Book review: Seán Hewitt's memoir shows the isolation and unhappiness many gay men feel

Writing this memoir, Seán Hewitt felt the need to hide identities other than his own under pseudonyms and dislocating methodology

Sat, 28 Jan, 2023 - 14:30

Josephine Fenton

Thirty-three is an early age for a memoir but Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, offers us his. Now lecturing in Trinity College Dublin, he was born in Warrington, England, and took his first degree at Girton College, Cambridge.

Hewitt opens his story among the dead in the cemetery of St James’s Oratory in Liverpool, the city of his postgraduate studies. He is in the graveyard to meet someone — to have sex with him. After the deed, Hewitt stoops down to a stream to palm water into his mouth, “cleansing himself back to sanctity”. He is down in the wide darkness and needs ablution and absolution.

As a published poet as well as a literature teacher, Hewitt can manipulate language to create meaning, and in the opening chapter symbolism reigns. He creates a gothic atmosphere using darkness and looming gravestones.

The skeletons of the dead lie in the tombs, foreshadowing the eventual skeletal forms of the two embracing men.

Their union may result in them evolving into “stick-thin corpses”, if a virus spreads within their bodies, destroying their organs and killing them.

Reading of the fear of Aids in the time of Covid is unsettling, and yet the parallels are there, reminding us of the unpredictability of endemic diseases, as they consume the vitality of victims.

The second chapter departs from the William Blake-like blackened churches and bloodstained walls of slavery-enriched Liverpool, reversing to the sun-dappled hallowed lawns of the University of Cambridge.

Here Hewitt is with Jack, a fellow undergraduate, and they fool around, hanging from branches in the orchard, and singing AE Housman’s poem, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’. Those who are familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited will not expect a happy ending for the beautiful Jack who, when he leaves the protective bubble that is Cambridge, will face a harsh and unforgiving world.

All Down Darkness Wide is literary: The title comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who some believe to have been a repressed homosexual, who had “everything hidden, everything kept down”. And Hewitt speaks about his own friends and family who have, in attempts to protect him, said that they were “scared he would be unhappy”. In fact, he thinks, they were aware that in following his happiness he would bring opprobrium upon them.

In other words, people were not scared for him, but of realising themselves to be part of a society which condemns queer men, including him, to ignominy.

In writing this memoir, Hewitt felt the need to hide identities other than his own under pseudonyms and dislocating methodology. It is certain that the great love of his life is not, as in All Down Darkness Wide, Elias of Gothenburg, but someone with another name, city and homeland. It may also be that, unlike Elias, this lost lover did not, as the fictional Elias did, survive repeated suicide attempts.

Hewitt’s book is about the isolation and unhappiness that many gay men feel as they navigate the world. It is about the dark corners and passageways, literal and metaphorical, into which he — particularly with his Catholic background — is hounded by opinion. During his young manhood Hewitt’s way of living was constrained, the joy wrung out of it by disapproval.

In contrast, Hewitt’s academic work has been lauded, enabling him to obtain status and confidence. And, he suggests in the acknowledgments to All Down Darkness Wide, he has found a stable loving relationship. He could replace the title of his life with a line from DH Lawrence: ‘Look! We Have Come Through’.