"Dark heaven's baffling ban".

Downes, David Anthony

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life. By Paul Mariani. New York: Viking, Penguin Group, 2008. ISBN 9780670020317. Pp. 496. $39.00.

After the first biographical study of Hopkins was attempted in 1930, there was a hiatus of seventeen years during which the Provincial of the British Jesuits, Fr. Martin D'Arcy, authorized the writing of Hopkins' Jesuit life by an American Jesuit, Anthony Bischoff, as a companion to an early life of Hopkins then being written by an English scholar, Humphry House. These were commissioned in the flush of Hopkins' writings being published by Oxford University Press. Neither biography got beyond the draft stage. A biography by Eleanor Ruggles was published in 1947 which could only be called a beginning effort. In the following four decades several studies were written which discussed or touched on some periods of Hopkins' life, but it was not until biographers were catching up to the new materials that it became possible to write a fully informed biography. Notable examples are those authored by Bernard Bergonzi (1978), Robert Bernand Martin (1991), and Norman White (1992). White's biography has been received by most Hopkins scholars as the most definitive work except for lacking a greater insight into Hopkins' powerful religious side. Hence a new biographer might try to write a biography mostly centered on Hopkins' complex spirituality. Mariani's biography is an effort to fill this void in a finally complete biography.

Surprisingly, Mariani's book is controversial because of the manner in which Hopkins' religious life is narrated. (An illustrative example of this disapproval is the sharply negative critique in Mark Ford's review of the biography in The New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009.) The first issue of dissent by such readers is the very structure and style of the biography Mariani has written. The narrative pattern he chose is that of biographical diary organized around a schedule of time patterns in which he offers a sense of place and predicament made informative by drawing on Hopkins' notebooks, letters, and other scribblings. What the reader encounters throughout the book are these piecemeal verbal snapshots of each setting with some personal commentary largely drawn from Hopkins' writings. What has bothered some readers is that the author often intrudes himself into the scenes, less with biographical insight than with some deeply felt kinship, so that the prose reads like Hopkins' double echoing his subject's words. Another difference, off-putting to some readers, is that the book is written, for the most part, in the present tense. Supposedly this was done in an attempt to vitalize the scenes, giving them a dramatic immediacy of Hopkins resurrected in his own words. Surprisingly, except for noting Hopkins' spiritual struggles, the author seldom does any deep, assessive probing of the various destructively difficult existential phases of Hopkins' short, tragic life.

Mariani attaches the poems Hopkins wrote in each timeframe to show how each one reveals some aspect of Hopkins' spiritual temper in an effort to exhibit how Hopkins' poetic nature became part of his daily strife. Sometimes the poem fits nicely, but not always. This effort to wed Hopkins' poems closely to his life situations sometimes strains the narrative or the poem. Trying to make these connections exact is often guesswork at best.

One attribute that may distract some readers is the tone of the narrative language. After reading a portion of the biography, one gets the impression that there is an overtone in the language which expresses more than that of its literal meaning. The reader begins to feel that there is another, higher level of assertion in the text. I am speaking of a rhapsodizing, religious tonality that is like an organ background meant to elevate the narrative story to a psalmody, as if Hopkins' life story--events and associated poems--are in the author's perspective a canticle, a kind of verbal canonization of Hopkins' life. A sensitive reader, especially one sympathetic to Hopkins' Christian sensibility, might well feel moved by this mantra, especially responding to the powerful religious exhortations in many of the poems. However one is never sure in a poet's use of language how much is heart and how much is art. I respect Mariani's admiration of Hopkins' felt realization of the presence of Christ in his life. But the narration of this dimension of his spirituality in his life story, while legitimately witnessed, should not become a doxology. Moreover, this authorial point of view, in my opinion does not sufficiently elucidate the tragic enigma of Hopkins' life.

"Heirs Spells": The Mystery of Spiritual Furies

I see Hopkins' life as priest and poet differently than does Mariani, along with many other Hopkins scholars who have written about his life and poetry. My view of Hopkins' life rests much more on focusing on the profound conundrums which are at the center of his story, paradoxes which I think every biographer must confront. I began to develop this view of Hopkins when I first started writing about him with an essay titled "The Hopkins Enigma" in the Fordham University journal, Thought (Vol. xxxxi, No. 143, Winter 1961). What follows is a brief biographical outline which will note the multiple riddles of Hopkins' life as I view it. I do not claim to solve these riddles; rather I am sorting out pieces of the mysteries that abound in his personal tragedy.

We are all shaped to some degree in living our lives by our physicality. In Hopkins' case this is most notable. He was very short in stature, slight in muscularity, high pitched in voice. Unsurprisingly he responded to these personal features by showing his physical prowess, exhibiting his odd sense of humor, and displaying his verbal cleverness in his youth. Whether these attributes made up for his elf-like stature and his puckish personality, we can only guess. One paternal hint is that his verbal play was much appreciated by his father, who himself indulged in comic puns and verbal riffs. Other traits were his sweet gentleness and his softness of feeling. Most notable was his highly expressive acuteness of mind. His father saw him as having a professional future in academia or journalism. His exacting, perceptive esthetic sensitivity might have directed him to a vocation in art or literature. His most limiting attribute was his physical frailness that was evident despite his show of manly prowess. Surely these conditions modified his life's possibilities and shaped his future life.

Just when Hopkins noted his epicene nature is unknown. Whether the family took notice is doubtful. Homosexuality in Victorian culture existed in all levels of society. While public morals roundly condemned homosexual activity, it was tolerated if it was kept in the shadows of society and away from the courts of law. In schools, at all levels, the masters tried their best to suppress such tendencies. No doubt their efforts did not prevent young students in the lower schools from encountering some knowledge of homoeroticism; in the upper schools and the universities, these activities, while frowned on, were manifest.

In Hopkins' case, we have no overt evidence of such activity. However, the erotic bent of his esthetic sensitivities came to the fore, interestingly, in his university days at Balliol, when he must have encountered the homosexual milieu, not only among his fellow students, like Digby Dolben, but also among his college tutors. He certainly must have been aware of such inclinations and lifestyles in his relations with Walter Pater who introduced him to the literary and art worlds where homosexual authors and painters like Oscar Wilde and Simeon Solomon came to his attention. (See my extensive study of Hopkins and Pater in Victorian Portraits: Hopkins and Pater, Bookman Associates, 1965.) Norman White's biography discusses this topic with integrity.

Another attribute of Hopkins' personality was his scrupulosity. The evidence of this trait is fully manifested in his penchant for note-taking, sketching, and, of course, his verbal descriptive powers. This attribute is pervasively notable in his recordings of his early moral and religious experience. Any perusal of the voluminous notes in his journals in which he reveals his faults--moral, social, and dietary--reveals this nagging attribute. These personal lapses frequently caused him to be very self-accusatory, moving him to keep notes of these "sins" and to regularly confess them. The confessional notes, kept on the advice of his Anglican confessors, also exhibit an active sex drive assuaged by masturbation. Such common "growing up" phases remind us that Hopkins had a normal libido which was part of his youth and his adulthood. An interesting aspect of this attribute in his life is the manner in which he repressed his sexuality and yet expressed these feelings in the subtexts of some of his most passionate religious poems.

The next set of biographical enigmas revolves around his Oxford days. Several observations are in order here. The first is, unsurprisingly, Hopkins had fewer close friends than was typical in Oxford university life. Those friends he did have, given their shared religious and intellectual bents, recognized Hopkins' brilliance of mind and his very considerable expressive powers in areas of their mutual interests. Any examination of the letter exchanges with his Oxford chums, during university days or in later years, reveals how Hopkins, odd in so many ways, did hold their attention and interest and their admiration. Of course, the dominant talk on the Oxford campus was J. H. Newman's conversion to Catholicism. Some saw this as a betrayal of "The Oxford Movement." Some fewer were provoked to leave their religious affiliation. Still others held on to the Anglican Church, while others just turned agnostic. Religion dominated discussions and arguments throughout the university among tutors, students, and priest-scholars. The subject would become a staple of their conversations and their letter exchanges.

Hopkins was thus plunged into this great religious debate which became a major distraction from his studies. When he fatefully made up his mind to become a Catholic, it is doubtful he really comprehended the bombshell that would go off in his family and his future life. Manley Hopkins was dreaming of his son's prospects for a great public career. His mother, Kate Hopkins, who was very close to this fragile son, saw the ruptures that Gerard's conversion was causing in the family. Through the later years she was the only member of the family who tried to keep in touch by letters. In his new religious life, Gerard did make some home visits but they were few and far between. To some degree, Gerard, in making this decision, had so disappointed his family that he became, in some respects, an unacknowledged outcast.

It is a fair estimation that Gerard's conversion left him on his own, his future obscure. As he entered the Newman world, he began to ponder what he was to do. In choosing to become a Catholic priest, he fully sealed himself off from his family, now becoming two removes from his family heritage. His decision to join the Jesuits was, perhaps, the most fateful of choices. He now associated himself with one of the longest religious biases in the history of English culture. He was now affiliating himself with the most disliked, even hated, religious group in English history since the Reformation. His distinguished Oxford degree became a nullity.

This vocational decision, which Newman approved, we now know became a personal and professional tragedy for both Hopkins and the Jesuits. Most serious biographers have not adequately explored this, the saddest facet of the enigma of Hopkins' life which his letters, notebooks, and many of his most powerful poems declare. The truth is that the Jesuits should never have accepted him into the Society. The first sign of this unsuitability, despite his intellectual brilliance, was his failure to pass his third year theology exams, the consequence of which disbarred him from holding any official administrative post in the Society. The second, a long drawn-out series of failures, was his increasing awareness that he did not possess the necessary personal qualifications to carry out the religious missions given to him. Therefore, after his ordination, he began a lifetime of professional misadventure. He was not successful in any assignment he was given. While his intellectual and creative brilliance were duly noticed, what was also becoming clear was that his mental well-being was too unstable to do the work of parish priest and his brilliant intellectuality too eccentric to teach in their schools. He was reassigned numerous times amid perennial Jesuit shifts so that he became increasingly depressed. When the Jesuit Provincial fobbed him off to Ireland to teach in a school trying to become a university, he finally cracked under the pressures of semi-slum buildings, a high school library, with an assignment to vet hundreds of academic applications of freshman students, very many of them ineligible to do university studies. Unsurprisingly, in this demeaning task, as the health of his mind and body declined, he wrote his most powerful poems of despair. No biographer has adequately plumbed the depths of this personal and professional tragedy in his Jesuit life as it really was. In all of this turmoil, it must be said that his conversion to Catholicism commanded his life and that the vows he took as a Jesuit shaped his conscience and his consciousness in life-changing ways. They remained the spiritual lodestars to guide him through happiness and dread.

When Hopkins went to Wales for his Jesuit studies, it became clear to him that he might be giving up the central aspiration of his life--becoming a poet. He knew that he had a major talent that he might pursue as a vocation. The evidence of this gift was manifested early on when he won honors for his poetry. As a youth, he and his father collaborated in submitting a poem titled "The Escorial" (1860) to a competition in which it won the poetry prize at Highgate School. Two years later, he wrote a poem titled "A Vision of the Mermaids," which was impressive for someone of his age and was decorated by an elaborate pen-and-ink drawing. It was clear that major creative talents were lodged in him very early. These poems exhibited surprisingly advanced awareness of the literary tradition preceding his time. The poems kept coming because, as he wrote later, "myself it speaks and spells." But he scrupulously felt that his resident artistic nature and his desires to express it were at odds with his religious vocation, so he vowed to stop writing poetry, even burned some copies of his poems. This decision would nag him throughout his Jesuit training. But he could not quit being a poet though his conscience was very troubled. He saw no place for poetry in his Jesuit life and neither did the Jesuits. When his Superior hoped that someone would write a poem about the nuns dying in the Deutschland shipwreck, all that pent-up literary desire burst forth and he produced his first major poem, his longest and his most original creation. His personal artistic restraint was breached. He could perhaps be a Jesuit and a poet selectively and secretly during his leisure time. To his chagrin and disappointment, few Jesuits showed any interest. After due reflection and some personal moral risk, he submitted his now-famous shipwreck poem to the Jesuit journal, The Month. It was rejected as other poems would be in later attempts. Still he began to feel uncomfortably free to continue writing poems in mufti but still feeling guilty all the way. Before the Jesuits, maybe even God, he wondered whether his poetic talent was not a gift. What was left to him was his tedious priestly life which increasingly became a protracted disaster. Ironically it was his poetry that maintained his sanity, eventually becoming his triumph.

He kept in touch with old friends from Balliol days--A. C. Macfarlane, Edward Bond, E. W. Urquhart, E. H. Coleridge, and erstwhile with several others. He had the sympathy and admiration of his best friends. But he wanted a literary correspondent. Eventually he found literary solace with R. W. Dixon, and a happy but brief acquaintance with Coventry Patmore. But perhaps the biggest ironic twist in his life occurred when Robert Bridges, a Balliol friend from Oxford days, became his resident critic. Bridges was a publishing poet with whom to talk poetry, exchange poems, someone who shared his devotion for the poetic muse, especially someone who took some critical interest in the poetry he was writing. Little did he know what fate had brought him: perhaps the central literary figure in Hopkins' literary destiny.

Bridges, a latecomer to the literary world, was writing poems in a dated Victorian mode often based on the mythology of the Greek and Roman classics. He knew he was becoming outdated using "thou" and third-person singulars, "goeth" and other archaic diction in stale poetic forms. Bridges was now looking for a new prosody that would be more in accord with the poetry of the incoming literary age. So Hopkins' aboriginal poetic forms interested him despite Hopkins' deeply religious focus. A religious agnostic himself, a resolute hater of Catholics, with a particular dislike of Jesuits, he still found in Hopkins potential for a provocative literary friendship, one which might afford him a new prosody. As for Hopkins, misfits as they were, he was so needful of some critical attention for his writings that he valued Bridges' friendship especially as it offered him as well a notably competent reader of his poetry. As we now know, this friendship was a fortunate fall though Hopkins never lived long enough to know it.

Much has been written about this relationship, but I do not think any biographer has adequately explored it, especially Bridges' assumed superiority as a master poet and Hopkins a literary plebeian. This is evident in his harsh critiques of the poems Hopkins showed him. Hopkins did strongly defend his poems, increasingly realizing that Bridges' literary sensibility was outdated, and the subjects of his poems passe From the beginning of their literary friendship, Bridges again and again did not grasp the modernity of Hopkins' poetry, and mostly saw his prosodic innovations and his extraordinary verbal powers as extreme poetic misadventures. Also Hopkins overmatched Bridges' grasp of classical literary culture, a subject in which he took a First at Oxford. Yet Bridges continued to offer his views as the master, Hopkins his student. It should be added that Bridges gradually realized that his Jesuit friend was no literary neophyte. Over the years, there occurred a genuine affection between them that surely motivated Bridges to preserve Hopkins' poetry after his death, to seek gradually some selected publication of his poems, and finally, in his last years, to give them a commemorative publication.

Today's Hopkins admirers justly credit Bridges for saving Hopkins' poetry. He did keep the notebooks containing the poems that Hopkins sent him for critical appreciation, a moral slip which Hopkins allowed because he had no one among the Jesuits who had any lasting literary interest in them. Bridges' friendship offered a way to combat his feelings of guilt about his poetry; still he had scruples that he was violating his priestly vows. He permitted himself to think of his poetry as a pastime, always insisting that none of it should be published. The notable paradox of this friendship was that, after Hopkins' death, Bridges rescued Hopkins' writings by managing to retrieve Hopkins' papers from the Irish Jesuits, along with his own letters. Another move that Bridges quickly made was to persuade the Hopkins family to allow him full control over the fate of Gerard's poetry as well as to forestall any later Jesuit interest in his writings. Thus began Bridges longish pondering of what finally to do with Hopkins' poetic works.

Various scholars have examined this friendship but not with the deep scrutiny it deserves. We know how harsh Bridges' criticisms of Hopkins poetry were both from comments he made when he first tried to publish some of his poetry. There are grounds to believe that Bridges, in later years, involved the Hopkins family in a conspiracy to make sure that the Jesuits had no hand in claiming copyright, no role in determining the destiny of Hopkins' poems, and that, should they be published, he would be the editor, all of which he managed to accomplish. When he published the first edition 29 years later, in his introduction he offered an apology for the poetic strangeness, oddity, and eccentricity of his gifted friend's poems, thus protecting him from supposed critical scoffs by acknowledged master poets like himself. He could now feel fully assured that he had honored his Jesuit friend's literary keepsakes. The paradox is that this Poet Laureate is principally remembered today as the first publisher of a world-class Jesuit poet. What a chapter is the Bridges/ Hopkins story, if fully probed and assessed!

Nineteen years after Hopkins' poems were first published, the Jesuits had yet to discover his poetic genius. The one exception was Fr. G. F. Lahey, S. J., who published a short life of Hopkins in 1930. It was a good beginning, though Lahey was bereft of many Hopkins sources. It was not until the late 1940s that there was an earnest effort made to check the Jesuit archives for ally lost memorabilia. In tile forefront of this endeavor was Anthony Bischoff, S. J., who, under tile guidance and support from the then-lesuit Provincial, Fr. Martin D'Arcy, began an historic search that turned up significant records and documents of and about Hopkins, thereby establishing a Hopkins archive at Campion Hall, Oxford. He recovered Hopkins' will which became the legal basis for returning to the British Jesuits their rightful ownership of Hopkins' writings. He also established a major Hopkins research center at Gonzaga University. These efforts slowly surcharged an international scholarly movement to study Hopkins. Twenty-eight years later, in 1975, under the aegis of a British Jesuit, Alfred Thomas, a commemorative stone honoring Hopkins was placed in Westminster Abbey near W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot. Today Hopkins studies are flourishing in conferences around the world (see "The Hopkins Society: The Making of a World Class Poet," Renascence, Vol. 67, Summer 2005). This story is part of the enigma of the extraordinary life of this great poet and should be a detailed part of any complete Hopkins biography. This story is not fully told in Mariani's book.

The Mariani biography is a loving, celebratory diary in which the author mostly records the salient episodes in Hopkins' life, admires the letters he wrote, the poems he composed, notes the deep spiritualization he evinced in good and bad times of his life, all done in an organ-toned prose. Reviews reveal readers who find the writing uplifting but too full of a doxological spirit; others question some of the book's factual integrity. Devoted Hopkins lovers relish the soft hymnal spirit that exudes from the narrative style. This reader is disappointed that Mariani, a capable biographer, has not seized the full opportunity to produce a definitive biography in these years of celebrating Hopkins' literary art by Oxford University, which is publishing newly edited editions of his complete works. In not writing a more incisively dramatic biography, one which offers a deeply assessive, detailed account of Hopkins' darkish tragic existence--perspectives that would have made clearer how astonishingly remarkable his life was, how incredible was his poetic genius to have survived such unhappiness--Mariani missed the opportunity to explore Hopkins' extraordinary, enigmatic life. Like many lovers of Hopkins, perhaps he did not want to look deeply at the dark side in which Hopkins' poetry found its shining lights.

David Anthony Downes

California State University, Chico, emeritus