mean gruesome (and often public) death – disembowelling, stringing up, that sort of thing. On his mother’s side he was descended from the family of Sir Thomas More; his uncle became head of the secret Jesuit mission to England and was caught trying to flee the country during a storm and sent to the Tower; and his younger brother was arrested for sheltering a priest and subsequently died in prison when Donne himself was only twenty-one. The twin legacies of martyrdom and ultramontane loyalty therefore framed his existence; for most days of his life, he must have been acutely conscious of the implications of his Catholicism.
These linchpins notwithstanding, I should admit (if I am to be honest) that the biographical discovery which sealed my affinity for John Donne was a matter less intense. In the course of my reading, I also came across a first-hand account of the twenty-something man, left to us by Sir Richard Baker. This report relates how on ‘leaving Oxford, [Donne] lived at the Innes of Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited verses’. Naturally enough, this description appealed: the portrait of a serial philanderer, who was ‘not dissolute, but very neat’. Here was a man, I thought.
As well as marking the beginning of my pilgrimage of discovery, and aside from the intimate punch of the poem itself, ‘The Indifferent’ also presented some difficult technical challenges. With ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘The Broken Heart’, I had followed a similar textual scheme to that which I had employed for one of the earlier, single-sonnet Shakespeare commissions – a scheme derived, I happily admit, from the hand of my favourite calligrapher and personal hero, Jean Flamel, secretary to the Duc de Berry in the early fifteenth century. Now, however, with this poem, I had a problem.
Bâtarde, the hand that Saul, Wesley and I had agreed on for the Donne, is one of the most elastic scripts; and there are as many rules concerning the precise rotation and relative dimensions of the letters as there are examples of the form. These rules the good scribe will know, then disregard, then cleverly reinterpret. But even such ingenious reinterpretations are themselves to be cast aside when it comes to the lawless land of poetry. Let us ignore the vexed question of the versals; let us also forget the potential confusion of the lettering particulars (cursive or textura feet? cojoins? ligatures? serifs and hair-lines?); and let us look instead at the wider problem of layout. How, for example, does one legislate for margins, spacing or letter discretion when the lines of text are all different lengths? Good poets have good reason for fashioning their lines the way they do and it is not for the calligrapher to go barging in and breaking them up. And yet, so often the overall aesthetic effect of so much irregularity – even when written out well – is somehow to clutter and stifle, detracting from the words themselves. So rendering poetry per se is problem enough. However, with a manuscript collection, the whole thing is made infinitely more complicated because there will be such a diversity of lengths – two words a line here, thirteen there – all of which need to share the same script. Consider: in The Songs and Sonnets, Donne uses forty-six different stanza forms and only two of them more than once.
Put simply, my problem with ‘The Indifferent’ was this: some of the lines were too bloody long to fit on the fucking page.
The first verse goes as follows:
I can love both fair and brown,
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,
Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,
Her who believes, and her who tries,
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork, and never cries;
I can love her, and her, and you and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
Executional troubles notwithstanding, you can well see why ‘The Indifferent’ became one of my early favourites. I like the exhaustive catalogue of that opening stanza and you can feel the speaker’s familiarity breeding its contempt even as he writes – ‘abundance melts’, ‘want betrays’, ‘spongy eyes’, ‘dry cork’: knowing phrases if ever I saw them.
Of course, the speaker of the poem is not entirely to be identified with Donne himself – this is partly an exercise in posturing and the work is based on one of Ovid’s Amores. But, between ourselves, I am not so sure that the pose is all. Although Donne is indeed playing the languid courtier, I believe his final trick is that he actually means it:
Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.
Must I, who came to travel through you,
Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?
This is not merely sport or showing off. There’s a freight of cruelty travelling with that ‘travel through you’ – all the more so because on the surface it seems so casually delivered, a nonchalant relative clause passing time on the way to the next big verb: ‘Grow’. (Calligraphers love their capital Gs.) Plus, by way of further compression, ‘travel’ can also be glossed as ‘travail’, and of course, whichever word actually appears on the page, the homophone’s meaning will be bound to sound in the reader’s (or listener’s) mind – exactly as Donne intended. Then there’s the mock (and mocking) indignation at the curse of women’s faithfulness. But it’s in the third verse that he delivers my favourite bit of the poem.
Venus heard me sigh this song,
And by love’s sweetest part, variety, she swore,
She heard not this till now; …
It is not enough for Donne that the goddess of love grants that variety is her most delectable aspect; he must have her swear upon it. Yet when you read, and indeed write, the verse as a whole, the crucial line gives the impression of being incidental to the guiding contour of the argument. However, nothing in Donne is ever en passant and those seemingly innocuous commas turn out to have been the means by which he has smuggled in the central credo of the entire poem: for Donne, ‘variety’ was what it was all about.
And so it was for me.
But how to explain this to Lucy?
The silent telephone calls began the day after the disaster and continued with increasing frequency in the week that followed. At random times of the day or night – just as I was poised to stroke the difficult stem of a ‘k’, or when I had at last cast myself into bed and was about to close my eyes – the spiteful persecutor would suddenly screech into life. The vicious ring would send me racing madly into the hall, where I would lunge for the receiver and quiet my tormentor until the next attack, two minutes or seven and a half hours later, at three thirty-six in the morning. Lucy never spoke but I knew it was she. She did not even bother to withhold her number.
For several days, I soldiered doggedly on, seeking to make light of the situation, blaming myself and quietly reflecting that if I was going to make such an unholy balls-up of my affairs then relentless telephonic harassment was no more punishment than I deserved. Most trying of all was the necessity of keeping up a breezy manner in case the call turned out to be somebody else.
By the middle of the second week I could take it no more. I pulled the phone from its socket and temporarily suspended all contact with the outside world. What else was I to do? I had tried talking into the receiver. I had tried ringing the poor girl back. I had even tried to out-silence her: the two of us just sitting there on either end of the line,
