He loved to coin formations with the super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous. It was part of his bid to invent a language that would reach beyond language, because infinite wasn’t enough: both in heaven, but also here and now on earth, Donne wanted to know something larger than infinity. It was absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry.
I couldn’t say what prompted me to read a biography of John Donne — in my mind he was frozen as the stern elder preacher who would chillingly warn down the length of a gnarled and bony finger it tolls for thee — so I am delighted to have so enjoyed Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite, reminding me that even those dusty old poets, forever frozen in woodcut portraits on foxed anthologies’ frontispieces, were once young and striving and pulsing with life. As Rundell reports, there is only the sketchiest of biographical information available on Donne, but with an exuberant and colourful writing style, she brings his world alive and makes the case that not only was Donne one of the greatest innovators of the English language in his day, but that he arguably remains the greatest writer of desire in English of all time. With such big claims satisfyingly supported, I was entertained and educated throughout; delighted after all to have taken this plunge on Donne. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London. It’s traditional to imagine two Donnes — Jack Donne, the youthful rake, and Dr Donne, the older, wiser priest, a split Donne himself imagined in a letter to a friend — but he was infinitely more various and unpredictable than that.
By the time he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral by King James I, not only did parishioners risk their lives to hear Donne speak to crushing crowds, but his sermons were often collected and published and widely scrutinised. As for his earlier work, Donne published a few manuscripts but no poetry in his lifetime and what has survived to us is all from letters that he wrote to friends; poems that were often copied and passed on, so that there are now something like four thousand copies of his poems, in 260 manuscripts, with no definitive versions of any, and only one poem extant in Donne’s own hand — repeatedly, Rundell proves that writing a biography of Donne is a daunting task. But as Donne lived at the same time as Elizabeth I and Shakespeare and Johannes Kepler (and probably met each), Rundell is able to sketch the outline of Donne’s life by evoking the greater world around him. And from Donne’s beginning in an outlawed Catholic family (he probably saw an uncle hanged and drawn and quartered for his “apostasy”), to his years of striving for a position at Court and his unsanctioned marriage to a young upper class lady (the beloved Anne would provide Donne with twelve children in sixteen years — seven of whom would survive her own death following her last childbirth — and Donne vowed in Anne’s eulogy to never love again, and he did not), there are definitely enough known facts of his life to make him come alive on the page. And throughout, Rundell quotes generously from Donne’s poetry accompanied by her own colourful commentary:
(Sir Philip) Sidney’s woman’s hair is gold, her shoulders ‘be like two white doves’ and her whole person ‘out-beauties’ beauty itself. Donne’s counter-blazon takes that tradition and knifes it in a dark alley. He writes how the sweat of his own mistress’s brow is ‘no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets’, while on his companion’s mistress:
Rank sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles,
Like spèrm’tic issue of ripe menstr’ous boils,
Or like the scum, which, by need’s lawless law
Enforced, Sanserra’s starvèd men did draw
From parboiled shoes and boots, and all the rest
Which were with any sovereign fatness blest.
Honestly, the exuberance of Rundell’s metaphors were half the joy in reading this book:
• Edward Alleyn: the greatest actor of the age, the man who made Faustus his own, Master of the King’s Bears, and possessed, in the etchings, of a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice skate.
• He wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in.
• For all their length, his sermons were never sombre or staid: they were passionate performances, attempts to strike a match against the rough walls of the listeners’ chest cavities.
• To read the full text of a Donne sermon is a little like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant: large and unfamiliar. To modern ears, they are winding, elongated, perambulating things; a pleasure that is also work.
• From failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you.
Again: Super-Infinite was a pleasure to read and Rundell’s admiration of Donne is infectious; I am delighted to have picked this up and can enthusiastically recommend it.
