Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Baber thought Aphra Behn had started a fight by claiming in her Universal Hopes that very few poets were writing loyal poems, thus drawing attention to her own achievement and his silence. His small output suggests he was slow to compose and lacked his rival’s facility. So, when he did finally publish his poem on the royal birth, he addressed Behn’s readership directly. In her assumption of a boy she had, he complained, been premature, almost hubristic, raising the possibility of ‘Abortive Joyes’: ‘Some could not Bridle their Officious Rhime, / But must bestow an Heir before the Time.’ Given the demands of court propaganda, Behn must have found this below the belt.

  More troubling because nearer her own insecurities was the clear dig that Aphra Behn was a professional writer, part of the ‘Writing Tribe’. Beside these dull mercenary hacks, he, John Baber, a court poet, did not need the absurd hyperbole they churned out. Where Behn offered her skill as poet in return for money, he offered the unmercenary loyalty of a gentleman. In addition he blamed the ‘Writing Tribe’ for failing to create a proper representation of James II. With such charges Baber had laid himself open and had only himself to blame for the hatchet job Behn undertook.

  The similarity of Behn and Baber, even to the mediocrity of their poems on the birth of the Prince of Wales, meant that, in mocking him, she inevitably mocked herself. So she was forced to deflate the image of the godlike royals which she too had been busily creating. Her poem on Baber thus became a rare glimpse of the political Behn in undress.24 Had she been less concerned with herself, she might have paused to consider whether a beleaguered monarch was best served by a squabble between two of his few supporters.

  To counter the accusation of premature rejoicing, she used gossip she had unearthed: that Baber had in fact finished his poem before the birth, had offered it to a publisher, and then, in cowardly fashion, held back until he was sure of the child’s sex. Beside this cowardice she emerged both daring and loyal. Her main attack was, however, stylistic. Baber’s grasp of metre was faulty and he had to pad out his lines with ‘Dids, and Does, and a quaint Simely’ to make them scan. Behn easily reduced the opening—‘Nine Months a Loyal Zeal has Fir’d my Breast; / Which for Nine Muses could not be at Rest’—to nonsense, the lucky jingle of nine and nine being fatuous: ‘The first thy Loyalties short date Rehearses; / The next, how Damnably thou Pump’st for Verses.’

  Behn had even more fun with Baber’s accusation of hyperbole, the very stuff of the panegyrist. It is comic to watch the great mistress of exaggeration literalising Baber’s conceits and making his routine claims ridiculous. For instance, she demolished his image of the trading City without a soul, its ‘Maces and Furrs’ like ‘Roses after June’ once royal favour was lost: this was quite incomprehensible, Behn snorted, roses blooming after June would be prized, and maces and furs were nothing like them.

  As for Baber’s notion of himself as a gentleman-courtier, she easily countered it. Usually Behn extolled and craved the courtly life but here, to deflate Baber, she reduced it to what she must always have known it was, an endless waiting on the King, wearily attending ‘His Couchees, and his Levies’. The life suited Baber, who saw everything in terms of outward show, belittling a disgraced peer as a dirty garter ribbon and a cashiered colonel as a man without a laced coat. All poets wanted something for their dreary attendance, she pointed out, and, if not money, it was an honour or a title.

  Gleefully Behn developed Baber’s unwise boast of not being a professional. Indeed he was not. And he might have escaped censure ‘had not [his] Unlucky Rhiming Spirit, / Writ Satyr now, instead of Panygerick’. Amateur writers of panegyrics could be indulged because they did no harm and might be rewarded for loyalty, if not for art. Baber should have jingled out a welcome to the new prince, as he had for the coronation. Satire such as the attack on herself was, however, the province of the real professional writer and Baber had been foolish to encroach: ‘Why so sharp Squire Bavius on your Friends?’ (Bavius was a poet from the time of Augustus; he was synonymous with bad verse and malice towards the more gifted.) Behn in her turn had to be ‘sharp’, for Baber had attacked her in her real business.25

  The most perplexing of Baber’s accusations concerned the representation of the King, for Behn could see that she and Baber did not differ much politically, although he went a little further than she did in seeing James as a reformer, as well as conserver. To ridicule Baber, Behn had actually to ridicule what she usually supported and to defend what she commonly mocked. For instance, she had to defend the usually maligned City: ‘She’s still in Favour; and deserves to be, / Inspight of all thy ill-timed Poetry.’ Also, Baber had praised James’s disastrous persecution of judges and Anglican bishops: to attack him she even risked sounding Whiggish by accusing Baber of the foolish belief that

  ... because the Judges Chaines is gone,

  The gaudy Triffle lost, the Man’s undone:

  Dull Fool, that ne’re to Merit gave its due,

  But thinks all Vertue to consist of Show:

  As if the Man, once Worth his Prince’s Grace,

  Must with his short-liv’d Frown become an Ass.

  A Prince’s Favour, then by the same Rule,

  Shou’d make him Lov’d, or Wise that is a Fool.

  If the collector Narcissus Luttrell had not written ‘By Mrs. Behn’ on the copy of To Bavius, which he immediately acquired, one might be forgiven for doubting the authorship of this anonymously published poem. Clearly it was not for the eyes of the King.26

  Whatever she thought in private and wrote anonymously, Behn’s main professional business was to praise the loyal actors and eulogists, both now in need of bolstering. She began with her old friend, the playwright and Stuart propagandist, Henry Nevil Payne, who had the advantage of having prospered under James II and thus been enabled to show his ‘Bounty’ to her. To him Behn dedicated her Antwerp story, The Fair Jilt’; in the dedication references to the hero, ‘prince’ Tarquin, gave way to those of a greater Prince, the object of both their veneration:

  I present you with a Prince unfortunate, but still the more noble Object for your Goodness and Pity; who never valu’d a brave Man the less for being unhappy. And whither shou’d the Afflicted flee for Refuge, but to the Generous? Amongst all the Race, he cannot find a better Man, or more certain Friend.

  James seems to have recognised this and urged Payne to write retaliatory pamphlets.

  In ‘Astrea’s Booke’, Behn had refuted in the margin an attack on the much denigrated Roger L’Estrange, who had dominated Royalist propaganda through all her working life.27 Now he was required by James to counter the versions of recent history put out by Burnet over in Holland.28 As part of his Tory organ, the Observator, L’Estrange had produced a Brief History of the Times, aiming to capture the past for the Stuarts—or, in Behn’s words, rescue ‘the World from stupid Ignorance’. More specifically, it was intended to settle the matter of Edmund Bury Godfrey’s death in the Popish Plot days, a fine example of the triumph of Whig propaganda—as the warming-pan story was also fast becoming. As with Payne, she was needed to commend L’Estrange’s effort. Her response in Poem to Sir Roger L’Estrange was to add to his ‘Truth’ with her own vision of recent history as a series of fictions: paradise lost, truth betrayed by perjury, and virtue banished by fraud and flattery. The result was a present of corrupt laws, false religion and a misled ‘restless People’.

  L’Estrange had used his History not only as propaganda but also as self-vindication. He had been a man driven from comfort and ease by zeal in the cause. So Behn alluded to his chequered years, his exile during the Popish Plot, his effigy burnt on Accession Day, his return and rededication to the royal crusade. For him, she used the religious vocabulary usually reserved for royalty, and L’Estrange was translated from a propagandist into a prophet: what he preached was truth, not opinion. Publicly silent when L’Estrange had been driven into exile in Scotland, she now found it easier to look back at a past made deceptively clear than to cope with a t
urgid present.

  Another enterprise in which Behn became involved at this time was a literary work made propaganda by the moment. At least it was intended as such when advertised in April 1688 (although, unhappily, it seems not to have arrived in public until July 1689, politically a very different time). This was Nahum Tate’s English edition of Cowley’s huge Latin work, Of Plants, dating from the Interregnum and early Restoration. Aphra Behn was asked to ‘translate’ Book VI called ‘Of Trees’.

  She seemed unaware of an earlier translation of 1680 and, since she could not easily read Latin, she must have had help in her writing from a classically educated friend, probably Nahum Tate himself. One or two errors suggest that Behn was working from ear, that she was hearing an oral version and rendering it there and then into couplets. However she did it, the result was smooth and fine. Like Dryden with Ovid’s Heroides, Tate went out of his way to praise the only female translator in the volume and the only person without Latin. Behn’s book, he claimed, ‘o’ertops the others’.

  Like Behn’s admired Edmund Waller, Cowley had lived through the trying times of the Civil War and Interregnum. According to his biographer Thomas Sprat, he had travelled ‘where-ever... the King’s Troubles requir’d his Attendance’. The circumstances of his return to England were, however, obscurer. Sprat claimed that he came as a Royalist spy and ‘was advis’d to dissemble the main Intention of his coming over, under the Disquise of applying himself to some settled Profession. And that of Physick was thought most proper...he proceeded to the Consideration of Simples... retir’d into a fruitful Part of Kent where every Field and Wood might shew him the real Figures of those Plants of which he read...’. In case this might seem accommodation with the enemy, Sprat continued:

  instead of employing his Skill for Practice and Profit, he presently digested it into that Form which we behold.... The two last [books] speak of Trees, in the way of Virgil’s Georgics. Of these the sixth Book is wholly Dedicated to the Honour of his country. For making the British Oak to preside in the Assembly of the Forest Trees, upon that Occasion he enlarges on the History of our late Troubles, the King’s Affliction and Return, and the Beginning of the Dutch War, and managed all in a Style, that (to say all in a Word) is equal to the Greatness and Vigour of the English Nation.

  It was this important, deeply political sixth book that Behn was asked to put into English couplets. It stretched to 1,726 lines.

  The work was closer than her other Latin ‘translations’ of Ovid and Horace to the original. Perhaps she did not want to deviate too far from Cowley, whom she reverenced as one of the great poets, or, perhaps, noting Cowley’s attacks on the Dutch and his triumphalist Stuart rhetoric, she was keeping an option open of hiding in the future behind the words of a poet now dead.

  Behn was used to many of the devices of the work, as well as to the main allegory of talking trees.29 Years before she had written of a voyeuristic juniper. The oak, as symbol of English stability, had gained great significance from Charles II’s often-told story of his seclusion in its branches after the Battle of Worcester. In keeping with this incident, the Stuarts saw themselves as planters not destroyers of trees, guardians of woods and of the nation. In Cowley’s poem, Charles actually became a woodland deity. In contrast, Evelyn associated the Parliamentarians with the destruction of forests in the building of ships for war and trade, both activities supported now by the modern Whigs.30 William of Orange was suspected by some of wanting to rule England so as to embroil it in a French war; so he too would need to cut down trees for wood. He could not, then, be construed as the guardian of the English oak like the Stuarts.

  Book VI ends with a rousing description of the Battle of Lowestoft or Solebay, which had taken place on 3 June 1665, just before Behn set out on her spying mission to Antwerp. In this battle, the English under James, then Duke of York, had defeated the Dutch, and a Dutch ship named the Orange had been the last to threaten the English before catching fire from cannon shot. The poem was tailor-made for the present moment.

  For Behn, Cowley’s verse became something beyond a vehicle for politics (and for the modern reader a tedious exercise in the skimming of footnotes) when she reached line 586. She was discussing the laurel, used by kings to adorn their conquering brows, when she suddenly deviated from her text:

  And after Monarchs, Poets claim a share

  As the next worthy thy priz’d wreaths to wear.

  Among that number, do not me disdain,

  Me, the most humble of that glorious Train.

  At this point she wrote in the margin: ‘The Translatress in her own Person speaks.’ Then she went on:

  I by a double right thy Bounties claim,

  Both from my Sex, and in Apollo’s Name:

  Let me with Sappho and Orinda be

  Oh ever sacred Nymph, adorn’d by thee;

  And give my Verses Immortality.31

  Behn’s enormous esteem for royalty made the claim for the artist an important one, echoing the language used for James himself in the dedication of The Second Part of The Rover: he ‘made double Conquest’ by his sword and virtue and took the laurels. But it also confirmed the impression given by her state poems and many of her dedications that, although she revered kings and their semi-divine and prophetic roles, she more and more valued the artist as both their subordinate and their creator. It was perhaps an inevitable progression as kings tottered on their thrones.

  Behn’s admirers often compared her to major male writers and she herself, blaming the wrong-headedness of those who would not accord her the fame she deserved, insisted that she wrote like any man. Yet, when she came to make this direct plea for significance, it is in a woman’s tradition that she saw herself: that of the equivocal Sappho and the irreproachable Katherine Philips.32

  There was little influence of either of these women on her work, but both, like Behn herself, were concerned with their reputations. The ‘Matchless Orinda’ was tireless in covert self-promotion before her early death and Sappho, most famous of female poets, was the first writer to claim explicitly that song confers immortality on the singer. In linking herself with Orinda, Behn may have been conscious again of Dryden’s separation of her from her apparent rival, but she was probably also recalling Cowley’s own elegy for Katherine Philips, in which he claimed that, if there were a ‘Woman Laureat,’ it would be Orinda. Although the notion had been most clearly expressed for her by the antagonistic Robert Gould in his lampoon ‘The Female Laureat’, Behn, too, might have claim to such a post. It was perhaps some comfort to the ailing, over-worked woman who, in these last months, had had to push her pen so relentlessly for a tottering governmenr.

  Chapter 29

  The Widdow Ranter and Oroonoko

  ‘frightful Spectacles of a mangl’d King’

  By 1688, everyone in London political circles felt trouble imminent.

  It was impossible not to sense the movement of illicit messages back and fore between England and Holland, and the King’s loyal subjects were simultaneously strident in his support and anxious for themselves. Behn responded with her usual propaganda and panegyric, but now, even more than before, she shadowed them with part tragic, part cynical reflections on the regime and the man she was hymning. Her covert fears were expressed in a pair of related works, the play The Widdow Ranter and the short story Oroonoko, both set in the New World of her youth, when she had briefly called herself an ‘American’.

  Perhaps her recent use of the name George Marten in The Younger Brother had opened up memories, but Behn may also have been coming to suspect that the old label suited her. Although she had socialised with some of the great in London and with many of the wits, she had always been an outsider, someone from away, someone who had had to sing for her supper. She had desperately wanted to be of the court of Charles II, then of James II, then even of a counter-court with Mazarine in Chelsea, as her dedication of The History of the Nun suggested. All her efforts had been abortive. Through them, however, she had always
assumed that royalty, courtiers, and the aristocracy were the ultimate insiders. Now, with the state shuddering, she saw that there was really no inside in England, no safe place and she felt in London a similar sense of duplicity and instability to that experienced years ago in Surinam. Everywhere was ‘America’.

  It was not a moment to stage her only unperformed play, The Younger Brother, which exhibited infidelity largely unpunished and used the last name of a famous republican for its hero. Yet, she did not wish to start another before the old was produced. The court was, however, on a drive to recapture public opinion and it was at last commissioning playwrights.1 Probably Behn was approached, perhaps with the offer of a prologue and epilogue from the Poet Laureate, Dryden. If so, she could not refuse.

  The time for crude theatrical propaganda of the sort that had marked the Popish Plot years was over. People were no longer clear about issues. So Behn responded not by straightforward mockery of democracy and praise of monarchy as in The Roundheads, but by showing what chaos would come if a legitimate authority were absent and if all felt it their right to govern and choose governors, as in America. People would only stay in their correct social places when the central authority was noble, legitimate and absolutely fixed, as both kings Charles and James had thought. The events described in a pamphlet, Strange News from Virginia; Being a full and true Account of the Life and Death of Nathaniel Bacon Esquire, published in 1677, provided the germ of an American story that could become a lesson to England: ‘This Country wants nothing but to be Peopl’d with a well-born Race to make it one of the best Collonies in the World...’.2