A New Hopkins Biography

BOOK REVIEWS A New Hopkins Biography Robert Bernard Martin. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1991. xvi + 448pp. $29.95 ROBERT MARTIN is probably the closest thing we have to an official popular biographer of Victorian authors. Though he has done much else over a distinguished career, from studies of Charlotte Bronte's novels to Victorian comic theory and even to detective stories (under the demipseudonym of Robert Bernard), his most accomplished work has been in the sphere of biography. He is the author of lives of Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson, and Edward FitzGerald, as well as the present biography of G. M. Hopkins. Of the pre-Hopkins biographies Martin's 1980 life of Tennyson has enjoyed the greatest popular and critical success, winning no fewer than four literary awards. All of Martin's biographies share some features, but perhaps the most striking is Martin's positing of a central, defining and illuminating quality that, as it were, "explains" his subject. This is often revealed by the title or subtitle of the work. Thus Tennyson has "an unquiet heart," and FitzGerald is "with friends possessed," while even as long ago as the biography of Kingsley, we learned from the title that the essential Kingsley was to be found in the "dust of combat." Let it speedily be said that the present reviewer does not necessarily disagree with these capsulizing flashes, especially when they are as persuasively presented as they are in Martin's biographies; but one does have reservations about the sufficiency of their hermeneutic character. Poor FitzGerald was indeed possessed with and by rather than of friends; and Kingsley is now remembered almost solely for his involvement in public controversy , most particularly the one that provoked Newman into writing the Apologia, a work that appeared two years before Hopkins was accepted into the Roman conununion by none other than Newman himself (though that reception was quite routine, as Martin makes clear, Newman having by then become the fashionable receiver of converting Oxonians and one who barely noticed Hopkins among the crowd). But though these insights do often capture essential elements of the personalities in question, they are also often limiting, especially from a literary point of view, for they seem to explain more than they do. What now do we understand of FitzGerald's magnificent rendition of the Rubáiyát from his addiction to his friends, or of, say, Kingsley's Water Babies (a landmark in children's literature) from his lamentable appe467 ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 tite for intellectual conflict? One is reminded of the literary practice of another industrious recorder of the lives of the Victorians, the biographer Georgina Battiscombe. Her Keble biography is subtitled A Study in Limitations—this of the man who created the Oxford Movement; her biography of Charlotte Mary Yonge is subtitled The Story of an Uneventful Life—this of a woman who wrote more novels than Trollope. (On the other hand, Battiscombe understands Tractarianism rather better than Martin.) Martin's method, like Battiscombe's, leads him to stress unduly whatever the chosen key element may be. In the case of the Hopkins life the key element is the "very private" character of that life, which is equivalent to what Martin sees as Hopkins's latent (if that is itself not too latent a word) homosexuality. In order to persuade the reader of the centrality of this aspect of Hopkins's life, Martin does two things that distinguish his biography from previous lives of Hopkins, one quite rewarding, the other less so. First, he devotes more than half of the book to Hopkins's life before the writing of "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which is the beginning of Hopkins's mature poetry, a point that most other biographies reach very much sooner. Second, he posits a life-defining love affair for Hopkins that is supposed to explain Hopkins's privacy and inwardness as well as the tension and power of his poetry. One should hasten to point out that the love affair does not in this instance refer to a consummated physical action, but it does mean an erotic attraction that went...