I have just read a good 1991 book. It is GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: A VERY PRIVATE LIFE, by Professor Robert Bernard Martin. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a thoroughly English man, an Anglican convert to Catholicism, who became a Jesuit priest and died aged 44 in Dublin. 

Professor Martin has brought to life a great, tortured writer. But I am greedy. I demand even more knowledge of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I want, in short, the kind of insights from developmental psychology which Asheville scholar Susan W. McMichaels produced in her 1997 JOURNEY OUT OF THE GARDEN: ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION. I reviewed that book in last week’s TRIBUNE column. By being profound about Brother Francis, Susan McMichaels has spoiled for me merely competent biography of Father Gerard.

Maybe it is part of our being “modern.” Mere external facts, genealogies and a person’s times and milieu are no longer enough for us. We also want to get inside a great person’s head and see things as she saw them. 

We demand biographies which probe the unconscious motives of a great personality.  That is why we applaud Erik Erikson’s 1962 YOUNG MAN LUTHER. And if no one author can move beyond standard biography by applying modern theories of human development, well, never mind. For we also readily accept a great team effort such as THOMAS WOODROW WILSON by American diplomat William Bullitt and  Professor Sigmund Freud.  That classic will be reissued later in 1998 under the title WOODROW WILSON: A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY.  Bullitt recorded the external facts and time line of  Wilson’s life and explained the President’s  foreign policy. Freud then interpreted the evolution of  Wilson the man using psychoanalytical theory. 

Contemporary biographers are almost compelled by our culture to probe the inner life of their subjects. Some writers do so instinctively and without consciousness. Others explicitly lay out their assumptions.  Regarding Robert Martin’s life of Gerard Manley Hopkins: it is not that the author does not probe his subject’s psyche. He does.  But  he does so by reaching out with little thought for bits of undigested Freud and Jung in the cultural air we all now breathe. By contrast, Susan McMichaels’s approach to Francis of Assisi is more methodical, more explicit in the use of a particular theory of development. It makes us wish for a similar approach to Hopkins.

Here is a question for a fresh biographer of Gerard Hopkins. How could such a great poet’s great works remain either so misunderstood or so totally ignored during his lifetime--to the poet’s great personal pain? Gerard Hopkins was wracked by melancholy most of his life. He was scrupulous to a fault. Preserved are some of the elaborate lists of sins and temptations which he drew up to prepare himself to make oral confession during his final years as a High Church Anglican . We also have scores of letters to a tiny handful of friends and puzzled admirers. Most of their letters to him he destroyed before his death. Within days of his passage two zealous Jesuit colleagues threw away what was left. 

Do not wager that Gerard Hopkins, S.J. will  be canonized a saint. Granted, he was a good man. He “sanctified his neuroses.” He fought melancholia and feared for his sanity. He had a model on how to be a Catholic convert and priest, a model, alas, too inimitable for his stressed out inner resources. That model was the multi-faceted, vastly achieving older contemporary, John Henry Cardinal Newman. Unlike Newman, Hopkins during his lifetime was famous for absolutely nothing. Father Gerard, who had once shown such promise and who had taken  vaunted “double first”honors in classics as a student at Oxford, later turned out sub-par as preacher, teacher, guide of souls and as administrator.  Had he not written great poetry, we would not now want to know and understand the life behind the verses. 

His poems are about God: 
 

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” 

And  he prays to 
 

“Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread.” 

Father Gerard’s poems are also about his soul and about finding God in nature.  His works are in every anthology of great English poetry. Behind those verses there was a sad life which we are impelled to try to understand.

Recall with me a few of his lines:
 

“This morning I saw morning’s minion, 
dapple dawn drawn falcon.”

“Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
....
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.”

And, finally, that quatrain from “Inversnaid” which is a rallying cry to all  environmentalists. It would doubtlessly also have appealed to their patron saint, Francis of Assisi:
 

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet; 
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

What can a biographer of Hopkins do to best Professor Robert Martin? In a sense, Francis of Assisi is easy, made to order, just a finger exercise, for a competent Jungian like Susan McMichaels. For, by every criterion of Jung, the “little poor man” of Assisi developed an explosively world-class integrated, healthy personality acknowledged as such by Pope and Sultan alike. Francis wrote the book on how to integrate a personality. Not so Gerard Manley Hopkins. How would a Jungian in 1998 lay hold of a man whom many judge a faintly disappointing human being?  When Hopkins died, no one truly grasped that he had made himself into a great poet.  His invention of “sprung rhythm,” his linguistic experiments and most of his poems became widely known only after he rested in a Dublin grave.

Francis’s life was glorious and glorified. Father Gerard’s life was not appreciated by his colleagues and invokes pity.  Small wonder, then, that we call for a Sigmund Freud or a Susan McMichaels to look at Hopkins and tell us what defining opportunities he did not seize. And tell us why. Above all, why?  What went wrong? How could an increasingly miserable, marginalized, unappreciated man spin off such great poetry? Does Hopkins's psyche remind of Emily Dickinson?

For the sake of his  poetry, Reverend Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. deserves either a new and profound virtuoso biographer or a gifted biographic team. I think that we need look no farther than Buncombe County, North Carolina for a better Hopkins biographer--should Susan W. McMichaels care to try her hand.

-000-

for Asheville TRIBUNE