Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words

Katherine Rundell — All Souls fellow, children’s novelist, and author of the Donne biography Super-Infinite — discusses with Tyler Cowen whether Donne’s faith was sincere, what his tract on suicide argues, why children’s fiction deserves serious adult readers, and how the craft of writing for children differs from writing for adults.

Key ideas

1. Rundell reads Donne’s life and language as a study in transformation, not just a biography. Super-Infinite takes its title from Donne’s own habit of pushing language past its normal limits with ‘super-’ coinages — super-infinite, super-miraculous, super-eternal, super-dying — words for ‘a man who longs for immensities’. The same restlessness runs through his life: a child of a persecuted Catholic family who became a religious controversialist against Catholicism and, eventually, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.
2. She argues for Donne’s religious sincerity against a purely careerist reading. Cowen presses the case that Donne’s Anglican devotion was charade — art dressed as faith, adopted for survival. Rundell cannot construct the argument unprompted, engages with it once Cowen states it, but rejects it: newly dated letters show Donne pushing towards ordination even when the king’s favourite offered him easier, secular alternatives.
3. Biathanatos is a private argument about suicide, not a public manifesto. Donne’s treatise argues that suicide is not always a sin — he even suggests Christ’s death was, in that sense, one — but he told a friend to show it to no one. Rundell reads it as personally motivated rather than politically radical, sceptical of a reading premised on self-ownership as anachronistic for the period.
4. She thinks T.S. Eliot got Donne half right. Eliot revived Donne’s reputation but, in Rundell’s account, smoothed him into someone seeking wholeness, when Donne’s poetry is really an argument for human fracturing and strangeness against the tidier love poetry of contemporaries like Raleigh and Sidney.
5. Children’s fiction carries ‘truths’ that are really hopes, and adults should read it for that. Rundell argues children’s novels present love, kindness, and equality as settled facts when they are aspirations — a utopianism she credits, via Ursula Le Guin, with fiction’s power to imagine the world remade. Her claim is that adults should read children’s books alongside adult fiction, not that adult fiction should imitate it; adult fiction does other necessary work.
6. On vocabulary, her craft rule is pacing, not simplicity. Rundell cut the word ‘adamantine’ from a dramatic peak in one book but kept the harder word ‘renunciation’ elsewhere, because her general position is that children’s writing can use almost any vocabulary — children guess, skip, or look words up, and difficulty rarely puts them off as much as writers fear.
7. Height-seeking — rooftop walking, learning to fly — is a recurring instinct she does not fully explain. Cowen proposes it connects to her archival method, offsetting the burrowing detail of Donne research with a totalising overview. Rundell resists claiming the connection outright but allows it ‘could be an argument’.

Content

The transformations of Donne

Cowen opens on origins: Rundell was paid to memorise poetry as a child, including Donne, and found it ‘faintly alchemic’ before she understood it. Asked for her favourite word Donne invented, she explains the book’s title directly — she loves his ‘super-’ prefix words (super-infinite, super-miraculous, super-eternal, super-dying), calling them ‘the linguistic habits of a man who longs for immensities’. That reach past ordinary limits, she suggests, is also the shape of his life: born into a persecuted Catholic family, he wrote two tracts against Catholicism, converted to the Church of England, and ended as Dean of St Paul’s — a trajectory of successive, often survival-driven reinvention rather than one settled identity.

Was Donne’s faith real?

Asked directly whether the young Donne — who wrote about the transmigration of souls and flirted with defending suicide — was ever a Christian, Rundell says the precise shape of his inner religious life is unknowable, but she is inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt: many people changed religion across their lives in this period, and she reads the ‘passion and fervor’ of his religious poetry and sermons as hard to fake. Pressed for a number — what fraction of early-17th-century English poets and intellectuals actually believed the literal doctrine of the Trinity, not just in God generally — she offers 70 per cent, while flagging that ‘belief’ meant different things to different people, and that compulsory church attendance produced plenty of quiet unbelievers going through the motions. She locates this febrile intensity in a wider context: plague repeatedly emptying English cities, closeness to death and war, and a printing-press boom expanding access to knowledge — conditions she thinks made the era ‘both intellectually and emotionally’ extreme, and which she sees faint echoes of in the present.

The Straussian reading Cowen proposes

Cowen asks for ‘the best Straussian reading of John Donne’ — a reading that looks past the stated argument to a hidden, more self-interested one. Rundell says plainly that she does not know how to construct it and asks Cowen for his own view. Cowen offers one: Donne may never have believed in the Anglican Church at all, becoming a dean purely for income and security while treating his art as sincere and his faith as charade — a reading he estimates at 10 per cent likely. Rundell grants the reading real pedigree, citing John Carey’s 1980s biography John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art as its clearest statement, but ultimately rejects it: newly discovered and re-dated letters show Donne still pushing towards ordination even after reaching some financial security, resisting the king’s favourite Buckingham’s offers of secular postings to Venice or Ireland. That persistence, against his own material interest, is what convinces her his religion was real.

Biathanatos and the ethics of suicide

Donne wrote Biathanatos, the first full-length English treatise arguing that suicide is not always a sin — in narrow circumstances, he suggests, even Christ’s death qualifies — but explicitly told a friend in Germany to ‘neither burn it nor publish it… show it to no one’, aware it could cost him his career. Rundell reports that some Donne scholars read the text as a private exorcism of his own suicidal pull rather than a public argument, and declines to read it as asserting anything as politically radical as absolute self-ownership, calling that anachronistic for the period. What she does find in it is epistemic humility pushed to an extreme: Donne’s observation that ‘we have been sure about so many things, and we have been wrong about them’ — including, he notes, about the stars — used to argue that no certainty, including the certainty that suicide is always sinful, is safe from being simply wrong.

Donne against his contemporaries, and against Eliot’s version of him

Rundell credits T.S. Eliot with reviving Donne’s reputation after Victorian neglect, and agrees Eliot rightly saw a poet for whom ‘every element of his life modifies his sensibility’ — body, religion, and the smell of a rose folded into one sensibility. But she thinks Eliot understated Donne’s strangeness, offering a Donne seeking wholeness rather than one who, against the tidy Petrarchan imagery of contemporaries like Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, insisted love poetry should carry fleas, sucking fish, and compasses — ‘the vertiginous and labyrinthine quality of human desire’. On the era’s other major poet, Ben Jonson, she is unpersuaded of his greatness relative to Donne: she admires his structural craft and gossip but has ‘never managed to find him a poet who gets into your intestines’.

The case for children’s fiction

Asked about the political lessons of children’s novels, Rundell argues they present ‘large, uncompromising truths that we hope exist’ — love matters, kindness matters, equality is possible — truths that are really hopes dressed as certainties. She credits Ursula Le Guin’s argument that fiction is the first place humans imagine a world remade: ‘all that we have made, we have made by man, and it can be undone by man’. Her position is not that adult fiction should become more like children’s fiction — adult fiction does other necessary work, chiefly the ‘right to elongate and experiment’ — but that adults should read children’s books alongside it, for pleasure and for that unabashed idealism. She backs two further claims with data rather than sentiment: boys, she says, disproportionately read books about boys while girls read books about both genders, a pattern she worries is self-reinforcing; and social media makes children’s fiction harder to sell, because it offers ‘insatiable hunger… constant satiety’ against which something ‘slower and richer’ struggles to compete.

Craft, deadlines, and self-binding

On vocabulary, Rundell’s rule is about pacing, not simplification: she cut ‘adamantine’ from a peak dramatic moment — a showdown between a child and a gangster — because she didn’t want anything to slow the reader there, but her general position is that children’s writing can use almost any vocabulary, since children guess, skip, or look up hard words, and difficulty rarely puts them off as much as writers fear. On deadlines, she is candid that she has never handed in a book without it being ‘clawed from my hands’ — she would want an extra four months on every book, and confesses a lingering wish to quietly remove some adverbs from Super-Infinite now that publishers won’t let her revise it. Writing her PhD, she used a commitment device with a friend: missing a daily word count meant a £100 fine to the wealthiest donkey sanctuary they could find, chosen so the money would do no harm but also no particular good — an incentive she says worked, and which she has since dropped only because the urgency that required it has passed.

Height-seeking

Rundell roof-walks and is learning to fly a small plane, both, she says, for ‘the feeling of height’ and a wider view of the world than street level allows. Cowen proposes this connects to her research method — Donne scholarship requires burrowing into archival detail, and height-seeking might be the counterweight that lets her hold a whole book’s shape in mind. Rundell does not claim the connection for herself unprompted, but grants, once Cowen states it, that it ‘could be an argument’ — the totalising view from a rooftop or cockpit as the necessary complement to a scholar’s habit of dwelling on detail.

See also

• Katherine Rundell — speaker; author of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Paula Byrne — fellow Conversations with Tyler guest and literary biographer of canonical English writers, working similar terrain of biography as close reading