DONE IN: As a poet, Stubbs’s Donne is more of a rhyming diarist. |
John Donne’s poetic reputation was in pretty bad shape till T.S. Eliot came along and slipped the lines “Donne, I suppose, was such another/Who found no substitute for sense” into the second stanza of “Whispers of Immortality.” Suddenly, Donne’s famously intricate “conceits” could take shelter in Modernism’s fanatic love of allusion and obscure literary reference. Scholars and readers have since flocked to him, and today he stands as the kind of powerful, canonical figure who gets slotted into survey courses.
And so John Stubbs’s detailed biography does not feel the need to defend or justify its subject. Instead, Stubbs, a first-time biographer who received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 2005, offers an exhaustive account of Donne’s 16th/17th-century Jacobean world, his various sexual and political maneuvers (the book begins, in high style, with a sex scene, Donne sneaking into the house of his mistress’s parents for a liaison), and the conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism that made it possible for him to assume his post as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Stubbs shines up a whole cartload of dusty English names: James I, Charles I, Sir Walter Raleigh. Sometimes, as with the flamboyant, volatile, ultimately tragic Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, the supporting cast overwhelms Donne. (In a mere 34 years, the Earl led a successful military campaign in Spain, an unsuccessful one in Ireland, shocked the queen by presenting himself in her bedchamber before she was properly dressed, and was executed for treason.) But as the artist isn’t always the most compelling guy at the party, it’s not hard to forgive his biographer a few extended diversions.
What’s more difficult to forgive is the superficial treatment of Donne’s poetry, which Stubbs insists on reading as biography: “He moulded his experiences and imaginings into fabulously complex verse schemes.” Later on, in describing Donne’s abilities as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the author writes that “the analysis of love, the search for Truth and success in bureaucracy all require a mastery of detail.” Although this may be true, Stubbs does not address what it is about Donne that made Eliot include him in “Whispers of Immortality.” In the book’s weakest moments, Donne is more a rhyming diarist than a poet.
Other issues have more to do with Stubbs’s own writing than with his treatment of Donne’s. He writes that Donne “moved just a little way up the Strand to digs in the Savoy.” Digs? Is this a Kinks concert? He’s equally weird about sex; extrapolating a real sexual encounter from a poetic one, he writes that “the girl’s skirt still had to fall, a cloud’s shadow leaving a meadow.” Gross.
Things pick up toward the end, when a converted Donne starts giving his famed sermons at St. Paul’s. Other biographers have suggested that Donne’s conversion was a selfish betrayal of his religion in the interest of careerism, but Stubbs’s treatment of his subject’s beliefs is serious and compassionate. Donne in his younger years was frequently persecuted for his Catholicism, and Stubbs envisions his conversion, which allowed him to continue speaking and writing, as a choice, not a capitulation: “We might invert his youthful motto, and say that Donne found it more sensible to change than be dead. . . . One of the central realizations of Donne’s life was that it was wrong and silly to will oneself towards martyrdom.” If Donne’s poetic reputation is assured, his historical reputation is still up for grabs, and in this area, at least, Stubbs has made a contribution.
