Book of the Day - Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne)

Are you living your best life? At the end of all this, at your curtain call, will you say, yes, I live fully and with great gusto and passion and vigor? Well, after you hear about today's subject of today's book, you may have a lot of work to do. Here to point out deficiencies, both yours and mine, it's Book of the Day. All right, Book of the Day, back for this week. It's a Monday edition, and we are coming to you from the Cederberg Public Library, or actually, my sunroom in Salkville. I'll have to talk about that sometime. I'd like to introduce to you today a poet who lives with intensity, with a wonderful command of the English language. John Donne. No, it's Steve Donoghue in Boston. Hello. Hello, everybody. Coming to you from my sunroom. Where's the sun, Steve? The books don't like sun. Well, we are talking about a biography of the great poet John Donne. This is Super Infinite, The Transformations of John Donne, and this is by Katherine Rundell. It came out this year, just a few months ago. I imagine we'll have a conversation whether or not you have it available. Within our walls at this time, no, but there are copies available in our system. Convince me. Why should I bring it in, Steve? Well, it's a mixed convincing. The author went to Oxford, but has never written a book for adults before. It's just her resume, her CV is kids' books. And that's no bar to writing an intellectually responsible, historically responsible biography. But talk about starting off on the deep end of the pool. John Donne is about as deep as it gets. He led a marginally well-documented life, but an unbelievably complex intellectual life that represents itself in some of the most brain-bending poetry in the English language. And he has also been, as you might expect, the subject of a great many scholarly biographies. This is not one of them. I'm not belittling the book. I'm saying you're aware of that almost right from the beginning, that it doesn't read like a scholarly biography that's as much positive as negative. It doesn't lay out its subject or pursue its agenda anywhere like a scholarly biography that can be as much a positive as a negative, but it is going to leave you wondering, well, okay, then what is this? What is this? Well, it sounds to me like a fantastic gateway drug to John Donne. It's the beginning for somebody, perhaps. The author is never anything other. In the whole course of this book, does this tell me how many pages? No? Let me see. I might have it here in my records. It's 350 pages. 350, okay. At no point in the course of this book is the author ever dull about John Donne. In fact, if I may, let me read a passage here. Please. Give you an idea of what we're talking about here. The passage will display strengths and weaknesses because the setup of the passage is, he was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute. And then we get this, but there are also few writers of his time who insisted so doggedly and determinately on awe. His poetry is widely delighted and captivated by the body, though broken, though doomed to decay, and by the ways in which thinking fast and hard were sensual joy akin to sex. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealized sanitized desire. He joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul. He wrote, quote, one might also say, almost say her body thought. In his sermons, he reckoned us a disaster, but the most spectacular disaster that has ever been. As he got older, he grew richer, harsher, sterner, and drier. Yet he still asserted, quote, it is too little to call man a little world. Except God, man is diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts than the world doth. Nay, than the world is. He believed our minds could be forged into citadels against the world's chaos. He wrote in a verse letter, quote, be thine own palace or the world's thy jail. Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity. That has, you can say two things about a paragraph like that. That paragraph, I'm reading one paragraph, but this book is almost entirely composed of prose like that. You can say two things about it. And one is negative, and one is positive. The positive is, it's immensely interesting to read. And the negative is, it's gibberish. It doesn't really mean much. Aside from the three quote by Dunn himself in that paragraph, who knows what any of the rest of it means? Brought the body to collide with the soul? Will you find that anywhere in John Dunn's poetry? Well, you will if you go looking for it. It sounds like Catherine Rundell is kind of a John Dunn fangirl, not to the bad way. Not in a bad way, no. Right, this is very much not, I'm glad that it doesn't bill itself incorrectly. The transformations of John Dunn, what does that possibly mean? He was a monstrous vermin. He wrote a poem. We covered that already. What does that mean? It can mean anything. The book doesn't call itself a biography of John Dunn. Instead, it very much reads as, I don't know if fangirl is the right word, maybe it is, but a very enthusiastic, complicated, sometimes contradictory appreciation of John Dunn. Which I think the world has room for appreciations such as this. I don't think that's, you know, as long as it's not the first, last and only word. Definitely not the first. This should not be your introduction to learning about John Dunn. You, of course, don't need any introduction at all to reading John Dunn, none at all. Or if you insist, if you're the type that wants, you know, someone to hold your hand as you wade into the pool, you could get the Penguin Classic selected John Dunn or the Oxford Royal Classics selected John Dunn. You could get one of those. Each one of a volume like that is going to have a 10 page introduction. That will be enough. If you go to Wikipedia, read all about the author, read the whole of the main body about the author, maybe read it a few times. So you get the general outline and the gist of what happened in his life and what didn't happen in his life, the major events, that sort of thing. And then once you've read it through two or three times, go at the Wikipedia page, which is free again, and this time chase down the hyperlinks. Someone's mentioned, go and find out who they were. When some body or institution is mentioned, go and find out what it is. Don't do that right away, but read about Dunn first and then do that. Something like that, you're going to need. I think to get much of anything out of this book. Aside from maybe the most important thing, which is that it's not possible to read super infinite and not immediately want to read John Dunn's poetry and maybe his sermons. You will immediately want to do that. And maybe there's an argument to be made that that is the primary job of a literary biography or a literary biographical treatment of any kind. Absolutely. I totally disagree with that. John Dunn doesn't need your help. And so when you write a book like this, I, of course, I'm saying, no, that's not justification enough to do that. But I had a deeper problem with this book. That passage that he was so familiar with darkness that it was his daily commute, apart from the anachronism of the daily commute. And apart from what was the other anachronism in there, there was another anachronism just in the passage that I mentioned. A little bit about God. Thinking fast and hard. Oh, yes. Very close to thinking fast and slow, which is the title. That also is slightly anachronistic. But when you talk about how he was so familiar with darkness, that it was his daily commute. Apart from the anachronism, there's something else that I noticed about that line and a million other lines like it in this book, which is that it fits in 140 characters. Was this book tweeted? More often than not. This reads like, you know, John Dunn is super infinite, awesome, a thread. I have followed threads like that. I've read threads like that on Twitter on any number of subjects. And I'm sure that everybody out there who's done that will agree with me. They're as often as not really enjoyable. Really, really enjoyable. So you tell me, is it just some hidebound, conservative part of my reading soul that says that's not enough? Is this how you basically make anyone under 30 excited about John Dunn? Well, is that how this book was pitched? I would like to know that. Is that how this book was pitched? I have no background in writing this kind of book. But I like, totally love John Dunn. And then the fire emoji. Gnarly. Fire emoji on the cover. I like, totally love him. Fire emoji. Would you want to write a book about him if I wrote it? Not a kid's book. God forbid we should ever see a kid's book about John Dunn. Board book? Hmm. It better be waterproof. There are all sorts of details of John Dunn's life. Was that how this was pitched? I want to write a book about John Dunn for people who have the attention span of a guinea pig. What a strange project. What an odd, odd project. Exactly. And again, I'm not saying that even that oddness. I don't believe it's possible to read this book and not be aware of how odd it is. What an odd thing it is. What is this? When I was reading this, I kept asking myself, okay, you got the details mostly right. You imported a ton of anachronisms, but what is it that you're doing? But I'm not even saying that that oddness of the book, of the project, is necessarily negative. The only way that I would think it would be completely negative is if we are all just giving up on, or if the publishing industry is insisting on, that being the only way to write a book like this. Uh-oh. That would be horrible. That would be horrifying. What are you supposed to do? Subjects in literature don't come much more recondite than John Dunn, but plenty of them are about that bad. What are you supposed to do with them? I mean, when I read this, this is unfair to the author because she poured her heart and soul into this book. You could tell from the excerpt that I read, this is a very smart book. No, certainly. To what end? I'm not trying to belittle. I'm not trying to belittle the book. I want to stress that. And I think our readers, our viewers pretty much know by now that we're not going in loaded for bear. We're trying to cheerlead you. We want to talk about books, but not every book can be. When I was finished with this book, the note that I wrote in big letters in my reading journal was, coming in 2026, Mary Wollstonecraft, you go, girl. And am I wrong? Am I wrong to wonder if that's what's coming? I don't know. And if it does come, though, is it such a terrible thing? Right, right. These are the questions that you will ask when you read Super Infinite. And they aren't all bad questions. No, no, I think. I'm much, much younger than my producer, but neither one of us are study buddies. We might have to ask them in the 21st century. Well, if you took the manuscript of this book and transported it back in time to Christ College, Oxford, in the 1950s, handed it to the foremost Dunn specialist at the time, who did write a book of his own and is the standard life of John Dunn, and said, here you go, what do you think? He'd have said, oh, I can do a book on Dunn. He'd have taken it home. He'd have had his mutton chop and a glass of weak beer. He'd have gone into his library, and I'd be willing to bet that he'd be found there dead in the morning of a coronet. Well, how important is that? How important is that? To his students, we might have been providing a service, but let's not go there. He had this manuscript in his hands, and a look on his face of sheer horror. All that's missing from that scene is that beside his chair was the footprint of a monstrous owl. His death was Super Infinite. Well, this is an episode of Book of the Day where our viewers and our listeners are going to come out of the episode with the same reaction. They're going to say, well, what are these guys doing? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do with this? Sorry, everybody. Sometimes that just happens. That sounds like a great way to begin the week, too. We can certainly leave people questions. You are already a deep, ingrained fan of John Dunn. If you know his poetry, if you've read a couple of, I almost said legitimate, a couple of normal biographies, I would say if you're in that position, you shouldn't miss this book. It might infuriate you, but you shouldn't miss it. It's clearly not aimed at you. And that itself is fascinating. Any other John Dunn book would have been aimed at the person I just described. I read an interesting user review that said, on another site, that said, it was like having John Dunn on a podcast. And while I would love that, I have the next best thing. You have a schoolmate of his, anyway. There we are. How perfect. Steve Donahue, as always, thank you so much for leaving us. Thank you for what? At this time, I don't know. Thank you for leaving us with large, universal questions. I have far more definite opinions about tomorrow's book. How perfect. You don't want to miss that. It's a cliffhanger, everybody. Thank you so much. We will see you back here on Book of the Day tomorrow. Take care, everybody.