Search for ‘Terry Eagleton’ (3 articles found)
From Terry Eagleton on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Bored by his country residence and deaf to his wife’s pleas for his company, [Rochester] spent his time in London brawling, drinking and whoring along with fellow members of a secret club known as the Ballers, which imported leather dildos to use in their entertainments. Impeccably egalitarian in his sexual favours, Rochester slept with everyone from court ladies to prostitutes in the cheapest brothels in town. He probably had affairs with men as well; few courtiers of the time did not. Homosexuality was intensely fashionable, despite being a capital crime on a level with treason. The socially inept John Dryden, in a feeble attempt to keep abreast of a group of fast-living companions, once blurted out: ‘Let’s bugger one another now, by God.’ At one point Rochester took as his valet a young Frenchman called Belle Fasse (possibly a pun on ‘belles fesses’ or ‘beautiful buttocks’), and probably bedded him – a reckless dalliance, given that Belle Fasse was a Catholic.
Though he was rapidly moving from sprightly young blade to raddled old lecher, his reputation as a wit, poet, daredevil lover and brilliant conversationalist was riding high. He lived in theatrical style, delighting in masks and flamboyant costumes, and now the theatre began to imitate his life. He became the model for a number of raffish characters, most notably Dorimant in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode. No Restoration comedy was complete without its Rochester lookalike. He also fell in love with another would-be actor, Elizabeth Barry, and soon found himself at sea in an ocean of Elizabeths. Barry had a daughter by him to whom she gave her own first name, and Rochester gave the same name to one of his daughters with his wife Elizabeth, perhaps as a sly joke at her expense.
There was a streak of madness about Rochester, a perverse, Wilde-like impulse to self-destruction. Rather as Wilde appeared to be courting disaster, so Rochester seemed to do his best to enrage the monarch on whom his fortunes depended. When Charles asked to see a satirical poem that was circulating around the court, Rochester handed him instead a vituperative lampoon of the king he had written himself. Whether he did this by accident or design is unclear. Perhaps it was a Freudian parapraxis, consciously accidental but unconsciously intended. In any case, Charles was furious, Rochester was banished from the court yet again and his various pensions and salaries suspended. He was reinstated some time later, only to be pitched out once more when in another bout of insanity he threw himself in a drunken rage on a phallic-shaped sundial dear to the king’s heart crying, ‘What! Do you stand here to fuck time?’ and slashed it to pieces with his rapier. It was said to be the most elaborate and expensive instrument of its kind in Western Europe.
As the syphilis addled his brain he grew odder and odder. Extraordinarily, he disguised himself for a few months as a gorgeously attired Italian physician, Alexander Bendo, and set up shop in a London street offering cures for scurvy, back pain, bad teeth, obesity, consumption, kidney stones and a number of other afflictions. His work required him on occasion to see his female patients naked, and if his more respectable women clients were shy of being intimately examined by him, he would sometimes do so disguised as Mrs Bendo. In his own person, he would also occasionally offer a cure for infertility by a strikingly simple technique.
Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography (“Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate”), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the “Duchess of nothing” Sarah Ferguson as “a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess”.
Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid’s-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey’s own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. “Why did you mention Battersea in that song?” a journalist asks him. “Because it rhymes with fatty,” he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.
Young Mr. Marx
As a student of law in his father’s footsteps, first in Bonn and then in Berlin, the bohemian young Marx was something of a brawler and boozer. He was, however, just about socially respectable enough to marry Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of a distinguished, aristocratic Prussian family. The pairing looked incongruous to some of their friends, with Marx, a hairy, swarthy commoner of suspiciously Semitic provenance, playing the Beast to Jenny’s Teutonic Beauty. He was always rather foolishly proud of his wife’s high-class origins, though Sperber suspects that the Westphalens’ nobility was somewhat specious. That Jenny was four years older was another scandalous feature of the marriage. As Sperber comments, the union “violated accepted norms of masculinity and of relations between the sexes.” Being younger than your wife was thought at the time to be shamefully emasculating, rather like being less educated than your valet. Judging from an enigmatic letter sent by Jenny to Karl, the couple also seem to have engaged in premarital sex, which was common enough then among the rural and urban masses but “virtually inconceivable behavior for the very proper daughter of a high Prussian state official from a straitlaced provincial city.” Nonconformism clearly began at home, as it did with Marx’s later collaborator Friedrich Engels, who took a working-class woman as his mistress. (The fact that she was of Irish origin suggests a marvelously convenient combination of class sympathies and anticolonialist ones.)
The young Marx began his career by securing a post at a radical newspaper in Germany. Journalism was to provide him for the rest of his days with a suitable alternative to academia on the one hand and street-fighting militancy on the other. Still, it took some time for this Young Hegelian to become a fully paid-up Marxist. Five years before he wrote the Communist Manifesto, he could be found “advocating the use of the army to suppress a communist workers’ uprising.” Communist ideas, he wrote, were genuinely dangerous and could “defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments.” It is as though Darwin had voiced his belief in Adam and Eve on the very brink of publishing On the Origin of Species. Having become a Marxist, Marx then famously denied that he was one.
For most of Marx’s life, much of his and Jenny’s time was devoted to keeping irate creditors from the door. He once commented that nobody had ever written so much about money while possessing so little. His poverty, to be sure, was of a suitably genteel kind. As Sperber notes, “except on one disastrous occasion, he never proposed that Jenny keep house for him.” Besides, there was always a slatternly servant or two to be hired. The couple could even rustle up the odd governess for their growing brood. But Marx’s knowledge of material scarcity was a good deal more than theoretical. It was a matter of when the butcher was to be paid, not just of the contradictions of capitalism. Three of his children died at birth or in infancy, in tiny apartments and slum neighborhoods. When his daughter Franziska joined this grim company, we are told he “had to spend the day of [her] funeral running around, seeking money to pay the undertaker.” It was capitalism that finally rode to his financial rescue in the shape of Engels, philandering son of a Manchester factory owner, who in the days before registered letters existed would cut banknotes in half and send them to his needy colleague in separate envelopes. During his time in England, Marx was also kept afloat by his articles for the New York Tribune, then the leading newspaper in the United States.
