THE POEMS Gerard Manley Hopkins left us when he died in 1889, have a stylish gloom which makes him strangely representative of the more thoughtful type of Roman Catholic.
No hellfire and brimstone ranter, he was a Jesuit who spent an inordinate amount of time asking himself the big questions, as Jesuits are prone to do. There is of course no contradiction between being a poet, with a sometimes excessive fondness for alliteration as Hopkins was, and also being a priest.
Indeed, if 19th century Jesuits had had a word for ‘groovy’ they would have probably used it to describe Hopkins. His fondness for the naked male physical form was a different matter. There was no way his superiors were going to be OK with that sort of thing, so it had to remain a secret.
Hence, Robert Waldron’s fictionalised version of Hopkins’ private thoughts on the issue in The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Brandon ).
Hopkins spent the last five years of his life in Dublin, having been sent in 1884 to become professor of Greek at UCD. His unhappiness with his life there drove his poetry to the depths with lines like: “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”
Much energy has been expended analysing the despairing sonnets Hopkins wrote in the five years before his death of typhoid fever in 1889. They were drenched in despair yet at the same time evasive as to what the source of that despair might be.
In this well written novella, Waldron fictionalises what Hopkins might have been thinking. Here, Hopkins is a man tortured by the contradiction between his devotion to the Catholic Church and his homosexuality, which was making itself increasingly obvious, at least to him, during those last few years in Dublin.
The Hopkins we meet suffers from profound loneliness, despite being surrounded by people much of the time and having a good many friends.
In places Hopkins tries to deny his sexuality, although not convincingly: “If I scour the Bible for support for my love of men, I find only Jonathan’s love of David. My love for John (and Dolben ) is similar…Their love was not carnal. And as much as I love John, I do not desire physically to possess him, but I must confess his very touch is ecstasy.” Indeed.
He also becomes aware of the poetry of his American contemporary, Walt Whitman. A friend warns Hopkins that: “reading him [Whitman] endangers my mortal soul. He says to burn my copy of Leaves Of Grass.”
However, Hopkins’ only objection to Whitman is that he writes free verse, which is, presumably, less of a threat to one’s mortal soul than homosexuality.
The book’s one big flaw is that it is written in the present tense, which real diaries almost never are. This makes the necessary suspension of disbelief difficult. That said, this is a quick read for anyone with an interest in Hopkins’ enigmatic life, and will no doubt be particularly popular with poets and Jesuits alike.
