Thom Gunn: the poet in his letters

In December 1944, when Thom Gunn was fifteen, his mother committed suicide by inhaling fumes from the tube of a gas-poker, used to light coal fires. The next morning Thom and his younger brother Ander found her corpse, as she knew they would, and she seemed to be punishing them as well as herself. He later wrote: “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.” He may also have felt guilty because his mother had rejected him and he could not save her. This traumatic event forced him to suppress his most intense emotions and later unleashed his self-destructive impulse.

A half-century later Gunn finally wrote about the suicide in a powerfully controlled third-person poem, The Gas Poker, which refers to her escape from pain and alludes to her precious sons:

Coming back off the grass
To the room of her release,
They who had been her treasures
Knew to turn off the gas,
Take the appropriate measures,
Telephone the police.

Gunn believed that his mother’s second husband, who’d left her, may have caused her death. He also blamed his father, a successful newspaper editor, who’d abandoned his wife and young sons in 1938. When his father died in 1962, Gunn was not emotionally affected and bitterly recalled, “I’d never had much to do with him and he was, finally, a ruthless and self-pitying man.”

Gunn was influenced by two literary dictators — FR Leavis at Cambridge and Yvor Winters for graduate study at Stanford — who both told students what to believe instead of encouraging them to think for themselves. Struggling to free himself from Winters, Gunn called him “dogmatic, arrogant, defiant, and almost always unnecessarily so”. He was also influenced by the equally dogmatic English poet and critic Donald Davie (born 1922), and said, with mixed feelings, “I do admire him, but he is a changeable and difficult man, and I can’t really deal with him as a friend.”

Gunn’s closest pals were the actor and translator, Tony White, and the bright Cambridge don, Tony Tanner, both of whom came to a bad end. White broke his leg playing football and died, aged 45, from a blood clot that travelled from his leg to his lung. Tanner, Gunn’s only straight friend, had two bad marriages and suffered from alcoholism, depression, nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts and terminal cancer.

In his letters —recently published as The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer (Faber, £40) — Gunn adjusted appropriately to each correspondent: matey with Ander, dutiful with the two aunts who brought him up after his mother’s death, filial with Winters, literary with the two Tonys, and rather soppy in his declarations of love for his lifetime partner and sometimes lover, the Jewish-American actor-director Mike Kitay. Gunn’s letters show his interest in rock music, movies and plays, but not classical concerts, ballet (all about saying hello) and opera (all about saying goodbye).

Born in Gravesend, Kent, Gunn was torn between living in America or returning to England. (Other famous literary expatriates, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, remained in America; WH Auden and David Hockney went back to England.) Gunn was also torn between writing and teaching. The university structured his life and provided a secure income, but prevented him from writing during term time. After abandoning graduate studies at Stanford, he taught at Berkeley from 1958 to 1966, and again for one semester a year from 1975 to 1999. He didn’t have much money until he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. Before he got tenure he had to carry an extra course each semester, but was a conscientious teacher. Sceptical about narcissistic and untalented creative writing students who tediously imitated the agonies of Sylvia Plath, he was charismatic when teaching poetry. Every inch the handsome poet, Gunn cut a dashing figure when I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1960s.

Gunn gave frequent, effective poetry readings throughout America and in England, but his editors don’t say if he had a lecture agent or what fees he earned. While reading at UCLA he “kept wondering whether any poet had ever thrown up on the stage during a poetry reading”. (I saw Auden and Ted Roethke drunk, trembling and pushing their papers off the lectern and into the crowd while reading at Harvard.) Gunn woke up the next morning with a poet’s harvest, “surrounded by naked bodies and uniquely hungover”.

This edition, a selection of about one-tenth of Gunn’s letters, provides an effective framework for his two main subjects: poets and homosexuals. It has a perceptive introduction; excellent chronology, index and brief biographies of Gunn’s friends; concise and helpful footnotes, and good photos. I found only two typos: Raymond Mortimer died in 1980 (page 25), Ellmann’s name is misspelled (page 708). This edition will provide the foundation of Gunn’s biography.

Trigger finger at the ready, Gunn cast a cold eye on the poetic competition and watched, as King Lear says, “who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.” Even-handed and often quite witty about his contemporaries, he had a weak spot for the verse of homosexual friends. He concentrated on Anglophone poets and never mentioned the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. He admired Thomas Mann’s “ambiguities that are so carefully under control . . . his delicacy of moral concern over disease as health and health as disease”. But he strangely ignored two of Mann’s greatest homosexual descriptions: Aschenbach’s longing for Tadzio in Death in Venice and Rudi Schwerdtfeger’s love for Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus.

Charles Baudelaire was always his great master, and Gunn self-reflectively observed, “he appraises the sensual so ruthlessly while at the same time never denying the way he has relished it”. Like Baudelaire, Gunn was “particularly concerned with the ways in which one can operate fully and at one’s best at the same time as perceiving the total bleakness. (This is why I see Camus as, not the greatest, but the central writer of the last twenty or thirty years).”

Gunn thought Philip Larkin was “an exquisite poet . . . but disastrously limited by his choice of subject matter — finally that choice has the effect of a kind of cowardice” by cutting himself off from vital experience. He deplored Larkin’s “closed mind, his sour & begrudging tone, his assumption that provinciality is a virtue,” but praised his “unexpected sympathies or when he writes a marvellously Symbolist ending to High Windows”:

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Gunn didn’t notice that Larkin echoed the ending of Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man:

And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Ted Hughes (PA Images)

When Ted Hughes (pictured above) left Sylvia Plath and she committed suicide (by gas, like Gunn’s abandoned mother), Gunn loyally felt sorry for him, not her. He disliked Plath’s rambling hysterical monologues, but found some incredibly beautiful passages, “where the image becomes an enormous and compelling actuality. . . It is amazing that her hysteria has produced poetry as good as this.” Hughes’ The Hawk in the Rain dazzled Gunn with its fearless energy, and his poetry made Gunn almost melt with envy. He concluded that Hughes was “by far the best person writing nowadays — for all the bombast, the romanticism, etc., he is making interactions between language & experience that no one else . . . is even capable of.”

Geoffrey Hill struck Gunn as “a strong vigorous writer who lets no nonsense slip into his verse”. But he wittily added, “increasingly with his poetry I get a strange sense of archaic costuming. Hill actually speaks of a lute as if he ran across people playing lutes all the time, in the bus, outside the supermarket”. Gunn had some doubts about the charming Seamus Heaney, the darling of reviewers, and paraphrased Voltaire on God to describe his work: “If there hadn’t been a Seamus Heaney, the critics would have had to invent one.” Gunn also allowed, “he is direct, honest and almost always interesting.” He liked Station Island, with its “constant happiness of phrase, as when he refers to the young priest in his soutane on his bicycle, being ‘glossy as a blackbird’—beautiful, enviable!”

Gunn was hostile to the precious and mannered John Ashbery, his personal and poetic antithesis: “He is really a good deal too Firbankian for me, languid-languid. I liked him on our first meeting, in New York, now he just bores me.” He didn’t think Ashbery “ever has any difficulty in placing his poems in an order: even passages within poems could be changed around. . . He’s totally incomprehensible. And you don’t even feel like wanting to know what he means”. By contrast, Gunn admired the underrated Ed Dorn, puffed by Donald Davie. Gunn wrote: “There is something very attractive there all right and a spasmodic rhetorical power . . . but there is an awful lot that is long-winded . . . and (worse) rhythmically very insensitive.” But Dorn eventually became one of his favourite poets. The North Atlantic Turbine and Geography were both stunning. Dorn’s novel By the Sound had “as lovely prose as I have ever read . . . Recollections of Gran Apacheria was clean and murderous.”

Gunn called Norman Mailer a weird combination of boring, self-pitying and irritating, brilliant and brave. The Armies of the Night made him the best writer around. The Executioner’s Song was an impressive and lovely book, with immense sympathy. In an amusing parody, he wished that Mailer “could have a hero who was small, terrible at fucking, with an undersized cock, timid, and completely untrained at boxing”.

Gunn’s second dominant subject was the homosexual world. He lived in an almost exclusive homosexual society, both at home and outside. His weird, polymorphous, perverse household on Cole Street in San Francisco was a volatile mixture of the inhabitants’ past, current and imminent lovers, including Gunn’s and Kitay’s, as they constantly changed partners in a complex quadrille. A photo of Gunn’s claustrophobic study shows a ceiling-to-floor collage of magazine cut-outs, with a small desk and no window. Roomers sometimes walked through it to get to their part of the house.
Gunn’s best-known image, imitating the popular movies The Wild One (1953) and Easy Rider (1969), portrayed him in black leather jacket, high black boots and a roaring motorcycle to show that homosexuals were not “girly”. He admitted, “I know it’s something of a pose . . . but what else can one do?” His elderly disciple Dr Oliver Sacks posed with a motorcycle to enhance his image. But Gunn could also, on rare occasions, camp it up and confessed, “got a new perm today . . . and now have a mass of tight curls. . . . I’m doing a real Shirley Temple trip”.

While Gunn was promiscuous, the dependent Kitay was a serial monogamist, and he kept his love for Kitay separate from sex with everyone else. Gunn went to black-leather bars for sado-masochism, wore a cock-ring to improve his erections and had a whole armoury of menacing sex toys from dildos to ball-stretchers. He picked comely men like fruit off a tree, boasted of 6-hour marathon encounters and topped them with 15-hour decathlons. The old satyr rivalled the excesses of the Emperor Tiberius on Capri, with a three-man, even five-man tangle of limbs. His wants, he said, were modest: “Drink, drugs, a mad biker with an imaginative cock and an infinitely hungry hole.” He would have agreed with Samuel Johnson, who replied, when asked what he thought were the greatest pleasures in life, “Fucking; and the second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink tho’ not all could fuck.” Gunn justified his sex life by stating that he had “an awful tendency to transform sexual attraction into a moral value”.

The risks were extreme, but he loved the perilous drama, and performed a hedonistic dance of death with no-holes-barred sex and brain-scraping drugs. He believed that hallucinogenics enhanced his sex life and inspired his poetry. As he slyly explained, they “take me to places I like being in, and places that I can still learn from”. He narrowly missed a narcotics-police raid, and masturbated with a pick-up in a McDonald’s toilet. He was never mugged or robbed by the strangers he invited into his house, but was exposed to syphilis and contracted hepatitis. He continued to haunt bars and baths while realising that “promiscuous sex is no longer political, just suicide” and predicted with fatal accuracy, “all this speed [methamphetamine] at my age will probably kill me soon”.

In 1974 he innocently described a bath house with “300 men in towels, all so laid back on drugs they can hardly stagger. And on holiday weekends, they are served ‘mescalin punch.’ I mean the Satyricon isn’t in the running.” Only a few years later, in the mid-1980s, six close friends, some nursed by Gunn as their lives flickered out, died of AIDS. (My brother, rapturous about orgies in the bath houses, died of AIDS in 1992.) Gunn’s mood radically changed, from the celebratory The Passages of Joy (1982), whose title gave a sexual twist to a chaste line from Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes, to the poignant portrayal of the AIDS epidemic and his own survivor’s guilt in The Man with Night Sweats (1992). Following his mother’s example, Gunn, in 2004, succumbed to his self-destructive impulses and died of an acute overdose of alcohol, meth and heroin.

When I wrote to ask Gunn about Orwell’s influence on his work, he replied on October 19, 1998 that the expression of Orwell’s ideas was as important as what he had to say: “He meant a great deal to me in the 1950s. I liked the essayist and the social chronicler more than the novelist . . . I especially admired him as a model for prose writing, and taught Homage to Catalonia repeatedly in my freshman writing classes at Berkeley from 1958 onward. He knew how to qualify his beliefs, and to show how they were qualified by his experiences — maybe the next most important thing to having beliefs at all.”

When I visited him on Cole Street in San Francisco in March 2002, his conversation was relaxed, his attention intense. Though we’d never met before, he greeted me with “nice to see you again” as if we were old friends. His house was sparsely furnished with many odd curios and modern pop art. He thought my projected book of original essays, Poets on Plath, was a good idea and would sell. Though the modest fee was acceptable, he didn’t want to contribute, and rightly predicted that I would not be able to capture Frieda Hughes or Geoffrey Hill. He signed six of his books with his name only, and was in no hurry to end our leisurely talk. Two years before his death at 74, he still looked handsome and rugged, and was charming and gracious. He moved like a panther, with a boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour, and with no suggestion of illness.

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