JOHN DONNE: The Reformed Soul
by John Stubbs
Viking ₤25, 592 pages

The publishing industry decrees that the market will bear a new life of a major literary figure every 30 years or so. Normally this involves sticking the old biography into the equivalent of a microwave, having added, if possible, a shaking of sex. In 1970 R.C. Bald published the results of decades of scrupulous and exhaustive research into the life and writings of the Renaissance poet John Donne, who was born a Catholic in 1572 and died Dean of St Paul’s in 1631. Nothing significant has come to light since Bald’s exemplary biography, but John Stubbs, and Viking, have decided that Donne’s extraordinary story was ripe for retelling.

Donne was fortunate in attracting the scholarly attentions of the indefatigable Bald, but seems to me to have drawn the short straw in having Stubbs attempt his makeover. This is an awful book: it is horribly written, frequently misleading and has nothing new or interesting to say about Donne or the historical period he lived through. It is microwave biography at its worst.

Stubbs must know that it is impossible to date with any certainty Donne’s songs and sonnets, which circulated in manuscript among Donne’s friends but were not published until two years after his death. And yet, in a misguided effort to use the poetry to illuminate the life, he keeps presenting particular lyrics as having been inspired by particular circumstances. “The Sunne Rising” is made out to be a riposte to a tract by Donne’s father-in-law, who was unhappy about the secret marriage, in 1601, of his daughter Ann to impecunious Donne. The tract urges its readers to get up early, to which Donne “retorted snappishly... with Ann curled beside him: ‘Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windowes, and though curtaines call on us?’”

But the poem could have been written 10 years earlier, or years later. Indeed none of the songs and sonnets indicate that the beloved in question is the poet’s wife.

Equally absurd scenarios are contrived for other poems. We are categorically told that Donne wrote “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” on the eve of his departure for France in 1611. There is no evidence for this. When Stubbs writes that Ann, who was pregnant with their eighth child, had the “consolation” of being presented with one of Donne’s greatest poems, he is simply making things up. He cannot be trusted to give an accurate account of the poems he refers to either: in a precis of Elegy 4, he tells us that “the young couple shook the floor by night” with their strenuous sex: this is made up. The poem nowhere mentions this detail.

Still, the quotations from Donne, and indeed from Donne’s first biographer Izaac Walton, register as welcome oases in the deserts of Stubbs’ tiresomely jaunty prose. Essex, we are told, has lots of “pizzazz”, but he’s always tearing off “in a flap” or storming out “in a huff”. James I’s daughter, Elizabeth, is hit off as “a bubbly, spoilt but lovable girl”. In an effort to illustrate Donne’s famous pronouncement that “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”, every stage of his career is fleshed out with a series of laughably inept summaries of the lives and personalities of Elizabethan and Jacobean luminaries. Many of these are levered in from popular historians such as C.V. Wedgwood.

The blurb describes Stubbs as “one of the most remarkable biographers to have emerged in recent years”. Alas, this life of Donne is remarkable only for its dubious sleights of hand and overall crassness.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College London.