Richard Scott Larson
Seán Hewitt's "All Down Darkness Wide"
The memoir as a literary form takes shape through the act of retroactive sense-making, the accumulation and organization of otherwise disparate personal experiences into a story with a translatable structure. “All those years, it was as though time were blowing through me and taking form, being winnowed into narrative,” writes Seán Hewitt in All Down Darkness Wide, his captivating coming-of-age memoir that also serves as a monument to a collective queer past. The deceptively meandering text that follows is the result of an energetic and sometimes restless mind at work structuring memory into art.
The memoir, resulting from that aggregated narrative time, is a reverse engineering of the conventional coming-out and coming-of-age story. Hewitt narrates a harrowing phase of a relationship with another man while contemplating the lingering effects of living in the closet—a familiar story, even if the details here are particularly harrowing. But All Down Darkness Wide is strongest when Hewitt’s sexuality is placed in a historical context, and the narrative is all the more engaging when it acknowledges its place in a wider body of queer autobiographical writing and the broader evolution of queer lives.
In the book’s opening pages, Hewitt describes arriving late one night at a cemetery in Liverpool to meet a stranger for sex. He’s recently parted ways with Elias, his boyfriend of five years, whose struggle with severe depression has reconfigured Hewitt’s understanding of the world, leaving behind a numbness that he yearns to obliterate. He gracefully and lovingly renders the anonymous hookup as a communion with the lineage of all the men who have come before him.
Cruising, then, is contextualized as participation in a legacy that has been passed down. The effect is both sexy and deeply moving, our desires being made to mean something beyond our own bodies. “I cannot speak for the unheard sounds of those in the graves below,” he writes. “But for the man I met—for all of them—for that endlessly linking river, with all its nodes and tributaries, I can offer whatever of my body still holds.”
Hewitt falls ill following the encounter, waking up one morning with a sore throat and swollen glands, and the immediate terror about his possible diagnosis conjures up images of “all those men lining the corridors of wards, all those bleeping machines and frail, stick-thin corpses. Though I did not know them, their ghosts haunt me. I am, somehow, their descendant: I arrived into a world full of ghosts, and owed a part of myself to each of them.”
The possibility of death continues to walk alongside Hewitt as he weaves together the origin story of his queer identity with his intense relationship with Elias, particularly during a traumatic period following Elias’s barely interrupted suicide attempt. He’s haunted not just by the legacy of the AIDS epidemic but also by the death of an old flame from his college days, which he only discovers after a casual online search of the boy’s name after years of not being in touch:
“For me, his death began to seem part of a lineage: all these men I knew and walked beside, collapsing under the pressured atmosphere of the world. And I looked to myself and began to see my life differently, as though all the things I had thought or done as I grew up took a new perspective and crystallised. That day, I felt as if we were all walking headlong into some winnowing fire, and the further we walked, the less of ourselves we seemed able to carry with us.”
These thoughts about Jack’s death send Hewitt back to lines from the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hewitt studies the work of Hopkins throughout much of the timeline traced by the memoir as he completes a graduate thesis while living abroad with Elias in Elias’s native Sweden. “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.”
Hopkins—a Jesuit priest and posthumously celebrated poet tormented by desires that threatened always to upend his life—was perhaps imagining this line of men heading to some kind of heaven, a release from earthly burdens. But Hewitt sees a legacy of queer shame and inevitable death, a procession toward a shared fate.
Hewitt increasingly identifies with Hopkins as he sinks deeper into the complicated man’s life and work, tracing the progression of Hopkins’s poetry “from the ecstatic early verse to the final, dark sonnets,” almost as if to retroactively diagnose where it all had gone wrong—when Hopkins’s optimism about the world slipped irrevocably into melancholia.
A sense of shame is communicated across time. Hewitt describes Hopkins writing in his diary about his “sheer terror at what his body was doing, at what he couldn’t stop himself from wanting. I could see him purging himself out of existence” (Hewitt’s interpretation). The work in the memoir with Hopkins and his legacy is delicately and almost spiritually rendered, the tone thankfully more ruminative than academic.
For Hewitt, Hopkins embodies the contradiction between loving the world and the torturous experience of existing within it. Hopkins provides a sense of solace, which reframes Elias’ present-day suffering and offers Hewitt a way to understand Elias and maybe even save him.
The structure of All Down Darkness Wide elevates the text beyond what is already a deeply felt and beautifully rendered personal reckoning with a loved one’s suffering. The elliptical nature of Hewitt’s recollections deepens their meanings. Actions move forward in the central narrative—Elias’s gradual recovery, Hewitt’s return to Liverpool, and the couple’s eventual breakup—while his internal narration meanders back toward a childhood spent closeted and afraid of the kind of man he knew he was rapidly becoming. The writing is both spare and deeply personal, the familiar scenes of childhood queerness all the more powerful because of how simply and precisely they’ve been rendered here.
The burden of keeping Elias’s mental struggles a secret from others in his life has now hurtled Hewitt back into a different kind of closet as he recalls being made to keep his private turmoil hidden from view as a child. He depicts a catalogue of queer shame through a coming-of-age story told in brief vignettes centered on the shared indignities of childhoods spent lying about who we are until finally, we become “irrevocably and radically whole” through sheer force of will.
In the months following Elias’s hospital stay, he and Hewitt move into a new apartment and try to begin the next uncertain phase of their lives together. They also spend much of their time quietly translating poems by Swedish writer Karin Doyle into English after Hewitt discovers an old volume in a section of dusty books at an antique store.
The translations invite Boyle into Hewitt and Elias’s relationship, and the shared activity—bringing the poems to life by bridging the space between two languages—helps them communicate with one another through this strained new reality, even as they learn about Doyle’s personal struggles as a queer woman prone to depression who ultimately took her own life.
The connection to Elias’s reality proves to be sobering to them both, yet they find in Doyle a common syntax of personal suffering, something both familiar and difficult to face. “It was as though something beyond the words had been said between us, some other voice speaking in the room,” Hewitt writes, “and we had both heard it, and we had both understood.”
While the notion of Elias as a character rather than a device to reflect Hewitt’s own process of maturity sometimes remains hazy and peripheral, I understand the reluctance to represent him too invasively. The scenes of translation show us the depth of what they shared together, even if certain details remain off the page.
In one of Doyle’s final poems, which Hewitt and Elias also translate together, the speaker follows a procession similar to that of the men described in the earlier poem by Hopkins, this time a line of women who are depicted as crossing a bridge “from the depths of night to the day.”
The recurring image of a procession of figures walking headlong into some unknown future leads Hewitt to draw connections from the distant past all the way to his present-day circumstances with Elias as he takes his own place among those gradually making their way through the dark: “Maybe I could call to them, could call to myself. In my body, in my deeds, in my words. I would set a fire burning for them, I would bring them home.”
The memoir that Hewitt leaves behind offers these wanderers a path to follow, the fire of its urgent testimony lighting the way in a montage of images that poetically cohere in quiet juxtaposition. Like other memoirs presenting examples of queer ways of being, such as T Fleischmann’s explosive Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, Hewitt’s contribution presents queerness as a movement through space and time, as bodies marching alongside each other and always following the ones that came before.
“I think we carry those other histories, too, even before we know them,” Hewitt writes. “We speak with those ghosts all the time, even before we recognize who they are or what they are telling us.” And in that way, his memoir becomes a different kind of translation: one writer communing with his own ghosts and reporting back in a language that we all can share.