Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (FSG, 2022) is one of the best biographies I’ve read in several years. It doesn’t matter if the only thing you remember about the metaphysical poet John Donne are those tired quotes “no man is an island” and “never send for whom the bell tolls…” This is an electric account of the life of a poet whose brain teemed with brilliant, clever, secular and religious verse and who spent his life trying to find work to support his wife and family of ten children. He started out as a lawyer–one of several careers; went to prison for marrying an underage girl without her father’s permission; converted from Catholicism to Protestantism and became one of the most popular preachers of his day. I wrote an undergraduate thesis on John Donne and this biography embarrassed me for what I missed: the essence of this brilliant poet. Take a look at this poem: “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” which may be familiar to you, but entirely appropriate to read now in our cynical and chaotic times.
A Chance Meeting: American Encounters by Rachel Cohen (2004; NYRB 2024) is catnip for literary readers. In short chapters, Cohen writes about the coincidences that brought together artists, writers, photographers, and poets and how their work flourished from those happy accidents of influence. Henry James, William Dean Howells, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Willa Cather, Alfred Stieglitz, Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, and Richard Avedon are among the many whose life-changing friendships she recounts. The book opens with the eleven-year-old Henry James and his father visiting the lower Manhattan studio of Matthew Brady to have their picture taken. The young James is fascinated by the daguerreotype process; he begins to think about the portrayal of style and class, the notions that would monopolize his fiction all his life. The chapter that recounts the beginning of the friendship between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop is remarkable; equally remarkable is the one that tells of the first meeting of the artist Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. Cohen’s insights into the thoughts and feelings of these artists in pivotal moments of their lives are enchanting and insightful. Sometimes I read several chapters in one sitting; other times I read one chapter and then had to put the book down and think for a while. A delight from beginning to end.
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