The poet’s powerful account of his romance with a depressed young Swedish man is a revealing portrait of language, passion and belief
This extraordinary memoir by the poet Seán Hewitt suggested itself after he had made a brutally impersonal discovery. While trawling the internet, he stumbled, in a moment of casual curiosity, upon something he had not known – that a young man with whom he had been romantically involved at Cambridge had died before his time (there is a non-invasive sensitivity about Hewitt’s decision to leave the reader to guess at what must have happened).He remembers “Jack” (the names in the book have been changed) with warmth and in such idiosyncratic detail that it makes you feel you have met him yourself – you can picture the daredevil flirtatiousness, bookishness and beauty. And it is mournful to reflect that Hewitt’s elegant assessment – “it was as though he had perfected the art of himself” – cannot have been shared by his subject. The affront of learning about Jack’s funeral in this way – and the grief that followed – led Hewitt to thinking about the context of Jack’s death and of others, himself included, for whom homosexuality, even within 21st-century Europe, continues to be a love that dare not always speak its name.
Jack disappears early from the narrative as he did from life, giving way to a young Swedish man – the memoir’s central figure – encountered by Hewitt while travelling in Columbia. Elias is the life and soul of the party: charismatic, bold, seemingly at ease in his own skin – with garlands tattooed around the nape of his neck. He offers Hewitt scraps of Swedish, teases him for failing to roll his Rs correctly. Again, Hewitt pulls the reader in, knows how to charm. He is, before and after everything else, a romantic: “Real life was something that people lived when they weren’t in love,” he writes. Remembering a night swim just before he and Elias become lovers, he describes “the ocean turning over in its bed, still too far off to be seen”. This joyously understated line contributes to the growing erotic charge of the scene.
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