Donne's "dialogue of one"

New Criterion, Jan, 2007 by Paul Dean

          On a huge hill,
   Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that
                                              will
   Reach her, about must, and about must go,
   And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.

These lines from the third of John Donne's satires, written sometime in the 1590s, express and enact rhythmically the individual's effort to discover a spiritual home. For Donne this was a process of strenuous grappling which lasted all his life (1572-1631). Born a Catholic, related on his mother's side to Sir Thomas More, he saw his uncle Jasper, a Jesuit, flee into exile and his younger brother Henry die in prison on a charge of harboring a priest. Gradually, he became an Anglican, a kind of senior civil servant and in line for preferment at Court, but threw away his future by an impulsive, though loving, clandestine marriage with his employer's ward Anne More. He lost his job and his prospects, and spent thirteen years in poverty and obscurity before being browbeaten into taking holy orders by James I. He ended as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, one of the most celebrated preachers of his day.

John Stubbs's new biography of Donne is the first since R. C. Bald's of 1970. (1) Bald was a meticulous scholar, but his book was as dry as a barrel of ship's biscuit. Stubbs writes more colorfully, with an eye for anecdote and descriptive detail. Sometimes this leads him into chattiness, or padding where our factual knowledge of Donne's life is scanty, but he carries the reader along. His main problem is that, given his aim to present Donne as a "reformed soul," he has hardly any chronological signposts to help him. Few of Donne's poems can be dated with confidence, and attempts to infer a life story from them, as from Shakespeare's sonnets, are at best conjectural. Stubbs thinks that Donne was "still a practising Roman Catholic" in 1592, though "slowly leaving [Catholicism] behind"; in 1598 "strong ambivalences remained, yet by now Donne was moving away from the Roman church." In that same year, when he entered the service of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of England (in effect Lord Chancellor, and himself a convert from Catholicism), he became involved in the harassment of Catholics. Perhaps, as Stubbs concludes, by this point he "found it impossible to say just what he believed any more." The mischievous among us would say that Anglicanism was thus a logical step.

In the critical study which has dominated the field for twenty-five years, John Carey's John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981), Donne is presented as an apostate, neurotic and guilt-ridden, unable to detach himself emotionally from the Catholic faith but propelled into Anglicanism by a lust for power. Carey's melodramatic picture, which mars a book often rich in insights, is countered by Stubbs's cooler summary of Donne's adaptations to the changes he had lived through. His choice had not been between liberty and tyranny, for "such a choice did not exist." "Sooner dead than changed" had been his motto, in provocative Spanish, on an early portrait; Stubbs suggests he "found it more sensible to change than be dead." It took some courage to defy family tradition in this way. "One of the central realizations of Donne's life was that it was wrong and silly to will oneself towards martyrdom." The famous pronouncement "No man is an island" gives the corollary: "It was impossible to resign from mankind." One may accept Carey's demonstration that Donne continued to find value in Catholic theology and iconography (so did Shakespeare, after all) without concluding that he was a hypocrite. Stubbs remarks, "The Reformed Church gave him ample room for the Catholic habits of mind and devotion his upbringing had instilled."

That is admirably sane, but later we read with astonishment:

   Many Papist practices were carried over by the
   Reformed religion. Yet in the old Roman
   Church, the Church on which Donne turned
   his back, the afterlife was a different prospect;
   all the trusting believer needed to do, to reach
   heaven, was to attend services, receive the
   sacrament, observe the holy days, feast days
   and times of abstinence.

That is an unbelievably crude description, amounting to a Lutheran caricature, of pre-Reformation religion, as anyone who knows Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars--surprisingly given by Stubbs as his authority here--will immediately recognize. It can only mislead the novice reader. The same oversimplification occurs when he hears in the Holy Sonnets the voice of "a Protestant soul, stripped of the support of the old Roman Church," as though a Catholic could not fear death and damnation as much as a Protestant! Donne knew, if Stubbs doesn't, that it was determination to avoid damnation for heresy which took Thomas More to the block.

Stubbs's treatment of Donne's literary inheritance and achievement is also variable. He never discusses a poem in its entirety, and some of his judgments are questionable: "The Autumnal" is more than simply "a rather hurtful bit of work," and it seems perverse to write off "Twickenham Garden" as "one of the weaker poems in his early style of a weary but willing lover." "There are virtually no contemporary poets who can be said to have influenced him," Stubbs writes, before suggesting, unconvincingly, the "rough, snaggy rhythms" of Wyatt. Surely the major presence in Donne's background is Shakespeare, whose early plays he is likely to have seen. He was a noted theater-goer in his youth at the Inns of Court--much later, in a sermon, he spoke of seeing comedies specifically--he knew Ben Jonson personally, and he became father-in-law to the actor Edward Alleyn who created the great Marlovian roles, Tamburlaine and Faustus. Only Shakespeare can parallel the variety and distinctiveness of the voices Donne created (something Browning admired and imitated). Moreover, Shakespeare wrote, in "The Phoenix and Turtle," a poem more strictly and austerely metaphysical, if we must use that rather unhelpful term, than any of Donne's. Stubbs rightly says that "the relationship between Donne and the speakers of his poems is something like that which dramatists have with their characters," yet elsewhere he reads the poems as straightforward autobiography.