Paul Mariani is one of our most distinguished literary biographers. He is drawn to write about tormented poets, having published lives of John Berryman, Hart Crane, and Robert Lowell. Mariani also writes about troubled poets who seek balance by making lives outside the world of literature, like physician-poet William Carlos Williams. In addition, Mariani has published his own poetry, a memoir of his 30-day Catholic retreat experience, and a study of religious poetry. Now, in his new biography of the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a man tortured by doubt and guilt and instability, Mariani has brought all these interests together. In his new book, the result of decades of immersion in Hopkins's life and work, he has found a way to tell Hopkins's life story that plunges a reader deeply into the mind and soul of this passionate, disturbed, highly original poet, thereby producing an unusual and powerful work of biography.
A poet's life, from the inside
Hopkins, born near London in 1844, lived just shy of 45 years before dying in Dublin, weakened by years of nervous illness, after contracting both typhus and typhoid. Though raised within the Church of England, Hopkins at 22, after a period of intense and anguished consideration, convinced of his calling, converted to Catholicism. This conversion, and the subsequent struggle to commit himself even more intensely to a Christ-like life, represent the central story of Hopkins's life. Along with that, his compulsion to write poetry of tremendous originality and immediacy, his guilt over homoerotic urges, his powerful need to express how fully he saw God in all of nature, and his effort to balance religious retreat with his callings as teacher and writer devastated Hopkins's soul as he tried to sustain the pure, simple life of a Jesuit priest and teacher of classics.
Most of Hopkins's story is essentially internal, an account of emotional, philosophical, and spiritual ordeal. This presents serious problems for a biographer, especially when his subject is long dead and restrained by Victorian and Church pressures against candid expression. Mariani makes use of Hopkins's letters and notebooks, and devotes extensive space to analysis of Hopkins's poetry, where the inner man is most open. But what distinguishes this biography from previous ones is not Mariani's scholarship or uncovering of vital new material, but the fullness of his absorption into his fellow poet and fellow Catholic's experience and art.