Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton
by Joe Moshenska (Basic, $35)
The life of John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, “defies a simple recounting of facts,” said Nathan Pensky in The Boston Globe. How can anyone today assess the poet’s impact on our notions of Satan and hell without knowing the man, and how can we possibly know a man who lived in England four centuries ago and was also a scholar, a statesman, a self-professed prophet, and a revolutionary who fully endorsed the 1649 beheading of King Charles I? In his “strange but captivating” new book, Joe Moshenska, a professor of English at Oxford University, tosses aside convention to imagine his way into Milton’s head. Moshenska makes his experience of Milton’s writing part of the story. He also fills in gaps in the record with fictional versions of how certain events may have transpired. “The results are stunning in their insight.” A reader winds up feeling, in the end, as if Milton’s story “could be told in no other way.”
Making Darkness Light, in 11 chapters, “gives us 11 ways of looking at Milton,” said James Parker in The Atlantic. We see him as the brilliant son of an accomplished amateur musician. We see him as a traveling polyglot meeting Galileo in Tuscany. We also see him as a propagandist pamphleteer, an official in Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived republican government, and, finally, as a blind man and defeated revolutionary who in his early 50s sits at home reeling off the 11,000 lines of his great epic poem to various transcribers. Milton said the words came to him at night, in his dreams. Moshenska wants us to understand that it is more important to know that Paradise Lost ’s Satan—the template for so many other compellingly narcissistic fictional antiheroes—was created by a man who was defeated by circumstance but still certain of his own genius.
Moshenska’s fictional embellishments detract from the fine work he does elsewhere, said Fiona Sampson in The New York Times. “Literary biography should be based on a scrupulous, trustworthy close reading of evidence both literary and biographical.” But Making Darkness Light is “not so much an exercise in biography as a combination of memoir and of that most American of disciplines, comparative literature,” said Kate Maltby in the Financial Times. Moshenska’s self-indulgence “should grate, and at times it does.” Even so, he knows Milton cold, and his engagement with the poet’s consciousness “emerges as an extraordinary, seductive work of intellectual imagination.”