ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE Reading Group Guide

Reading Group Guide

Dear Reader, When I was eighteen, I moved away from home to university, and found myself for the first time among a group of people who would meet and talk about books. Each Wednesday evening, we would come together, bringing drinks and snacks and not a small amount of gossip, and talk about the week’s book for hours on end. It felt like heaven. So it brings me great joy to imagine you gathering together to read All Down Darkness Wide. Thank you for choosing it.

Launching All Down Darkness Wide will be my first real introduction to America, and it gives me much solace and excitement to know that this book will be in your hands. This memoir moves from England to Colombia, from France to Sweden; but, though I’m writing to you now from Dublin, Ireland, this book really began its journey in the USA. It was in a small flat in Manhattan’s Chinatown that I first started to scribble down the ideas and to map it out. So it feels like a homecoming, in a way, to bring it back to American readers.

In some ways, this is a book about the power of literature to console, to challenge, and to haunt. It began in my mind as a novel, and quickly became the most personal work I have ever undertaken. The book was sparked by a strange but insistent idea: a main character would be haunted by ghosts that may or may not be the figments of his own past, his own identity. What ghosts are we haunted by? How do they guide us, and speak through us?

Might we choose our own family of ghosts? I started writing to get closer to what haunted me, to get some agency over it, to haunt it back.

Perhaps each of you will bring your own stories to this book. Who are you? What histories are yours? Who gave them to you? What might you do with them? Perhaps you might follow that ‘wandering light’ through the book, and onwards into your own pasts, to find out.

May you and yours go well this year; or, as we say in Ireland, go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl. May the wind always be at your back.

Yours,

Seán Hewitt

Discussion Questions The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation of Seán Hewitt’s debut memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, a luminous coming-of-age story, and a heartbreaking meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

1.

The book begins in a cemetery, a setting that raises questions about things that are hidden and forgotten. What do you see as the difference between those two adjectives in the context of the memoir?

2.

As a gay man born in 1990, Hewitt grows up in a period of major cultural shifts in the queer experience. How is this changing sociopolitical reality manifested in his life specifically?

3.

How did the nonlinear, flashback sections of the prose inform your reading of the more recent events of the narrative?

4.

What unites and what distinguishes the figures who haunt the book—namely Jack, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Karin Boye, Bernadette Soubirous, and even the Virgin Mary? When Hewitt writes “here was this procession of men, walking beside me, people I knew and loved being added to it, and, one by one, their lights were being put out. In their midst, I felt my own light flickering, too” (31). What tethers his experience to theirs, and what sets his apart?

5.

All Down Darkness Wide describes furtive sex, playful sex, terrifying sex, sex that communicates deep love, and sex that’s diven by repression and insecurity. For both Hewitt and his partners, what does sex bring to bear toward our understanding of their characters?

Discussion Questions continued 6.

How does Elias’s depression change him? How does it change Hewitt? The memoir is written so that the reader recognizes those changes slightly ahead of the narrator—as a reader, what was the impact of this effect for you?

7.

Both Hewitt and Elias have parents who are loving and caring, yet part of growing up is recognizing the limits of what our mothers and fathers can do to protect us and heal us.

How do Hewitt and Elias experience and process this shift?

8.

What does Hewitt find within the Catholic Church that resonates with his sense of self, and how does he ultimately come to turn away from that institution?

9.

Together, Hewitt and Elias begin a translation practice in which “each poem was like an icon, something we spoke through, something that seemed to crystalize our broken thoughts into forms we could both understand” (160). Why do we sometimes have to turn to the words of others in order to articulate the truest versions of our own thoughts and feelings?

10.

Can an author be the ultimate authority on their own life? When Hewitt writes that “lying is something I had become good at with practice,” (184) does the sentiment raise any questions for you about this text?

A Conversation with

Seán Hewitt

Q

You’ve said that All Down Darkness Wide began as a novel, but in the writing process became a memoir. Can you tell us about the moment or moments when you recognized that shift taking place?

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A

I wrote the cemetery scene that opens the book first: in the novel version, the protagonist met the ghost of Gerard Manley Hopkins, or at least someone whom he has mistaken, during a breakdown of sorts, as the ghost of Hopkins. I had the idea that the protagonist would begin to be haunted by a series of projected ghosts, which each spoke of some dislodged or repressed aspect of his psyche. Then, after a few months, I was lying awake one night and thought: Who am I kidding? The protagonist is me. I also thought: What am I hiding for? Who am I hiding from?

Writing this book as nonfiction became particularly important to me. As it became a more personal story, I wanted the reader to know that this is not exaggeration, or fiction, or entirely invented. Instead, I wanted them to know that this happened, this can happen, this continues to happen. That was vital to me, because I wanted the book to break through a silence. As readers will know from All Down Darkness Wide, I (like many people) spent a lot of time covering up, spent a lot of time manufacturing stories, manufacturing silences. This time, I thought, it is time to be brave. In writing the book, though, I found it wasn’t quite so easy to ever be “done”with fictionality. Still, at least I could address some of my own fictions, and some of our own fictions, head on.

Q

All Down Darkness Wide. How did you choose this title for your memoir, and has its meaning changed for you over time?

A

I have always been preoccupied with literary journeys into the underworld, the “catabasis” of the Greeks, their obsession with descent, with the spiritual, and with retrieval. I knew my book would take something of that form, and that principle, and the line from Hopkins (“all down darkness wide”) floated into my mind as the perfect

A Conversation with Seán Hewitt continued encapsulation of it. If we go down into the darkness, down into the unknown world of ourselves and others, what might we bring back? And what might those talismans do for us? That’s where the structure of the book came from. There’s a little nod to this idea in the opening of the book —the light from my phone in the cemetery is “my golden bough”, the branch Aeneas uses in The Aeneid to allow him safe passage across the river Styx.

As I wrote, I became more conscious of the fact that I wanted to focus as much on the retrieval as on the darkness, as much on the hope as on the more difficult subject matter.

That gave me a new sense of what I loved about the rhythm of the line—the plodding, descending, quite ominous beat of “all down darkness” followed by the lovely opening out of “wide”, which seemed to speak to the freedom of darkness, as well as its vastness. It seemed to capture the movement of the book—the sense of range I wanted, a journey into the self, and then beyond the self, into history. It took on a sense of possibility, of adventure, of treasures that might be retrieved. The title began with the idea of descent, but it became, ultimately, about the hopeful return.

Q

Your first book, Tongues of Fire, was a poetry collection, and you’ve integrated the lyricism of poetry as well as entire stanzas by other poets into this work. How does poetry influence your writing? What was it like to return to writing poetry after working in prose?

A

The music and technique of poetry is something I’m endlessly fascinated by: how a line can stick in your head for years, how a poet can build a little room, how so much can be held in such a small space. My poetry was always energized by a sense of the possibility of layering, rhythm, the echo of images, and I put all of that to use in All Down Darkness Wide. Perhaps no one will notice them, but there are many recurring images through the book, which allowed me to hold it all together in my mind, as though it was a vast poem. I knew it had to do more than a poem though: it had to have characters, to have explanation, to give its own context, to hold a reader across two hundred or more pages.

In poems, you can hide yourself, and leave a lot more to the reader’s imagination, to hints and suggestions. In prose, you need to give more: “Why did this happen?” “Why is he behaving like this?” “How did he get from the café to the seaside?” In poetry, you can

A Conversation with Seán Hewitt continued get up and leave the room, leaving a sense of significance without actually spelling it out.

In prose, when you leave the room, the reader has to follow you. There’s no escape.

Going back to poetry after writing the memoir was quite strange. Suddenly, I had a sense of all these wide landscapes that prose could cover, and a new interest in narrative, too. I can feel it seeping into my poems, which have started to form into longer sequences, to take something of prose’s ability to explore one thing from many angles. Working between the two forms has opened both of them up to me in new and really exciting ways.

Q

The tension between boundless love and the limits of one’s own power is something you seriously reckon with. You write, “Perhaps I didn’t want to admit that my perfect dream was collapsing around me, that I wasn’t enough to help him by myself ” (81). What was it that made you able to finally admit that? Do you have advice for anyone going through something similar?

A

I think this comes back to the idea of fictionality. Some of our most dangerous, or most powerful, fictions are those we hold of other people and of ourselves. Do we love the person we love, or do we love our idea of the person we love? Do we love ourselves, or do we love our own fictions? We have a fiction of our own romantic ideal, and there are times that fiction is broken: by the actions of others, or when another shows us that we cannot fully know them after all. It was the latter that made me able to admit to myself that I could not be everything to someone else, because I was not their fiction, and they were not mine.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, but eventually it’s a liberating one: we can be beside each other, but we cannot be each other. If we are to fully reckon with our own individuality, we have to allow other people their own individuality, too: to listen to their own fictions, and their own truths, without trying to impose our own across theirs. I guess my only advice would actually be just a reassurance: you are not alone, and you cannot be everything. In my experience, it is the pressure of those two feelings that can be lethal.

The Lantern out of Doors Sometimes a lantern moves along the night, That interests our eyes. And who goes there?

I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where, With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright In mould or mind or what not else makes rare: They rain against our much-thick and marsh air Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind What most I may eye after, be in at the end I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd, Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Suggested Further Reading “To a Poet” by Karin Boye, from Complete Poems, translated by David McDuff (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1994) “My own heart let me have more pity on” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by William Henry Gardner and Norman Hugh MacKenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)

Mental Health Resources National Alliance on Mental Illness nami.org/Your-Journey/Family-Members-and-Caregivers

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

Crisis Text Line crisistextline.org/

Mental Health America mhanational.org/resources-and-support-peers

Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance dbsalliance.org/

Seán’s Journey

Gothenburg, Sweden | Elias’s hometown; Seán and Elias move in together

Dublin, Ireland | Where Gerard Manley Hopkins taught and died; Seán currently teaches at Trinity College

Liverpool, England | Where Seán and Elias

lived while Seán studied at the university; location of the opening scene in St. James’s Cemetery

Cambridge, England | Where Seán received his undergraduate degree and met Jack

Lourdes, France | Seán visits the sacred grotto on the Catholic pilgrimage

Popayán, Colombia | Seán meets Elias while

backpacking after finishing his degree in Cambridge