Aphra Jonathan Keates
Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn Angeline Goreau (Oxford £8.95) Aphra Behn is one of comparatively few 17th-century Writers whOm it is possible to imagine as adapting perfectly to the London of our own day. In fact Islington, where I live, is full of Aphras. One sees them pushing trolleys round the huge fluorescent supermarket at the Highbury end of Upper Street, cramming aubergines, guinea fowl and bottles of Rioja into the baskets. One sees them paying the fine on an overdue Beryl Bainbridge in the Holloway Road library, In yellow deux-chevaux with pensive-looking tangerine-faced children in the back, they drive carefully home to the Stickley & Kent conversion somewhere in Mildmay Park or the Alwaynes (both part of the great '70s drang nach osten) to Get On With The Book, amid the plastic salad whirlers, Sabatier knives and 'greasespotted Penguin volumes of Jane Grigson on the scrubbed top. They have worriedlooking hair, names like Diggy and Mogg, and husbands heavily committed to such solid issues as fidelity and school fees. And in a rather fatalistic, wholly unpolitical fashion they give their old clothes to Conservative jumble sales.
. Chile and recycled milkbottles are things of the past, and a strong vein of romantic nostalgia tempers their sexual realism. Whatever else, they are not feminists and neither was Aphra. Highly intelligent, witty and liberally imaginative, she Wrote in defence of a Tory and masculine orthodoxy not only because she wished to survive, but because she believed in it. Virginia Woolf paid her the ultimate tribute when she wrote, in A Room of One's 014)11.* . . all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.' She did this not by contesting the dominant assumptions of female inferiority but simply by showing that a woman, given the same material, might do as well.
That atavistic horror of the 'brainy gel' which still flourishes among the English upper class is an authentic survival from Aphra's own generation, when wives and daughters first began tiptoeing from the still-room to the library. Brought up among the Kentish gentry, she got her learning wherever she could, and eked it out with the 'bizarre vicissitudes of her early maturity. Barely out of her teens, she was taken by her mother to Surinam — like so much else in her story it is not at all clear why. Her six months among the rough-diamond colonists, lygers' and 'wild Indians' at any rate provided material for her finest work, the autobiographical novella Oroonoko, preparatory details of which were to ferment in her amazing memory for more than 20 years.
Her journalistic instinct was hardened and unerring. Marriage to Mr Behn, a merchant in Pepysian London, was a year and a hairs disaster followed by the series of silly ojd aldermen, doting husbands and boorish fumblers into which she metamorphosed her spouse for the stage. Set free by separation (Behn himself seems to have been uncomplaining perhaps Aphra should have taken on her contemporary, Milton, instead) she became, if vou please, a spy, Employed in public toils of State Affairs, Unusual with my Sex. or ti my Years.
sent to the Spanish Netherlands to infiltrate the circle of English dissidents who had fled there after the Restorai • The atmosphere is ill,. (amiliar one of coded correspondence, pi.antive requests for more money, and a constant awareness of being watched by those for whom she was watching others. You shall find still this that how great a child soever I am in other matters: 1 shall mind dilligently what I am about: and doubt not but to acquitt my self as becoms me, and is my duety . . . ' The good-girl tone in her letters to the intelligence chiefs was singularly unavailing: within the year she had returned to a debtor's prison and petitions to the crown.
A literary career grew out of these experiences in a way utterly characteristic of the woman, her epoch and (yes. why not?) her sex. The spirit of the decades. during which she produced the spate of plays, poems and novels which was to keep her, albeit precariously, until her lingering death at 49, is best summed up in a single line from Dryden's adaptation of Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare had written `Helenus is a priest'; Dryden added the words `and keeps a whore.' Nothing mattered to the Restoration wits with the sexual dimension, and Aphra's courage in going it alone among the poxed, crapulous poetasters and tuft-hunting muckers of the insufferable Charles Ii is made credible only by a kind of girlish innocence which seems never quite to have left her. She always appears genuinely and rather sweetly surprised at having managed to publish some more commendatory verses or get another play onto the boards at Dorset Garden, in the face of continuing snipes from fellow scribblers.
The uncluttered freshness and vivacity of her dramatic writing have no parallel in Restoration stage literature. Like her contemporary, the nowadays hopelessly overrated Rochester, she speaks with nonchalant ease that transcends the restrictions of her chosen form, but unlike his tone Of bilious, venereal disgust, her voice is a whoop of pleasure at the incalculable turns of circumstance, She is an appalling poet,. with the tendency of so many appalling poets to drop into verse when offered half a chance, and the construction of her plays is mere gingerbread, yet for this very reason things are that much more immediate and alive. Meetings, misunderstandings, plots and counterplots are set on foot with a wonderfully plausible spontaneity. We all have our favourite 'prescriptions for the malaises of the National Theatre: mine is that instead of dreary revivals of Shaw, Galsworthy and Maugham, they should give us plays like Aphra's The Rover and The Dutch Lover.
Angeline Goreau's book is only the second adequate survey of Mrs Behn's life and writings. The first was Maureen Duffy's The Passionate Shepherdess, published three years ago and, despite its infuriating quirks of style, the better work. Goreau, I think, misses the point through her desire to fill out the background of her subject's role as a 17th-century woman. Aphra is one of a good many women writers better understood by men than by their own sex, precisely because it is a predominantly male readership they have set out to challenge and engage. Hers was not a strident, humourless feminism, some kind of Restoration pre-echo of the late Victorian `Woman Question'. Like one of her own heroines, the adventuring Marcella in The Feigned Courtesans or Lucretia in Sir Patient Fancy, she exploded male pomposity and presumption by sheer indomitable energy and wit. What is more, she so very obviously meant to do it this way and most worthily succeeded.
And now isn't it about time we were given a decent modern edition of her works?
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