Gerard Manley Hopkins

...Paddy Kitchen (she is a British novelist and a biographer of Patrick Geddes) has assembled this material into a readable narrative...

...The biographer who wants to tackle these questions has scanty material to work with: Hopkins's sporadic journals, some sermons and devotional writings, and his letters, which are chiefly to Bridges and to Richard Dixon, a clergyman poet unjustly neglected, Hopkins thought, by the public...

...The Victorians invite this sort of thing, I suppose, Hopkins perhaps more so than others because of his preoccupation with physical beauty and spiritual ecstasy, but Kitchen's treatment is reductive and depressing in its repetitiveness—as though one could see in Leopold Bloom only the ogling, farts and lubricious fantasies, and none of the patience, thoughtfulness and love...

...The other weakness of the book is related to this reductiveness, and shows very clearly the limits of Hopkins as a biographical subject...

...Kitchen's treatment of the late Hopkins is spare and factual, just where you want it to pull things together and give a point of view...

...But Hopkins is a special case...

...And were it not for the devotion of one friend, the poet Robert Bridges, there would be little to say about Hopkins...

...On two points the reader should be warned...

...She is particularly good on the atmosphere of the Oxford of Jowett, Pater & Pusey...

...She has a novelist's sense of how to put characters into contexts and sketch a setting...

...His life was short and externally uneventful, though that might be said of many literary figures...

...How did the first-rate poetry, the sensuously vivid language and the radical energetic rhythms, emerge from the studious and disciplined life of seminary and classroom...

...15 February 1980: 95...

...Worse yet, his poems were known to few in his lifetime and were published only thirty years after his death, so there was little reason for attention, correspondence, critical discussion, or reminiscence, beyond what friends give each other...

...When it comes to assessing the last years of his life, and the meaning of his intense suffering and paradoxical creativity, we simply do not know enough about what he thought and Commonweal: 94 experienced, to go beyond what the poetry itself tells us...

...The familiar themes are all here: Hopkins's conversion under Newman's influence, the destruction of his early poetry and the decision not to write any more of it when he entered the Jesuits, the influence of the Spiritual Exercises and the long years of Jesuit training, the evolution of the ideas of "inscape" and "instress" in his journals, the abrupt return to poetry with the astonishing virtuosity of The Wreck of the Deutschland, its subsequent rejection when it was submitted to the Jesuit journal The Month, the paradoxical mixture of job failure and poetic creativity that marked Hopkins's later years, the final tortured sonnets, his death of typhoid at Dublin while he was an overworked reader of exams in what remained of the university Newman founded...

...The man who called himself "Time's eunuch" and, in the same last year of his life, "immortal diamond," and who said on his deathbed "I am so so happy," eludes Kitchen's grasp...

...A large part of it was affected, so far as public record is concerned, by being lived in a religious institution, so that much has to be inferred about his life from its life...

...A leitmotif of the book is what Kitchen calls ' 'the conflict between sensuality and purity," and every imaginable sexual overtone, every implication of sexual repression, is assiduously explored...

...Unless, that is, we construct an interpretive schema for his whole life, one that is large enough to encompass the mystic's suffering and the mystic's hope...

...The Oxford graduate, convert, poet, Jesuit priest, classics teacher lived from 1844 to 1889, well into the era when lives have been amply documented and memorialized...

...And what of the wreck of Hopkins's life, the succession of failures as preacher and teacher, and the tempting conclusion that his vocations as Jesuit and poet never fitted, perhaps never could have fitted...

...Still, the very problems create a challenge to the biographer...

...And, once it existed, how could Hopkins not have published it, could have so long resisted in fact Bridges's efforts to find an audience for it...

...The reader who wants to understand this Hopkins would do better to look at John Pick's biography of almost forty years ago...