Thom Gunn: the leather-bound lyricist

Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life (720 pp, Faber & Faber, £25/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $45) begins with the most traumatic event in the poet’s life.  In December 1944, at the age of fifteen, he broke into the barricaded sitting room and found the corpse of his mother, who had gassed herself.  Depressed after two broken marriages, Charlotte didn’t love him enough to stay alive, and he felt she had rejected him.  Thom had slept in his mother’s bed till he was thirteen, and thought she’d made him both a homosexual and a poet.  

Charlotte remained unpredictable even after her death, and haunted Thom’s thoughts, dreams and poems for the rest of his life.  He often had nightmares about finding his mother’s body and thought, “Oh no, not again .  I think I’ll let somebody else find her body this time.”  In an unpublished draft, “Of the Dead”, he recalled the succubus “breathing the gas in her red dressing gown / for ever and ever she dies again / while I reproach her, for the bitter drama / she had to act out.”  She’d behaved theatrically as well as badly.

Slim and nearly six feet tall, Gunn arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, “shy, gangly, awkward, pimply and sexually confused”, but later got better looking and was ravenous for men.  He studied with two extremely dogmatic and dictatorial teachers: F.R. Leavis at Cambridge, then Yvor Winters at Stanford.  In a weird misjudgment, Winters told his credulous students that Sturge Moore was a better poet than Yeats.  Winters also cruelly criticised Gunn’s work: “He told me all my recent poems were journalistic and melodramatic”, and twisted the knife by adding that “your rhythms, when I can find them, are uninteresting; the diction is genteel but unimportant.”  Gunn rolled with the punches and took the punishment, thought Winters was a fine teacher and eventually became an infinitely greater poet than his master.

Though not known for his wit, Gunn could be quite amusing.  His tattoo needleman was “Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt”.  The lesbian poet Elizabeth Bishop “puffed manfully” on a proffered joint.  When he won a Somerset Maugham travel grant, he said his homosexual patron would have approved of taking his lover on the trip.  He turned down a lucrative Visiting Poet job at Stanford, which paid $80,000 for ten classes in ten weeks, and insouciantly remarked, “since I have no desire for a butler or for a yacht, I could see no reason for breaking my pattern of afternoon naps.”  The first homosexuals he saw were “old men in raincoats jacking off in public urinals.  It’s not a very attractive role model.”  In senescence, he himself acquired “that look of the armored reptile behind which the old man’s eyes dart furtively, seeking refuge.”  He fancifully defined safe sex as “prodding each other with broomsticks held with welding-gloves.”  He liked to quote queer graffiti: “We are the people our parents warned us against” and “the lifestyle we have created for ourselves is as lethal to us as the Moral Majority”.

Thom Gunn had a two-shot, Tommy-gun name, and his tough, masculine public image—living dangerously with leather costume, black boots, panther tattoo, earring and Harley-Davidson motorcycle—was copied from Marlon Brando’s role in The Wild One.   Friends were surprised that he didn’t wear leather underwear.  He confessed, “although I may appear like a strong person, I appear to myself as a weak person so I’m always attracted by the strong.”  This deceptive pose belied his gentle private character, but certainly helped sell his books.  

Gunn wrote about choice, will and loss.  Frequently on the move and on the edge, he believed that “Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, / One is always nearer by not keeping still.”  He described the death of friends, as well as a major theme in modern literature, in “life seemed all / loss, and what was more / I’d lost whatever it was / before I’d even had it.”

Like all poets, Gunn kept his eye on the competition.  He disliked the personality and poetry of his Berkeley colleague Robert Hass, and thought, “he’s a sleaze, very charming, and would get away with murder.”  Ed Dorn was one of his favorite poets and he found Gunslinger very impressive.  He saw through Allen Ginsberg’s persona, but was hugely impressed by him and said, “I’d always imagined he might be a bit hysterical, like some of his poetry, but he is sensible and kind , and takes charge and looks after people in a way I admire.”  He underrated the popular Seamus Heaney and didn’t believe he was “that good.  I think he was invented by a committee of teachers with a sense of high fashion.”  He thought his own antithesis Philip Larkin “was a terrible influence on British poetry. . . . His distrust of rhetoric was also a distrust of feeling, a distrust of daring. . . . His most prominent attitudes—his closed mind, his sour & begrudging tone, his assumption that provinciality is a virtue” were unattractive.  He admitted, “I may be better than anybody else in England but Larkin and Ted Hughes, but that isn’t particularly good.”

Gunn’s relations with the more talented and successful Hughes were more complex than with other poets.  He was dazzled by Hughes’ The Hawk in the Rain and almost “melted with envy” at Wodwo .  Faber & Faber published a joint Selected Poems by Hughes and Gunn, which became a widely used set text in British schools. In their homeland both men became “Establishment” poets.  He remained wary of Hughes’ bombast and romanticism, was troubled and alarmed when Hughes was “positively beleaguered by celebrity” and believed his own “newspaper reputation”.  He decided that Hughes was “not somebody I even want to know very well.”  Hughes sought Gunn’s advice on whether to publish his intensely personal Birthday Letters about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, and Gunn encouraged him to strengthen himself by standing up to his enemies.  He was disappointed by the bombastic book, and thought Hughes had self-defensively “forgotten all subtlety of approach.”  As Poet Laureate, Hughes asked Gunn to accept the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.  Permanently absent in America, Gunn refused the British award.  He slightly missed having a fifteen-minute chat with the Queen, but knew it would be more interesting to tell friends he’d turned down the Medal instead of accepting it.

Plath said that Gunn was Hughes’ “poet-twin”.  Like Plath, Gunn was a Mid-Atlantic poet, but he disapproved of her best book, Ariel : “The trouble is with the emotion, itself, really.  It is largely one of hysteria, and it is amazing that her hysteria has produced poetry as good as this. . . . I don’t like dramatising myself.  I don’t want to be Sylvia Plath.”  Like Gunn’s mother, Plath gassed herself in the London winter of 1963 and rejected her young children who lived with her.  Gunn was appalled when his writing students imitated Plath with bogus and self-pitying poems about “breakdown, mental institution, and suicide attempt, of which experience does not always seem first-hand”.   

Gunn was a conscientious and exacting teacher, part-time, on and off, at Berkeley from 1958 to 1999.  He taught additional classes without extra pay and, Michael Nott writes, “he updated his notes and varied his course content each year, came up with new quizzes and assessment questions, and generally encouraged his students to explore their own reading and writing interests. . . . His teaching focused on practical analysis that could help students both understand  poetry and write it themselves.”  In 1994 he gave the graduation address to 5,000 spectators in the Greek Theater.  He was invited to be a guest professor at many universities, and was usually ignored and lonely when he got there.  He particularly hated Cincinnati, and slyly threatened to go back there when things got bad in San Francisco.

Gunn’s first lover was the theater director Mike Kitay, whom he’d met in Cambridge and lived with for the rest of his life.  Kitay warned that Gunn would do anything for sexual “tricks” with other men.  Though they slept in the same bed for many years, sex became for them increasingly associated with erotic tension and sadness.  Their sexual separation began early on while Gunn was a student at Stanford.  (Gore Vidal and his lifelong partner Howard Austen also had a non-sexual relationship.)  Gunn wanted and actually got both stability and promiscuity, “an intricate emotional complex of sexual freedom within a committed loving relationship.”  In “The Justification”, Gunn used an astronomical image to explain his Platonic ideal: 

What I envisioned: 2 planets

Revolving on themselves, equal

& self-sufficient

yet locked in the invisible

firm embrace of gravity. . . . 

From a distance they look one

But—tho eternally reconciled—

They are two.

Like many homosexuals, Gunn lived in an exclusive world where he felt more kinship, community and protection, a sense of belonging without shame or fear.  (The two homosexuals I knew well both said I was their only straight friend.)  In 1971, with his Guggenheim grant, Gunn bought a house on Cole Street in San Francisco and set up a hippie commune with Mike and his current lover, and a volatile rotating tribe of homosexual inhabitants.  Gunn’s house resembled Nanny Auden’s 1940 commune on Middagh Street in Brooklyn.

Gunn’s writing was propelled by drugs and sex, which Nott realistically and honestly describes.  In “a fucking beautiful year, Gunn wrote like a prince & cruised like a beggar.”  He struggled for years to “come out” in his poetry and later became the leading homosexual poet, but the ambiguous expression of his sexual tastes in his earlier poems was more artistically effective.  He drew an unconvincing parallel between writing and acid trips, and called both “adventuring into places you cannot have predicted.”  Attracted to danger, he was eager to try anything.  In “The Lost Weekend of 1995”, a friend inserts the point of a needle and “pushes it through his vein”.  In another drug scenario, during six hours of hallucinations “nothing had a permanent identity, least of all myself”. Magnolia bushes assumed strange shapes and looked like “Bosnian refugees with their luggage.”  He was blocked from writing in his last years by aging, his grief over a close friend’s death and the usual struggle to begin again after completing a book.  Inspiration had dried up, and he was left with the dead end of desperate sex and addiction to increasingly powerful drugs.

Gunn’s ideal lover was “a beautiful young wounded boy.”  He knew that “anticipation and delay were just as thrilling as the sex itself”, but also wanted instant gratification.  He loved novelty, voyeurism and experimentation.  His polymorphous delinquency and what he called “the malady of queerness”, included bondage and sadomasochism (“a form of love”), whips and beatings while chained to a bed and a chummy four-way trick with acid.  Equipped with cans of lubricating Crisco, patrons enjoyed the perilous excitement and ecstasy of the bathhouse.  They could bid at slave auctions, and penetrate “an entire wall of glory holes with people kneeling in front of crotch-high holes and servicing disembodied erections.”  He misbehaved and was expelled from his favorite Hole in the Wall leather bar: “I had this guy’s cock out and he had mine out and we were doing enjoyable things to them.”  Gunn said he “never much liked anal sex” and added with a superb simile, “I have always been terribly oral, sucking and being sucked like some shellfish in the tides.”  The happiest moment of his life was being surprisingly sucked off by his close friend Tony White.

Gunn feared he might be infected with AIDS before its symptoms appeared, but survived the scourge in the 1980s and could say like the messenger in Job 1:15 “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”  He felt guilty about his miraculous escape from the epidemic, and mistakenly thought he could take the same risks with drugs and not become addicted.  During the plague years his self-destructive impulse was fueled by drinking, drugging and tricking.  After doubling his dose of speed and taking home a hopeless addict, he had recklessly dangerous sex and was greatly relieved at his annual physical to test HIV negative.  To relieve his guilt he generously gave money to indigent victims, and housed “homeless speed freaks” who repaid his hospitality by stealing his watch and wallet.  Like Walt Whitman during the Civil War, he suffered with those he saw suffer, visited terminal patients in hospitals and nursed his dying friends.  

In addition to the Guggenheim, between 1988 and 1998 Gunn received seven prestigious and well-deserved prizes, including a MacArthur grant and an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  But some of these prizes, which coincided with his permanent writer’s block, made him feel unworthy and intensified his guilt.  He had always emphasised youth, and could not cope with old age and decrepitude.  A close friend thought he was destroying himself, and he confessed while using drugs, “I’ll probably kill myself doing this kind of thing one of these days.”  Mike Kitay was powerless to save him.  On April 10, 2004, following his mother’s tragic example, Gunn died of a drug overdose, with methamphetamine, heroin and alcohol in his bloodstream.  British poets didn’t commit suicide, but in America—like Hart Crane, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Sylvia Plath—Gunn killed himself. 

Michael Nott’s descriptions of Gunn’s innumerable queer pickups and drug trips are extremely repetitious.  But his sympathetic and perceptive narrative, mainly based on Gunn’s lively letters, includes concise accounts of the composition, publication and reputation of his formal verse.  This intelligent biography, along with the recent editions of Gunn’s poems and letters (of which Nott was co-editor), place him with the finest postwar British poets: Hughes and Larkin, Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. 

Jeffrey Meyers has published essays on Gunn in Style (Winter 2010), Kenyon Review (July-August 2019) and TheArticle (11 July 2021).

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