Robert Nye
A Notable Disliker of Milk and Martyrdom
John Donne: The Reformed Soul
By John Stubbs (Viking 565pp £25)

It is the details that delight. Donne hated milk. Mortally sick, about to celebrate his death by sitting for his portrait in a shroud, he was urged by his doctor that ‘by Cordials, and drinking milk twenty days together, there was a probability of his restoration to health’. Donne would have none of it. The doctor (a Dr Fox, son of the author of the ‘Boke of Martyrs’) insisted that his patient should at least try. Donne thereupon drank milk – but for ten days only. Then he told Dr Fox that he would not drink the stuff for another ten days even ‘upon the best moral assurance of having twenty years added to his life’.

John Stubbs repeats this anecdote from Isaac Walton’s Life of Dr John Donne (1640), which remains a readable piece of work for all its faults. Walton was somewhat cavalier in matters of chronology, jumbling or telescoping events to suit his sense of emotional rightness. He says, for instance, that Ann Donne died ‘immediately after [her husband’s] returne from Cambridge’, and that Donne ‘in this time of sadnesse ... was importuned by the grave Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn … to accept of their Lecture’. In fact, as Stubbs tells us, Mrs Donne did not die until two years after Donne was made a Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge, in 1615, and he was appointed Reader at Lincoln’s Inn a year before her death. If it is the details that delight then it is obviously worthwhile to get those details right. Another of Walton’s failings – that of paraphrasing his subject’s letters and running excerpts together to illustrate a general theme – is even more reprehensible. Yet in the end it would be difficult to deny the merits of Walton’s Life, and the matter of the milk is wholly to the point in this connection.

Walton, after all, knew Donne. He first met him when Donne was his priest in the London parish of St Dunstan’s. He had read the poems, he had heard the sermons, he had talked with the man whose mind made both. What he has to say is therefore very valuable when it comes to trying to make sense of the total poet/person: John Donne, Jack Donne, Dr Donne, Dean of St Paul’s and sometime author of verses urging his mistress to undress more quickly. What better to depict the persistence to the last of what Donne himself described as his ‘masculine perswasive force’, however trivially, than the exchange over the milk with Dr Fox?

The first thing to be said about John Donne: The Reformed Soul is that it works by the same accumulation of lively and significant detail. For instance, John Stubbs argues backwards from the poem called ‘The Perfume’ to tell us that when the young Donne went skulking by night down the corridors of the mansion where his mistress lived with her parents, he had to devise a way of walking which kept his silk suit from ‘whistling’. Similarly, when finally found out by the girl’s father, it was on account of the perfume Donne left behind him, whereas ‘Had it beene some bad smell’ the old man ‘would have thought / That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought’. This is as vivid as anything derived from the life by Walton, and, though based on lines of verse, convinces one reader at least that it might well be fact. Donne, after all, was not in the verse-fiction trade, and wrote his poems mainly to tell the truth.

Given the revival of interest in Donne’s work over the past century or so, it is surprising that there have not been more biographies of him. Sir Edmund Gosse produced a typical Victorian tombstone, Life and Letters, in 1889. The modern equivalent was R C Bald’s John Donne: A Life (1970), a book which has been described as full of the minutiae of Church politics while showing little understanding of poetry or even interest in it. Now, as mention of that whistling suit should demonstrate, we have a biography worthy of its subject, which brings the apparatus of scholarship to bear on Donne’s life and work, examining his career, his family and his friendships with close attention, basing most of its speculations and conclusions on the poet’s own poems and letters and upon references and reports dating from his day. This is apparently John Stubbs’s first book, but you wouldn’t suppose as much from the assurance with which he writes.

Such assurance is particularly noticeable in those early chapters which use the imagery of the Elegies and Satires to give a living breathing sense of the young Donne in pursuit of amorous adventures, and then sailing as a buccaneer against the Spanish. If later chapters become a touch dry and tendentious then that is maybe because Donne did too. Besides, the book picks up whenever it has a chance to talk directly about poetry. Stubbs never loses sight of the fact that Donne was first and foremost a poet, and it is essentially in its relation of the verse to the life, inner and outer, that this volume excels.

There have been some strange books about Donne, none of them stranger than John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981), a book perhaps unique in its field in that it comes perilously close to accusing the poet of insincerity in his religious vocation. Stubbs is altogether more sympathetic and historical-minded. While conceding that Donne had such a naturally sceptical temper that ‘there were frequent times when absolutely nothing at all made sense to him’, this biographer is sure-handed in his understanding of his subject’s status as ‘one of the most sophisticated but also most genuine defenders of the English Reformation’. The book’s subtitle – ‘The Reformed Soul’ – should be heeded here; Stubbs reminds us that Donne was born and brought up as a Roman Catholic, his ancestor being the martyred Thomas More. Donne’s brother Henry was arrested in May 1593 for hiding an Italian priest in his house, and died of a fever after spending time in prison. It will be seen that the poet was bound to the Roman Church by the strongest ties, those of shed blood. Yet in his first overtly religious poem, written in the same year that his brother died, Donne was already turning away from both Rome and the Geneva of Calvin in favour of his own vision that

On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go.

The thought is independent, the rhythm of its expression rugged, dogged, persevering. Donne, in all the years that followed, approached – slowly and painfully, as Stubbs shows – what he took to be truth in this way, going about and about in search of a catholicity restless in faith until it had exhausted reason. After much soul-searching he eventually identified himself as Anglican – which is to say that he observed the Church of England to be the Catholic Church in England. His objections to Roman Catholicism were less doctrinal than political. Stubbs sees this clearly, and has plenty to say on the subject, some of it addressed to those (like Carey) who have not given the religious Donne sufficient credit. ‘It is important’, he writes, ‘to avoid twentieth-century parallels … Becoming a Protestant in the 1590s was not like joining the Nazi party in the 1930s: the Protestant regime Donne served was no more repressive towards dissidents than the Roman Catholic regime he would have worked for had the English Reformation been defeated.’ One of the central realisations of Donne’s life, stemming from his family history, was that it was wrong to will oneself to martyrdom. ‘To set oneself apart, to try being an island, was also a great mistake.’

Perhaps the greatest merit of Stubbs’s book, apart from its insistence on and understanding of the poetry, is that it has such a firm grasp of the seriousness of Donne’s religion. The author keeps coming back to the seventeenth of that extraordinary series of Devotions, prose poems, prayers, and meditations written in sickness, in which Donne wrote the famous lines, ‘No man is an island, intire of it self; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the maine’, and in which he concludes that we should never seek to ask for whom the bell tolls because when it tolls it tolls for each one of us, death being the ultimate defining human experience. This is a long way away from Carey’s imputation that Donne was some kind of time-serving hypocrite. My own view is that it is also much nearer the truth.

James Reeves once remarked that while some poets strike us as putting reason to sleep when they make love, Donne is almost alone in remaining a rational man even under the pressure of extreme emotion: ‘Indeed, it might be said that with him desire stimulates intellect.’ The perception could also be extended to Donne’s religious poems, where desire for the infinite is likewise a motivating factor but there is seldom any sign of belief that a man ought to take off his intelligence before addressing himself to his maker. It is this, above all, that makes Donne seem so modern. He remains a wit, where others are merely mystics.

It might perhaps be accounted a fault that Stubbs does not make more of such things in considering why T S Eliot, for instance, made a cult of Donne in recent times:

Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense…

It might also be thought that John Stubbs could have developed further his own perception that Donne the poet and Donne the preacher were not two different men, but rather a sort of Romeo with the mind of Hamlet. Nevertheless, John Donne: The Reformed Soul lives up to its deeply serious title, and does not disappoint even in such shortcomings. It is, when all is said, a true biography, not a work of pseudo-criticism. It is the best life of Donne which I for one have ever read. If this marvellous book doesn’t win one of the major literary prizes then we have the wrong judges.