The poet Seán Hewitt’s first foray into memoir unfolds in the nonlinear way favoured by many contemporary exponents of the form. We move with elegant fluidity between phases of Hewitt’s life: recollections of growing up near Liverpool with a developing sense of his queerness; his complex and furtive sexual experiences at university; the development of his literary interests; the illness and devastating death of his father.
At the core of the book, however, is the writer’s relationship with the inscrutable Elias. Elias is a Swedish student Hewitt meets while backpacking across South America after having finished his English degree at Cambridge. They begin a whirlwind romance. The bright green waterfalls and infectious reggaeton of their surroundings are as transfixing to Hewitt as Elias’s “confidence … aloofness ... easy sociability”.
Among the memoir’s quieter interests is the legacy of Hewitt’s Catholic upbringing. One beautiful passage, for example, describes his time volunteering at the sanctuary at Lourdes. But as the text homes in on the ineffable Elias, and as their relationship develops, religiosity takes on subtler forms. In reflecting on the specific headiness of first love, Hewitt’s writing becomes confessional.
When they finally have to leave each other, they find that the separation is too much to bear. Hewitt reworks his plans for postgraduate research in Liverpool and moves to Elias’s hometown, Gothenburg, to study remotely. But their once-intense connection alters. Hewitt encounters his first bracing Swedish winter and Elias falls into an unexpected and profound depression. He attempts to take his own life and is hospitalised.
The confessional mode continues after Elias is discharged and the story becomes, in part, an examination of caring for someone “close to the edge of life”. Hewitt’s paranoia about leaving Elias alone even briefly – “How could I keep him safe?” – vibrates off the page.
Queer artists who dwell on their own suffering are often accused of unhelpfully figuring homosexuality as a kind of trauma. But throughout this troubled period, engaging with poetry galvanises Hewitt and leavens the text. Together, the two men informally translate the work of Swedish writer Karin Boye. They throw themselves wholeheartedly into this task of creating something new together. Hewitt captures the process vividly, emphasising both its slipperiness and its all-consuming quality: “Each line of each poem would … change shape as it arrived, and between us we’d chisel it down to something that suited us both, finding the right words, and trying to keep the music in the language, which had a meaning of its own, something that echoed beyond the words, and seemed to catch a glimmer of the world behind them.”Equally, in engaging with the writings of the esoteric Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as part of his academic work, Hewitt finds in the texts “a bouncing, riotous energy. Something in the rhythms, the clashes and the uncertainties of the syntax, thrilled a voltage through my body, and I wanted to throw the book down and run outside to look at something, to see the world as he made me see it.”
The Swedish landscape offers fresh perspectives and a sense of possibility too. While visiting the summer house where Elias tried to kill himself, Hewitt has a moment of respite out in the garden, which he conveys with some of the grace that characterises his prize-winning poetry: “The wild lupins that grew here in summer were all shrunken back to the tuber, and only a wick of pink light was cooling over the sea. I closed my eyes, pressed my lips to the cold air, and balanced myself against it, as though I were lowering myself slowly into a new reality.”
Hewitt’s introspections take him towards a place of self-acceptance, a partial reconciliation with what he has endured. It would be inaccurate to suggest the story is ultimately redemptive. As the memoir proceeds, however, it does so with a discernible sense of opening out, of Hewitt moving away from the shadows to a place where he is able to say: “The ties between myself and my world, the ones that had held me down, were being cut. My body and my queerness and my life became inseparable … I felt myself becoming irrevocably and radically whole.”
• All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir 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.
