The Priestly Donne

자료: http://www.nysun.com/arts/priestly-donne/53153/

By ADAM KIRSCH | April 25, 2007

In 1600, a London printer entered the title of a new book in the official Stationers' Register: "Amours by J.D. with certen other sonnetes by W.S." No copies of the book survive — it's not clear whether it was ever actually printed — but it is irresistibly tempting to hope that the two poets in question were John Donne and William Shakespeare. Putting their work into a single book would have been a publisher's coup. Not only were they two of the greatest love poets in the language, but they were both curiously reluctant to see their verses in print.

Shakespeare's sonnets, with their extended psychodrama of "Fair Friend" and "Dark Lady," were too revealing for the poet to want them publicly exposed. But at least Shakespeare was a professional writer, content to earn his living whipping up plays for his company of actors. For Donne, on the other hand, being known as a poet was something he tried strenuously to avoid. Even as his witty sophisticated poems were delighting his friends and patrons, he anxiously limited their circulation fearing that their frank sexuality and acute satire would give him the wrong kind of fame. He was af ter a more conventional career first as a courtier and diplomat, and then as a priest in the Church of England. He tried to maintain the distinction when he sent a friend a copy of one of his works, with a warning that the "Book [was] written by Jack Donne, and not by Dr Donne."

"John Donne: The Reformed Soul" (Norton, 565 pages, $35), the fascinating new biography by John Stubbs, is all about the split between those two identities, and their deep connection. Ironically, of course, it is Jack the poet, the self Donne feared and fled, who is most loved by posterity. Dr. Donne, the Anglican priest, was also a powerful writer. His challenging, moving sermons helped win him the prestigious post of Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral, and they are still marvelously alive. In fact, it was in a religious work, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions," that Donne coined his two best-known phrases: "No man is an island" and "Ask not for whom the bell tolls."

Yet it is the secular verse of Jack Donne — the love poems, verse letters, elegies and satires — that really keeps his fame alive in our secular age. It was not always so. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Donne was largely scorned as one of the "Metaphysical" poets, so named by Dr. Johnson for their over-elaborate intellectual conceits. But in the early 20th century, a critical revolution led by T.S. Eliot helped to put Donne at the center of the English canon, where he remains today.

Reading his poems, it's easy to see why he appealed to the modernists. No poet seems to have a more contemporary sensibility. Donne is always feeling his thoughts and thinking about his feelings, with an ironical self-consciousness that is truly modern. If Shakespeare seems to disappear behind his universal characters, Donne remains at the center of his poems, intimately knowable. Like us, he worries about science and religion and politics; like us, he rejoices in a spiritual independence that also makes him uneasy. What Donne wrote in 1611 about his scientific, individualistic age is equally true almost 400 years later:

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out; 

The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit

Can well direct him where to look for it...

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone: 

All just supply, and all Relation:

Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he hath got

To be a Phoenix, and that then can be

None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

Donne's poems are still the best reason to cherish him. But Mr. Stubbs, deliberately and understandably, does not make them the center of his biographical portrait. Instead of the literary and philosophical Donne, whom 10,000 critics have amply explored, Mr. Stubbs focuses on the political and social Donne, the man of the world trying to make his career in an exceptionally turbulent time.

The main source of that turbulence was religion, and Mr. Stubbs's subtitle, "The Reformed Soul," points to the sectarian divisions that shaped Donne's life. When he was born, in 1572, the Protestant or Reformed Church of England was just emerging from a period of extended violence and insecurity. A half-century earlier, Henry VIII had broken with Rome, dissolved the monastic orders, and plundered England's ancient abbeys. His son Edward tried to purge the state of its remaining Catholics; then his daughter Mary, still remembered as "Bloody," tried to re-establish Catholicism with a series of persecutions. Not until Elizabeth took the throne, in 1558, did the Protestant settlement start to look permanent.

Donne's family, however, still clung to the old Catholic traditions. In fact, the poet was born into a tradition of heroic resistance and martyrdom. He was a direct descendant of Thomas More, the most famous Catholic victim of Henry VIII; two of More's teeth were still guarded by the family as holy relics. His uncle, Jasper Heywood, was one of the Jesuit priests who roamed England to keep the Old Faith alive — heroes to the Catholic remnant, figures of fear and dread to the Protestant government.

When the future poet was 12 years old, he visited his uncle in the Tower of London, where he had been imprisoned for treason. Only a royal pardon commuted Heywood's sentence from death to banishment. Donne's younger brother, Henry, was not so lucky. When they were both law students at the Inns of Court, Henry helped to conceal a Catholic priest in his lodgings. He was discovered, arrested, and jailed in the notorious Newgate prison, where he quickly died of disease.

How did John Donne, the heir to so many Catholic heroes, become one of the stars of the Protestant Church? And should we admire him for it? These are the questions that Mr. Stubbs sets out to answer, armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of the period and a mastery of the surprisingly numerous biographical sources. One of the most satisfying things about "John Donne: The Reformed Soul" is the contrast it offers to the endless biographies of Shakespeare, which often read like literary shell games, as each new biographer switches around the same few scraps of evidence. Shakespeare the actor left few traces in the historical record; Donne the priest left many, including personal letters, official documents, the reminiscences of friends, and his biographically revealing poems.

Drawing on all these sources, Mr. Stubbs offers a subtle and convincing explanation of Donne's character. What drove Donne to abandon Catholicism, he argues, was not just self-seeking ambition. It was a conviction that remaining Catholic in Protestant England would mean consigning himself to a frustrated, isolated life, depriving him of the opportunity to be part of the world of work and effort and change.

This was a sacrifice Donne could not bring himself to make, since his deepest belief — underneath all his professional Protestant apologetics — was that the particular form of Christian worship mattered much less than the sincerity of the believer. Writing to the powerful Duke of Buckingham, Donne defended the Spanish Catholics who were seen as England's most dangerous enemies: "Their authors in Divinity, though they do not show us the best way to heaven, yet they think they do: And so, though they say not true, yet they do not lie, because they speak their Conscience." Or, as he put it in his famous third Satire, "So perish souls, which more choose men's unjust / Power from God claimed, than God himself to trust."

This was a brave and humane argument, and one that the English people at large were not yet ready to hear. When Donne died in 1631, the divisions between Puritan and Anglican, parliament and king, were already setting the country on the road to civil war. To survive during such times, Donne needed to be cautious and flexible, and Mr. Stubbs's subtitle underlines his adaptability: He was able to form and re-form himself as needed. In telling the story of those transformations — from Catholic to Protestant, poet to priest, notorious seducer to happy husband — Mr Stubbs helps us to see Donne whole.

He also helps us to imagine Donne's world, the wonderfully brutal Elizabethan London that we get to know best through the odd detail. We learn from Mr. Stubbs about how Thomas Egerton, Donne's patron and chief of the Chancery Court, once punished a lawyer for submitting an overlong brief by burning a hole in the middle of the bulky document, and forcing the lawyer to wear it around his neck. Around the same time, an anonymous prankster got in trouble for riding his horse up the steps of St. Paul's bell-tower and out onto the top of the steeple. It was a time, in other words, that valued the extraordinary gesture; and its greatest praise may be that it was able to put a mind as extraordinary as John Donne's to good use.