Rundell doesn’t diminish the repellence of these, but she also points out that the absurdity is the point – he may even have been taking on the arguments of others and demonstrating their nullity. In his Paradoxes, Donne pushed arguments to often ludicrous limits, comparing women to “fleas sucking our very blood”.
In effect, then, poems such as The Flea are exercises in showing off about women, and Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on. She is convincing in her suggestion that Donne wrote his most satisfying erotic poems not for his lovers but for an audience of male friends. This is a love story, yet few of Donne’s love poems were written for Anne, and Rundell is good, too, on Donne as the swaggering womaniser who in reality had very little sex. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before, dwelling on the daring of Anne’s acceptance of this man at a time when upper-class young women obeyed their fathers and, crucially, demonstrated their virtue by being unwooable. It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. Then there were years as the impoverished, frustrated father of 12 children (six died), a period of grief after his wife’s early death and his final efflorescence, at once unexpected and inevitable, as a clergyman who was swiftly promoted to dean of St Paul’s. Donne moved between success and penury, with a stint in law, an unsuccessful foray as an adventurer in Spain, and a period at court that ended when he secretly married Anne More and was thrown in prison by her father. Donne was born into a Catholic family at a time of persecution family members were imprisoned and tortured. In addition to Carey’s study, there’s a recent comprehensive biography by John Stubbs. The facts of Donne’s life are well known.
“The body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.” “He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” she writes. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called “felt thought”, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract. Rundell is right that Donne – “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age.
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