Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite

 Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite, The Transformations of John Donne (Faber)

The 2006 biography by John Stubbs, John Carey's Life, Mind and Art and J.B. Leishman's The Monarch of Wit cover John Donne as well as need be for most readers, with Dr. Johnson and T.S. Eliot's reputation-making essays, but one never thinks there isn't room for more. Not, at least, when it's written with such flair as Katherine Rundell's biography. It seemed a bit showy at first and colourful more than scholarly, but it is vibrant and entertains vividly with its sharp insights and implications.

Donne's life hardly needs making more vivid. The horrors of religious persecution, his brother's death in prison, war, his own imprisonment, the deaths of so many of his children, including seeing a ghost, plague, poverty, the death of his wife and his own final illnesses as well as his necessary career advancement in high places make for lurid drama. His transformations from 'super-Catholic' to the orthodoxy of Protestantism, from self-styled libertine to a crowd-pulling, box-office preacher of some severity, from the world into abstraction and from embracing life to embracing death are a scintillating and often gruesome story that maybe need Katherine Rundell's brilliant mind and incisive prose to accommodate them.

Donne's change of religion is a sensible move in the circumstances given his brother's gory death on a charge of hiding a priest whose end is gorier still but his apparent switch from luxuriating in rakish pleasures to that of a hardline, devotional moralist, it is suggested, was brought forward by the death of Anne, his wife, who spent all her sixteen years of married life having children. It has long seemed to me that Donne's reputation as a womanizer was largely self-made and Katherine seems to agree,

Was, then, Donne a great tumultuous lover: a conqueror of swathes of women? After so much time and so much entropy, we can only guess: but, almost certainly not.

Certainly, once married, he seems uxurious and those who write so much of sensuality are likely to be imagining most of it but he's a compelling personality, a risk-taker by nature and I'm not at all sure. Anne's father, Sir George More, who has legitimate doubts about the marriage to a 'scribbling reprobate', once he hears about it, hears rumours that Donne was,

as sexually promiscuous as his poetry implied

and so Katherine isn't categorical on this most prurient of questions.

For one whose poetry was such a 'combinatorial, plastic process', who did not, like Thomas Parnell and Alexander Pope, believe that 'art had rules'; who 'did not want to sound like other poets' and was a 'neologamist' who,

accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford  English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language,

it would have been a great opportunity to meet Johannes Kepler when appointed chaplain on an ill-fated diplomatic mission to Bohemia in 1617. Kepler was re-designing our understanding of the heavens at least as drastically as Donne was mangling many people's idea of poetry. Luckily, Kepler is unaware that Donne was the author of Ignatius His Conclave which had scurrilously implicated his own mother as involved in witchcraft but if the trip wasn't a political success, Donne's career didn't suffer for it and it was a significant step on his way to the post of Dean of St. Paul's which was lucrative enough after so many financial worries and he was good at even if he thought he preferred to go to Venice as ambassador.

Having had quite a life, though, Donne took to death with some relish as if it were the same sort of metaphysical abstraction that he made his poems from. He had only been Dean for two years when serious illness first gives him a close-up view of it in 1623 and from then on, he's increasingly devoted to it until delivering his sermon about not asking 'for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee' and organizing his own passing, in sermons and the design of his shroud and statue, in a more thorough way than even David Bowie did more recently.

One could hardly fail, you might think, with a life like that to recount but there's a lot of it to organize and making an incoherent mess of it would be equally easy for an undisciplined biographer. Katherine Rundell uses the material in a virtuoso performance, never over-laden with detail and hugely readable in 24 themed chapters that follow seamlessly, 300 economical pages that include illustrations so that it is no hardship to be richly entertained and informed at the same time, making light of its deep import. It's no surprise at all that it's a prize-winner and already featuring on lists of Books of the Year. It very much belongs with Carey, Leishman, Stubbs, Johnson and Eliot.