Under the Sign of Donne

IN THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM in Cambridge, there is a painting by Stanley Spencer, "John Donne Arriving in Heaven" (Fig. 1). It is almost his earliest, done in 1911 when Spencer was an eighteen-year-old student at the Slade School of Art. It was exhibited the following year at the Grafton Gallery's Sec ond Post Impressionist exhibition, although not particularly noticed in the hubbub and horror caused by the Cezannes or even by the paintings of the British group—Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and their soon to be nemesis, Wyndham Lewis. There is certainly something of a Cezanesque proto-geometry to the painting's spaces, but in its subject and the generating idea for that subject it was quite unlike the others on those gallery walls. The figures are both their own tombstones and their resurrected bodies. They are at once stationary and in motion, here and there, in prayer and expectation— John Donne just happening by. The painting was prompted by Spencer's re ceiving a copy of Donne's Sermons from his fellow Slade students, Gwen and Jacques Raverat, and in particular by the phrase, to "Go to Heaven by Heaven," which Spencer interpreted as going past Heaven, alongside it, heaven here being Widbrook Common, a place near Cookham, where Spencer spent most of his life, receiving and painting heavenly visitors.1 Suddenly coming upon that painting prompted a series of questions that resulted in this partial inventory of twentieth century Donne signs and sight ings. Among them—where was Donne in the literary/artistic imagination at the start of the century during the years immediately before the 1912 Grierson edition and in the decades that followed? Who read him, painted him, thought about him? What have been the terms of the engagement? And behind those questions—why Donne? This investigation is more exploratory than polemi cal. The cast of characters is so varied, the Donnes invoked so multiple (love poet, dandy, satirist, religious poet, polemicist, priest), and the responses so various, that gathering the materials and making them speak to each other is in itself a useful enterprise. For it is remarkable that a writer so word specific as Donne, so much a figure (even as a composite of many figures) of a time, of