Thom Gunn; Independent obit (great)
Hyfler/Rosner
Poet of the modern city who exchanged London for San
Francisco
29 April 2004
Thomson William Gunn, poet and critic: born Gravesend,
Kent 29 August 1929; Lecturer, later Associate Professor,
English Department, University of California (Berkeley)
1958-66, Visiting Lecturer 1975-90, Senior Lecturer 1990-99;
died San Francisco 25 April 2004.
Thom Gunn was a major poet from the extraordinary generation
that included Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Geoffrey Hill.
Though in later years he attracted less admiration than some
of his coevals, he was regarded by a minority as the finest
of them all.
Gunn was first and foremost the poet of the modern city. In
love with its speed, anonymity and unpredictable eroticism,
he could communicate that feeling of intense excitement the
traveller feels on reaching a new town as night falls. Much
of this emotional power derived from what might seem its
opposite: his control of form and his subtle verbal
intelligence. There was always a sense of strong emotion
contained and a powerful intellect brooding over feeling.
He became famous young, but his celebrity declined in middle
age. One reason for this was that, though self-consciously
modern in his life, as a writer he stood aside from the
currents of his time. He disliked the cult of personality,
preferring to stand at a distance from his subject-matter.
Moreover, he lacked a national identity. Though British, he
lived in the United States and learned from modern American
poetry. But he never became an American poet himself: to
Americans he was indelibly British, while to some British
readers his language lacked distinctiveness. He described
himself as an Anglo-American poet, and to those who admired
him this seemed a striking virtue - something new and
necessary in the annals of literature.
The American side of him experimented with what he called
"openness", the looser forms of avant-garde America. His
achievements in this manner are substantial, but he was more
obviously at home in the standard metres and rhyme, which he
used in a strictly traditional manner. It has been said of
him that he was the most Elizabethan of modern poets, but
this was not an academic matter: in his hands the inherited
forms and conventions seemed utterly natural and breathed
with his own modernity. His "Street Song", for instance, the
monologue of a Californian drug-dealer, recalls the pedlar's
songs of Dowland and Campion.
Thomson William Gunn was born in Gravesend in 1929. He had
extraordinary parents. His mother, whom he adored, was a
left-wing socialite and former journalist, who taught him
the value of books and emotional honesty. His father, a
well-known editor of the tabloid Daily Sketch, was a
powerful, even overbearing figure, with whom the poet fell
out as he grew up. After what Gunn described as a happy
early childhood, most of it spent around Hampstead Heath,
which figures rather often in his poetry, the parents split
up. Their divorce inaugurated a phase of anguish, the climax
of which was his mother's suicide in 1943. More than 50
years later he recorded the trauma of that event in "The Gas
Poker", one of his best late poems.
Not surprisingly, the intelligent and sensitive young man
who began his National Service in 1948 and went up to
Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1950, had schooled himself in
emotional defence. The uniforms, leather jackets and suits
of armour in his early poems probably stand for this, and
they go with an enduring concern with courage, risk and
heroism. The post-war Army provided him with a complex
persona, the unremarkable soldier who, in imagination as in
body, is trained for conflict.
Cambridge English in the era of F.R. Leavis, whom he greatly
admired, provided him with the intellectual equivalent of
this, a toughness of the mind. It was reinforced by
friendship with a fellow undergraduate, Tony White, who
acted impressively in student plays and died sadly young.
White's Shakespearean heroes, according to Gunn, were
existentialists facing out the loneliness of existence and
the absence of ultimate meanings. All these elements combine
in Gunn's first book, Fighting Terms (1954), published as he
left Cambridge. Durable poems like "The Wound" and "Tamer
and Hawk" are colossal achievements in an undergraduate.
In the year of Fighting Terms Gunn won a fellowship at
Stanford University in California. During his time at
Cambridge he had recognised that he was homosexual and had
fallen in love with an American student named Mike Kitay.
The two were anxious to live together and Gunn wanted to
visit his partner's native country. They were to stay
together for the rest of their lives, the "free city" of San
Francisco becoming their permanent home.
At Stanford Gunn studied under the rugged, brilliant and
autocratic Yvor Winters, whose toughness excelled even
Leavis's. Gunn never met anyone who loved poetry more
passionately than Winters, who was also in his view a major
poet. What is more, though Winters's stance on poetry was in
the strict sense reactionary - he thought Modernism a false
turning - he none the less encouraged Gunn to learn from
Modernist virtues. In particular he urged him to read
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, who with Ezra
Pound, and such disciples of Pound as Basil Bunting and
Robert Duncan, were to shape much of his subsequent
development.
Around this time, Gunn's work was being anthologised with
the group of English poets known as the Movement - with
Larkin, Amis, and so on - but he never really shared their
outlook. Like another awkward member of the Movement, his
friend Donald Davie, he was always more international and in
sympathy with Modernism.
Winters's influence combines rather unexpectedly with the
existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre in Gunn's second book,
The Sense of Movement (1957). This is the book that
established his image. "On the Move" celebrates that hero of
modern American culture, the biker, but does so in the
manner of John Donne. There is a famous poem on Elvis
Presley, a celebration of the American city and explorations
of sexual irregularity - rent-boys, fetishists and
voyeurism. The last poem, "Vox Humana", is in syllabic metre
and anticipates an important change of tone and direction
that becomes more prominent in My Sad Captains (1961).
Syllabics give the poet a fixed length for his lines without
determining the poem's rhythm. The rhythm is thus free and,
as Gunn has since told us, syllabics provided a route into
free verse, which, trained as he was in lyric metres, he
found it difficult to write. The relaxation of rhythm - the
movement is more like that of prose - enabled him to climb
down from the heroic posture and observe the world around
him with the casual eye he admired in Williams or with the
care for the things of the world that is so strong in Pound.
"Considering the Snail", a witty but passionate poem, asks
the question "What is a snail's fury?" It deepens, as it
questions, Gunn's preoccupation with heroic will and energy.
The title poem, "My Sad Captains", pays homage to the hero
figure at the same time as it draws away from the heroic
mode.
My Sad Captains begins a process of increasing humanism. The
journey from the lonely, self-defended existentialist to the
deliberately vulnerable and humane observer is allegorised
in what is perhaps Gunn's most ambitious work, the long
sequence "Misanthropos", which dominates his next book,
Touch (1967). Touch also includes Gunn's first serious
attempts at free verse, including the triumphant title poem.
The hesitantly delicate movement of this beautiful work
leads the reader through a process of thought and discovery,
in which the cold and insulated body of the solitary speaker
discovers the warmth of love through mere physical contact.
Winding over the line-endings, the syntax mimes the process
of falling asleep in his lover's arms. The speaker yields to
the fact of the physical world, sinking into "a place" which
is at once the warm part of the bed, the realities of love
and of common humanity, the unconscious world of sleep, even
perhaps the fact of death as the logical extension of our
life:
the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.
"Touch" and "Misanthropos" are great poems in a somewhat
uncertain collection. They prepare the way for Gunn's finest
single book, Moly (1971), his response to the drug LSD and
the psychedelic culture of 1960s California.
It is possible to read Moly as a single work on the theme of
metamorphosis, of evolving identity and the physical world
as paradise. As that last phrase suggests, it is the most
Poundian of Gunn's books - Pound's goal was "To write
Paradise" - though, in contrast to Pound, it represents a
return to traditional form, as if to say that the
indeterminacy of the experiences evoked requires the
ordering that rhyme and metre allow. The golden world of
modern California has, too, an Arcadian dimension that
reminds one again of the Elizabethans.
The next book, Jack Straw's Castle (1976), presents the
darker side of that world, dominated as it is by images of
dismemberment, confinement and the "hippy" murderer Charles
Manson. It is also notable as the first book in which Gunn
frankly acknowledges his homosexuality, which, though
present throughout his work, was masked in the era of
prohibition. Sexual frankness now becomes a major element in
his writing, most obviously in The Passages of Joy (1982),
though that is also very much concerned with friendship, a
substantial theme of Gunn's.
The themes of gay love and ordinary male friendship combine
again in tragic circumstances for Gunn's magisterial
response to the Aids epidemic of the late 1980s. This is the
sequence of elegies for friends that dominates The Man with
Night Sweats (1992). In these poems Gunn again returns to an
Elizabethan manner. His model is Ben Jonson, stoical,
reticent, restrained and all the more moving as a result.
Gunn had never been a political poet, yet it must be
admitted that these poems had a political effect, helping to
educate perceptions of gay life. Moreover, the book regained
for Gunn something of the reputation he had had around 1960
when he shared a Selected Poems with Ted Hughes, a book that
has kept both writers in the sights of, for instance,
A-level students.
The Man with Night Sweats was followed by a Collected Poems
(1993) and what will now be his last book, Boss Cupid
(2000). The latter shows his power to excite and alarm
undiminished, notably in "Troubadour", his largely
sympathetic account of a serial killer.
Gunn lived nearly all his adult life in the city of San
Francisco, which he loved deeply. From the late 1960s onward
he owned one of the famous "Victorian" houses in the
Haight-Ashbury district, then at the height of its fame. As
such a poem as "Taxi Driver" suggests, with its litany of
local names, he was in some ways a regional poet, though
conscious that the region had been adopted.
He earned his main income from teaching at the University of
California at Berkeley, mostly on a part-time basis. He was
a charismatic lecturer, but he resisted the temptations of
an academic career. His contributions to literary criticism,
though unacademic and modestly framed, are of outstanding
value. The prose is admirably direct and limpid; the essays
do not theorise but lead the reader through the process of
reading poems. The main publications are selections of Fulke
Greville, Ben Jonson and Ezra Pound and two impressive
volumes of essays and reviews, The Occasions of Poetry
(1982) and Shelf Life (1993).
For those like myself who wrote in his shadow, it is hard to
imagine a world without Thom Gunn. I first met him in the
mid-1960s when he was spending a fruitful sabbatical year in
London. I was 19 and, after a brief meeting at a reading,
wrote him a fan letter. I was stunned by his friendly
encouragement and constructive criticism. He was a man
wholly without self-importance or the sense of status and
was therefore well equipped to give help to his juniors.
He had always felt himself something of a rebel, which gave
him sympathy for the young. At the same time, there was no
stridency in his make-up and a great deal of his niceness
and self-deprecation was due to old-fashioned good manners.
Since he cultivated a piratical appearance - an ear-ring and
tattoos long before they were fashionable, motor-cycling
jackets and boots, outrageous T-shirts and so on - this
gentlemanly courtesy was surprising. It was much more
visible to Anglophile Americans, who detected an English
gentleman under the leather gear.
His relaxed manner, his raucous humour and a love of
vulgarity all kept him youthful. He was also outstandingly
handsome, as women sometimes regretfully noticed, and he
kept himself fit and lean with frequent visits to the gym.
When I last saw him just a year ago, he was beginning for
the first time to look like an elderly man. He was conscious
of it, and one felt it made him less at ease with himself
than he had been. He told me then that he had given up
writing verse. He had tried to force himself but the poems
never flowered. "I've got no juice," he said.
That seemed the right expression, if a sad one, for a man
whose life had run on a palpable sense of energy, the
movement that the bikers in "On the Move" deliberately
"join". I wondered then how such a man, however fit and
trim, could live on into his eighties. Perhaps this sudden
and unexpected death was what he had hoped for.
Clive Wilmer