Too Mousy, Alas

Thom Gunn, writing to Clive Wilmer in 1994, notes, “I found myself thinking like the robot dying on the roof at the end of Blade Runner ‘the things I have seen.’” Gunn, who was then 65, is wryly self-dramatizing here, a familiar tone throughout his correspondence, but there’s truth to his boast. The Letters of Thom Gunn (Faber, 2021), edited by Wilmer, Michael Nott, and August Kleinzahler is at once a biography, an annotated bibliography, and a social history that tracks Gunn from boyhood to death, an arc that goes from his jokey contributor’s note in 1956—“Is 27, has been twice arrested, likes motorcycles and Elvis Presley”—to his cameo in a local ’90s San Francisco gossip sheet as “nouveau riche leather-man Thom Gunn.”

Gunn is a study in self-invention. He was born in 1929, in distinctly non-nouveau Gravesend, and spent his childhood moving around Kent, South London, and Cheadle before a brief period of contented settlement in Hampstead, north London, that was terminally interrupted by his mother’s suicide when Gunn was 15. At that point Thom was still Tom, but as outlined in his fond, if characteristically terse, essay “Cambridge in the Fifties,” collected in The Occasions of Poetry (1982), it was only when he arrived at university, after a tedious stint of National Service, that he was able to fashion the attitude, or perhaps the pose, that allowed his poetry to happen. This pose was partly shaped by one of the dominant figures at Cambridge, the literary critic F.R. Leavis, and most importantly by Leavis’s attitude toward self-pity. “Anyone who took Leavis’s lectures will remember the way he’d say ‘self-pit-teh’ when talking about, let’s say, some poem by Shelley,” Gunn later said. “He thought self-pity a very bad thing to write about. I suppose it’s a bad thing morally to give way to. People who are sorry for themselves are boring, aren’t they?”

If self-pity, or being boring, was the enemy, something had to offer a counterweight. For the undergraduate Gunn, there were a number of positive influences, chief among them 16th century poetry’s “plain style” of impersonality, its verse forms offering a sturdy rigging on which to hang—usually modern, sometimes classical—subject matter while subduing the ego of the “I.” This led to the poems that became Gunn’s first collection, Fighting Terms (1954), published while he was still at Cambridge. It wasn’t only his historical reading that offered answers. In addition to an already documented epiphany (present only offstage in the letters) while traveling in France—“I experienced a revelation of physical and spiritual freedom that I still refer to in my thoughts as the Revelation.… I suddenly found I had the energy for almost anything,” he wrote in “Cambridge in the Fifties”—he also found guidance, inspiration, and sympathy in fellow students. Most notable was his formative friendship with aspiring actor Tony White, as well as with other key figures such as Karl Miller, who went on to become an influential editor, and Mike Kitay, who became Gunn’s life-partner. Gunn’s sensible, occasionally violent early poems—full of shields, doubles, and tough-guy courtliness—attracted the right sort of attention, albeit sometimes for the wrong reasons, as when Robert Conquest included Gunn in his New Lines (1956) anthology, and conscripted the poet into what became known as “The Movement.” This was a cohort of poets mostly writing plainspoken poems of (very) ordinary experience, a reaction of sorts against the blood and thunder of the Forties. Gunn wrote to Conquest:

I don’t think the Movement is a movement in the same sense that, say, the Imagists, the Thirties, the Apocalyptics, were movements.… [T]he different writers you name share little else beyond a desire to get rid of the phoniness that was preparing in the Thirties and that made the Forties an all-time low in Eng Lit.

Gunn was right about how little his fellow Movementeers had in common, though, like Philip Larkin, the other star of the anthology, the boost it gave his career was more beneficial than not, aside from the burden of disavowing his membership of what was largely an arid troop of pentametric ironists. A change of continent did much to shake off any lingering associations to John Wain, Kingsley Amis, et al., as Gunn moved to the United States in 1954—in part to be closer to Kitay, who was carrying out his own military service. At Stanford University, Gunn was taken up by another authoritarian mentor, Yvor Winters, who taught in the English department. What we get from the letters, in a way that’s only gestured at in Gunn’s essays, is the degree to which his shift from British to Anglo-American poet was another great act of will. We see how pliable he was to Winters’s influence and to the modernist tradition that Winters promoted. Gunn went from being an Elizabethan on wheels to an admirer of Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound; his verse shifted from stanzaic certainty to West Coast breath measurement, via syllabics and other, not always fruitful, experiments.

The letters are dominated by a few key addressees (Tony White, the literary critic Tony Tanner, and the academic Douglas Chambers chief among them) and the book feels divided, implicitly at least, into the periods before and after White. Writing to White in 1955, Gunn confesses, “I can’t help feeling that you were the cause, direct or indirect, of most of my best poetry, and by implication of my straightest thinking and strongest grasp on things.” We witness much of this thinking and grasping in the letters to White, in which Gunn asks for criticism and second opinions on poems, and puzzles through the new American reading he’s diving into headfirst. More esoteric but, one senses, fundamental to his composure and capacity to work, are Gunn’s pledges of allegiance to “the Values,” a sort of shared existential code with White, first outlined in their student days. These appeared in Gunn’s earlier writing, but where they might have seemed a dewy-eyed in-joke in the context of a personal essay, here it’s clear that a postcard White sent to Gunn in 1954 vowing “panache, logique, espagnolisme, l’imprévu, singularité and MAGNANIMITY” is the closest Gunn, who grew up “unselfconsciously atheist,” gets to a foundational faith. To Tony he is plain-dealing, flirtatious, fond, and more unguarded than almost anywhere else. He wittily abhors poems that give off a “shocking smell of paper,” commits himself to an unpretentious heroism, and aims desperately to be a man of action both in life and on the page:

The ideal in writing would be the logic of the Romance languages combined with the knowledge of the desperate need for emotional discipline that one gets from living in a cave. Figuratively, if you see what I mean.

He is also endlessly encouraging of White’s own ambitions, and is aghast when White abandons acting in 1958 for an easier life. Gunn lays out his objections in resonant, seemingly self-reflective, terms:

I think quitting could be looked on as an oblique form of cowardice, in that you didn’t want to wait long enough to fail—fail either from your own fault or not. But it’s a risk (failing) one should invite.… One is living only when one has put oneself in a position where it is possible to fail, and the larger the possibility of failure the greater one is.

White did return to acting but died in 1976 after a leg break in a soccer game led to a blood clot. The aftermath of his death leaves Gunn striking a desolate note, albeit still eschewing self pit-teh, and “not ready for [White] to disappear into literature just yet”:

I must say I haven’t felt a loss like that since my mother died … that old duke of the dark corners; but in any case the world does seem enormously diminished.

True to his word, Gunn continued to put himself in positions where it was possible to fail, time and again, and it is this laudable trait to which the letters most strongly testify. Like Donald Davie, a regular among these pages (or at least the version in Gunn’s late elegy for him “To Donald Davie in Heaven”), Gunn changes his mind on poets, finding his own “ability to regroup/without cynicism,” thinking better of Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Marianne Moore, and adding aspects of their work to his own approaches. An abandoned doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens is only the first in a decades-long attempt to get his head around the US traditions he had grown up ignorant of, filling in the blanks on Williams and his disciples, embracing fulsomely “the potential of the greatest innovations of the last 200 years,” and arriving at an iconoclastic attitude toward the canon: “To hell with great traditions—it is good to inspect other people’s great traditions and then select what one needs from them.” He remained open to influences, sometimes at Winters’s suggestion, although he also followed his own nose. Poems such as Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966) and Pound’s “Canto XLVII” take on an almost sacred sheen (on the latter: “I read it with amazement, for the first time, fell in love, and came to read the rest”) whenever Gunn enthusiastically recommends them to his various correspondents, but he is similarly bowled over by contemporaries, not least one of the editors of the Letters, August Kleinzahler, and some of Forrest Gander’s Deeds of Utmost Kindness (1994), the latter admittedly complicated by a crush on Gunn’s part.

Aside from these insights into Gunn’s reading we also come to see a great deal about his developing fame, and his mockingly cultivated relationship toward it. In other contexts, this attitude might verge on the sociopathic but, in a poet open about his various masks and stances, it feels more self-protective carapace than chilly inhumanity. Writing to his brother Ander in 1994 about a profile of himself published in the Los Angeles Times, Gunn notes:

I seem a person without a trouble in the world and someone who never uttered an unkind word to anyone. It did make me realize how we all, while being less than half-aware of it, work continually at projecting a personality. And then something like this is published, and you see what you have been doing all along!

Gunn was often up to something, and certainly wasn’t living in a cave. As well as projecting a personality, he projected ideas about his reputation to close friends, or at least tried to balance the idea of being something of a celebrity back in England with—until prizes came later—at best a marginal figure in US poetry. Displaying a healthy aversion to what he called the “Sylvia and Iris shit,” whereby the writer’s cult of personality occludes their achievement, Gunn was ambitious on behalf of his writing. “I may be better than anybody else in England but Larkin and Ted Hughes,” he told Tony White, “but that isn’t particularly good. I want to be better than Rimbaud + Baudelaire + Donne and unfortunately do not look likely to be. Too mousy, alas.” At other times he fears becoming a minor poet, namechecking Edwin Muir and Charles Tomlinson among others as cautionary tales of the not-quite top drawer. Nearing his 60th birthday, little has changed in terms of his sense of achievement. He feels himself a grandee only in a diminished field:

I am well aware that what stature I am considered to have is really the result of our living in a time in which achievement is mostly very low. In a village of mudhuts, a two-storey building looms like a skyscraper, indeed.

Arguably, his greatest work was to follow. The Man with Night Sweats (1992) sees his earlier shapely stanzaic patterning allied to an urgent desire to elegize friends lost in the previous decade to AIDS. It’s a period in which he writes “promiscuous sex is no longer political, just suicide,” but, in a further case of stiff upper lipdom, is quick to highlight how his generation “have had it unnaturally easy” with regard to health care and life expectancy. Gunn’s notion of a poem’s purpose rings out when he talks about these elegies:

I think of poetry as being like carpentry, or clothes design, or architecture, or something else of that practical sort. I am not more perceptive about the emotions, or more feeling, than anybody else, but I am better with words.… I actually got a kind of satisfaction from writing that long poem about Allan’s death: I thought of myself as fashioning a kind of monument for him, and using all my skill at its most elaborate—even showing off with it—so as to make that monument worthy of him.

The elegies are among his finest poems, pulsing with barely contained feeling yet staying true to the Values, refusing to wobble into soppiness despite extraordinary provocation. Gunn’s homosexuality—at first guarded from public view to avoid contravening the law in the 1950s and ’60s, subdued into analogy or symbol at best—is another cornerstone here. Gay rights move a long way in the course of these letters, from an early scare that Kitay might be court-martialed due to suspicions about his sexuality to Gunn’s setting up a sort of Edenic household in San Francisco where partners and lovers move in and stay for years. It was communalism based on a version of his happiest time in childhood, living with his mother and brother in Hampstead, but also on what Wilmer calls “hippie sentimentality.” Gunn has visions of paradise among the bathhouses and hot springs, laced with San Francisco’s fabled bohemianism and sometimes LSD or other substances. That hippie sentimentality intrudes somewhat on the books of the middle period, wafting through the dream logic of Moly (1971) and Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), with Gunn’s transition from the music of Marlowe to Black Mountain being less than seamless.

The foreword to the 800-page Letters mentions that the book contains around a tenth of Gunn’s extant letters, so what is included necessarily involves narrative construction. What Gunn would have made of their publication isn’t clear; on leaving a friend’s house who had died of AIDS in 1984, Gunn “located an enormous bundle [of letters] by myself and dropped them in a dustbin outside.” In a 1993 letter to Wilmer, referring to the recent dustup over the publication of Larkin’s correspondence, Gunn writes, “I certainly wouldn’t want my letters to be published immediately after my death, or ever, making sarcastic references to people I haven’t even met.” It’s possible that Gunn, always with an eye on the vagaries of posterity, might have grown less definitive later. A limitation of this book—again alluded to in its introduction—is a relatively incomplete cast, in part due to refusals of permission, and in part to the decreasing cultural role of the letter in the period covered. There is also, in the later years, an abundance of correspondence to do with Gunn’s sexual exploits in bars, clubs, and at home, a catalog of speed-aided fourways and solo porn-watching sessions that, while included to give a sense of Gunn’s appetites in age, eventually becomes wearing. “I am not only a sexual poet any more than Whitman or Isherwood are only sexual writers,” Gunn upbraids a graduate student in one letter. In another, he responds to Robert Pinsky’s criticism of a cento, “Letters from Manhattan,” included in Boss Cupid (2003), which is about tricking: “[Pinsky] didn’t like it because it seemed like ‘the gay poet’ kind of dipping his wick into Manhattan then boasting about it, at age 67,” Gunn writes, revealing, elliptically, how he viewed this swanking by proxy.

What the reader gains from such access to a poet’s sex life, beyond fulfilling prurient curiosities, isn’t clear, but the editors’ decision to devote a significant portion of the later years to this material is also to acknowledge Gunn’s own admission that his writing juices had largely dried up—gardening, cooking, and sex became more important aspects of his daily routine. It’s also to circle back to his being a man of action. For all the laying out of Gunn’s erotic habits, one doesn’t sense any great confidence being betrayed. Gunn was open about his sexual exploits, something mentioned in Kleinzahler’s memoir-essay about Gunn in Cutty, One Rock (2004):

The only time Thom took issue with my extraliterary behavior was when I was having an illicit affair. His objection had nothing to do with sexual infidelity and the institution of marriage—how could it?—but he believed that over the course of such relationships one becomes accustomed to lying, and the habit of lying is detrimental to one’s poetry.

While we hear plenty about what might once have been called his “personal life,” this type of candor belies any great plumbing of more private depths. There are few psychological insights, and only rarely do we see behind the mask of the cheery, light-hearted enjoyer of life. We witness Gunn habitually practicing his own advice. The writer we encounter is, above all, honest, and if what we get is surface rather than self-scrutiny, it’s a seeking, open, generous surface. For all the bulk of the book, its usefully detailed apparatus and modest footnoting, there are no real revelations to be had, only confirmation of Gunn’s commitment to his art and to pleasure, his breadth of interests, and his gift for raucous, loving amity—nursing dying friends or their estates, hosting, cooking, doing something grand when the occasion called for it. Aging sybaritically, joking that, like Popeye, he had an old man’s head on a gym-buffed body, Gunn went out swinging.

He left behind a body of work that was less than Baudelaire but “fifteen times as good as” Wain, Jennings, and Amis (by his own 1954 reckoning). In 2001, three years before his death of “acute polysubstance abuse,” at age 74, Gunn wrote to his brother, “When I was little I hoped to have a really dramatic life, but Mother’s suicide changed all that. I suppose I got my wish anyway.” Drama, sure, and half a foot of shelf space.