Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Licensed on 20 October 1683, Love-Letters was published in 1684 by Randal Taylor. He was known as a ‘trade’ publisher, one who could serve as a front for several booksellers and, in his lowly position, be a kind of bulwark against prosecution, while not directly financing publication himself.28 Often trade publishers were binders and could claim complete ignorance of the work if it got into trouble—usefully so for it was even more dangerous to write prose propaganda than poetry:

  Though truth in prose may be a crime,

  ’Twas never known in any time

  That one was hanged for writing rhyme.29

  The work probably did well, for there was a great vogue for secret texts and for erotic fiction. It was as well for the remnants of Behn’s reputation that she brought it out anonymously. There were naughty books around, even pornographic ones—L’éscholle des Filles, for example, to which Samuel Pepys ashamedly masturbated and which Horner of The Country Wife denied possessing—but they were not openly written by women.

  Since it was anonymous, scandalous and possibly dangerous, Aphra Behn did not dedicate her book to the great, but instead addressed an obscure man called Thomas Condon, apparently a young captain and firm supporter of the Duke of York, her longtime hero.30 From his description, it seems that, though no patronage could be expected from him, he had materially influenced the work by his physical charms, and he must have been in the secret of the authorship. Indeed it is possible that he actually inspired Behn’s erotic feelings. Darkly she alludes to a scandal of an amour in which Condon had done something ‘base, silly and unmanly’. Since she claims she ‘too well knew the story’, she may have been involved.

  Except in his politics, Condon is, Behn insisted, close to the luscious Philander, a man like Hoyle attractive to both sexes:

  that I may believe Silvia truly happy, give me leave to fansie him such a person as your self, and then I cannot fail of fansying him too, speaking at the feet of Silvia, pleading his right of love with the same softness in his eyes and voice, as you can do when you design to conquer.

  The personal notion led Behn to rhapsody: ‘you are young as new desire, as beautiful as light, as amorous as a God, and wanton as a Cupid, that smiles, and shoots, and plays, and mischiefs all his fond hours away.’ She prays that Condon, like Philander, will not love unlawfully—possibly it was a veiled allusion not only to Grey’s incest but also to homosexual love (an ‘unmanly’ act?) which may have caused her pain with Hoyle. But mainly Behn warns Condon not to hoard his body and mind as a ‘lazy Lover’; he should go into circulation—like her book.

  Chapter 23

  The Great Frost and Voyage to the Isle of Love

  ‘A body has no creditt at the Playhouse as we used to have ’

  Between the advertising of Love-Letters and its printing, London suffered another of its great winters. Despite considerable cold, in the previous year the Duke of York had complained that his ‘ice-house’ had not been filled, but the winter of 1683 and 1684 answered his wishes.1 The severe frost lasted from 15 December until 5 February. The Thames froze solid and Luttrell reported ‘above fifty coaches’ sliding on the ice while whole oxen were roasted for the gathered crowds. ‘Most sorts of trades’ sprang up, including puppet shows and three or four printing houses. (This was probably necessary for them since the frost closed some presses for as long as ten weeks.) People bought ballads and ‘tooke a fansy to have their names Printed & the day & yeare set down, when printed on the Thames’.2 According to lampoons, men and women even copulated in the booths on the ice.3 It was a release after the scared years of the Popish Plot, a passing interlude of early Restoration spirit.

  In her newly receptive state, Aphra Behn ignored the matter of her bowdlerised commendation and celebrated Twelfth Night with young Thomas Creech, who had come down from Oxford for Christmas. Despite the Protestant lack of sympathy for the tale of the three kings, the feast of the epiphany, the last of the midwinter festivals which lightened the long, hard and very dark winter, was observed in much the same way as Christmas came to be later. Many superstitions attached to it: for example, that the thorn tree at Glastonbury which grew from Joseph of Aramathea’s staff bloomed at midnight. Like almost every event in England, Twelfth Night was celebrated with bonfires and a wassail bowl, but the centre of the feast was a rich cake baked round a bean and sometimes a pea. The man who received the bean was chosen king of the feast, the woman with the pea became queen.

  The cake was a yeast-raised rich offering of almonds and sugar, based on a pastry of butter, wheat and eggs.4 ‘To make a great Cake’, a cook was instructed to ‘Take two gallons of fine flower and a halfe,’ add it to five pounds of currants, half an ounce each of mace and nutmeg, a pound and a half of butter, cream, rose-water, sack, three-quarters of a pound of sugar and a pint of ale seasonings. It was all extremely expensive and Pepys records his ‘excellent Cake’ made by the maid Jane costing him ‘near 20s’. Jane was fortunate in this excellency, for anything yeast-based could go seriously wrong—as it seems to have done for Behn, who supplied the cake for this occasion. Perhaps she tried to make it herself—in any case, she called the result ‘lamentable’.

  As a gregarious person, she enjoyed the evening, which she found particularly memorable because she had met ‘A Man whom I shall ne’re forget’. He was a ‘True Tory’ and, in her usual hyperbole, ‘A God in Wit, tho Man in look’—in plain words, not overly handsome but very funny and perhaps sexy. In Behn’s open frame of mind he had had an enormous effect on her and, when she later wrote to Creech asking him to pass on her ‘vast esteem’, she complimented both men by declaring the guest worthy of Creech. This sounds like a first sighting of Tom Brown, a youth of nineteen who, like Behn, admired Creech’s Lucretius.5

  Thomas Brown, son of a Shropshire farmer, became a good classical scholar and went to Oxford in 1678. There his avid enjoyment of sociability merited expulsion by Dr Fell, which he avoided by turning a Latin epigram into the memorable rhyme, ‘I do not love thee, Dr Fell’. Intending to make a living by wit on the edges of the theatre, he had come to London but, failing at first, he had had to resort to teaching in a school. Trying to rid his ashes of the ‘Load of Dirt’ thrown on them, his posthumous biographer wrote, ‘Fortune obliged him to prefer Money (which he only wanted) to Reputation.’6

  After some years he returned to London, at a time when ‘Politicks and Polemicks had almost driven Mirth and Good Humour out of the Nation.’ ‘[H]is wit soon procur’d him a numerous Acquaintance’ who liked his jaunty conversation, easy-going manner, malicious wit and satirical sallies. Brown was greatly in demand by those with time to pass agreeably and he spent much of his in the tavern. The company he amused was willing to pay for his wine, but not his clothes and lodgings and, since he was ‘of an Humour not to chuse his Acquaintance by his Interest’, he continued to lack money for necessities, however much he preferred it to reputation. But, in one instance, there is a hint that he did have some ‘Interest’ in his acquaintance. After Behn’s death, when he had taken to faking correspondence for a living, Brown included his old friend in an exchange called Letters from the Dead to the Living, in which he imagined Aphra Behn and the ‘Celebrated Virgin’ actress, Anne Bracegirdle, trading insults.7 Although an unkind response to old friendship, the letter purportedly by Behn fits well with her tendency in the early 1680s to see chastity as hypocrisy or lack of opportunity, and to admire women who negotiated sexual conventions with ‘cunning’ and ‘Managements’: ‘Experience has taught me to judge of my own Sex to perfection, and I know the difference there is between being really virtuous and only accounted so.’ The pseudo-Behn moves in a company of promiscuous women friends who delight in cross-dressing, ‘Shifts and Evasions’.

  Anne Bracegirdle’s supposed answer is more damning. The middle-aged Behn is portrayed with a young male entourage:

  You were the young Poets Venus; to you they paid their Devotion as a Goddess, and their first Adventure, when they adjourn’d from
the University to the Town, was to solicit your Favours; and this advantage you enjoy’d above the rest of your Sex, that if a young Student was but once infected with a Rhiming Itch, you by a butter’d Bun could make him an establish’d Poet at any time.

  Behn never had the power to make anyone an ‘establish’d Poet’, even if she had, as the bun image implies, been sexually serviced by him, but she could be of some help. In her next anthology of poems, Miscellany, she published five works of Tom Brown’s, including two that might bear on their relationship.

  In ‘The Parting’, ‘Damon’ quits ‘his dear Amyntas’ for ‘cruel bus’ness’. This sounds like an excuse to a lady for leaving early. (Behn herself supports the impression in a later prologue in which she imagines ‘old and tough’ widows abandoned by young and ‘drunken Sot[s], that had kind hours, / And taking their own Freedoms, left you yours’.8) In ‘On a Token sent me by a Lady’, the lady sends money to the poet and freely ‘told my friend—let that be drunk for me’. He is properly grateful: ‘Each Jovial Glass, your fair Idea gave.’ Behn was generous to needy poets: she was reported to have helped the now ill and indigent Otway, and later reminiscences bear out the impression of care, sometimes appreciated, sometimes not, as well as her poetic nurturing.9

  Brown makes his Behn into the poets’ whore, a woman who sleeps with Dryden or a Whitefriars ballad-monger if he will praise her. She preys on young men poets both for sex and for rhymes: ‘well might you be esteem’d a Female Wit, since the least Return your Versifying Admirers could make you for your Favours, was, first to lend you their Assistance, and then oblige you with their Applause.’ Yet, with all this, her amorous intrigues and her tireless efforts to please a fickle audience, her reputation never rose above ‘the Character of a bawdy Poetess’.10

  The picture of the lusty Behn, coinciding with Wycherley’s, is part of the conventional mockery of a public woman. Behn herself helped paint the portrait with her demand that women be allowed to express their sexual feelings as freely as men and her insistence that chastity and prudery were simply masks over universal female desire. The picture may have had a grain of truth in it. Behn may simply and scandalously have enjoyed the company of young men; she may have had an amorous flirtation or two; she may have been strictly chaste, hence the heated quality of her compensatory prose; or she may even have had sexual intimacy—possibly of the coitus interruptus sort that her continued scenarios of ‘disappointment’ suggest. If so, and if Tom Brown was one of her partners, he may have felt justified in using her in turn.

  Behn herself drew many robust pictures of older women desiring sex and knowing its price. One was in the ‘cast-mistress’ of the old African king in Oroonoko, who is courted by Oroonoko’s friend Aboan for ulterior purposes:

  she had not forgot how pleasant it was to be in Love: And though she had some Decays in her Face, she had none in her Sence and wit; she was there agreeable still, even to Aboan’s Youth; so that he took pleasure in entertaining her with Discourses of Love. He knew also, that to make His Court to these She-Favourites, was the way to be great; these being the Persons that do all Affairs and Business at Court.11

  Most likely Behn was somewhere between Brown’s picture and that drawn by the editor of the 1702 edition of her plays, who wrote: ‘Those who had the happiness to be personally acquainted with her were so charmed with her wit, freedom of temper and agreeable conversation that they in a manner ador’d her.’ She was appreciated by the ‘more sensible part of mankind’ and loved by ‘men of all ranks’.

  It is just possible that Brown not only created the insatiable, lustful Behn, but also, in his insistence that she stole from men like himself, alluded convolutedly to his own habit of ascribing to her what he had in fact written. If this is the case, he was helped by another young man she might have met at this time, Charles Gildon from a noted recusant family, who would subsequently mar his position by depleting his inheritance and marrying unwisely. Both young men (Gildon was twenty-four years her junior) exploited Behn as thoroughly after her death as Brown implies she exploited men before. They were aided in this by Samuel Briscoe, an eccentric bookseller who needed money as pressingly as Brown and Gildon, and who went bankrupt in the late 1690s. In the publisher John Dunton’s words, ‘by contracting a friendship with Tom Brown, [Briscoe] will grow rich as fast as his author can write or hear from the Dead, so that honest Sam does, as it were, thrive by his misfortunes...’. One of the ‘Dead’ must surely have been Aphra Behn, whom Briscoe began publishing in 1696 when the successful dramatisation of Oroonoko gave her name sudden currency. Briscoe himself was unwise enough to remark on ‘[t]he General Doubts that Posthumous Works create of their being genuine’.12

  If this scenario is true, then some of the poems Briscoe published and ascribed to Behn in the eighteenth century, many of which fitted into the lubricious picture he and Brown were creating to sell her works, may be as dubious as that picture. For example, one poem published by Briscoe with the spurious ‘Remains’ of Tom Brown and dated to this time, was a curious attack on the notorious Moll Howard, now leading a loose and decadent life at Tunbridge Wells.13 The occasion was supposedly a rumour that she was to marry the Earl of Kildare, much satirised as a loathsome ninny. Quite why Behn should attack the one-time mistress of the Duke of Norfolk, her powerful patron, is unclear; if she did, she was either two-faced or multi-faceted, depending on one’s intellectual standpoint.

  At this frosty time when she was entertained by Creech and may have met Brown, Behn purportedly took part in a short-story writing competition in which she elected to imitate the French comic fictionist, Scarron, by writing a tale of a ‘mighty Cake’ reminiscent of her ‘lamentable’ Twelfth Night one which Brown had probably seen: ‘Memoirs of The Court of the King of Bantam’. (Bantam was common cultural currency for the strange and grotesque. Sir Patient Fancy had already referred to it when Sir Credulous was persuaded to serenade his lady with the ‘King of Bantam’s own Musick’. In 1682, however, Bantam became sensational when its ‘monkey-like’ ambassadors visited London, with their ‘fat slaves, who had no covering save drawers’, in the diarist John Evelyn’s shocked words.)

  ‘The Court of the King of Bantam’ tells of the outwitting of a stupid rich man, Mr Wou’d be King, who is duped by a younger brother, Friendly, the name of Behn’s hero in The Revenge, who manages thereby to provide a dowry for his daughter and a keeper for his pregnant mistress.14 The story is saturated with theatre, referring to popular plays of the time, from Beaumont and Fletcher’s much revived King and No King to Nat Lee’s tragedy The Rival Queens, and to the ‘Airs in the last new Plays’, of which several were Behn’s. The gull, Mr Wou’d be King, acts in the insolent way at the playhouse so often described by Behn and her fellows: failing to listen to the play, he gets up part way through and condemns it as ‘Damn’d Bawdy’. The work he fails to see is Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds—in his Bracegirdle letter, Brown accused Behn of having been a mistress of Ravenscroft.

  The story could certainly be Behn’s, and there are persuasive touches of her in the homosexual desire that drink brings out in Mr Wou’d be King. Yet it is also possible that, many years later, remembering their first meeting on Twelfth Night and the plays and excitement of his early season in London, Tom Brown wrote the story under her name, consciously putting in those ‘persuasive touches’.

  He was chronically short of money at this time, and was himself translating Scarron into English for Briscoe. In 1696, Gildon helped Briscoe bring out a one-volume edition of The Histories and Novels Of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn, consisting of the known and published short stories along with ‘Love-Letters’. Another edition would need a new angle to sell. How better to provide this than for Gildon or Brown to write short stories as if by Behn and, if Brown were the author, to compose one in the manner of the man he was translating, Scarron? When the story, also published by Briscoe, came out in 1698 Gildon was worried about the difference between Behn’s baroque prose fiction st
yle and that of the new work: ‘The Stile of the Court of the King of Bantam, being so very different from Mrs. Behns usual way of Writing, it may perhaps call its being genuine in Question.’ The answer he gives is that it was done for a wager to see if she could write in Scarron’s style.15

  Two other Scarron-like stories that might have come from Behn’s hand at this time—or Brown’s or Gildon’s later—are ‘The Adventure of the Black Lady’—which, in All the Histories and Novels of 1698, Gildon declared clearly confessed its ‘admirable Author’; and ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady’, first published in 1700 by Briscoe. Like ‘The King of Bantam’, both stories cited specific locations in London, especially Whitefriars where Behn had lived.

  In the manner of ‘The Court of the King of Bantam’, ‘The Black Lady’ dates itself by reference to a theatrical performance: of John Wilson’s The Cheats.16 It too has self-conscious touches of Behn. Having lost trunk and friends in alien London, the dark-haired heroine responds by sending out for ‘a Pint of Sack’. But other curious elements are less typical. Proving pregnant, the heroine keeps to her room to hide her ‘great Belly’. One of the Scarron stories that Brown translated was ‘The Useless Precaution’, in which the man’s beloved kept to her room because she was in the last stages of pregnancy.17 In her condition, the ‘Black Lady’ is forced by her officious friends to choose life on the parish or marriage to a man she has come to loathe; the Overseers of the Poor who search for her are called rapacious ‘wolves’ who prey on the poor. Is this Behn getting at her father—a onetime Overseer of the Poor? Or Brown, knowing more than most, getting at Behn?

  The other short story is linked to Behn’s drama through the name Wilding, used in her latest play, The City-Heiress. He becomes the villain of ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady’, though, quite unlike any recent rake in Behn, he is both witless and forced to reform through his sister’s indulgent generosity. The story is also linked to The Dutch Lover through the initial situation of the heroine, Philadelphia, established in a brothel which she takes for a respectable house. Like one of Behn’s spirited theatrical heroines, Philadelphia tries comic plotting, but only after she has, unlike Behn’s girls, revealed her romantic essence in tears and doleful tales. Later, she romantically falls ill for six weeks on hearing that her lover has been lost at sea. She extricates herself from the brothel not through pert talking or clever trickery but by impressing the hero with her virtue. The ending gives the woman the social power she never quite achieves in any Behn work.18