A Pair of Herberts

{Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, by Isaac Oliver}

John Stubbs's John Donne: The Restless Self, about which I've written before, includes a brief sketch of Sir Edward Herbert, brother of Donne's fellow poet George Herbert and son of Donne's friend Magadalen Herbert, that I think you'll enjoy.

Though sickly in his youth, by adulthood Sir Edward

had grown into the complete Renaissance man--swordsman, scholar, poet and courtier, the last a role he sniffed at with the right kind of elegant disdain.

He quickly became known for his overdeveloped sense of honor--and his perpetual readiness to avenge perceived slights with violence. Say Stubbs,

He once chased a French cavalier across the countryside for playfully running off with a lady's ribbon, then took it as a personal affront when the rattled Frenchman tried returning the trifle without admitting first that he had been made to give it back.

In an incident with shades of some other scenes of inappropriately glimpsed nudity that I've written about before, Herbert inadvertently (he claimed) wandered into the bedchamber of a Lady Ayres one day and "sawe her through the Courtaines lying upon her bed," pining away at a miniature of him. Sir John Ayres, hearing of this, accused Sir Edward of "whoring" with his wife--and, accompanied by a group of swordsmen, set upon him in London one night.

Sir Edward presumably was glad at the chance to fight, and maybe even was glad to be outnumbered five-to-one. What better way to prove his honor? Stubbs gives us the blow-by-blow:

Ayres and his team were instantly repelled and quickly appalled. Herbert broke his sword with the first stroke, but still fought all of them off with just the stump of the blade. A friendly passer-by, Sir Henry Carew, decently pulled a dagger from Herbert's ribs so that he could go and knock Ayres down for a third time. With the hirelings vanquished and the jealous husband on the ground, Herbert straddled him, hacking furiously: "when kneeling on the Ground and bestriding him I struck at him in fowre seurall places and did almost cut off his left hand," he reported.

But even that wasn't enough for Herbert. Healing quickly from his injuries,

he offered to meet Ayres at a time of his choosing to finish the affair like gentlemen.

{George Herbert, by Robert White (1674)}

Oddly enough, Sir Edward's brother George is a relatively serene figure. He spent much of his life, apparently contentedly, as a country priest, and his poetry, Stubbs notes,

is the unique record of someone finding sufficiency in life as a soul, and a soul, moreover, that could genuinely get on with God.

Even a nonbeliever like me can discern the quiet confidence underlying Herbert's rushing tumble of metaphor in this poem:

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earht;
Engine against th' Almighty, sinners' tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days' world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

And then there's Herbert's argument for straightforward truths, cleanly expressed, in "Jordan":

Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves?
Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.

What an odd house the Herberts' must have been, to have produced both Sir Edward, with his prickly honor that perpetually needed to be defended, and the clear-eyed, confident belief of George. So far, I've not been able to learn anything about their other eight siblings, but it does make me wonder just what they were like.

On a huge hill, cragg'd and steep, Truth stands

I've written before about John Donne's "Meditation XVII," and about how Donne's most famous line, "No man is an island," from that Meditation, is a far more interesting thought when considered as part of the passage that surrounds it:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Similarly, John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006) adds interest and nuance to Donne's work by putting it in the context of a skilled reconstruction of his life. Though Donne is often viewed as a complicated, even paradoxical man--a writer of erotic love poems, raised a Catholic, who later became one of the foremost ministers of the Church of England--Stubbs does a convincing job of drawing a line of emotional and spiritual consistency throughout a life of outward change.

Donne lived in the chaotic period between two of the greatest upheavals of English history (Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church and the English Civil War) and watching him tack back and forth as needed to navigate the political, social, and religious difficulties of the era is fascinating. A Catholic in a Protestant society, he converted when it became necessary--and, Stubbs argues convincingly, found a way (in his deep-rooted ecumenicalism) to fully embrace the change. Exiled from society due to his elopement with the daughter of his first patron, he assiduously courted friends and connections until he was restored to the court's good graces. Eventually, as his prospects of landing a government position (which he badly needed to feed his large family) dimmed, he completed his journey from his Catholic upbringing by heeding King Charles's suggestion that he become a minister. From then on, Donne put all of his intellectual and emotional powers at the Church of England's disposal, developing a more somber and strongly moral tone and becoming in the process one of the most-loved writers in the Christian tradition.

Through all of these changes, however, Stubbs argues, Donne continued to be driven by the same search for truth that can be seen in his earliest satires and even his love poetry, which each in their way aim to strip away hypocrisy to reveal underlying realities and desires. Stubbs returns regularly to the following passage from Donne's "Satire III":

On a huge hill,
Cragg'd, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe,
And what the hills suddenness resists, winne so;
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.

Stubbs isn't always able to convince, of course. It seems important to accept that Donne was often simply having to make the best of a bad situation--his sycophantic letters to his court patrons, in particular, come across as full of the very lies the younger Donne would have enjoyed puncturing in verse.

The portrait of Donne we're left with is appealing nonetheless: a man refusing to be defeated by any setback and unwilling to ever settle for a received idea, instead perpetually sifting, considering, and reconsidering. That very process animates the best of Donne's metaphysical verse, as he strings thought upon thought, forever pushing for a deeper understanding; it's even present, in a different form, in his lighter work, where he subjects image and metaphor to that same sort of intellectual pressure. I also find Donne congenial because even in his later years, he appears never to have denied his possibly embarrassing past of love affairs and youthful abandon--in other words, to the Christian eye, sin; rather, he seems to have accepted that the God he knew knew him also, both his sins and his goodness, and would accept him as a whole.

Reading about Donne's life, I couldn't help thinking about a couple of fascinating what-ifs. At one point, Donne was angling for a secretarial position with a colonial expedition to Virginia, which leads me to marvel at the thought of Donne's poetic impressions of the American wilderness and the hardships of colonial life. (Peter Ackroyd wrote a novel about the same idea as applied to John Milton, whom he sends to Massachusetts with the Pilgrims--anyone read it?) There's also the question of what side Donne would have taken in the Civil War had he lived another couple of decades. It's hard to imagine him not disdaining the Puritans' harsh intolerance, but at the same time it's impossible to know what he would have made of the Church's increasing crackdown on Puritanism in the years leading up to the war. Which way would Donne the mutable survivor have jumped?

From what we can't know, I'll return to what we do know: the poetry. Which Donne I like best depends on my mood, on whether I feel like following his wanders through metaphor to a truth about humanity or to a simple tryst. Tonight, because it's a lovely summer evening, I'll choose the love poetry to close, one of my favorites because of its ingenious conception, from which Donne wrings every drop of meaning.

The Flea

Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
Me it suck'd first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled bee;
Confesse it, this cannot be said
A sinne, or shame, or losse of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoyes before it wooe,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than wee would doe.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
When we almost, nay more than maryed are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloysterd in these living walls of Jet.
Though use make thee apt to kill me,
Let not to this, selfe murder added bee,
And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three.

Cruell and sodaine, has thou since
Purpled thy naile, in blood of innocence?
In what could this flea guilty bee,
Except in that drop which it suckt from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and saist that thou
Find'st not thyself, nor mee the weaker now;
'Tis true, then learne how false, feares bee;
Just so much honor, when thou yeeld'st to mee,
Will wast, as this flea's death tooke life from thee.

Trollope goes digital, Borges goes ghostly, Donne goes on a peace mission

Not a lot of time tonight, so all I've got for you is a collection of odds and ends.

1 In all the writing about Trollope I've been doing this summer, I've neglected to mention Penguin's great new Trollope site, created with the help of the Trollope Society. It's everything such a site should be--especially for a writer as prolific as Trollope--giving a brief synopsis of each novel and major character, information about his Barset and Palliser sequences, and biographical information about Trollope. A particularly nice touch are the eye-catching (though slightly too contemporary?) cartoon renderings of Trollope's characters. But surely Phineas Finn didn't really look as horrid as this?

I also learned from the site that Trollope thought that the ending of Phineas Finn was a bit abrupt and unsatisfying, as did I. In his Autobiography, Trollope admitted:

It is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to it I had made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return.

If I may be allowed to absurdly mix eras and forms: the ending reminded me of the end of Don Knotts's great comedy The Love God?, wherein Knotts's character ends up not with the vivacious career woman (and bombshell) he's been seeing, but with the lovely young lady from his hometown who has been patiently waiting--and who is as dull as paste. It makes sense for the ethical arc of the story, but it's impossible to believe and makes no damn sense on any other level.

2 I learned about the Trollope site through the ReadySteadyBook blog, where I was involved in the following exchange after blogger Mark Thwaite ended his post by asking if he should give Trollope a try:

Stephen Mitchelmore: No!

Mark Thwaite: Sage, succinct advice as ever, sir!

Levi Stahl: I totally disagree with Stephen Mitchelmore: Yes!

The Palliser novels provide insight into politics, strongly drawn characters--including several fully realized, sympathetic portrayals of strong-willed women--and a drawn-out, sensitive depiction of a marriage of two very different partners who despite their differences (and the strictures placed on them by society) are essentially equals.

Trollope doesn't have the humor of Dickens, the godlike sympathy and understanding of Tolstoy, the fire of Dostoevsky, or the piercing aphoristic insight of George Eliot, but his attention to his characters and the realities of their world make him well worth reading.

Stephen Mitchelmore: But Levi, we do share the same reasons!

3 In With Borges, which I wrote about the other day, Alberto Manguel mentions that he's just one of many people who, over the years, served as readers for the blind master. I imagine them reuniting once a year in a secret library, an invisible college of readers conjuring the Borges who is not in the library, the lost Borges, the one who, in "Borges and I," writes:

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause--mechanically now, perhaps--to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.

At the end of a long evening of wine and talk, during which they've tricked him into lowering his guard, the Borges they conjure is swiftly trapped between two covers and filed away in an obscure, rarely visited section of this already obscure library.

As the years mount, and death slowly winnows the circle of readers, the Borges they conjure becomes less solid; what was at their first meeting a gargantuan reference book becomes, by their last, perhaps a single line of poetry.

4 After writing about Borges's admonition to his nephew ("If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear."), I thought that Borges might have enjoyed my favorite Victor Borge joke, which I heard him deliver to a young whippersnapper on the Jack Benny Show:

Borge: How old are you?

Whippersnapper: I'm six!

Borge: Shame on you! When I was your age, I was twice that old!

5 Having written recently about the Thirty Years War, I was surprised to learn yesterday from John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2007) that Donne served as chaplain to the delegation that King James sent to Frederick and Ferdinand, the chief warring parties, in 1619. The mission, however, was doomed from the start, as it had been

entirely seeded and nurtured by a Spanish subterfuge. Spain's great aim in the Bohemian crisis was to keep England from sending military and financial aid to the Protestant rebels: the neutrality desired by the Spanish was assured by massaging King James's diplomatic ego. The great Machiavellian Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, reassured his masters that "the vanity of the present King of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be obtained by his means, so that his authority may be increased."

Actually that's the sense I get of the whole war: if you were involved, you were probably being double-crossed.

For his part, Donne in the years to come would be a strong voice against English involvement in the war, despite anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish public sentiment. Donne surely took up that position at least in part because it was the position of the King, in whose good graces Donne needed to stay--but it's also not hard to trace that preference to Donne's youthful memories of the horrors of war and his seeming general distaste for sectarianism and the violence it often entailed.

6 Finally, it seems fitting to follow Donne, the poet of love in secular and religious guises, to a couple of fun throwaway lines from Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game (1961):

I lighted her cigarette. She was poised and cool but not at all subtle. She leaned forward to take the light and to give me a look at large breasts harnessed by a lacy black bra. Eve learned that one the day they got dressed and moved out of Eden. It has been just as effective ever since.