The numerous admirers of Seán Hewitt’s debut poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, will need no encouragement to pick up this slim but powerful memoir. That collection established Hewitt’s recurrent preoccupations, in its meditations on mortality, memory and queer desire, as extensions of a closely observed natural world, and his particular poetic voice, precise as frost on a fern.
All Down Darkness Wide is suffused with death, half in love with it. It is bookended by atmospheric evocations of the cruising ground in the cemetery below Liverpool’s louring Anglican cathedral and ends in a moving coda with the aftermath of Hewitt’s father’s death. In between, Hewitt gives disarmingly frank accounts of two love affairs with young men “who had entered the darkness and had struggled to leave it” and analyses the romantic compulsion to save a loved one from the worst effects of depression.
The first relationship is with Jack, a slightly older, much more confident Scottish PhD student Hewitt meets in his time at Cambridge. As he seemed brilliant, perfect, grounded, Jack’s off-stage suicide comes as a shock all the more devastating for the mystery surrounding it and all the undergraduate might-have-beens.
The second relationship, with a Swede called Elias, is far more concrete, adult stuff. Hewitt moves to Sweden with him, is welcomed into the family by Elias’s parents and the possibility of a shared future is just starting to seem assured when suicidal depression lays Elias low as unpredictably as a lightning strike on a summer meadow. In either case, the suggestion is that undeclared shame about sexuality may be to blame.
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The accounts are painful and honest but what enriches them and raises this memoir to another level are the extended passages where Hewitt links his growing sense of the impossibility of love being enough to pull someone back from the abyss to the stories of the queer despair of two great poets with whom he has a particular affinity: the tortured Gerard Manley Hopkins and the suicidal Swede Karin Boye, whose lyrics Elias helps him translate as English poetry.
Mental contortions
Hewitt writes devastatingly of the mental contortions of the gay schoolboy struggling to pass, “the stealth tactics of conformity: how to hide a lisp, how to correct a too-expressive walk, how to pitch my voice lower, which I practised in my bedroom for many weeks during puberty”. He is similarly clear-eyed in his assessment of the mental contortions of liberal parents. “When they said, ‘I’m just scared that you’ll be unhappy,’ what I really felt they were saying was ‘I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.’ A sort of threat, veiled as a kindness.” The book is as much a shrewd analysis of the processes of internalised homophobia as it is of the dubious romance all too often cast over stories of suicide. “For too long I had chosen to cohabit with the world’s tacit disdain. Then, before I realised what was happening, the people I had hidden behind turned against me.”
One of the quietest, most thoughtful sections of the narrative comes when Hewitt is doing his best to coax Elias out from beneath an utterly flattening bout of depression by working alongside the bed he cannot seem to leave. He is translating poems by Boye. From time to time, he rouses Elias to help him fathom the multiple resonances of this Swedish word or that and finds that Boye’s luminous lines come to form a fragile bridge between them. And this in turn seems to justify the very point of poetry: “the deep, painful recesses of a mind somehow brought onto the page…”
This is a book glittering with beguiling detail, from Hopkins and his fellow acolytes being made to add “modesty powder” to their baths to render the water unalluringly opaque, to the niceties of translating Swedish poetry, to the icky ghastliness of volunteering on pilgrimages to Lourdes as a pious teenager. The latter comes in a darkly comic passage worthy of David Sedaris that makes one wonder whether Hewitt might at some point take steps into fiction.
Discursive yet succinct, humane, unsparing of its author, All Down Darkness Wide will surely take its place alongside H is for Hawk as a hard-to-categorise memoir hybrid whose sales will catch fire through word-of-mouth recommendations. It will send readers in search of Hopkins and Boye as Helen McDonald’s book prompted us to reassess TH White.
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