Gerard Manley Hopkins—A Stranger Still?

Extract

Biography is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences in popularity. Literary biography seems to be particularly in vogue. But the purpose of telling the story of some great author’s life is no longer simply historical or even hagiographical. In this post-structuralist age, the intention of such a pursuit as biography has to be expository —to get behind the public face and reveal the real man or woman; to deconstruct the myth and reconstruct the person and their ‘emotional, intellectual and psychological makeup’.’ It is precisely this which Professor Martin tries to do in his most recent biography ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life’.

Hopkins, the enigmatic priest-poet of the nineteenth century, seems in one way a particularly suitable candidate for such a treatment. On the surface there seems to exist such a very great divergence between his public persona, a Jesuit priest dedicated to the discipline of the Ignatian ‘Spiritual Exercises’, and the private man, a poet of great imagination and originality. Whether this dichotomy is seen as responsible for the psychological imbalances which intermittently afflicted him, or as the dynamic which is at the centre of his creativity hardly matters. On the other hand, the facts of Hopkins’ life, both public and to a large extent private, are very well established. His poems were published in their first collected edition in 1918; the personal journals were published in 1937 and the letters between 1935 and 1938. Professor Martin did, it seems, have access to the originals of the journals and to Jesuit sources especially with relation to the final period of Hopkins life in Dublin.