Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wheeler, Edward
Despite its defects, Another Person was an earnest play in a spirited production in a fine setting. By the time this review appears, the seats, the lights, the performers, the echoing voices will be...
...I would have heard the explosion...
...Martin is extraordinarily fair and is determined to right some old biographical wrongs...
...I was in my crib...
...GERALD WEALES All things counter and spare dmit that Gerard Manley Hopkins's strength was artistic greatness and his weakness psychic imbalance and this biography has a neatly polar form...
...Looking like the tomboy next door, Cinque does a Southern, working-class woman, wryly perky, whose perfect love affair dissolves when the lover becomes both suicidal and murderous...
...People, love, and people's business, she implies, are isolable entities, like Legos, which it is appropriate to select, stick together, and pull apart whimsically...
...His eloquent memoir seems less splendid autobiography than an occasion of grace...
...But it, too, was dealing with the outsider and with an insistence on the perception of self that refuses to be a foreign country...
...I was saved by laundry," she says...
...A self-willed young Oxford man as pious as [Hopkins] could hardly have helped becoming progressively High Church in inclination...
...Start thinks she married once more after that...
...Rhodes was barely a year old at the time...
...Still, the selected bibliography points the direction to literary studies which make the case for Hopkins's greatness, and a rereading of the poems cannot but renew a sense of their power and originality...
...Once he was a Roman Catholic...
...Hopkins believed that: I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond...
...Martin handles his subject with such deft- ness and alert qualification that he avoids any sense of the reductive: however, char- acter is fate...
...MICHAEL O. GARVEY, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, works in the Public Relations and Information office at the University of Notre Dame...
...It turns out to be sheets on a clothesline, which brings the piece full circle, back to the clean sheets that six-year-old Michael insisted on when she visited him from knowing innocence to knowing innocence, perhaps...
...The priest-poet, his biographer, and their readers cannot but be driven into dis-ease by the cruel mysteries of flesh and spirit...
...In a defensive letter written late in his life, he tells Richard, "You were left with me and i did the best i could...
...Malcolm and Rhodes are more imaginative than that...
...Perhaps another Charles Williams (the "mystical" novelist and Hopkins's second editor) might someday DOMESTIC DESTINIES give us the spiritual vision of Hopkins's inner life, but we face in A Very Private Life not only the paradox of Hopkins the poet and the man, but the larger relation- ships between art and life and between world and spirit...
...The corpus is small and must make up in intensity what it lacks in size...
...It's difficult to imagine either of these writers agreeing with Anna Quindlen's baleful defense of suicide in a recent column: "And if that day comes, whose business is it, really, but my own and that of those I love...
...But Robert Bernard Martin's willingness to rest the biographical evi- dence on the razor sharp vision of the poet- ry also makes reading the story of Hopkins's life deeply painful...
...As autobiographers, Andrew Malcolm and Richard Rhodes have in common a principled refusal to invoke such authority, offering their private pain to public scrutiny on a hunch that it might be of more than personal significance...
...He argues for the great debt Hopkins and Hopkins's readers owe Robert Bridges, the close friend and editor of the first edition of the Poems...
...At the end, drinking heavily, she tries to commit suicide, but she gets distracted from her attempt to drown herself by something shim- meting and white in the distance...
...L7 the stick that weighted the linen bathroom window shade from its slot, sat on the toilet, put her mouth around the muzzle of a 12- gauge shotgun and used the stick to push the trigger...
...The Arthur Rhodes his son presents is physically powerful, emotionally remote, and morally weak...
...By the time this review appears, the seats, the lights, the performers, the echoing voices will be gone...
...11 October 1991:585 A HOLE IN THE WORLD Richard Rhodes Simon and Schuster, $19.95, 271 pp...
...she worked him for more than fifteen years, until he died of cancer of the stomach in 1964...
...Rhodes was born in 1937 in Kansas City, where his father worked as a boilermaker's helper for the Missouri Pacific railroad...
...Rhodes's childhood was the sort of enormity which Ivan Karamazov might well have included in his argument for clinging to unappeased anger rather than embracing the kingdom that Jesus pro- claims...
...And ordination almost inevitably meant that he would not be a simple parish priest or even a member of one of the easier orders...
...Give [sic]his usual preference for the harder of his alternatives, his choice of order seems almost inevitable, since in all obvious ways the Jesuits would be the most diffi- cult for him, as well as for his family and friends...
...But it is odd to come away from a biography feeling the need to substantiate the writer's basic premise...
...Ivan will have no part of a harmony which includes the suffering of innocents, but the suffering innocent who is the pro- tagonist of A Hole in the Worm becomes remarkably capable of forgiveness and emerges into late middle age "amazed and grateful that he never forgot how to play...
...Martin adds, in another context, with only a hint of the ominous: "Yet it is pos- sible for a man to be crushed by a duty he has freely embraced...
...My primary obligation is compassion--not to snoop around nor to opine, but simply to share your pain...
...Their father's new wife told Richard and Stanley that "we have a few rules around here," introducing them to a twenty-eight- month-long nightmare...
...It might be best to close by letting Hopkins speak for himself by quoting a poem Martin curiously doesn't mention but which also comes from the Dublin years...
...no chance of his not being GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS A Very Private Life Robert Bernard Martin G.P...
...Richard, Stanley, and their father boarded for five tolerable years with a pleasant family but "thereafter...lodged to other people's prof- it, precariously, wherever Dad could find to go to ground...
...I don't believe she began with a calculated program of coer- cion," Rhodes writes, "any more than the Nazis began with a calculated program beyond expulsion for the European Jews," but "since we were children, and had few rights in the first place, since our father was too cowardly to defend us from bru- talization, everything became possible for her as well...
...htis Cinque's solo performance, which I saw recently at the Painted Bride in Philadelphia, was a far cry from the splendor--past and present---of the En Garde Arts production...
...Your anguish, shame, grief, horror, and helplessness usually erupt from a precinct of your soul which I may enter only as an invited guest...
...Clean Sheets (part 2 of Growing Up Queer in America), is a fairly straightforward narrative about a lesbian love affair that turnsugly and dangerous...
...Following his mother's death Richard's oldest brother, Mack, was sent to live with relatives in Washington State...
...The order was strict, but it was also solid, and Hopkins needed a firm structure of belief and behavior within which to move...
...She slipped...
...In his quiet way Hopkins was a very headstrong man, determined on extremes...
...and the landmark courtyard will have gone back to collecting its debris...
...Putnam's Sons, $29.95,448 pp...
...His older brother, Stanley, then two years old, "found the oceanic body, draining its sea of blood...
...So much gravitas weighting such a pointed view...
...Edward Wheeler ordained...
...The situation is a picnic with the speak- er's dead cousin Michael--dead of AIDS presumably, although that is never said--whose photograph (actually Cinque's picture) BOOKS sits in a beach chair surrounded by junk food of the 1950s while Cinque tells him her unhappy story...
...Once begun, a course of moral action, particularly a difficult one, had to run its full length before he could let it go in peace...
...It's feasible that a terribly oppressed and frightened little boy could learn to write fine prose...
...SOMEDAY Andrew H. Malcolm Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 296 pp...
...Against the widespread disparagement of Bridges as a fusty Victorian in the years when Hopkins was seen as a protomodernist, Martin shows how much Bridges meant to his col- lege friend and correspondent and how much he had to forgive in Hopkins's fre- quently insensitive and demanding letters...
...That he could also learn to love, to pity, and to forgive is mystery pure and simple...
...On the other hand, rejecting Bridges's neg- ative assessment of the effect of the priest- hood upon Hopkins, Martin shows how essential for Hopkins was his Jesuit voca- tion and how concerned his superiors were to support and to promote this talented but eccentric priest...
...Having moved in that direction, he had a sense of compulsion to go as far as possible, so that he finally became a convert...
...One important ingredient that had been left out of his nature was moderation...
...The lower case letter of his first person pronoun seems tragically appropri- ate...
...Often funny, sometimes soft where it intended to be tough, almost too careful about its edible 1950s artifacts, Clean Sheets was an effective solo piece by a personable young woman...
...Even if the Jesuits, like almost everyone else 11 October 1991:583 if a life lived in such self-imposed con- straints, where "thoughts against thoughts in groans grind," can produce the great poems of the age...
...Cinque plays everyone around her, not so much creating characters as doing varying voices which suggest the speaker's idea of friend and foe alike...
...After a few years as a nomadic single parent, he married a veteran of "four or five" previous marriages, "a mantrap, someone who bushwhacked husbands and cleaned them out...
...These days, even such perfunctory recognitions of human community are precious...
...In addition to routine physical battery, their stepmother, "as diseases do, REVIEWERS EDWARD WHEELER /'~ chairman of the English Department at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...Michael O. Garvey ersonal suffering endows the sufferer with an authority which it seems almost blasphemous to question...
...At the beginning of his life, "the world aquired a hole" when his twenty-nine-year- old mother committed suicide...
...Dad became her plow horse...
Vol. 118 • October 1991 • No. 17
