island of Love, Behn used the opportunity to insist that she too honoured ‘chaste’ love and that she had here presented a couple who did not end in bed. Far from the Rovers of the 1670s, Weston was praised for his ‘Abhorrence to Lewdness’. To such a man she was ‘A. Behn’ not Astrea. It is hoped that his ‘Happy’ parents, to whom he was such a credit, paid her for the dedication and that he appreciated it when he became an eminent barrister.

  La Montre marked the entry of a new publisher in Behn’s life, William Canning and his printer Holt, mentioned in ‘Astrea’s Booke’. With Canning she would be closely identified during her final years—indeed she became his major author. For this first venture with him Behn provided commendatory poems from her friends, Nahum Tate, George Jenkins, and Richard Ferrar. Predictably they praised her for improving on de Bonnecorse—Jenkins actually claimed she made a writer out of the Frenchman who had little merit before she softened the coarseness of his ‘Rubbish’: ‘We owe to thee, our best Refiner, more / Than him, who first dig’d up the rugged Ore.’18 Outside the circle of well-wishers, however, the mocking Matthew Prior thought the pretty frothy work too long:

  The Poetess Sung: at length swore She’d prove

  That She and Jack Hoyle taught the whole Age to Love

  And on with’t She ran, nor had ended ’till now

  But Phoebus reprov’d her, and gave her to know

  That her Tongue went too fast, and her Love watch too slow.19

  Avoiding the eroticism of The Island of Love, Lycidus, to which Behn returned after a gap of two or three years, also differed from the chaste La Montre. Using both Tallemant’s first and second Voyages, Behn produced a new work, closer to the French original than The Island of Love had been; it was more worldly and sophisticated than either The Island of Love or La Montre.

  Lycidus, the new hero, becomes a hedonist and extrovert, rendered so by experience: ‘I was ly’d and flattered into Wit, jilted and cozen’d into Prudence, and, by ten thousand Vows and perjured Oaths, reduced to Sense again; and can laugh at all my past Follies now.’20 Henceforth, he is resolved to pursue love ‘in such a manner as it shall never cost me a sigh’. In Lycidus coquetry and flirtation replace the romance and languor of The Island of Love, and characters assume not pastoral but theatrical names like Bellamante and Belinda. The god of love is no longer the power of the earlier poem, certainly not the tyrant of ‘Love Arm’d’ from Abdelazer, instead he rules ‘with Reason and with Wit’. He ridicules ‘Whining Passion’, suitable only for ‘Boys and formal Asses’, and accepts love as masquerade—Lycidus is just as successful with his false sighs as with his sincere:

  I never vow’d nor sigh’d in vain

  But both, tho false, were well receiv’d.

  The Fair are pleas’d to give us pain,

  And what they wish is soon believ’d.

  And tho I talk’d of Wounds and Smart,

  Loves Pleasures only toucht my Heart.

  The hints of a Restoration world of wits, coxcombs and fops have increased—although politicians are scarcer—and people fear lampoons as well as rejection. Always fascinated by social and intellectual codes, Behn relished the description of the realm of Intelligence, suitable only for a few, where communication occurs with signs, cyphers and half-words—an Arcadian version of Antwerp. The true lover becomes the fooled spy who has insufficient intelligence, but, for the fake one, the pleasures are evident: he can with the aid of codes take ‘all freedoms, without controul’. The danger is solipsism, a descent into a private code, for ‘there are as many Languages as persons’, as well as a tiring promiscuity—when once the self is separated from words, there is no end to the roles it can play.

  Cynically Lycidus succeeds in bedding two women. The effect is more comic than erotic as the verse falls into doggerel rhythm. The end finds the hero caught by one beloved in flagrante with the other. He has overplayed matters and he has little option but to turn from women to glory. He will pursue a public career, as his female lovers of course cannot.

  Behn’s many additions to Tallemant tend towards complexity, to understanding the mechanism of feeling, the selfish love of a lover on the rebound, the confusion in the mind which registers conflicting emotions, the duplicities of regret. Without allowing herself to enter her poem directly as in La Montre, Behn as author yet gives a sense of an older literary and amorous person looking elegiacally back over experience; to the description of the new lover of the beloved she adds youth, where the French had only beauty, and she interrupts the work to lament her own ‘easiness’, resolving ‘to be no longer a Mark-out-fool for the Rhiming Wits...to aim their Dogrel at’.21 Embittered life must be mitigated by amorous play, a play that has little to do with ‘truth’. In Seneca Unmasqued and a poem beginning ‘Cease, cease, Aminta to complain’, written at about the same time, Behn declared a preference for pleasing duplicity:

  I lov’d my Life too eagerly away

  To have disturb’d thee with too long a stay.

  Ah! cou’d you not my dying Heart have fed

  With some small Cordial Food, till I was dead?

  In this poem the speaker determined to accept her misery when abandoned by a ‘Youth’ for someone else, realising sadly that she had simply loved ‘too late’. Resignedly she awaited the moment when her ‘hopeless love’ would die of its own accord.22 Lycidus too accepts the death of love but, being a young man not an ageing woman, he does it more noisily and egoistically. In the end, however, for all their half sincere, half insincere posing, young man and older woman come together in being ‘in a Humor not to dye’, whatever died within and without them.23

  The ending of Lycidus sounds like Behn’s own farewell to her Rochesterian world and her genre of escapist and enriching pastoral poetry:

  I lookt back on all those happy shades, who had been conscious of my softest pleasures, and a thousand times I sighing bid ’em farewel, the Rivers, Springs and Fountains had my wishes that they might still be true and favor Lovers, as they had a thousand times done me. These dear remembrance[s], you may believe stay’d some time with me, yet I wou’d not for an Empire have return’d to ’em again, nor have liv’d that life over a new I had so long and with so much pleasure persu’d.24

  As Behn’s pastoral poetic career began, according to her memoirist, with a prophetic vision of a Cupid floating on the Thames between England and Holland, so it closed here with an elegy to her created Arcadia.

  Although the poems affixed to Lycidus also have an elegiac quality, there is one notable exception. In these final years, Behn’s verse came to be dominated by women—or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she was simply impressed with beauty and youth wherever they were found, in man, woman, boy or in those delicious beings who refused to submit to gender simplicity. Her half-utopian, half-earthy feelings were most perfectly captured (and hidden) in a poem which could indeed be by a man to a woman, a woman to a man, a woman to a woman or one of either sex to a transvestite or, as the last line suggests, an hermaphrodite—in short any kind of being as long as s/he is young. It is the sort of poem Mirtilla of The Younger Brother might have written.

  ‘To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’ opens:

  Fair lovely Maid, or if that Title be

  Too weak, too Feminine for Nobler thee,

  Permit a Name that more Approaches Truth:

  And let me call thee, Lovely Charming Youth...

  Against thy Charms we struggle but in vain

  With thy deluding Form thou giv’st us pain,

  While the bright Nymph betrays us to the Swain.

  With her pastoral sexual imagery, Behn can as ever touch on risqué matters, even though the setting here is explicitly not Arcadia but England where a concept of ‘Crime’ exists and sex is fixed:

  In pity to our S
ex sure thou wer’t sent,

  That we might Love, and yet be innocent:

  For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;

  Or if we shou’d—thy Form excuses it.

  For who, that gathers fairest Flowers believes

  A Snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.

  Thou beauteous Wonder of a different kind,

  Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join’d;

  When e’r the Manly part of thee, wou’d plead

  Thou tempts us with the Image of the Maid,

  While we the noblest Passions do extend

  The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend.25

  At one minute seeming a ‘beauteous Woman’, at another Clarinda hides the ‘Snake’, so often the penis in Behn’s erotic poetry. She is Cloris and Alexis, manly and maidenly, Amazon—Clorinda was an Amazonian character from Tasso—and girl, a physical version of the intellectual and sexual Behn, praised by her admirers as both masculine and feminine. The final line declaring that love is given to Hermes, the male, friendship to Aphrodite, the female, keeps her or him a divided hermaphrodite.

  ‘Hermaphrodite’ was a tricky term: sometimes it was associated with alchemy to denote a kind of perfection from the creative union of opposites; elsewhere it was used for a freak, as when Behn herself was mocked as ‘an Hermaphrodite’ with ‘neither Witt enough for a Man, nor Modesty enough for a Woman’. It could also denote an effete man or a bisexual woman: a relative of Colepeper’s wife, Anne Frecheville, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess Anne, was described in one satire as having ‘another sex to spare’ and in another as ‘Hermaphrodite’ Frecheville with her dildo.26 Clarinda is the epitome of all the seductive and ambiguous boy-girls Behn had for so long been creating, the Hellenas, Silvias and Olivias. Indeed so, for, above all, Clarinda is of the theatre—especially the Renaissance theatre from which Behn took so much inspiration.