Katherine Rundell's 'Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne'

You need to be both highly intelligent and a really fizzy writer to take on John Donne. He’s not the man for a worthy dry tome. Teaching his poems again recently confirmed to me yet again just how brilliant he is, just how thrilling his works are, and how accessible they can be to 21st century pupils: the bravura, the fragile confidence, the outrageous imagery, the sly humour, the anxiety, the fabulous facility with form.

I have in front of me now a book (pictured at the bottom) that was definitely up to the job, which I bought in 1983, John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. Christopher Hill rightly called it fierce and enthralling. Now comes Katherine Rundell, who thanks Carey for his formidable generosity in his reading of her text. His own book was

the most electric piece of literary criticism I read as a teen and thereby set me on the road to Donne.

I first came across Rundell because my daughter enjoys her children’s fiction, like Rooftoppers and The Explorer, which suggests she knows how to tell a story, a talent manifestly evident in Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne. The Contents page presents us with the tantalising titles of a series of intriguing stories: ‘Brother to a Dead Man’, ‘The Paradoxical Quibbler, Taking Aim at Women’, ‘The Ambivalent Father’, ‘The (Unsuccessful) Adventurer’, and in her 300 pages Rundell charts the stepping stones of this unfurling narrative, in what she calls an act of evangelism:

John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London.

She points out that

Donne loved the trans- prefix: it’s scattered everywhere across his writing – ‘transpose’, ‘translate’, ‘transport’, ‘transubstantiate’. In this Latin preposition – ‘across, to the other side of, over, beyond’ – he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable. …then there was the transformation of himself: from failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you.

Rundell is very good on how transgressive desire drives so much of the work (sexual desire, and, desire for God’s attention, famously coming - yes, I know - together in the outrageous imagery of his sonnet ‘Batter my heart’). Her novelist’s skills also come into their own in evoking the physical texture of everyday life in London (tantalisingly overlapping with Shakespeare’s time there). We are often reminded of how immediate his bodily self impacted on his psyche. Illness and death were never far away. Like Keats, he had a brother, Henry, who died young, in this case from the plague, and John had relapsing fever, whose early symptoms are exactly those of the plague:

He knew that bodily safety is an illusion and a fiction - a clarity that was the flipside of the bodily astonishment and urgency of sex.

Politics also could threaten your freedom. The Essex affair showed how power could turn on you, and he remembered that right to the end in his startling guise as Dean of St Paul’s, unexpectedly promoted to that position by the King:

He would never forget [Essex]: his sermons, years later, would be full of warnings about how easy it is to fall. There is no such thing as safety, while you are alive.

Donne’s poems were written 400 years ago, but they reach forward into the present, connecting us with life in a different world, but also to life as we experience it now. In his most famous image, which comes from a sermon rather than a poem, he pointed out that No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. We are connected through time, too, a part of the same human continent as Elizabethan England, and Donne’s poetry is a bridge back to it. He does make us work:

It was very deliberately that he wrote poems that take all your sustained focus to untangle them. The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? … The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world’s most mercurial resource.

Just so. In a world in which sustained attention seems constantly to be under attack, eroded from without and within, paying close attention to these magnificent poems, as Katherine Rundell has done in Super-Infinite, is an entirely cheering enterprise.

This episode from the Travels Through Time podcast is excellent: Artemis Irvine interviews Katherine Rundell (who chooses to travel to 1601).
An extract from the book.
The author in the Guardian; the plague, and the death of his brother Henry.