Altering the Life-Text: Walton's Life of Donne
[In the following excerpt, Epstein analyzes the structure of Walton's Life of Donne, pointing out the author's unique contributions to the biography genre.]
“Being speechless, and seeing heaven by that illumination by which he saw it; … he closed his own eyes; and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him.”
(Walton's Life of Donne)
I
In a letter crucially situated in the narrative of Izaak Walton's Life of Donne (generally considered the first, influential English biography of a literary figure that is itself of literary merit)1 the biographer induces his biographical subject to “bemoan himself”: “and yet, I would fain be or do something; … for, to chuse is to do; but, to be no part of any body, is as to be nothing.”2 “Any body,” of course, is a characteristically complex Donnean pun suggesting his estrangement not only from himself and his family but also from what, later in this letter, he terms, variously, “business,” “occupation,” and “service” (37). The letter is crucially situated for two reasons. First, it follows directly upon and delineates the consequences of Donne's early, unfulfilled efforts to be a “part of any body”—efforts marked by university and private study in various fields but an unwillingness to take a degree, accept a benefice, or set up in a profession, and by an interrupted and opposed courtship and marriage, which, for a time, separate him from family and friends and, despite a later reconciliation, displace him from government service. Second, the letter immediately precedes the series of events by which eventually Donne will become (as the letter laments he may never be) “incorporated into a part of the world” (37). The word “incorporated” (from incorporare, to embody) re-inscribes the key term “body,” and, in its various senses, suggests that the range of Donne's estrangement includes a failure ‘to combine into a uniform substance, to form an integral whole, to be admitted or received into a corporation or body politic, to be given or assume bodily shape, and to form an intimate union’ (OED). Yet, as we shall see, Walton's narrative seeks to incorporate Donne in all these senses, indeed, to develop a language of incorporation which ‘employs,’ ‘converts,’ and ‘monumentalizes’ Donne through an intimate union—through a ‘sympathy of souls’ embodied in Donne's poetry, sermons, and letters, and then ‘reanimated’ in Walton's narrative.
As I have indicated, this incorporation or embodiment begins just after the crucially situated letter in which Donne bemoans he is “no part of any body.”3 For the narrative then goes on to describe how Donne at last finds a patron (Sir Robert Drury), with whom he lives and with whom, despite his wife's pregnancy, Donne travels to France on a diplomatic mission. In Paris Donne has a “Vision” which, accurately as it turns out, depicts his wife's delivery of “a dead child” (40).4 The “Vision” leads to the narrative's discussion of similar stories of visions and miracles, all of which (like, for instance, that shared by St. Augustine and his mother) are linked implicitly or explicitly to conversion experiences and to the notion of “a sympathy of souls”(41). This discussion is followed by the first of Donne's poems to be inserted in the narrative—“A Valediction, forbidding to Mourn,” which is introduced as “Verses given by Mr. Donne to his wife at the time that he then parted from her” (42), and which, in its “twin-compasses” image, offers metaphysical poetry's most famous depiction of the familiar notion of the sympathy of souls. This poem (which, if it is not the first poem by a biographical subject to be re-inscribed in English literary biography, is at least the first to be treated as revealing its author's life and consciousness)5 is followed immediately by the sentence: “I return from my account of the Vision, to tell the Reader, that both before Mr. Donne's going into France, at his being there, and after his return many of the Nobility, and others that were powerful at Court, were watchful and solicitous to the King for some Secular imployment for him.” But the King, “pleas'd” with Donne's “many deep discourses of general learning” and the book (Pseudo-Martyr) which the narrative contends grew out of their conversations, “gave a positive denial to all requests” for “some secular employment” and instead “perswaded Mr. Donne to enter into the Ministry” (44-45). As earlier, when he was offered a benefice by the Dean of Gloucester, Donne now tries to resist ecclesiastical preferment, pleading his “unfitness” for “that sacred calling.” But, after a three-year period of study and spiritual wrestling compared to that of St. Paul, St. Augustine, Jacob, Moses, and David, he defers to God and the King and is moved “to serve at the Altar” (46-47). The narrative continues:
Now the English Church had gain'd a second St. Austine [sic], for, I think, none was so like him before his Conversion. … And now all his studies which had been occasionally diffused, were all concentred in Divinity. Now he had a new calling, new thoughts, and a new imployment for his wit and eloquence: … and all the faculties of his own soul, were ingaged in the Conversion of others. … and now, such a change was wrought in him, that he could say with David. … that when he required a temporal, God gave him a spiritual blessing. And that, he was now gladder to be a doorkeeper in the house of God, then [sic] he could be to injoy the noblest of all temporal imployments.
(47-48)
Here, then, is a significant passage in Walton's Donne. “No part of any body,” not yet “incorporated into a part of the world,” Donne has a “Vision” which is compared to a conversion experience governed by a “sympathy of souls”—a visionary, sympathetic conversion which the narrative then depicts as recorded in one of Donne's poems, and later reifies in the King's persuading Donne to reconsider his desire for secular employment and re-examine his fitness for sacred calling. By the end of this passage Donne is, figuratively if not literally, a convert, incorporated by the narrative into both the ministry of English religion and the visionary company of various biblical and religious figures who, like Donne, experienced a conversion from a life of passionate, sensuous diffusion to one of settled, spiritual service.6 The language of this passage and of the opening section of the narrative which surrounds it is characterized by the frequent repetition of such terms (and their cognates) as employment, office, undertaking, occupation, service, calling, sympathy, affection, fitness, and conversion. This language, and the language-structures with which it is related, initiate what we shall come to call a plot of ‘alteration.’ We shall begin our formal description of this plot with a brief exploration of the term “employment.”
Walton's biography habitually deploys various senses of this term. For instance, early in the narrative, the Lord Chancellor engages Donne “to be his Chief Secretary; supposing and intending it to be an Introduction to some more weighty Employment in the State” (27)—employment as ‘an official position in public service.’ After his unfortunate courtship, Donne loses his place and is described as “out of all employment that might yield a support for himself and his wife” (30-31), that is, Donne now lacks a specific ‘business, occupation, trade, or profession.’ When, after his “conversion,” he finds “a new imployment for his wit and eloquence” (48), the term is used in the more general senses of ‘the action of being at work’ or ‘the purpose to which a thing is devoted,’ the same senses and nearly identical wording invoked by Charles Cotton in a dedicatory poem preceding the narrative (11). Later, when “by a special command from his Majesty Dr. Donne was appointed to assist and attend that employment [an ambassadorial mission] to the Princes of the [Germanic] Union” (53), he serves as a public official sent on ‘a special errand or commission.’ These are just a few of the more than twenty times the term is used in the narrative to describe events or features of Donne's life. It is also used to describe the narrative itself. For instance, in the introduction Walton explains how Sir Henry Wotton, who intended to write a life of Donne to be published with Donne's sermons, asked Walton to collect materials for this project and how “I did most gladly undertake the employment” (21), as if he were performing ‘a special errand in the service of a private person.’ Later, the Waltonian biographer announces a topic (the Dean of Gloucester's offer of a benefice) “which shall be the next employment of my Pen” (31), a use invoking divers senses of the term, of which perhaps the most interesting is employment as ‘an implement.’
Similar terms, like undertaking, office, occupation, service, and calling, occur almost as often and in similar and even the same contexts (“I did most gladly undertake the employment” [21], “Now he had a new calling, new thoughts, and a new imployment for his wit and eloquence” [48]), and are also used to refer both to Donne's life and to Walton's narrative of it. One result of the ‘entwining, enclosing, or encircling’ (another sense of employment) of all these terms and their various nuances is that the biographical narrative comes to describe the ‘implication or signification’ (yet another connotation of the term) of its own employment: that is, in Walton's Donne biography itself becomes, variously and simultaneously, a special errand or commission performed in the service of the biographical subject; a trade, profession, or (semi-)official position serving the public and the individual; an implement devoted to the purpose of enclosing and signifying a life. In all these ways, Walton's narrative implies that biography is, like Donne's life, a conversion (a turning or returning) from a secular employment to a sacred calling, a conversion, moreover, undertaken through the offices of a sympathy of souls.
The introduction to the Life of Donne establishes this pattern through the language we have been tracing.
If that great Master of Language and Art, Sir Henry Wotton, the late Provost of Eaton Colledge, had liv'd to see the Publication of these Sermons [to which Walton's Life of Donne was originally prefixed] he had presented the World with the Authors Life exactly written; And, 'twas pity he did not; for it was a work worthy his undertaking, and he fit to undertake it: betwixt whom, and the Author, there was so mutual a knowledge, and such a friendship contracted in their Youth, as nothing but death could force a separation. And, though their bodies were divided, their affections were not: for that learned Knight's love followed his Friends fame beyond death and the forgetful grave; which he testified by intreating me, whom he acquainted with his design, to inquire of some particulars that concern'd it, not doubting but my knowledge of the Author, and love to his memory, might make my diligence useful: I did most gladly undertake the employment, and continued it with great content 'till I had made my Collection ready to be augmented and compleated by his matchless Pen: but then, Death prevented his intentions.
Hence, the narrative continues: “I shall now be demanded as once Pompey's poor bondman was, … who art thou that alone hast the honour to bury the body of Pompey the great? so, who am I that do thus officiously set the Authors memory on fire? … I who profess my self artless. … the poorest, the meanest of all his friends, in the midst of this officious duty” (20-21).
This dense, carefully wrought prose presents the biographer as an artless, accidental undertaker (that is, one who assists, takes up a challenge, carries out work for another, attempts an enterprise, engages in serious study, prepares a literary work, acts as surety for another, functions as a baptismal sponsor, or arranges funerals),7 who is forced by the untimely death of an established scholar and writer, with whom the biographical subject enjoyed an inseparable affection, to convert (the narrative's actual term in this context is “transport”) an “employment” to collect materials into an “officious duty” to memorialize the biographical subject. The person who is “fit to undertake … the Authors Life” is one whose competence, worthiness, propriety, correspondence, and readiness (all various OED senses of “fitness”) can be employed. But his own death has prevented Wotton, as Donne's death could not, from pursuing his design. The employment becomes now a special errand, an encircling instrument occupied in the service of both Donne and Wotton, an undertaking which not only carries out Wotton's design by taking up the challenge of engaging in serious study and preparing a literary work but also acts as surety for that work by functioning (as biography usually does) as the baptismal sponsor and funeral arranger of Donne's represented life. This undertaking derives its fitness from Donne's “glorious spirit” (21), from Wotton's “matchless Pen,” and from the correspondence (“the quality of fitting exactly”—OED: “fitness”), the inseparable affection, the sympathy of souls, which, according to the introduction, characterizes Donne and Wotton's relationship.
Indeed, the wording and narrative structure of the introduction entwines and implies the wording of the later “Vision” section, in which the concept of the sympathy of souls emerges as the governing affective principle of the conversion experience. In both, a secular employment (Donne's accompanying Drury's ambassadorial mission to Paris, Walton's undertaking Wotton's biographical enterprise) is characterized by “an unwilling-willingness” (39) to perform it;8 and, in both, the physical separation (Donne's from his wife, Wotton's from Donne, and Walton's from both Donne and Wotton) which follows upon that employment is reduced or re-encompassed by a mutual spiritual affection. This sympathy of souls which “indure not yet / A breach, but an expansion” (the “Valediction,” as in Walton, 43) causes those who were secularly employed and physically separated to be “transported” (21) or “alter'd” (39-40) by a visionary, miraculous conversion. Donne is converted into a minister, a poetic divine whose “studies … were all concentred in Divinity,” whose “earthly affections were changed into divine love,” whose “wit and eloquence” found “a new calling, new thoughts, and a new imployment” (48). Walton too is converted: he becomes a biographer, a divinely inspired language-user who finds “a new imployment” for his “artless Pencil” (21) through his “unwilling-willingness” to turn about (con plus vertere) Donne and Wotton in the enterprise of memorializing Donne's life and work. This conversion is not merely secular, not a mere alteration in employments—but spiritual, a visionary, miraculous experience governed by the sympathy of souls.
Various seventeenth-century senses of the term imply the complex significance of both Donne's and Walton's “conversion.” The narrative depicts both of them as “turning in position, direction, and destination,” as “changing in character, nature, form, or function,” and as “changing by substitution of an equivalent in purport or value” (OED). Indeed, the narrative habitually implies two of the more specialized senses of conversion. In the medieval church, the familiar connotation of “a bringing over to a special religious faith, profession, or party” signified particularly “a change from the secular to the religious life” (OED). Contextualized with another specialized sense of the term (“a translation into another language [or into a different literary form]”)—a use of this term employed, as the OED notes, in Walton's Compleat Angler—the sense of “conversion” as a change from the secular to the religious describes not only how the narrative depicts Donne's redirecting of his life and language but also how the narrative converts its own secular employment into a sacred calling, how it translates the language and language-structures of Donne's poetry and sermons, of medieval hagiography, and of seventeenth-century ecclesiastical biography into a somewhat different literary form that will come to exert a powerful influence on the subsequent development of English biography.9
Significantly, the intimate relationship in Walton's work between these two notions of conversion can be traced also to the last stanza of his elegy on Donne. First printed in the 1633 edition of Donne's Poems, this elegy has been linked to Walton's presumed editing of the 1635 edition of the Poems; moreover, both the elegy and the editing have been approached as a kind of proto-biography upon which Walton drew in putting together the hastily composed “prefatory memoir” that became the 1640 first edition of the Life of Donne.10 In the 1675 edition, the final one during Walton's lifetime, the elegy is the last of the various discursive materials which surround the narrative (the others include Walton's dedication, prefatory epistle, and introduction, as well as a poem, a letter, an epitaph, and an elegy contributed by acquaintances of Donne and Walton). In the elegy's concluding stanza the poet declares “I am his Convert,” and grieves that, in “this Elegy. / Which, as a Free-will offering, I here give / Fame and the World … / I want abilities, fit to set forth, / A Monument, as matchless as his worth” (89). Here, in this elegaic proto-biography which encloses the narrative by preceding it in time and following it in space, conversion assumes the status of a spiritual and literary transformation occasioned and authorized by the biographical subject. Furthermore, here, as in the narrative, the elegist/biographer presents himself as unfit to undertake his employment or set forth his monument, unless, as the elegy's first stanza suggests, he is inspired by “that man where Language chose to stay / And shew her utmost power” (87). Subordinate to his subject, who acts as his spiritual and literary inspiration, the biographer implies that the narrative's collation and translation of traditional life-writing forms derive from the sympathetic, incorporating employment he undertakes as his subject's convert. Simultaneously the biographer is undertaking another related effort to establish his credentials as an intimate friend of Donne and his circle. Through this effort, which he pursues both in the surrounding discursive materials and in the opening section of the narrative, the biographer is trying to situate his biography within an ecclesiastical hierarchy of men of letters, an intellectual enclave of devotional poets or poetic divines, who will function as verifiers of both the ‘factual’ integrity of the life-course presented and the spiritual and literary worthiness of the biographer who presents it.11 Hence it is as Donne's convert and this enclave's intimate that Walton assumes the authority to establish the symbolic structure with which he incorporates the plot of his mode of secularized/spiritualized biography. This strategy serves well the two interrelated notions of conversion upon and about which Waltonian and much subsequent English biography turn. But, as we shall see, the effort, and the failure, to sustain this strategy endanger both the middle section of Walton's narrative and this emerging plot of generic recognition.
II
After Donne's conversion from secular employment to sacred calling, the narrative turns to the process and occasions by which he becomes an ordained priest and then “A Preacher in earnest” (49)—indeed, by which he becomes one of the most eloquent and effective Anglican preachers of his time.12 As Donne approaches the altar and administers the sacrament, the ritual ceremony that reaffirms the holy covenant between man and God, so too the biographical narrative becomes an altar at which the biographer reaffirms the earthly covenant, the sympathy of souls, that links him and his biographical subject. As we have seen, this priestly reaffirmation is a sacramental rite that this narrative frequently performs. Yet in following Donne from priest to preacher, from altar to pulpit, the narrative must also make a different, if complementary, gesture. For, as Donne assumes the pulpit and (through his rapturous delivery of the pious language of a transplanted poetic wit) comes to symbolize the “excellent and powerful Preaching” of the “whole Clergy of this Nation” (54, 56), so too the biographical narrative becomes a pulpit from which the biographer preaches a sermon. The text of this sermon is the biographical subject's life, which as been ‘altered’ at the ‘altar’ (the two words share a Latin root and a variety of medieval spellings, an etymological and orthographic congruence that enriches, if not anticipates, their repeated use in Walton's and other seventeenth-century narratives) of Donne's language from a “life” (that is, an individual existence in concrete time and space) to a “text” (that is, a generically recognizable narrative of such an existence, the kind of narrative which, until the term ‘biography’ superseded it in the course of the eighteenth century, was conventionally designated a ‘life’). This alteration is, as we know, a crucial discursive transformation in biographical recognition—a fateful shift from life to text, from the natural to the narratable, which must alter the relationship between biographer and biographical subject. As we shall see, placing this conversion at the altar is the symbolic strategy with which Waltonian biography ordains and nearly interdicts English life-writing. For it is through the altar of Donne's devotional and poetic language that Walton's narrative discovers a key which permits the life-writer to unlock the traditional, hierarchical enclave (from clavis, key) enclosing him, and yet which, in opening up that enclave to alien influences, endangers the previously protected discursive relationships between life and text, biographical subject and biographer.
Although this interplay of sacrament and sermon appears throughout the biography, it is most prominent and most significant in the middle section, which traces Donne's life from his ordination to his rising up out of his death-bed in order to preach “his own Funeral Sermon” (74). At the beginning of this section the biographical narrative can comfortably locate itself at the altar, where the ceremony of holy communion recalls and sacramentalizes the earthly covenant, the sympathy of souls, which unites the Waltonian biographer and biographical subject. But by the end of this section Donne and this narrative of his life are situated almost exclusively in the pulpit, the place in which Donne and his biographer are determined to “take my death” (74). In this shift from altar to pulpit, sacrament to sermon, the narrative confronts Donne's and its own death, and discovers a way of preserving the endangered relationship between life and text that characterizes biographical recognition.
This crucial middle section begins with Donne's moving from altar to altar and pulpit to pulpit as he and the narrative explore the spiritual topography of his new calling. At first “his modesty in this imployment” prompts Donne “to preach privately in some village, not far from London,” but the King sends for him and he begins “preaching the Word so, as shewed his own heart was possest with those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distill into others: … and all this with a most particular grace and an inexpressible addition of comeliness” (48-49). Concerned lest those who “have not heard” Donne may conclude “that my affection to my Friend, hath transported me to an immoderate Commendation of his Preaching” (49), Walton brings various “witnesses” to testify to the spiritual power and grace of Donne's sermonizing. These witnesses include the King, who makes Donne one of his Chaplains in Ordinary, recommends him for a Cambridge D.D., and appoints him Dean of St. Paul's; the Queen of Bohemia, who “was much joyed to see him in a Canonical habit, and more glad to be an ear-witness of his excellent and powerful preaching” (54); “the grave Benchers of Lincolns Inne,” formerly Donne's unincorporated acquaintances, now “his beloved brethren,” who see and hear “a Saul … become a Paul, and preach salvation” (52-53); and, from among his numerous auditors, “a Gentleman of worth …, a frequent hearer of his Sermons,” whose elegy on Donne notes “—Each Altar had his fire / … wit, / He did not banish, but transplanted it; / Taught it both time and place, and brought it home / To Piety, which it doth best become” (49). Here, as earlier, the narrative re-presents Donne in the language of conversion: for it is not merely his eloquent delivery but also his example which impresses and moves his auditors.13 A conspicuous sensualist has become a famous minister, and the narrative reveals, as Cotton's dedicatory poem pointedly remarks (11), not only how this conversion occurred but the impact it continued to have on Donne's auditors and admirers:
… after his youthful swing,
To serve at his Gods Altar here you bring:
Where, an once-wanton-Muse, doth Anthems sing.
And, though by Gods most powerful grace alone,
His heart was setled in Religion:
Yet, 'twas by you we know how it was done.
As Cotton's verses (and their nearly obligatory pun on Donne's name) suggest, the narrative brings not only Donne but itself (and through itself, life-writing) “to serve at his Gods Altar.” For the altar is the sacred cultural locale in which Walton's secularized/spiritualized biography of sympathetic employment will initially situate itself.
Like Donne, the Waltonian biographer discovers that his narrative, “this well-meant sacrifice to his [biographical subject's] memory” (22), is fitly employed only when it comes “to serve at the Altar” (a phrase repeated often in both the account of Donne's life and its surrounding materials), where it can receive the sacrament that ritualistically reaffirms and reconceives the sympathetic bond between biographer and biographical subject as a holy covenant. Indeed, at about this point—after it has established the general pattern of Donne's ecclesiastical career and described the death of Donne's wife, following which both the biographical subject and the narrative emerge from the dark night of the soul and make “new ingagements to God” (52)14—the narrative explicitly introduces the notion of a written text as an altar. Donne's recovery from “a dangerous sickness” (57) is marked by the publication of “his most excellent Book of Devotions. … a book, that may not unfitly be called a Sacred picture of Spiritual Extasies, occasioned and appliable to the emergencies of that sickness; which book, being a composition of Meditations, Disquisitions and Prayers, he writ on his sick-bed; herein imitating the Holy Patriarchs, who were wont to build their Altars in that place, where they had received their blessings” (59).15 Here a written text emerges as an altar, as a sacramentalized locus of language which reaffirms God's Word. Here too, as it characteristically appropriates the language of its biographical subject, the narrative is converted into a “Book of Devotions. … that may not unfitly be called a Sacred picture of Spiritual Extasies.” The author of this “Book,” the biographer, builds his altar in that place (the language of spiritual ecstacy explored so profoundly in Donne's devotional writing) wherein he has received his blessing. Indeed, by this point, Donne's language and the language of this narrative of his life seem to have become almost thoroughly contextualized. Donne's ‘life’ and this ‘text’ of his life seem to be disappearing into one another. Altered by the altar of his language, Donne has been converted by his own convert into a locus of discursive activity in which biographer and biographical subject are now virtually indistinguishable.
And it is precisely at this point that the narrative skips rapidly over some nine years in Donne's life to present its biographical subject's falling into the lingering illness which leads to his death. This maneuver may seem premature (indeed, at least one-third of the narrative and many previously unmentioned details of Donne's life are still to come), but, in the sense that Walton's narrative has brought Donne to the brink of death by de-scribing and dis-embodying him in the language of his own language, this premature death in and of discourse is appropriate. The narrative, like Donne, is becoming undone.
A remarkable and witty strategy both signals the death of the narrative and tries, simultaneously, to re-embody and reanimate it, to initiate a procedure by which life converted into text can become text reconverted into life. For suddenly the narrative breaks into and away from its diachronic account of Donne's nearly exhausted life-course. In a brief, one-paragraph, first-person address to the reader (60) the biographer introduces an alternative narrative strategy—a synchronic account of Donne as devotional poet, public figure, “impartial father,” “happy reconciler,” and “lover of his friends” and family (68, 71). The narrative as we know it has been displaced. The counter-narrative dislodging it tries to reanimate Donne both by putting him in the context of a new rhetorical structure and by treating his final illness not as a retrospectively described incident that portends Donne's and the narrative's death but as if this and the other incidents of Donne's life were somehow being lived or relived simultaneously in and with the narrative:
Reader, this sickness continued long, not only weakning but wearying him so much, that my desire is, he may now take some rest: and that before I speak of his death, thou wilt not think it an impertinent digression to look back with me, upon some observations of his life, which, whilst a gentle slumber gives rest to his spirits, may, I hope, not unfitly exercise thy consideration.
As Donne gently slumbers and awaits his death, so the narrative's diachronic account of Donne's life rests momentarily in its inexorable movement toward its own exhaustion. Activated now is a digressive, synchronic account that seeks to reanimate this life-converted-into-text (this ‘life-text’) by deferring, if not denying, the dis-embodiment or disengagement of the sympathetic bond between biographer and biographical subject. Although this effort cannot succeed (eventually the digression must give way again to the diachronic narrative), it establishes the possibility of an ongoing alteration in which the mutual displacement of alternative narrative strategies constantly reanimates the life-text. This is a discursive tactic Walton uses yet again in this narrative and repeatedly employs in his other Lives. He forsakes it only when he can and must supersede it: as his subject's life and his narrative of that life draw to an end, his strategy of deferral is displaced by an even more ‘miraculous’ tactic—a transcendent reanimation, a divine alteration beyond discourse.16
The story of Donne's friendship with George Herbert, the central passage of this first synchronic alteration, typifies its basic concerns and indicates that, like the diachronic account which it is momentarily dislodging, this digression re-inscribes the language of sympathetic employment. Like Donne, Herbert is a divine poet, from whose book of devotional poems, The Temple (1633), “the Reader may attain habits of Peace and Piety, and all the gifts of the Holy Ghost and Heaven: and may by still reading, still keep those sacred fires burning upon the Altar of so pure a heart” (64). Appropriately, this language evokes that of The Temple, particularly “The Altar,” the well-known poem shaped like an altar, “Made of a heart, and cemented with teares.”17 Like Herbert, the narrative has made an altar of its language and its heart, an altar upon which the “great and glorious flames” sparked when the introduction “officiously set the Authors memory on fire” (21) can continue to burn as the “sacred fires” of Donne's pious language re-inscribed in the narrative. Moreover (like Donne and Wotton, Donne and his wife, and Donne and his biographer), Donne and Herbert share “a long and dear friendship, made up by such a Sympathy of inclinations, that they coveted and joyed to be in each others Company” (64). This is the kind of sympathetic relationship we have traced earlier in the narrative, an attachment founded in mutual affective and spiritual “inclinations” and “still maintained by many sacred indearments” (64), which are typified here by the reprinting of poems Donne and Herbert exchange concerning Christ's Cross as an anchor.18 Hence the synchronic account continues to explore the spiritual langauge that embodies the diachronic account: the Donne re-presented here is more or less the same Donne who rests near death in the sentences immediately preceding this digression. This effort to defer this death and to reanimate him through an alternative narrative strategy is merely strategic: the only significant change Donne can now undergo is death, which Walton will present as a permanent conversion beyond language and the temporary discursive variety it induces.
Thus, when the diachronic account resumes with the sentence “But I return from my long digression,” it is still confronted, as it immediately confronts Donne, with the problem of responding to a premature “‘report of my death,’” a report mixed with “‘an unfriendly, and God knows an ill-grounded interpretation’” that “‘I was not so ill as I pretended, but withdrew my self to live at ease, discharged of preaching.’” These are charges which the narrative, like Donne, is anxious to deny (both about Donne and itself). Donne's response could also serve as the narrative's: “‘It hath been my desire, and God may be pleased to grant it, that I might dye in the Pulpit; if not that, yet that I might take my death in the Pulpit, that is, dye the sooner by occasion of those labours’” (73-74). Accordingly, Donne rises from his sickbed to undertake “his last employment,” appearing once more at the pulpit, his “Text [so] prophetically chosen” that many of his auditors “thought … that Dr. Donne had preach't his own Funeral Sermon” (75). As Donne struggles up from his deathbed to re-establish his “holy ambition to perform that sacred work” of preaching at the pulpit, so the recently resumed diachronic account is now “prepared” to perform “that imployment” for which it too has “long thirsted” (74-75) and to which it is now committed—the preaching of Donne's and its own funeral sermon.
This employment, which occupies the rest of the narrative, begins with the response to the premature report of Donne's death and with Donne's rising to preach his final sermon. It continues with a statement Donne makes “the next day after his Sermon” (75), a statement which reviews the language and concerns of his (and the narrative's) past and prefigures his (and its) future: “within a few days I also shall go hence, and be no more seen. And my preparation for this change is become my nightly meditation upon my bed. … and looking back upon my life past, I now plainly see it was his hand prevented me from all temporal employment; and that it was his Will I should never settle nor thrive till I entered into the Ministry. … I know he looks not upon me now as I am of my self, but as I am in my Saviour … I am therefore full of unexpressible joy, and shall dye in peace” (76-77). As we have seen, this conversion “from all temporal employment” to the sacred calling of “the Ministry” emplots the language and strategy of alteration with which the narrative has tried to reanimate Donne's life-text. Now, as the narrative prepares for its ‘extinction,’ for the ‘quenching’ (extinguere) of its flames which will “be no more seen,” it prepares for the “change” which will alter life-made-text into text-made-life, for the miraculous, visionary conversion through which Donne and the narrative will be seen not “as I am of my self, but as I am in my Saviour.” This is the change that will rescue from the flames both the narrative and the altered discursive relationships which it envisions for this emerging plot of generic recognition.
Significantly, this change is initiated not in the altar, the sacramental language of which is ritualistically always the same (that is, unalterable), but in the pulpit, where reading and (especially) commenting on holy text induce discursive variety. It is not as priest but as preacher that Donne displays his “most particular grace” (49), his astonishing capacity to be “that man where Language chose to stay / And shew her utmost power” (87). In the pulpit, as in the biographical narrative, language can convert life-made-text into text-made-life, can transform human death into biographical life and biographical death into a discursive existence continuously renewed. Hence it is in the pulpit, where holy text is altered, constantly and variously contextualized, that the narrative locates itself as it confronts its biographical subject's and its own death. In preaching its own funeral sermon, the narrative seeks and finds a way to honor the complementary functions of Donne's sacred calling and yet to convert itself and English biography once again.
III
This final change, this last conversion in and of the narrative, is brought about through a maneuver characteristic of the sacramentalizing culture in which the narrative situates its biographical subject and of the secularized/spiritualized form of life-writing with which Walton's Life of Donne emplots English biography. Perhaps the best way of describing this maneuver is to term it a monumentalizing—a converting of an individual existence, biographical subject, or biographical narrative into a monument. For this is indeed the activity in which the narrative is next employed, as it describes how Donne “easily yielded at this very time to have a Monument made for him,” a “white Marble” likeness modeled after a drawing of Donne in his funeral shroud, an unusual pose upon which the dying subject insisted. Later, the monument was placed in St. Paul's (probably facing the altar) and to it was “affixed” a Latin epitaph which, the narrative asserts, was composed by Donne himself (78). The notion of the biographical narrative as itself a monument has already been introduced by Cotton's dedicatory poem (9):
Where one, has fortunately found a place,
More faithful to him, than his Marble was:
Which eating age, nor fire, shall e're deface.
A Monument! that, as it has, shall last
And prove a Monument to that defac't:
It self, but with the world, not to be rac'd.
Walton's Life of Donne emerges in Cotton's poem as a monument analogous to the marble statue at St. Paul's, but “more faithful” because, unlike that other public monument to Donne's memory (which, as Cotton's verses and a note attached to them suggest, was damaged by “the late dreadful fire” [9]),19 this narrative will escape immolation as (to quote Walton's introduction again) it contrives to “thus officiously set the Authors memory on fire” (21).
The biographical narrative as a monument to the biographical subject's memory is a familiar image that Walton's narrative (itself enclosed by Cotton's dedicatory and Walton's elegiac invocations of this image) helped to incorporate into English biography. The various intertwined senses of the terms “monument” and “memory” suggest how appropriate the image is to biography. Besides “a structure of stone or other lasting material erected in memory of the dead, either over the grave or in some part of a sacred edifice,” the term “monument” (derived from a Latin word meaning “something that remains, a memorial”) also signified to the mid-seventeenth century “a sepulchre,” “a written document” or “record” or a “piece of information given in writing,” and “a token (of some fact)” or a “mark … serving to identify.” Among the many senses of “memory” are the now obsolete denotations current in Walton's time, both of which are still retained in the term “memorial”: “a memorial tomb, shrine, chapel, or the like; a monument”; and “a memorial writing; a historical account; a record of a person or an event; a history” (OED). Hence the biographical narrative as monument/memory/memorial is a written document which records, identifies, enshrines, and entombs—a textualized token of fact which functions as the sacred, monumentalized structure of perpetuated memory. This is the final employment of Walton's Life of Donne: the undertaking which will restore the endangered relationship between biographer and biographical subject; the undertaking which will make Donne live again as it converts life-made-text into text-made-life; the undertaking through which the narrative (like Donne's monument) will seem (the narrative is quoting Wotton) “to breath faintly; and, Posterity shall look upon it as a kind of artificial miracle” (83).20
The narrative's ultimate effort to confront its own and Donne's death by miraculously converting itself into a monumentalized memorial that reanimates its biographical subject is undertaken through the dense language of employment and conversion we have been tracing. This ‘undertaking’ begins, appropriately enough, at “the gates of death and the grave,” as the biographer once again informs his reader that Donne will “rest,” this time for a brief synchronic account of various “Pictures” of Donne “in several habits, at several ages, and in several postures” (79). The first “Picture” is of Donne as a fashionable youth, whose “Motto then was, How much shall I be chang'd, / Before I am chang'd,” a representation which the narrative compares with “his now dying Picture” by invoking the word “change” seven times in the next paragraph. This comparison concludes with the narrative's remarking how Donne “would as often say, His great and most blessed change was from a temporal, to a spiritual imployment,” “the beginning” of which was “his first entring into sacred Orders; and serving his most merciful God at his Altar” (79-80).21 Here again, in the language of change, of the altering altar, the narrative reviews its initial conversion from temporal to spiritual employment. Then, “after the drawing this Picture,” the narrative represents Donne as he “retired himself to his bed-chamber” and “lay fifteen days earnestly expecting his hourly change,” that is, of course, “change” as his and the narrative's final conversion in and as death. With the pun on his name anticipated by Cotton's dedicatory poem, Donne ends his life of language (“closed many periods of his faint breath”) “by saying often, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done” (80-81). Now “speechless,” he envisions heaven, “close[s] his eyes; and then dispose[s] his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him.”
Hence, in an unalterable posture, ends “the Life” which the next sentence epitomizes as “Thus variable, thus vertuous.” Donne will change no more. “His speech, … his ready and faithful servant,” has “become useless to him that now conversed with God on earth, as Angels are said to do in heaven, only by thoughts and looks,” but it “left him not till the last minute of his life” (81-82). Unable to converse except with God, Donne abandons or is abandoned by the language of his life; ‘conversing’ with God, he will be finally ‘converted’ (like ‘alter’ and ‘altar,’ the two words share a Latin root) beyond the language that was and is still (in this narrative) his life (or the text of his life) into “a posture as required not the least alteration.” This desire to convert beyond conversing, to become “speechless, and [see] heaven by that illumination by which he saw it” (81), to be employed as the “ready and faithful servant” (a re-inscription of the introduction's “Pompey's poor bondman”) who erects an unalterable monument that closes the many periods by which the biographer attempts to memorialize the biographical subject, is the sympathetic employment which this and, indeed, most biographical narratives undertake. Most biographies implicitly or explicitly claim that they can change life into text and then back into life again: that biography is a preserving monument which escapes the flames by which it sets the biographical subject's memory on fire; that biography is a converting vision which illuminates forever the fitness of the relationship between biographer and biographical subject; that biography is “a kind of artificial miracle” that will enable all biographical narratives to claim of the “small quantity of … dust” (which their monumentalized biographical subject has become) what Walton's narrative claims in its last sentence—“But I shall see it reanimated” (84).
Thus the narrative ends with “A Valediction, forbidding to Mourn,” with a leave-taking, a farewell, which denies or at least challenges its own and Donne's disembodiment. In a characteristic gesture, it returns to and turns about Donne's language, particularly the language of the sermons, which, in the early editions, followed the biographical narrative.22 For instance, Donne's final sermon (“his own Funeral Sermon”) contains a passage (“by recompacting this dust into the same body, and reanimating the same body with the same soule”) which inscribes the relatively rare seventeenth-century word “reanimate” in a verbal and conceptual context similar to the end of Walton's narrative.23 Hence, like the entire narrative, the final re-inscribed sentence (“But I shall see it reanimated”) contextualizes the sympathy of souls by employing the language of the biographical subject as the language of the biographer. Moreover, its privilege of place, its valedictory locale, implies yet another alteration entwined in its language. For its last word, “reanimated,” suggests that the textualizing and spiritualizing conversion we have been tracing in the narrative's language of “incorporation” has or is occurring. Corpus is converted or reanimated into anima: that is, body returns to soul, textual embodiment returns to living substance (or essence).24 Valediction, a speaking farewell, becomes interdiction, not only in the sense of the medieval church (debarring a person from ecclesiastical functions and privileges, as the biographer has done by appropriating his subject's devotional language and spiritual duties) but also in the sense or state in which the narrative represents Donne on his deathbed—that is, an inter-diction, a speechless, blessed condition, a conversation without words, a speaking between man and God “only by thoughts and looks” as the soul departs the body and ascends to heaven. In this interdiction, this sacred, wordless locale between body and soul, life and text, man and God, biographical subject and biographer, Walton's Life of Donne ultimately situates biography.25
IV
As I have suggested, the Life of Donne delineates some of the symbolic patterns and fundamental issues that characterize English biography after Walton. For instance, its appropriation of hagiography and ecclesiastical biography emphasizes in these traditional forms of English life-writing a dynamic relationship between secular employment and sacred work that English biography probes throughout the succeeding centuries—as, for example, in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, which, as we shall see, ironically de-authorizes the ‘ministry of work’ and the ‘work of ministry’ with which Waltonian biography ordains the traditional English life-course. Moreover, the Life of Donne implies that English biography will continue to alter in and between the employment of various secular and sacred structures of authority, a prosopographical approach which describes biography as undertaken or underwritten by state, church, family, academy, and other cultural institutions. This approach is memorialized most conspicuously in such collections as Johnson's Lives of the Poets, the Dictionary of National Biography, and the many other biographical dictionaries, compilations, registers, and records frequently and continuously sponsored by these institutions. Furthermore, Walton's Life of Donne suggests that the narrative situation of English biography will continue to endorse a constantly shifting relationship between biographer and biographical subject, a relationship marked either by the blessed, wordless condition of valediction becoming interdiction, where the biographical subject is treated with a reverence which Boswell (describing his reading of Waltonian biography) labelled “unction,”26 or by interdiction becoming malediction, where the word as curse or slander is the instrument of damnation and, as in ‘debunking’ biography, suggests an alternative vision of the relationship between biographer and biographical subject. In these and many other ways that we shall note in subsequent chapters Walton's Life of Donne inscribes and describes English biography as it has come to be written and read over the last three hundred years.27
Perhaps the most significant contribution to generic recognition undertaken by Walton's Life of Donne, however, is its effort to present biography as altering in its employment between life and text. As we have seen, the Life of Donne incorporates into English biography a plot of alteration which implies that biographical narrative can summarily authorize the sympathetic, visionary conversion of life into text and then reconvert the miraculously preserved monument of that life-made-text into a reanimated text-made-life. This is a ‘law’ or ‘principle’ of alteration which, as we shall see in the next chapter, adduces the plot of the generic frame “recognizing the life-text.”
Thus we shall end this chapter with a brief preview of the concerns and argument of Chapter 3, which offers a formal theoretical framework for recognizing how the familiar biographical commitment to ‘facthood’ emerges from varying relationships between and among the natural, the cultural, and the narratable, that is, the ways in which biographical recognition habitually oversees the conversion of life into text and text into life. This looking forward begins with a glance backward at a word to which this chapter has already devoted much attention. The Latin root of “employment” is implicare, to fold, which, as we shall discover in the next chapter, is a fit term to describe how biographical recognition conventionally tries to unobtrusively fold life (the ‘pre-text’) into text by establishing an ontological space between the natural and the narratable where the cultural ‘facts’ of institutional documentation are treated as remnants of the natural events of a concrete life.28 In this ontological space of life-made-text, this cultural life-text which is both life and text simultaneously, a ‘fact’ becomes a remnant, a discursive trace or track of a natural occurrence in the concrete world that can be employed, implied, folded into the narrative, where it becomes an unalterable monument of and to the life of the biographical subject—a traditional strategy which, as we have seen, Waltonian biography deploys and authorizes.
What this conventional maneuver conceals is that this folding may be no more (or less) than an epistemological operation of discursive conversion, through which the activity of living can be treated as the activity of encoding and then re-encoded in and by the life-text (which is itself re-encoded in and by the narrative). To employ the fold in this way is to deny any vestigial, natural connection between ‘facts’ and events; rather, to do so is to imply that a fact is a trace within discourse of discourse, a culturally motivated, value-laden sign that, simultaneously, encodes and re-encodes a self-referential process which has been called “unlimited semiosis.”29 Employed or folded in this way, the life-text resists the monumental as it alters continuously in and between various discursive contexts. Employed or folded in this way, the life-text avoids the monumentalizing of the memorial, the entombment in a written statement of facts, which characterizes and threatens the life and death of all biographical subjects, all biographical narratives. As we have seen, Walton's Life of Donne confronts this unavoidable situation as it alters between various approaches to the textualizing and contextualizing of Donne's life and to the threat of its and Donne's death. Yet it always seeks to convert (to turn about, not turn away from) this constantly altering law of conversion which governs the generic frame “recognizing the life-text.” That it does so, that it (re-)inscribes this alteration between the ontological and epistemological operations of monumental employment as it seeks the blessed inter-diction beyond human language, is yet another witness to the secular power and spiritual grace with which Walton's Life of Donne incorporates English biography.
Notes
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Notable discussions of traditional narrative, generic, and symbolic structures in Walton's Donne can be found in David Novarr, The Making of Walton's Lives (Ithaca: Cornell, 1958); R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970); Francisque Costa, L'Oeuvre D'Izaak Walton (1593-1683), Etudes Anglaises, no. 48 (Montreal, Paris, Bruxelles: Didier, 1973); John Butt, “Izaak Walton's Methods in Biography,” Essays and Studies (English Association), 19(1934), 67-84, and Biography in the Hands of Walton, Johnson, and Boswell (Los Angeles: California, 1966), pp. 1-18; Richard Wendorf, “‘Visible Rhetorick’: Izaak Walton and Iconic Biography,” Modern Philology, 82:3(1985), 269-91; and Judith H. Anderson, “Walton: Likeness and Truth,” in Biographical Truth: the representation of historical persons in Tudor-Stuart writing (New Haven and London: Yale, 1984), pp. 52-71.
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Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson, World's Classics (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford, 1927), p. 37. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically by page number only. Until the publication of the new Oxford edition, the World's Classic version, based on the 1675 second collected edition of Walton's Lives, will remain the most frequently cited and readily available text in scholarly discourse. The details of many of the textual differences among the 1640, 1658, 1670, and 1675 editions of the Life of Donne are discussed in Novarr, pp. 19-126. Novarr's basic points can be summarized briefly. Walton's “Elegy” (first printed in the 1633 edition of Donne's Poems) and Walton's presumed editing of the 1635 Poems can be approached as a kind of proto-biography upon which Walton drew in putting together his hastily composed “prefatory memoir” of 1640. The many minor stylistic changes of 1658, which was the first of Walton's Lives to be printed independently, heightened Donne's dignity and religiosity and “made the Life into a work of art.” The 1670 first collected edition, to which Walton's “Elegy” was first appended, continued this “process of taking nothing for granted” by seeking “precise impression” through “double expression.” By the 1675 second collected edition the original narrative “had doubled in length” through the accretion of many minor changes and the addition, in 1675, of “three apocryphal stories about Donne.” “With every revision Donne approached closer to sainthood,” so that what had begun in 1640 as “not a typical hagiography” because “its detail was too particularized” became, by 1675, “Walton's closest approach to hagiography.”
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The crucial narrative functioning of this “letter” is adumbrated by R. E. Bennett's demonstration in “Walton's Use of Donne's Letters,” Philological Quarterly, 16(Jan. 1937), 30-34, that what I have been calling a “letter” is “a composite of eight passages from five letters, all of which had been printed in 1651,” a composite which Walton introduced with the phrase “And thus in other letters” but presented as if they formed one continuous epistolary narrative. Bennett considers that Walton's alterations and paraphrases do not conceal an “intention to deceive” but reveal a “purpose to put in relief Donne's gloom” and “may be essentially true regardless of the sources of the details.” Especially relevant are the alterations Bennett notes in the passage beginning “but to be no part of any body”: by dropping the first part of the second sentence, substituting “I” for “they,” and making several other minor changes, “Walton has caused Donne to seem to talk directly about himself instead of about himself by means of a general truth.” Nevertheless, for our purposes at least, the key words “incorporated” and “body” are retained. See also Novarr, pp. 98-99, and 99n17.
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“Walton's account [of this ‘Vision’ episode] is riddled with inaccuracies. … The seventeenth century cherished such tales of apparitions and supernatural appearances. Even so, it is not inconceivable that some such hallucination occurred. … In the course of telling and retelling, the story, no doubt, became more and more circumstantial and therefore less accurate, but the substratum of truth may well be there” (Bald, Life, pp. 252-53). This is one of the many instances in which Bald and other modern scholars examine Walton's factual reliability. The key articles in this examination are by Butt, Bennett, I. A. Shapiro, John Sparrow, and Evelyn M. Simpson. Of course, Bald is the major mid-twentieth-century authority on this issue; even before his biography of Donne appeared, he summarized this ongoing evaluative project in “Historical Doubts Respecting Walton's Life of Donne,” in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: Toronto, 1964), pp. 69-84.
Although finding fault with Walton's documentary integrity, twentieth-century scholarship has generally adhered to Bald's opinion that Walton's narrative “has traced the main outlines of Donne's life: even if the pattern has since had to be modified here and there, the essential impression remains” (Life, p. 11). Other scholars make the same point with the same metaphor or use a “portrait” metaphor in a similar context. See, e.g., Butt, “Walton's Methods,” p. 81; Bennett, “Walton's Use of Donne's Letters,” p. 34; H. C. Beeching, “Izaak Walton's Life of Donne: an apology,” Cornhill Magazine, n.s. 8 (Jan.-June 1900), 255; and The English Works of George Herbert, ed. George Herbert Palmer, 6 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), I, 46. Two commonly held notions influence this acceptance of Walton's ‘impression’ or ‘portrait’ of Donne: (1) “Walton's ideals were not those of present-day historical scholarship” (Bald, “Historical Doubts,” p. 69), and (2) “Walton's contemporaries seem to have recognized the fundamental truth of the Life” (Bald, Life, p. 13). But I do not wish to become involved in evaluating documentary evidence or deciding vexing problems of biographical interpretation. I am only peripherally interested in approaching Walton's biography as a nominally factual narrative to be evaluated in terms of its conformity to standards of scholarly research developed and enshrined (for the most part) well after the mid-seventeenth century. Primarily, I wish to approach Walton's narrative as an aesthetic object revealing and concealing language-structures through which biography can be distinguished from and contextualized with other (nominally) literary and nonliterary genres. A recent article which generally adopts this approach is Clayton D. Lein, “Art and Structure in Walton's Life of Mr. George Herbert,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 46(Winter 1976/77), 162-76.
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“Perhaps [Walton] was not the first biographer to recognize the potential value of such material: but certainly he is the first biographer to employ it so extensively,” Butt, Biography in the Hands, p. 9.
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In discussing the “Vision” section as “the major addition to the Life of 1675,” Novarr asserts that it is “a kind of double dream” linked to Monica and her son, St. Augustine, as well as to “the doctrine of sympathy of souls” as inscribed in “A Valediction, forbidding to Mourn,” a title which is, as Novarr incidentally reports, “unique” for this poem (pp. 111-13).
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All these senses of “undertaker” were current sometime in the seventeenth century, although, according to the OED, two of them (one who prepares a literary work and one who arranges funerals) did not enter written language until after 1675. Of course, the pre-dating of various senses of words listed in the OED has long been a small, scholarly industry, and the OED only claimed to list the earliest written use of a word which its researchers could find, not the ur-written usage or the moment of the word's assuming a particular nuance of meaning in spoken language (and thus becoming available for puns in a literature which was, after all, frequently and at times exclusively circulated in oral subcultures). One alternative is to accept the premise of much twentieth-century revisionist literary study, that is, that all meanings of all words are entangled in the net of language and hence are always already present. Another seventeenth-century sense of “undertaker” is an investor in a joint-stock company, certainly a familiar usage to a merchant like Walton. In this respect, we could say that Walton (and his friends) invest cultural and literary stock in Donne, an economic approach to biographical recognition explored in detail in Chapter 6 (“Recognizing the Biographer: Boswell's Life of Johnson”). See also Chapter 1 (“Introduction: Recognizing Biography”).
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Actually, the narrative explicitly attributes “an unwilling-willingness” to the attitude with which Donne's wife gives her “faint Consent to the Journey” (39), but the term also describes well the attitude of the “I” of the introductory materials and the Donne of the “Vision” section. Moreover, the term echoes the claim of “The Epistle to the Reader” that, unlike the writing of the lives of Donne and Hooker, which were “accidental” and/or “injoin'd,” the life of Herbert is “a Free-will offering, … writ, chiefly to please my self” (5-6). As we shall see, “Free-will offering” is also the phrase with which Walton's elegy on Donne describes itself (89).
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Situating Walton's Donne at the intersection of medieval hagiography and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical biography is a conventional trope of biographical study and Walton criticism, to which we shall attend only in passing. Donald A. Stauffer, for example, sees all Walton's Lives as marking both a “culmination” and a “development” of the ongoing “biographical tradition” as they “raised to perfection the saint's life in English” and revealed their author's “belief in biography as an art.” See English Biography Before 1700 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1930), pp. 91, 109, 115, 117. See also, e.g., Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: a history of literary biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 20; English Biography in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto (1951; rpt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 35; Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth, 1928), p. 69; Paul Murray Kendall, The Art of Biography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), pp. 97-98; Robert Gittings, The Nature of Biography (Seattle: Washington, 1978), p. 26; and, for a summary of a related tradition, Michael P. Rewa, Reborn as Meaning: panegyrical biography from Isocrates to Walton (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983).
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Novarr, pp. 28-51.
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Donne's intimate friendships were literally and figuratively sealed by his sending his closest friends a copy of his seal of the Cross upon an anchor. Among others, copies were sent to Henry King, George Herbert, and Sir Henry Wotton, all of whom figure prominently in either the prefatory materials or interior narrative of Walton's Life of Donne. See Walton, p. 63, Bald, Life, p. 487, and Novarr, p. 74. King, whose letter to him praising the Lives Walton inserts before his own introduction, was also one of the executors of Donne's will (Walton, p. 68, and Bald, p. 488). George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, to whom Walton dedicated the Lives and “with whom Walton lived for many years in the episcopal palace at Farnham, … was a younger contemporary of King at Westminster School and Christ Church” (Butt, “Walton's Methods,” p. 68). Donne and Richard Corbet, Bishop of Oxford, whose epitaph on Donne Walton inserts just after his narrative, were linked by a contemporary in 1621 as “‘pleasant poeticall deanes’”; moreover, in 1646 Donne's son presented Corbet with a copy of his father's Biathanatos and also “apparently edited Corbet's Poems” (Bald, pp. 408, 550). All these associations run deep. As Butt remarks, this pattern of friendship “was part of the acquaintance that prepared Walton for his biographical work, and allowed him to take advantage of the opportunity when it was offered” (“Walton's Methods,” p. 68). Indeed, the intricacy of the friendships upon which Walton bases his biographies is one of the major themes of a forthcoming, full-length, scholarly biography of Walton by Clayton D. Lein, portions of which I have been privileged to read in manuscript.
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Novarr describes Donne, at 53, as “the most eminent preacher in England” (p. 24); Bald discusses “his later reputation as one of the great preachers of his age” (Life, p. 315).
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Bald's description (Life, p. 322) of Donne as the Reader at Lincoln's Inn (drawn from various sources) reinforces Walton's general presentation of the impact of Donne as preacher.
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“The death of his wife marked a turning point in Donne's life; it deepened his sense of religious vocation, and produced something much closer to a conversion than the feelings which had prompted him to enter the Church,” Bald, Life, p. 328. This is a common observation about Donne's life.
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In remarking that Donne “was doubtless well read in the literature of penitence and conversion from the Confessions of St. Augustine down to his own time,” Bald cites language from Donne's sermons which implicitly and explicitly links the recovery from illness with conversion (Life, pp. 235-36). The conversion motif has been noted before in Walton studies. For a recent example, see Costa (p. 426): “Cette Vie [Donne] reste, en effet, un récit dramatique fondé sur le thème augustinien de la conversion.” Bald, who characterizes the Devotions as “unique in the annals of literature,” quotes the book's description of the onset of the illness: “‘I was surpriz'd with a sodaine change, and alteration to worse …’” (Life, p. 451).
Here we can observe that the term “alteration” was embedded in Walton's cultural context, as were many of the other key terms we have been tracing in Walton's narrative. Several examples (among many) from Bald's biography should indicate the contemporary pervasiveness of such terms as incorporate, employment, fitness, and undertake. Bald quotes a 1653 history describing Doncaster (with whom Donne travelled to Germany) as “very fit for his imployment” (p. 348); quotes a letter from Carlisle to Donne (1622) describing the printing of one of Donne's sermons as “the onely employment it needs” and its dedication as “fittest to my Lord of Buckingham” (p. 435); quotes a letter from Donne (1608) noting “I have had occasion to imploy all my friends” and citing one especially who “performed what ever he undertook, (and my requests were the measures of his undertakings)” (p. 161); quotes another letter from Donne (1614) describing “certain men (whom they call undertakers),” who try to influence parliamentary elections (p. 285); and reminds us that a seventeenth-century use of the phrase “to be incorporated” was to be admitted into a university through the awarding of an honorary degree (p. 227).
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It is possible to see this alternation between diachronic and synchronic narrative strategies as an ancient biographical tradition. A. J. Gossage summarizes the argument of the early twentieth-century German scholar F. Leo, who “distinguished two main elements in Greek and Roman biography”: “Chronologie, broadly speaking, is the narrative account of a man's career, containing his accomplishments in peace and war, in a chronological sequence, while Eidologie is the classified account of deeds, incidents, habits, and sayings illustrative of his character without any chronological relation to each other.” See “Plutarch,” in Latin Biography, ed. T. A. Dorey (New York: Basic Books, 1967), p. 57. Leo and other classicists associate these narrative modes with Plutarchan and Suetonian biography respectively, although there continues to be much scholarly debate about how rigorously and how broadly to apply these categories. See, e.g., Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971), pp. 18-20, 86-87, and Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: a quest for the holy man (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California, 1983), pp. 51-55. All narratives can be said to deploy the diachronic (chronological) and the synchronic (eidological); indeed, these strategies are constantly displacing each other, although we may wish to characterize particular narratives as generally or at specific points privileging one of them. What is especially interesting about Walton's narratives is the biographer's reflexive gesture of calling attention to certain instances when he is shifting from one to another of these constantly alternating narrative strategies. Contemporary critical practice often ascribes to such a gesture a degree of ‘conscious artistry’ with which we do not usually credit Plutarchan or Suetonian biography.
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The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), p. 26.
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“To symbolize his new life [as an Anglican priest], Donne had a new seal made,” Bald, Life, p. 305. For a judicious treatment of “Walton and the Poems about Donne's Seal,” see Novarr, Appendix B, pp. 503-6. This tracing of a sympathetic relationship is characteristic of mature Waltonian biography: see Lein, pp. 165-68.
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But Bald notes: “Miraculously, Donne's monument suffered less damage than any other, and survived almost intact.” Bald also notes that “from the first the monument attracted a great deal of attention” and served as a model for many other similar monuments of shrouded figures. “It seems to have been Donne's intention to represent the resurrection of the body; the shrouded figure is rising from the funeral urn,” and the last line of the epitaph can be translated as “Whose name is the Rising.” “It must have faced the altar” (Life, pp. 533-36). See also Novarr, p. 72n17, and 110.
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To the mid-seventeenth century “artificial” could signify not only contrived, unnatural, fictitious, or deceitful but also artful, workmanlike, or scholarly (OED).
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As Novarr points out, Walton mistranslates the Spanish motto (“Antes muerto que mudado”), which probably ought to read “Sooner dead than changed.” I agree with Novarr that this mistranslation is “ingenious and artful,” and that its elaboration transforms “the comparison of two pictures into a recapitulation of Donne's life, … into a testimonial of Donne's inherent religiosity and even into a meditation on man's journey through life” (pp. 118-19).
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Butt asserts that Walton's Donne was “frankly commemorative. … a somewhat hastily produced preface to a great volume of sermons. … a memorial tribute to the man who had preached the eighty sermons that followed” (Biography in the Hands, pp. 3-4).
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The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California, 1962), X, 239. Novarr also traces “reanimate” to Donne's final sermon (pp. 62-63).
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Simpson, Novarr, and Bald all point out that the end of Walton's narrative, especially the death-bed scene, echoes Donne's funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert, A Sermon of Commemoration for the Lady Danvers. Bald notes that Walton heard the sermon preached and later bought a published copy of it (Life, p. 497n1). Simpson claims that “Walton's indebtedness … is not merely verbal, it is seen also in his arrangement of his material” (“The Biographical Value of Donne's Sermons,” RES, n.s. 2[1951], 350). Novarr also catalogues similar narrative and verbal details as he argues that Walton “does not turn the Life into a sermon of commemoration; he writes a sermon of commemoration at the end of the Life as a summary of the life” (pp. 65-67). Among the verbal parallels noted is that between Walton's last sentence and the section of Donne's sermon describing “That body which now, whilst I speake, is mouldring, and crumbling into lesse and lesse dust. … That body which was the Tabernacle of a holy Soule, and a Temple of the holy Ghost” (Sermons, VIII, 92-93; see also Bald, Life, pp. 496-97, and Novarr, pp. 62-63).
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For the various senses of “valediction” and “interdiction” see the appropriate OED headings.
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Boswell: the ominous years 1774-1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle, The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 55, 175.
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Walton's impact on Johnson and Boswell, the major biographers of the next century, was profound. Johnson considered the Lives “one of his favourite books,” and the Life of Donne “the most perfect of them.” He once contemplated both editing the Lives and writing Walton's life, and later encouraged and assisted attempts at both projects. See Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934-50), II, 279-80, 283-85, 363-64, 445-46, 530, III, 107. Boswell, introduced to the Lives by Johnson, admired their “simplicity and pious spirit,” and planned both an annotated edition of the Lives and “a new life” of their author. See Boswell's Life, III, 107; The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the “Life of Johnson,” ed. Marshall Waingrow, The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, Research Edition, Boswell's Correspondence: vol. 2 (New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1969), pp. 567, 572; Boswell for the Defense 1769-1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Frederick A. Pottle, The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill, 1959), pp. 228, 236-37, 269; and Boswell: the ominous years, pp. 55, 74, 150, 175, 215-16, 280.
Walton's Lives were much edited and read in the nineteenth century. He was “a favorite of the Coleridge-Wordsworth group,” as evidenced by Wordsworth's sonnet, “Walton's Books of Lives,” and James Gillman's Life of Coleridge (1838), which began “with an eloquent tribute to Izaak Walton's art as a biographer” and which tried to present its subject “as a saint of the Waltonian pattern.” See Bald, Life, pp. 14-15, and B. R. McElderry, Jr., “Walton's Lives and Gillman's Life of Coleridge,” PMLA, 52(June 1937), 412-22. Novarr summarizes “The Walton Tradition” (pp. 3-16), and also suggests parallels between Walton and Strachey (pp. 493-96). Despite his key role in championing the revival of interest in Donne's poetry, Strachey nowhere explicitly reveals a close reading of Walton's Life of Donne. The only Stracheyan reference to Walton which I can find is in a review of early-twentieth-century biography of Wotton, to which Strachey briefly compares Walton's biography of Wotton (Spectatorial Essays [London: Chatto and Windus, 1964], pp. 18-23).
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Jacques Derrida associates the term “fold” (pli) with the edgeless bounding of genre theory (“The Law of Genre,” Glyph, 7[1980], 216, 221, 228). My notion of unobtrusively “folding” the pre-text into the text relies on texere, to weave. Hence pre-text as a “weaving before or in front” and consequently as a “covering” or “cloaking” which acts as a “disguise” or an “excuse”; and therefore “fold” as a “wrapping or covering,” a “layer (of cloth),” which bends, envelops, or entangles as it yields or swerves (from truth). Additional senses of “fold” are also pertinent here, especially “to roll up, as a scroll,” and “a leaf of a book” or “a sheaf of paper,” as well as the spiritual sense of an enclosure for sheep, that is, a congregation, church, or sect as “the fold of Christ.” Walton's Life of Donne implicitly invokes the “fold” in many of these senses as it envelops, entangles, enwraps, enscrolls, and encloses biographical narrative in the covering, yielding, textualizing and spiritualizing of Donne's life.
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See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana, 1976; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 66, 71, 200-01.
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