Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who was babysitting him told him that it was wrong. ‘I was perhaps only six or seven at the time, but she knew. I knew it too. It was as if she had peered into the deep, secret part of my soul and seen what I was hiding.’
Alongside the precocious knowledge came desperate attempts to conceal the truth. Hewitt adopted alien ways of being: ‘I regulated myself; I policed myself.’ As an adolescent, he spread rumours about his exploits with girls. He even watched heterosexual porn on the sitting room television in the hope that his classmates would spot him from the street. By the time he went to university his armour was so deeply embedded that it was indistinguishable from his skin.
Hewitt is unsparing in his depiction of the emotions experienced in caring for someone with depression
All Down Darkness Wide is his account of his quest for an authentic life. It is poignant and painful, rigorous and sensual, focussing on the four people who helped him on his journey to selfhood. Two are lovers: Jack, a PhD student, whom he first visits for a troilist tryst in Cambridge; and Elias, a Swedish backpacker, whom he meets in Colombia. Two are poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Karin Boye.
None of these guides and guardians lived untroubled lives. Both Hopkins and Boye died in their early forties. Hopkins, unable to express his love for men, was wracked with guilt about his desires and the particular sacrilege of eroticising ‘the muscular body of Christ on the crucifix’. Boye’s romantic life was convoluted. Her suicide was followed within days by that of her long term partner Margot.
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