A super-excellent biography

Katherine Rendell is a writer of superb children’s books (check out The Explorer) and also, surprisingly, a Fellow of All Souls. Super-Infinite, her biography of John Donne, is a fabulous gem, what she calls her ‘act of evangelism,’ crammed with a detailed, wide-ranging and stimulating examination of every transformation of Donne’s life, writings and background. I loved it and have listened to it twice to catch the details which can be missed listening to a serious work as packed full as this one.
What makes Rendell’s work so satisfying is the way she weaves background material her subject. The brutal persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth raged through Donne’s early life with Catholics hanged, drawn and quartered, including women, members of his own family and the young priest sheltered by Donne’s brother Henry who died from the inhuman treatment he received in prison. Plague (which she links with the Coronavirus) was a ‘constant stalker’ with people boarded up in their houses to die in their tens of thousands. Donne sailed on expeditions against Spain in 1596 and 1597 witnessing the ships wrecked by storm and engagement with their crews decked in silver lace as they left England educed to vast piles of rotting corpses and suppurating wounds. He witnessed the beheading of Essex following his disastrous rebellion - Essex, who had once strutted in trousers costing as much as a cottage, hanging onto life with a twinkling eye even as as his head was severed. Five of Donne’s twelve children died and his beloved wife Anne lasted only a week after giving birth to the last which was buried with her. No wonder Donne’s works are permeated by death, rot and decay whether it be his poetry, his Sermons delivered to up to 6000 people from St Peter’s pulpit or his courageous arguments surrounding suicide in his 1608 Bathanatos.
Rendell is brilliant on the poems with their 340 neologisms, unfurling the layers of meaning, illustrating what she calls Donne’s “alchemy a mix of unlikely ingredients which spark into gold, images clash up against one another and the world looks, however briefly, new”. She gives a vast range of contemporary detail, such as whores’ ‘purses’ (think about the one well loved for her handstands!) and Eton’s rat-infested dormitories to astronomical discoveries and the first production of Twelfth Night, which all hugely enlighten and extend.
There’s a great deal more to be said about this book but this is enough! Just listen and revel in it. Narrating a book like this with plentiful quotation from prose and poetry and so many changes of topic and tone can’t be an easy task and a sub-standard narration would have been ruinous. But full marks to Jamie Parker for his faultless narration for which Katherine Rendell must be very grateful.

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