Greene explains the lasting friendship between the king and Rochester as one of shared cynicism, but he also sees a hidden idealism in the Earl that doesn't really seem to be there.

Rochester was indirectly responsible for at least three deaths. Once, when he and some friends went whoring and mistakenly ended up at the door of a local constable, Rochester drew his sword, but then ran off and let his unarmed companion be killed. Greene says simply, "by the time he returned to Court, he had earned his forgiveness from the king." Later, during a paranoid inquisition following the revelation of the Popish Plot, his testimony led to the execution of an innocent man accused of being Catholic. And yet another time he and a friend seduced a country gentleman's young wife and then carried her off to London--the cuckold hanged himself. Again, when brought to the attention of the king, "their story atoned for their offence."

A strange echo introduces the final portion of Rochester's life: "In the sixties there had been a time for mirth; now in the seventies was a time for seriousness." Rochester's satires had earned him the reputation of, as he wrote, "a man whom it is the great mode to hate." His two great loves, wine and women, finally turned on him so that by 1677 he was almost blind. In 1680 he died--either of tertiary syphilis or delirium tremens--disgraced for alleged cowardice on the dueling field, and accused of having thugs beat up Dryden, England's poet laureate (there is still no conclusive evidence about the latter charge).

Greene compares Rochester's poetry to that of Donne, and in at least one respect he's right: "Both poets were driven by the circumstances of their lives to be satirists." But Lord Rochester's Monkey goes too far in ascribing to Rochester (based mostly on his death-bed return to Christianity) a metaphysical resonance that just isn't there. Rochester was a bold and cunning contriver and his redemption for enjoying all the pleasures of a decadent age lies in his contempt for that age, expressed in poems like "Upon Nothing," and "A Satyr Against Man":

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 sort of Flesh and Blood I pleas'd to wear,

I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear,

Anything, but that vain Animal

Who is so proud of being Rational.

In his letters to Pritchett, Greene said, "one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy." He demonstrates that same kind of sympathy in Lord Rochester's Monkey but it is overbearing. And as Leon Edel says in his book Literary Biography, "There enters into the process a quality of sympathy with the subject which is neither forbearance nor adulation." Edel describes a certain form of the biographical genre that, in its rejection of chronological order, can "borrow from the methods of the novelist without, however, being fiction." Here again Greene aims for that but fails. He avoids a two-dimensional portrait, yet in his attempts to give this third dimension to Rochester's life he misses. His book is like a holograph that has jumbled up the diffraction pattern from which a three dimensional image of Rochester might have been projected. All that's left are a few juicy slices of life plus a lot of silly pictures.

There's nothing wrong with this, except that Greene supposedly wrote the book for the common reader. One of the few obligations he claims a writer has to society is "of not robbing the poor, the blind, the widow or the orphan...if we do less than these we are so much the less human beings and therefore so much less likely to be artists." In this deluxe coffee-table edition he has certainly robbed the poor, he has wasted paper, and most disgraceful of all, he's even robbed the blind, who cannot see his profusely illustrated money-maker.