More Will Be Donne

John Donne lends himself to having good books written about him, perhaps his vivid life and famous poems make him a more interesting figure than a late C20th poet's life on a university campus. David L. Edwards's John Donne, Man of Flesh and Spirit is neither a biography or a commentary on the poems but dies both things in chapters loosely on themes like Donne's early career, his marriage and his sermons. Edwards has an ecclesiastial background and the book was a 'selection of the Episcopal Book Club' and so the emphasis is more on religion than a purely literary study would be.

It's difficult to approach Donne without some 'compare and contrast' between the young Jack Donne, the ladies' man and careerist, and Dr. Donne, the sermonizing Dean of St. Paul's. The connection is the words that make his reputation but the turnabout in moral and spiritual attitudes is more complex.

Edwards is persuasive in throwing out previous ideas about Donne's libidinous poems being all made up. They might have been exaggerated but it's hard to deny that the young rake was not entirely a figment of his own imagination. The rite of passage that he undertook on his way to being such a crowd-pulling churchman could be mainly expedient for an ambitious man in Protestant times but his marriage to Ann is very significant, too. He seems to give up the pursuit of any available women as soon as he meets Ann and ruins his career prospects by marrying her to the disapproval of her influential family. He found a kind of 'love' that surpassed the laddish sport of seduction for seduction's sake.

However much that might seem admirable, it leaves us with the lasting impression that, like many creative artists, he was all about himself. Exchanging the life of self-indulgent gadabout for that of the fundamentalist convert threatening his congregation with all kinds of damnation for their sins, Edwards points out that in between Ann dies aged 34,

Her body worn out by the sexual appetite of her husband, who seems to have been feeling proud as he counted up her twelve pregnancies which went to their full term, on the monument over her grave.

 

Edwards takes on earlier accounts of Donne, most determinedly John Carey's Life, Mind and Art which had seemed seminal in Donne Studies, but does so with such gusto that we feel inclined to take his point. And, in his final chapter on the sermons, he is happy to concede that the insistence on the presence of God everywhere in human life would not be taken as so absolute and incontrovertable by a modern audience as it was by his, for whom the term 'atheist' didn't mean anything as unthinkable as 'non-believer' but designated someone maverick or unorthodox in their religion.

It's never been easy to assimilate the fact that that Donne was only eight years younger than Shakespeare and that so little mention is ever made in writing on the lives of either of them that surely they would have known, or known about, each other in the comparatively small community of courtly and literary London in the 1590's and 1600's. That there is no evidence of it has never been a reason to discourage much more outlandish speculation on the lives of either of them. One thing that they certainly shared, or their legions of commentators have insisted on commentating on, is their fixation on the pun as a literary device which, through their perceived insistent usage, has been regarded as a set piece of Elizabethan and subsequent literary fashion.

For all the ambiguous uses of 'will' in Shakespeare, Donne is littered with 'done's' and 'more's', from Ann's maiden name, so that it's impossible for him to use those words without a scholar finding personal resonances in them even if he had wanted to. 'Die' and 'rise' are other words that can't be allowed only their strict meanings but it could equally be Donne's fault if he can't because he usually does intend the double meanings.

It's not often that a poet, or any other sort of creative type, emerges from a book about them as a more attractive figure than one thought. They are only human, after all, and invoking the terrors of an all-powerful, highly judgemental god, doesn't make the later Donne any more amenable than the man about town with a low opinion of the women he is so infatuated with. There is something to be said, after all, for those days in which we were told to study the text and no more than that because we can usually admire the art if not the artist. 

But those days are gone when, as a sixth form protégée, one took it for granted that because poems were in libraries and bookshops they must be any good and one should know about them. It's not like that at all. Books are in bookshops because the proprietors think they are likely to be bought by their clientele.

Donne remains admirable for making more in his poems than the sum of the, often monosyllabic, words he uses which is where the 'poetry' is. Nobody disputes the ingenuity and I, for one, wouldn't be offended if the poems were entirely 'performances' that don't count sincerity a top priority. He has to be given credit for the many great such performances he put in, not least, 

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

One is less impressed that Donne was really only ever about himself, though, and even in 'No Man is an Island', where he begins by saying that,

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

What he really means is, 

therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

 

It was him that was dying and he went to great lengths to make a performance out of that, whether or not he really thought that eternity awaited and from there earthly affairs would, look like,

what an adult sees when watching children's games: when the saints 'look down and see Kings fighting for Crownes', earth's struggles look like boyes at stool-ball'.

That's what they look like anyway. 

More will be done before Donne can be properly re-assessed in the light of this excellent book. I'm not sure if I can have him in my Top 6 Poets until that enquiry is completed. It's quite possible that the poetry is still great once Donne and God have been distilled out of it but that's a lot of distillation that's required.