All Down Darkness Wide

March 28, 2022
Laurel Prize winner Hewitt (Tongues of Fire) mines the capriciousness of love and pain in this poignant reflection on living with a clinically depressed partner. Unable to find steady work after graduating Cambridge, Hewitt set off on a backpacking trip through South America, where he met Elias. The two quickly fell in love and Elias moved back to Liverpool with Hewitt, despite only knowing him for a short time. “It felt right,” Hewitt writes. “I’d wanted so long to have someone like him.” However, when the pair moved to Elias’s native Sweden, a crisis unfolded as the Elias Hewitt knew, typically easygoing and boisterous, was ripped away by a struggle with depression that led to a suicide attempt. In a raw and hypnotic retelling reminiscent of Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, Hewitt recounts the turmoil of loving someone who “was shadowed at every turn by an inversion of himself,” and whose depression he became ensnared in; over five years, Hewitt writes, “I was so numbed I was barely aware of its presence.” Yet amid the devastation—which crescendos at their relationship’s end—Hewitt crafts a moving story of salvation, as he charts his path out of darkness and into self-acceptance. It’s an exquisite vision of queer heartbreak and liberation.

Starred review from May 1, 2022

This memoir, though ostensibly about a lived life, suggests something spiritual, as befits its title, taken from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. It is also fitting because Hewitt (literature, Trinity Coll., Dublin; J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism) is well-known as a gifted poet, as was Hopkins. He writes about casual sexual encounters but much of the core of the book is taken up with Jack and Elias. Jack was his love at Cambridge as an undergraduate. Though the relationship was brief, Jack, characteristic of first loves, was memorable for many reasons, not the least of which he was very handsome. Hewitt met Elias while travelling in South America. He moved to Sweden to be with him and stayed with Elias as he faced a long bout of depression. There is much more here including an excursion to Lourdes and its ramifications. Even more poignantly, he opens up about his vulnerability to gay shame and its triggers. What can't be conveyed in a short review is how poetic the writing is. This book bears reading twice it is so beautiful. VERDICT Readers seeking an elegant, profound memoir will find none better than this. Highly recommended.--David Azzolina

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Starred review from May 15, 2022
A poet recounts his relationship with a man suffering from paralyzing depression. When Hewitt, who "was brought up vaguely Catholic," grew up in 1990s and 2000s England, he felt he needed to show "that I was good, that I was kind, that I followed the rules" because "I had a secret to keep." The secret was that he was gay at a time when the Catholic Church railed against an equal marriage rights bill passing through Parliament. That is only one of the many challenges Hewitt chronicles in this stunning memoir. The death of a boyfriend when Hewitt attended the University of Cambridge made him think of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poem "The Lantern Out of Doors" provides this book's title. Hopkins, a gay man and Dublin priest, is a primary influence in Hewitt's life. Hewitt frequently references him and "the boundaries blurring between Hopkins's work and the life I was in," especially during the narrative centerpiece: his post-Cambridge relationship with Elias, a young Swedish man he met on a trip to Colombia. The bulk of this book describes Elias and Hewitt's years together, first in Liverpool and then in Sweden, and Elias' descent from someone "confident and chatty and open" to a man who required an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital after contemplating suicide. Scenes in which Hewitt and others try to nurse Elias back to health are among the most memorable. This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition on "ghosts" like Hopkins and on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another, from the patient at the psychiatric hospital who laments that his son never visits and, when he sees Hewitt, says, "I knew you'd come"; to Hewitt's own father, who, on his deathbed, confided, "All I want is my boys....As long as I can still be with my boys, and can still sit in the garden and hear the birds. That's all I want." A profoundly moving meditation on queer identity, mental illness, and the fragility of life.

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Starred review from May 15, 2022
Even if readers don't know that British author Hewitt is an award-winning poet, they won't be surprised after encountering the beauty of his prose in this affecting memoir ("The wood was singing itself awake under the sun."). Hewitt writes about a multiplicity of subjects, often in an introspective manner, but the chief focus is on his relationship with a young Swedish man named Elias. The two meet while they are traveling in Colombia and fall in love. They move together to Liverpool for a year while Sean is working on an academic degree and then move to Sweden, where the trouble starts. Elias begins to show signs of a deep depression that come to a head when he nearly kills himself and is hospitalized. When he is released, the two take a studio apartment, where Elias' symptoms recur. The story of the subsequent deterioration of their relationship is heartbreaking and, like so much else in this remarkable book, haunting. In flashbacks and flash forwards, Hewitt also writes insightfully and movingly about his coming of age as a gay man who often seems to display a deep-seated, internalized homophobia; he longs to be normal. Happily, his book is anything but normal; it is extraordinary and simply unforgettable. Bravo!

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