Doing Donne

John Stubbs
DONNE
The reformed soul
566pp.Viking £25.00.
0 670 91510 1

“Doing Donne” has proved too much for many scholars. Like God the Father, told repeatedly in Donne’s “Hymn” that “When thou hast done, thou hast not done”, they have struggled to accommodate Donne’s texts and life records in their entirety: these seem too complex and shifting. Back in 1936, I. A. Shapiro assured the Oxford University Press that his edition of Donne’s letters would be delivered in a fortnight – or so I was told by my late mother, his colleague at the University of Birmingham. Shapiro died in March 2004, full of years, the Letters undelivered. In default of such an edition, it has been widely felt that a comprehensive biography could not be written. R. C. Bald, who embarked on one, died suddenly in 1965 after finishing only ten of the eighteen chapters of John Donne: A Life, though the work was ably completed by W. Milgate. First Sir Herbert Grierson, and then Dame Helen Gardner – neither of whose names appears in the index of Donne: The reformed soul by John Stubbs – gained major honours for careers which included long and arduous collation and analysis of the many manuscript texts of Donne’s poems according to classical principles of textual criticism. Barely was Gardner cold in her grave, however, before a team of editors in America, led by Gary A. Stringer, embarked on a great Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (being published by Indiana University Press), adopting a radically different editorial approach. Time will tell who among us will live to see this project completed. John Stubbs may well do so, for he is not yet thirty.

Stubbs’s primary achievement, therefore, is to have completed a substantial and lively account of Donne’s life and times for new readers. If, as Herbert said, “A verse may find him who a sermon flies”, it may also be the case that a new, “young” account of Donne will find readers who might not embark on Bald, although his remains the standard Life. Unlike Bald’s, Stubbs’s has no illustrations. But this matters less than it might, because Stubbs’s great gift is for visual evocation and physical narrative. All of the visual images of Donne are beautifully evoked. He also writes marvellously about Donne’s swashbuckling youth as a member of two of the Earl of Essex’s great ventures, Cadiz and “The Islands Voyage”, as well as his likely viewpoint on the “Essex Rising”:

Donne would have been a very loyal subject indeed if he did not experience a moment of split allegiance in the torn-up mud and confusion of the Strand. A herald rode through the town, proclaiming Essex a traitor. If the rising failed, Donne could not afford to be anywhere near renegades who might claim him as an acquaintance or as an ally. Yet as the Earl, fantastically arrayed, hurtled out with his elite bodyguard, it must have seemed quite possible that Donne’s former general would not fail, and that all the steady paper-shuffling of the previous three years might count for nothing. Another excellent descriptive passage is the account of St Paul’s, “exploited for loitering as well as labour, and subjected to the continual drift of tourists. The place stank with the living and the dead”. Stubbs thanks his school history teacher warmly, and it occurs to me that he may be one of the brightest early products of the “empathy” component of GCSE history invented in the late 1980s: “imagine that you are a servant in the City of London during the Great Fire”. I hadn’t imagined that such an exercise could be so fruitful.

Stubbs’s diction is lively and unbuttoned. Donne’s Savoy lodgings are “digs”; George More, “this short man with a short fuse”; James Hay, “one of the Court’s beautiful people”. Playing companies spend summers “bunking through the provinces”. Occasionally it descends into slackness and cliché: “Letters were special for Donne”; young Englishmen visited Paris “to soak up the culture”; Elizabeth of Bohemia was “a bubbly, spoilt but lovable girl”. Sensibly, he refers to Donne’s father as “Mr Donne”, to distinguish him from his elder son, but doesn’t explain, perhaps because he doesn’t realize, that this should be mentally expanded as “Master”, not “Mister”. He also fails to indicate the considerable socio-economic status enjoyed by “Mr. Donne”, who rose to be a Warden of the Ironmongers, one of London’s twelve Worshipful Companies. Allusions to him as “a shop-keeper” may lead young readers to imagine a corner shop selling tin tacks and fork handles.

The book’s raison d’être is indicated by its subtitle. It appears that this will be a fresh examination of Donne’s abandonment of the committed Catholicism of his maternal forebears, with his adoption of England’s Reformed faith treated as both morally and intellectually defensible. As a riposte to John Carey’s fierce account of Donne’s “apostasy” in his brilliant John Donne: Life, mind and art (1981), this seems promising. Unfortunately, however, it is not delivered. While David Colclough, in an excellent entry in the ODNB, suggests that Donne had put Roman Catholicism behind him “by 1597”, when he entered the employment of Lord Keeper Egerton, Stubbs has him still not definitely converted by this time, remarking that “it is surprising to find Donne so close to such work” as the searching out of recusants. Yet if he had just embraced the Reformed faith, he may have been especially anxious to display his new commitment. A few years before his ordination, he “was committed to the Reformed Church; but he could not bear to think that ordinary Papists were damnable by default”. In the end, Stubbs never does quite make up his mind about when Donne jumped from the Catholic ship. All he is positive about is that Donne strongly disapproved of torture.

Stubbs has degrees in English Literature from both Oxford and Cambridge. It is disappointing therefore that his use of Donne’s poems is literal-minded and simplistic. The construction of many sections takes the form of an arresting anecdote, loosely connected to Donne’s life; then a sequence of narrative focused on Donne; and finally, glosses on this narrative derived from the poems. Stubbs has no qualms about his literal citations from poems, claiming that these offer “the best indications of what Donne was really doing”. Occasionally the method works well, as with “The Storme” and “The Calme”, which evidently combine specific reference with rhetorical experiment, but elsewhere it is very much weaker. While Colclough in ODNB describes Donne as “experimenting with tone and form”, alluding to the rakishness of “the speakers of the Elegies”, Stubbs treats all the poems, including Satires and love poems, as Donne’s own unmediated comments on “real” experience. He should perhaps have considered the wise comment on love poetry made by Giles Fletcher the Elder in 1593:

“a man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandrie, and not goe to plough: or of witches, and be none: or of holinesse, and be flat prophane.”

(Donne may have been familiar with Fletcher’s sonnet sequence Licia. Like Donne in this period, Fletcher was a devotee of the Earl of Essex, and an active propagandist for the 1596 Cadiz venture in which Donne served.)

There are other ways in which the book disappoints, especially in its second half. Twenty-first-century readers, at least half of whom may be female, will expect very much more searching consideration of Donne’s relationship with his wife Ann, and of Ann’s own life. Chapter sixteen, dealing with the immediate aftermath of her death, offers no summation of her short life. Nor do we learn who looked after the six orphans, and nothing is said about the likely emotional impact on them of their mother’s death. Of course the evidence is scanty. But we do know that it was the tenacity of her husband’s “masculine perswasive force” that killed her. It’s clear that her yearly pregnancies became increasingly difficult. In 1611, while Donne was swanning around Europe with the childless but wealthy Drurys, Ann was “very sad, and sick in her bed”, having given birth to a stillborn child after a long and difficult labour, while staying on the Isle of Wight with her affable brother-in-law Sir John Oglander, who called her “the best of women”. Oglander’s words are more straightforwardly admiring than any by her husband. All later childbirths seem to have been problematic, and she had at least one miscarriage. Though Stubbs claims that “Ann was coping”, there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence for this. Her death from puerperal fever after another stillbirth seems inevitable, in default of married chastity.

It is here that I am tempted to follow Stubbs’s example and turn to Donne’s own verse for biographical enrichment. In contrast to Carey, who quotes the poem in full, rightly remarking that it is “not boring”, Stubbs deals sketchily with the celebrated Elegy 2 (or, in Grierson’s edition, 19), “To His Mistress Going to Bed” (“Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy; / Until I labour, I in labour lie . . .”). Conventionally dated to the mid-1590s, for no very clear reason in terms of topical or textual evidence, Stubbs places the poem even earlier. He associates it with Donne’s first year as a law student, at Thavies Inn – the period of the earliest portrait – when “Donne was anxious for life to begin; he chafed at postponements”. He describes the eighteen-year-old as “a seasoned Lothario”, and follows John Carey both in calling the “Mistress” a “girl” and in treating the poem as a piece of reportage, emotional if not physical. Greater thought should have been given to continuity here, for only a few pages later Stubbs describes Donne as “careful, reticent by nature” on entry to Lincoln’s Inn, where he chose to be portrayed as “meticulous and conservative, obeying the sombre dress code of his new academic home”. How does this careful conformity square with his alleged status as already a “seasoned Lothario” who had succeeded in seducing numerous “girls”?

I believe that previous scholars have all dated “To His Mistress” too early, perhaps wanting to get Donne’s amorous escapades out of the way before he met and privily wooed the thirteen-year-old Ann More in York House. They have been further encouraged to do so by an article by the late Shapiro which cites an undated letter to an unnamed correspondent as evidence that the five Elegies omitted from the 1633 first printed edition of Donne’s poems were all written before 1600. I think we can lay this aside. Attention needs to be given to the poem’s second word, “Madam”. There are only five other instances of “Madam” within Donne’s verse – three to the Countess of Bedford, two to the Countess of Huntingdon. Obviously a highly imaginative law student just out of puberty could fantasize about seducing an aristocrat. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. There are many signs that the setting is domestic, even familial, and that the poem ritualizes sexual congress between a husband and his socially superior wife. (Ann More was the daughter of a knight and major landowner.) The addressee’s possession of a chiming watch indicates that she presides over an orderly household, and the words “now ’tis your bed-time” scarcely suit a scene of one-off seduction. These lines suggest routine as well as ritual. Of course an unmarried Donne could fantasize about sex with a well-born lady, but he would be unlikely to imagine her as already a mother. The speaker’s punning allusion to his own eagerly anticipated “labour” in line two anticipates the addressee’s recent experience of female “labour”, requiring the ministrations of a midwife, in line forty-four: “As liberally as to a midwife show / Thyself”. That run-on line, making “Thyself” stand naked and alone at the beginning of line forty-five, is among the poem’s many fine touches. To me, “To His Mistress Going to Bed” reads as the hypergamous Donne’s erotic address to his young, higher-born wife, already the mother of at least one child by him. She has emerged from her lying-in, and is being invited, amid an abundance of “white linen” that shows that she is no longer bleeding, to a “licensed” yet exciting resumption of conjugal relations. This means, of course, that, like Grierson, I favour the 1669 reading of line forty-five – supported by a number of manuscripts – as “There is no penance due to innocence”.

As Isaak Walton noted, John and Ann were prolific even by the standards of the time. Because of Sir George More’s obstructive fury, they did not begin to cohabit until the summer of 1602, and Donne also spent nearly a year abroad with the Drurys. Nevertheless, there were thirteen pregnancies in sixteen years. Donne must have resumed conjugal relations at the earliest opportunity after each lying-in. If, as Stubbs and most other writers agree, Donne used poems of “Valediction” to placate Ann when he was about to travel, it doesn’t seem implausible that he also used verse to woo her back after her weeks in the care of midwives. Whether or not Stubbs is persuaded by this “domestic” reading of Elegy 2, I think he should have given more attention to the women and children in close proximity to Donne, as well as to his creepily cultivated countesses and the genuinely fascinating Magdalen Herbert.

In what sense, in conclusion, does Stubbs portray Donne as a “reformed soul”? The second half of Stubbs’s account is even less flattering than Carey’s thrilling demolition job, but it’s not clear that Stubbs is aware of this. For instance, he calmly accommodates the likelihood that Donne purchased the Deanery of St Paul’s with a large bribe to Buckingham. Stubbs also shows how little Donne cared about the conjugal happiness of his first-born child, Constance. Not only did he engage in fierce quarrels over money with her elderly husband Edward Alleyn – an old acquaintance, and a generous-hearted man – but his “pointed coldness and meanness” extended to withholding “her mother’s childbed linen”, even though he had promised it to her as a New Year’s gift. In his final chapter Stubbs reminds us that Donne realized “that it was wrong and silly to will oneself towards martyrdom”. If he delivered himself of such sentiments at such a time they can’t have gone down well with his poor old mother, apparently still Catholic, though now resident in the Deanery. Whatever his power in the pulpit, Donne’s private life, in this account, was no advertisement for the Reformation.