The posthumous works of Lord Rochester

And there they were, filling half a shelf in the bookstall, uncollected works of Lord Rochester, the celebrated eighteenth-century English satirist and libertine, lover of Nell Gwyn (later King Charles II’s mistress) and probable author of the notorious, but seldom performed stage play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery. Lord Rochester was revealed, here in the spiritist bookstall, to be the author of a lengthy series of historical romances, posthumously written, in bodice-ripping paper covers, both in Portuguese and in French.

When Rochester was alive the genre of the modern novel barely existed. Spiritist eschatology, however, blurs the principle of anachronism, embracing synchronicity as well as life after death. The works of Lord Rochester offered for sale in the spiritist quiosque were thus fictional in a double sense—they were novels, and they were authored, ostensibly, by an imaginary spirit being.

Many of them, it appeared, had been psychographed in French, in Paris in the 1890s, the heyday of European spiritism, by a pop-eyed Russian medium named Wera Krijanowski. According to her Portuguese-language translator Wera Krijanowski wrote in her sleep, under the inspiration of various spirit guides—Rochester being the chief of them. She would spend the following day deciphering the hand-writing on the sheaves of paper that she found scattered through her house each morning, with no recollection of ever having put pen to paper.

Today séances and spirit-writing are long out of fashion in Europe. The remaining copies of the French editions of these books, if any remain, will be lying dust-laden in a publisher’s backroom somewhere. These Brazilian versions, though, in a kiosk in the centre of São Paulo, were recent reprints (Some had no translator cited, nor any French original.) They were selling well, according to the flyleaf of one of them, in editions of 20,000 or so.

On the shelf were half-a-dozen titles credited to the hand—or voice—of Conde J.W.Rochester. There was The Legend of the Castle of Montinhoso, a Gothic tale set in Russia and Italy, and The Benedictine Abbey, in which a thirteenth-century monk becomes perilously involved in “ciêncas misteriosas”; there was the story of Alcibiades, and a tale of Alexander the Great, and a biblical thriller involving the priests of Baal. And more: Two Thousand Years Ago, The Revenge of the Jew, and Queen Hatasou. In the last of these the author treats of the cult of Moloch in the XVII-dynasty Egypt, with spine-chilling accounts of ritual murder, vampirism and—naturally—spiritism.

The discarnate Lord Rochester had been busy in the afterworld, transforming himself into an historical novelist of impressive range, though not much stylistic variation. In a preface to A Lenda do Castelo de Montinhoso (the fourth edition, published in São Paulo in 1987 by the Spiritist Nucleus of the Wayfarers of Good), the Portuguese translator—Wallace Leal V. Rodrigues—describes its author thus:

As a writer, Rochester is egregiously Gothic, an authentic heir of the talent of Horace Walpode [sic] and Mme Anne Ward Radcliff [sic].

Those acquainted with the life of the sublunary Lord Rochester, author of the “A Satyr Against Mankind” may wonder how this seventeenth-century figure (Rochester lived from 1647 to 1680), could be heir to two writers born generations after him, in the eighteenth century. The first of these, Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto and pioneer of the revival of Gothic architecture in Britain, was born in 1717 and died in 1797; the second, Ann Radcliffe, née Ward, another pioneer of the Gothic, was born half a century later, in 1764, and died in 1823.

There’s a further twist: it was Walpole—the real-life Walpole, a voluminous letter-writer and critic—who put the seal on Rochester’s posthumous reputation as a gifted ne’er-do-well. In A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (1758), he wrote that Rochester was “a man whom the muses were fond to inspire, but ashamed to avow.”

(Walpole himself, it may be noted, was no stranger to authorial impersonation. He published the original edition of his pioneering gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764 under a pseudonym, with the claim that it had been translated from a recently rediscovered sixteenth-century Italian manuscript.)

But my new friend of the blue necktie explained that my questions regarding chronology revealed falta de entendimento, a lack of understanding of the elaborate Buddhist-influenced metaphysics of Kardecist spiritism. In the spiritist universe, he explained, after death, human beings continue their existence in the aether, and—freed as they are from the constraints of time—they may also be reincarnated here on earth.

Or preincarnated. Thus it turns out that Rochester was successively a priest of Baal, a Greek soldier, a medieval monk and, in his penultimate incarnation, the pioneering French surgeon, Ambroise Paré. Enough lives, clearly, to provide plenty of material for the books that he was subsequently to be credited with.

In Rochester’s final—or most recent—appearance on earth, the man in the blue necktie explained further, he switched gender to become one Madame Dolores (floruit c1800). Manifesting herself through a medium named Wera Krijanowski—in other forms and spellings, Krijanowskaia, or Kryzhanoviskaia—Madame Dolores dictated Rochester’s autobiography, which was published under the title Memoirs of the Spirit.

It is in Memoirs of the Spirit that Lord Rochester—or Madame Dolores, or Wera Krijanowski—he or she or all three—explains the full range of Rochester’s multiple lives and metamorphoses. We learn, inter alia, that it was in his incarnation as Madame Dolores, a voracious novel-reader, that Rochester developed a special taste for the works of the celebrated Gothic duo, Radcliff and Walpode. And it is revealed that his letters to his wife contain the seeds of this posthumous romantic style.

Here there is a documented connection to Rochester’s life on earth. The letters referred to are actually-existing letters from Rochester to his real-life wife, Elizabeth Malet, an heiress with whom he sensationally eloped in 1667 at the age of eighteen. As a result of this misdemeanor—recorded in the diaries of Samuel Pepys—Rochester was imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London. The Memoirs of the Spirit thus weaves in a few elements of Rochester’s earthly oeuvre, though it does not include any of his poetry, the work for which he is known in conventional English literary history.

Nor does the book mention any of the other documented episodes of his rakehell life in the court of King Charles II. For details of these we have to turn to contemporary memoirs, notably that by his friend Gilbert Burnet.

“For five years together,” Burnet wrote in Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John, Earl of Rochester, Rochester “was continually drunk”, leading him to do “many wild and unaccountable things.”

Burnet records a number of Rochester’s impersonations. At one point in his tumultuous career, after one of his companions was killed in a brawl in Epsom, Rochester fled to Tower Hill, where he adopted the persona of a Doctor Alexander Bendo, a German doctor who claimed to be able to foretell the future. Dr Bendo treated barrenness and other gynaecological disorders in women and performed cosmetic surgery. On one occasion, we learn—maybe more—Rochester assumed the guise of the grave and matronly Mrs Bendo in order to enable him to engage in consultations with young women in private.

So a turn as Madame Dolores in the afterlife would not be the first occasion on which Rochester adopted a female aspect, albeit a less respectable one. You might think that all this real-life impersonation and cross-dressing would be interpreted by spiritists as a suitable preparation for a posthumous career in the protean world of the spirits. But almost all the events of Lord Rochester’s real, sublunary life go unmentioned in The Memoirs of the Spirit.

The portrait of Lord Rochester

Would Rochester himself—the historical Rochester, the Rochester of the real world, Rochester the satirist, the brawler, the libertine, the mountebank—have found some amusement in all this? He would surely have mocked the credulousness and solemnity of the spiritist milieu. But in the spiritist universe, of course, the Rochester known from the historical record is no more. His character has changed. In the Spiritist imaginary he has been transformed. He is, perforce, a convert to Spiritism. In the same way that Mormons make mass posthumous conversions to the Church of Latter-Day Saints, Spiritists claim all dead souls, of all religions, for their own. In their book, as the man from the bookstall stressed when I put this to him, the count is no longer a satirist or a rakehell, if he ever was one. He is a spirit now. And as such—this is explained in The Memoir of the Spirit—he has a special mission to work for the propagation of—one might have guessed—spiritism. This mission, the author—she or he—tells the reader, has been ordained so that Rochester can atone for the negative aspects of his life on earth. Hence the many references to spiritist ideas in the novels published under his name.

Lord Rochester’s monkey. Detail of the portrait of Lord Rochester by Jacob Huysmans

In a final twist—hopefully final—it turns out that these may not in fact, be intended as novels at all, but as true chronicles, observed and recorded by Rochester’s various avatars—the priest of Baal, the medieval monk, or the surgeon Ambroise Paré. The spiritist world, like that of most religions, is immaculately self-referential and self-extending, a vast closed system of thought, one that subsumes all history and human achievement to its capacious idea of the afterlife.

I was grateful to the stall-holder for explaining these things to me. I asked him his name. It was João Espirita, he said coyly, João of the Spirits, or João the Spiritist.

Is that so? I said.

O Conde, I added, had himself had something to say about the spirit world, even during his lifetime, though I could not quite bring this lines to mind. So I set out for the bookshops near the Praça da Republica to look for a Portuguese edition of Rochester’s poetry to give to João Espirita.

Those familiar with the works of Rochester in English may recollect better than I did the opening lines of “A Satyr Against Mankind”. It is Rochester’s best-known poem, admired by writers as diverse as Goethe, Ezra Pound and Graham Greene.

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.

The antic, sardonic spirit of “A Satyr Against Mankind” is reflected in the best known portrait of Rochester, by Jacob Huysmans. Here he is bewigged and dressed in silk and satin, every inch the Restoration courtier, and accompanied by a pet monkey, who proffers him a crumpled page torn from a book, which may or may not be one of his own. As he does so the Earl solemnly hands the monkey a laurel crown, the sign of victory among poets.

Huysmans’ portrait reflects the mocking irony and misanthropic brio of Rochester’s own work. It hardly fits into the solemn metaphysics of spiritism, which posit an evolution away from animality to eternal life as a spirit. In this afterlife, in the passage from satirist to spiritist (if we are to accept, for a moment, the account of Vera Krijanowski and her familiar, Madame Dolores) the discarnate Lord Rochester has set aside his satirical bent and his stated aspiration to be reborn as another kind of creature, and begun a further cycle of reincarnation as a human spirit.

Writers and spiritists

Searching for a Portuguese version of Lord Rochester’s poems, I tried half a dozen bookshops in the steep streets leading down to the Viaduto do Chá, but without success. The real Rochester, it seemed, had never been translated into Portuguese—just as his spirit-works had never appeared in English. What I did find as a gift for João Espirita, though, was a collection of poems by the Portuguese modernist poet, Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, the book of disquiet.

Pessoa, who lived in Lisbon from 1888 to 1935, had a keen interest in spiritism and automatic writing, though he stopped short of calling himself a medium. He wrote in three languages—Portuguese, English and French—and employed a vast range of pseudonyms, or, as he called them, heteronyms. More than seventy have been noted by literary scholars. For each heteronym Pessoa created a distinct personality and authorial style. It is surprising, really, that he too has not been claimed by the spiritists of Brazil as one of their own.

Returning to the Spiritist quiosque in the Praça da Republica I gave the book I’d found to João, explaining why I had bought it for him. He was pleased, and invited me to lunch at the headquarters of the Spiritist Federation a few blocks away. He closed up his kiosk, shuttering the doors and the louvred side-panels, till it became an unadorned box once again, gleaming in the noonday sun, the spirits confined within. We walked across the square and plunged into the traffic on Avenida Ipiranga, then down a few blocks to the Spiritist Federation building. This was the mothership of spiritism, I realised; the bookstall in the Praça Republica was a satellite, an outlier.

The Spiritist Federation was a huge place like a hospital, with séance rooms and a canteen where we drank mucilaginous soup and queued for an audience with Mãe Benedita, one of the star mediums there. While we waited we discussed Fernando Pessoa’s multiple personae—their relation to psicografia and to the convolutions of Kardecist spirit writing. We peered into a room where a psychographic medium, with eyes closed, was writing in trance. Such mediums may write non-stop, for hours, João explained, leading some to complain, afterwards, of cramp.

Psychographic sessions can be seen as a pantomime version of the creative process. In the multiple impersonations of spirit writing there is a useful trope, an analogy for all literary composition, representing the relation of writers to their ghostly precursors, to the voices they channel and the other writers that make them the writers they are. And at a further level, it occurred to me, the connection of a medium to the spirit world is like the connection to language itself: in its extreme representation of the act of creation, spirit writing epitomises the paradoxical decentering of everyday personality that all creative writing involves. By this interpretation psicografia might be seen as transforming commonplace writerly vices—the anxiety of influence and the hidden lure of pastiche—into positive virtues, a tribute to the writing of real writers.

There are a number of other poets besides Pessoa who have taken automatic writing seriously. W.B.Yeats, for example, and the surrealist André Breton, and, more recently, the American poet James Merrill. Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover was written with the help of a ouija board; in readings he would channel the voices of deceased poets he had known, including W.H.Auden, as well as his own tutelary spirits—among them, Ephraim, a Jewish scholar from the first century AD.

Despite exceptions like Yeats and Merrill and Breton it is seldom claimed that automatic writing has produced a significant work of literature. Nevertheless, as a kind of theatre, as a drama of identity, the psychographic spirit session has an enduring fascination. The medium’s attempt to incorporate the spirit of other writers may be understood in various ways: as aspirational, a kind of homage; as the anxiety of influence; or as an act of possession—where possession by the writer in question is transformed into possession of their authorial prerogative. And there is a special analogy, it may be argued, between psicografia and the process of translation: the translator’s task is, in a sense, to become possessed by the spirit of the original, to speak for the text in another tongue—in another place and time. Wallace Leal V. Rodrigues, the translator of Rochester’s Memoirs of the Spirit and other works, would surely agree.

To return to Lord Rochester, then, and his afterlife in Brazil: are any of his spirit-written works actually worth the effort of reading? The Legend of the Castle of Montinhoso? The Benedictine Abbey? The Revenge of the Jew? João Espirita had pressed a selection into my hand before we left his stall. Later, on the long train ride to Bauru, in the far west, I sampled them. Even with the challenge of reading in Portuguese they quickly became tediously repetitive, as The Memoir of the Spirit had done. In the spirit writing attributed to Rochester, there is no hint of the style of the historical poet and satirist, neither his transgressive vulgarities nor his high mockery of the world of men. In the spiritist realm the brilliance of Rochester’s real-life works has been ignored or forgotten—they are beside the point. Instead his name is attached to a series of glutinous pastiches of genre-writing, all in prose. This description seems to apply equally to those transferred from French and to those fabricated directly by Brazilian mediums. The novels that are ascribed to O Conde Rochester are thus an act both of appropriation and of rejection: appropriation of the author’s name and rejection of the essence of his work. It is possible to find them interesting as a cultural phenomenon, but in the end what they amount to is the revenge of the low-brow, a banal appropriation and transformation of a high—or low—literary heritage.

Mãe Benedita and João Espirita

After a lengthy wait at the Spiritist Federation, we finally got to see Mãe Benedita, a capacious lady in her sixties, wearing multiple necklaces of coloured glass beads. The beads were a nod to Afro-Brazilian religious tradition, where different colours are associated with specific divinities of West African origin.

João was offered the first audience. He took his cap off and straightened his tie. What Mãe Benedita said to him, he told me afterwards, was that she could see that his skills as a medium were growing daily. In particular, she thought he had a gift for precognition. This pleased him immensely. It was an auspicious day, he said.

As we left the building to return to his quiosque, he confided that he had had a dream about me the previous night.

“But you only met me today,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Exactly. It was a dream that foretold the future. Before I talked to Mãe Benedita, I did not understand this. I had been thinking the dream meant I should put my money on the peacock in the jogo do bicho.”

(João was referring to the Brazilian numbers game, a weekly nation-wide illegal lottery with an elaborate associated system of predictive dream interpretation.)

“But now,” he went on. “I see the dream wasn’t about that. Mãe Benedita says it was about my own future. And she says it has to do with my mediunidade”

“But,” he added, shyly. “I’m only a beginner.”

“I’m at the same stage with writing,” I said.

He glanced at me. “At your age the Count was already dead,” he said.

“That didn’t stop him writing, though, did it?” I said.

“No,” he agreed.

“Maybe I’ll dictate books to you from the next world.” I said.

“But do you really believe in the next world?” he said, smiling.

“I don’t think so,” I said, smiling back.

“Well, there’s time in this world too,” said João Espirita.

“’Tá certo de que vamos nos encontrar novamente,” he said, as we parted in the Praça da Republica. I nodded in agreement—we would meet again.

We met again, a few times. As for my audience with Mãe Benedita—when I spoke with her she told me I would write a novel. But she didn’t say when. Or whether it would be in this world, or the next. ★