Volume 21, Number 15 · October 3, 1974
Rogue Poet
By V.S. Pritchett
Lord Rochester's Monkey
by Graham Greene
Viking, 231 pp., $15.95
Those who know the Graham Greene of the critical essays he was writing in the Thirties will remember a sound thing he wrote about Sterne and Fielding, and his remarks on their 'shell-shocked' Puritan predecessors in the revolutionary seventeenth century. (He was playing with an epithet he had taken from Trotsky in a very different context.) These readers will not be altogether surprised to hear that Greene had written a study of the most 'shell-shocked' of all, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, a real example of the 'burned out case.' The surprise is that the book was a substantial biography; that it has been lying for years unpublished in the library of the University of Texas.
Review, 1902 words
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