Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

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K Rundell does not spare the reader details of his obsession with death. What I did not know are his thoughts on suicide. He wrote a book on the subject. Knowing it would ruin him – it was a mortal sin - he entrusted it to a friend, asking him not to publish it. passionate about the ruthlessness of illness. He knew the futility of our endeavours. The isolation of illness being one of its most deleterious effects. I know very little about the poet John Donne. Iread his poem ‘The Flea’ at school and his name is very familiar but that's about it.

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This book does have good bits, too. Rundell is a witty and amusing writer, and she has lots of good research. I am familiar with Donne but I learned so much. I think we need a copy for our permanent library. His sermons attracted such large crowds that they would have to outside in the cold in their thousands. Apparently, they have tested the courtyard at St Paul’s and found it was designed to reverberate the sound. The attraction of the sermons may have lain in the language, or their undertone of pity for the human condition. What a delightful book Super-Infinite is: companionable, astute, intimate in tone and clear-eyed in judgment, it brings Donne and his milieu to glorious life. I loved it.” From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.Beautiful, radical, true. The way Rundell brings Donne and Donne’s poetics to life is a joy, shot through with deep readings, compassion, perspective, wit. Super-Infinite revitalizes what a literary biography can be: an urgent, visionary approach but also endlessly intellectually generous, open-hearted, and bold. It’s alive, and it made me feel more alive, as if clamouring to get closer to Donne, mid-sermon, jostled, trampled and completely okay with that.” Each this and that’: his work suggests that we might voyage beyond the blunt realities of male and female. In ‘The Undertaking’, probably written around the time he met Anne, the body can take you to a grand merging: I should stop here, I know, but I want to add one or two more things to give a taste of the book, like this about a young woman named Elizabeth Wolley who was said to be beautiful. Rundell wryly notes, “They said the same of Anne Boleyn, a woman who in paintings looks like an unimpressed headmistress.” (Rundell introduces us to James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, 1st Earl of Carlisle, "alias Camel face" and George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury," who hunting one day aimed at a deer and instead hit and killed a gamekeeper.) It was in the spring of 1574, when Donne was a toddler, that disaster first came for the family. His mother’s uncle Thomas Heywood was suddenly and without warning arrested. A house on Cow Lane, close to Donne’s own home, was raided; officials discovered Thomas, a priest and former monk, along with ‘divers Latin books, beads, images, palms, chalices, crosses, vestments, pyxes, paxes and such like’. (A pyx was the box used for wafers: a pax was a piece of engraved wood which was kissed by Catholics during the Peace. Before the invention of the pax the congregation used to kiss each other, until it was felt this was unreasonably intimate – and plaguey – for church.) I was at Loseley Hall where she grew up, a country mansion with extensive grounds, ideal setting for a Shakespeare play. I was acting as an extra, and when I said I loved Donne’s poems, I was lent a copy of his poems by the present owner. And yet, in Donne’s time, Anne’s father Sir George More angrily contested the union. He had higher aspirations.

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It definitely covered a lot of ground, but I haven’t come away with as strong a impression of who John Donne is as I did with Christopher Marlowe when reading The World of Christopher Marlowe . Understand, this was literally plague-ridden: The years in which Donne lived were marked by frequent outbreaks -- 1593, 1603, 1625, with smaller outbreaks in between. The 1603 outbreak, Rundell tells us, was particularly deadly. Based on London's current population it would be the equivalent of 880,000 dead Londoners in less than three months. Unimaginable. The “extravagance of paradoxes” was the pleasure and point of them. - the possibilities that lie inside pointing out absurdity. Donne discovered that if you force together the two Venn diagram circles of reason and the absurd, in the overlap there is a weapon….” Rundell is a master wordsmith, which makes for a fine biography. I must admit, a John Donne biography was not what I predicted to be a "best book of the year" but enter Super-Infinite. I have a new-found perspective (and respect) for Donne and his works after reading this, high aspirations for any biographer. Rundell is just a dang good writer who illuminates, with care and craft, the life and work of her subject.Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the great-niece of the Catholic martyr Thomas More. She sounds to have been formidable, unafraid to assert herself: a woman of whom it was whispered (erroneously) that she carried the head of Thomas More in her luggage when she travelled. Donne’s father, also John Donne, was an ironmonger, though not of the horny-handed, rugged variety; he was warden of the Ironmongers’ Company. The family had once owned magnificent estates, before they had been confiscated by the Crown in the various Tudor shake-downs of Catholic landowners. He married, in Elizabeth, the daughter of a musician and epigrammatist who had played for Henry VIII; so Donne was born into a family who had known the smell and touch of a king.

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The author of this biography, Katherine Rundell, also contains multitudes. A bestselling author of children’s books, a Fellow of All Souls, a night climber, and a tightrope walker, she is just the person to get to grips with the childlike curiosity, the mature intellectual dexterity, the plunges into soul darkness, and the balancing act of passionate worldly desire and a deep longing for God, which Donne’s life holds together all in one. Super-Infinite is a delight — quirky, learned, anecdotal, fun, and insightful. England had been so shot through with religious violence in the sixteenth century that there was ample evidence to cast either side as villain. Mary I, a Catholic, had burned at least three hundred Protestants, and now with Protestant Elizabeth on the throne a concerted effort was made to channel national ire at the Catholic minority. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs had been published in 1563, nine years before Donne’s birth, and its frontispiece illustration served well to remind those in doubt of where the country stood: on one side Catholics with bulbous noses are seized by gleeful demons, while on the other Protestants with aquiline profiles burn in the fires of persecution and rise to glory.

Prizewinning children’s-book author Rundell, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, delivers a fresh, delightful biography of John Donne (1572-1631). A staunch admirer—she places the “finest love poet in the English language” alongside Shakespeare—her book is an “act of evangelism.” Donne “was incapable of being just one thing,” writes the author. “He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over.” She nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived. A “lifelong strainer after words and ideas,” a youthful Donne kept a commonplace book at Oxford—now lost; Rundell suggests its technique of literary alchemy influenced his method of writing. At London’s Inns of Court, he mostly studied frivolity and wrote some “bold and ornery and intricate” poetry that “sounded like nobody else.” As Rundell reports, The Oxford English Dictionary records some 340 words he invented. Donne dressed fashionably and wore “his wit like a knife in his shoe.” In 1596, bereft after his brother’s death, Donne was “keen to get away” and tried his hand at privateering. Working for a wealthy friend, he wrote numerous rakish, erotic verse with stylistic “tussles and shifts,” often untitled, which he shared with others rather than publish. Alongside poems that “glorify and sing the female body and heart,” Rundell writes, “are those that very potently don’t.” It should come as no surprise, she notes, that someone who lived through a plague, watched many of his 12 children die young, and had suicidal thoughts wrote some of literature’s greatest poems about death. Long dependent on patronage to cover debts, “slowly, in both doubt and hope, Donne’s eyes turned towards the Church,” and he was ordained. King James appointed the “star preacher of the age,” famous for his metaphor-laden sermons, Dean of St. Paul’s in 1621. Both Oxford and Cambridge were, at the time, just edging into fashionability: until shortly before Donne arrived, both places had been looked at with sceptical eyes by anyone with claim to any class. In 1549, Oxford students were ‘mean men’s children set to school in hope to live upon hired learning’. It was only as the century wore on that more gentry started to pass through the doors – by the time Donne came to live there, it had started to have a little cachet. There were various attempts to give it more of a gleam: when the antiquary William Camden published the Life of King Alfred by the medieval monk Asser, he added notes of his own, putting into the mouth of the monastic the fake claim that the University of Oxford had been founded by Alfred the Great. And the city would have been very beautiful in 1584, yellow-stoned and with the River Isis nearby. Its spires soared less ecstatically skywards than today, as most of the colleges were not yet fully formed, and the great Bodleian Library did not open until 1602, but it was still a place worth loving.