This extraordinary memoir by the poet Seán Hewitt suggested itself after he had made a brutally impersonal discovery. While trawling the internet, he stumbled, in a moment of casual curiosity, upon something he had not known – that a young man with whom he had been romantically involved at Cambridge had died before his time (there is a non-invasive sensitivity about Hewitt’s decision to leave the reader to guess at what must have happened). He remembers “Jack” (the names in the book have been changed) with warmth and in such idiosyncratic detail that it makes you feel you have met him yourself – you can picture the daredevil flirtatiousness, bookishness and beauty. And it is mournful to reflect that Hewitt’s elegant assessment – “it was as though he had perfected the art of himself” – cannot have been shared by his subject. The affront of learning about Jack’s funeral in this way – and the grief that followed – led Hewitt to thinking about the context of Jack’s death and of others, himself included, for whom homosexuality, even within 21st-century Europe, continues to be a love that dare not always speak its name.
Jack disappears early from the narrative as he did from life, giving way to a young Swedish man – the memoir’s central figure – encountered by Hewitt while travelling in Columbia. Elias is the life and soul of the party: charismatic, bold, seemingly at ease in his own skin – with garlands tattooed around the nape of his neck. He offers Hewitt scraps of Swedish, teases him for failing to roll his Rs correctly. Again, Hewitt pulls the reader in, knows how to charm. He is, before and after everything else, a romantic: “Real life was something that people lived when they weren’t in love,” he writes. Remembering a night swim just before he and Elias become lovers, he describes “the ocean turning over in its bed, still too far off to be seen”. This joyously understated line contributes to the growing erotic charge of the scene.
At this point, there can be no hint of what lies ahead. But fast-forward to Gothenburg, months later, and the two men are living together. Superficially, all seems well except that Hewitt is failing to recognise the severity of a change in Elias. He does not see it perhaps because he does not want to or possibly because he is unfamiliar with clinical depression. But there has been a turning, a downswing – in keeping with the seasons. When Elias goes to the doctor for antidepressants, Hewitt privately thinks he is overreacting. A crisis follows, a panic-inducing brush with death and Elias is admitted to psychiatric hospital.
As part of the narrative plait, there is a continuing non-academic homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins (subject of Hewitt’s doctorate). A Victorian poet and priest, Hopkins worked for a while in Liverpool (Hewitt was born in nearby Warrington) and is his literary and spiritual soulmate. Hopkins knew the depths and the ecstatic heights and had to subdue his homosexuality throughout his life. The book’s title, All Down Darkness Wide, is taken from his poem The Lantern out of Doors and it is striking how, expelled from their context, Hopkins’s words have a disordered intensity, as if coming apart at the seams of thought or written in a second language. This will turn out to be fitting.
Trying to persuade someone that life is worth living is challenging: listing good things can sound feeble, footling and implausible. Hewitt’s efforts to boost Elias expose the limits of language itself: “Words seemed to unravel the spell of life,” he writes. For someone for whom the mastery of words is everything (Hewitt is a wonderful poet), this was dumbfounding. Gamely learning Swedish, he was also struggling with a second language. He admits: “I became strangely conscious that I could only say the things I had the language for…” After Elias is out of hospital, they translate the troubled Swedish poet Karin Boye into English. This is a fascinating undertaking. She speaks to – and for – them yet there are words “we struggled to make new homes for”. Hewitt shows how easy it is for two people (and this can be true even when they speak the same language) to become lost in translation.
Trying to find a reason for Elias’s depression was “like trying to shoot a cloud with an arrow”. Hewitt explains: “He was both the man I loved and the person who wanted to kill the man I loved.” He is very good on Sweden’s seasonal darkness and how it impinges. Gothenburg in winter is likened to film noir. He retraces unsalted paths slippery with old leaves and snow. His world is freshly precarious. Elias has survived but Hewitt is harrowed by what might have been and explains with moving realism: “It is hard to account for the trauma of a thing that didn’t happen.” He starts to experience Elias’s darkness as contagious – a damaging form of empathy. It takes time to understand that his wish to “fix” Elias is futile. Eventually, he recognises how “exhausting” it must have been for Elias “not to be understood, not to be heard, to have every question met with an answer”.
All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that. It is about coming out in the widest sense – and that includes the outing of depression. It is about the disinterring, too, of the fears of his younger self. And while it adheres to faith of a kind, the stability of belief is not always available to Hewitt, a former Catholic – any more than it was to Hopkins. He makes no secret of his loneliness as a young gay man in Liverpool and describes feeling haunted in a park by “a constant perched watcher, ready to swoop”, (no more than a wing-rattling heron). It makes one wish he could have swapped his fears for the line from God’s Grandeur in which Hopkins imagines the Holy Ghost brooding over the bent world with “warm breast and with ah! bright wings”.
• All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
