The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  A number of Thom’s poems are love poems to Mike, including “Thoughts on Unpacking,” “The Separation,” “Touch,” “The Hug,” and a newer one called “In Trust.” I heard “In Trust” for the first time at a poetry reading on the Berkeley campus and was extremely moved by it—partly, I imagine, because I was sitting next to Mike Kitay during the reading.

  Mike, who still looks very much as he did when Thom described him in “To a Friend in Time of Trouble” (“A handsome grey-haired, grey-eyed man, tight-knit”) had been giving me hints about who or what was being referred to in each of the previous poems. When this poem began, he fell silent.

  You go from me

  In June for months on end

  To study equanimity

  Among high trees alone:

  I go out with a new boyfriend

  And stay all summer in the city where

  Home mostly on my own

  I watch the sunflowers flare.

  But if the poem begins with separation, it ends with a powerful coming together:

  As you began

  You’ll end the year with me.

  We’ll hug each other while we can,

  Work or stray while we must.

  Nothing is, or ever will be,

  Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart,

  But what we hold in trust

  We do hold, even apart.

  Thom Gunn and Mike Kitay’s complicated history is reflected in their domestic arrangement, which includes other people who have entered their lives along the way—Thom’s family, or “household.” And this communal group is in turn embedded within the larger community of San Francisco, which Gunn also considers his home. Gunn’s two “obsessions,” as he self-consciously calls them, are both connected to this feeling of living within the larger civic society. “I don’t like people getting movies in their own homes, and I don’t like people driving around in cars,” he announces. “I think people should take public transportation and be with other people in movie theaters. Merely sitting near another person on a bus or in a movie theater is good for the sense of community.” Like all Thom’s pronouncements, this one has been susceptible to modification. He has given in to the culture of the VCR, and often watches videos at home now. (That’s how he disinterred The Fifth Element.) But he does still ride the bus everywhere, except when Mike is along to give him a ride.

  Thom Gunn’s permanent household—where, as he says in one poem, “Each cooks one night, and each cooks well”—consists, at this point, of himself, Mike Kitay, Bob Bair, and Bill Schuessler. Another housemate, Jim Lay, died of AIDS on Christmas Day, 1986. “Four of my friends died in one month,” Gunn said of the epidemic that stimulated him to write the central poems in The Man with Night Sweats. He himself is HIV-negative, a fortuitously exempted bystander to the mass tragedy, as he suggests in the poem “Courtesies of the Interregnum”:

  Excluded from the invitation list

  To the largest gathering of the decade, missed

  From membership as if the club were full.

  It is not that I am not eligible…

  In the notes at the back of the Collected Poems, Thom Gunn lists the names of the dead friends referred to in his poems about AIDS. “For the record—for my record if for no one else’s, because they were not famous people—I wish to name them here.” He has always had strong feelings about names, about the specific, individual identity assigned to one person and no other. “Poor girl, poor girl, what was your name?” he asks in the last line of “The Victim,” his poem about Sid Vicious’s murder of his girlfriend, and in the notes he supplies the answer. The actual, historical record, the particulars of an individual personality, matter to Gunn, and this is one reason his memorial poems have such power.

  The same passion for specificity also explains another, very different aspect of Thom Gunn’s character: his enormous congeniality as a gossip. He remembers every tidbit of information ever passed on to him, every remark ever made to him, and by whom; and he can retrieve it at exactly the pertinent moment in a conversation. “I’m the soul of indiscretion,” he confides, and then listens eagerly to the next gossipy secret.

  That is one side of Thom Gunn. The other side is just the opposite: a man who deeply believes in the virtues of impersonality. In an essay called “My Life up to Now” he comments on the fact that he is very consciously “a rather derivative poet,” and then goes on to say that “it has not been of primary interest to develop a unique poetic personality, and I rejoice in Eliot’s lovely remark that art is the escape from personality.”

  You can find the same idea in his poem “Expression,” which complains about “the poetry of my juniors,” in which “Mother doesn’t understand, / And they hate Daddy, the noted alcoholic.” Tired of this confessional mode (the mode of most contemporary American poetry, from Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath onward), the poem’s speaker goes to an art museum, where he seeks out a medieval Italian painting of the Virgin and Child. The poems ends:

  The sight quenches, like water

  after too much birthday cake.

  Solidly there, mother and child

  stare outward, two pairs of matching eyes

  void of expression.

  On the assemblage-style wall of Thom Gunn’s second-floor study, amid cut-out pictures of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, antique postcards of nude bodybuilders, and assorted posters, clippings, and visual paraphernalia, is a photograph that doesn’t go with the rest. In it, a beautiful dark-haired woman holds a pretty blond baby, both of them staring outward at the camera. I have been in the study before, to pick up a lent book or admire the view out the back window, but I have never before noticed the photograph. Now, however, we are spending longer than usual here, because Thom is giving a tour of the house to Tony Kushner. (Kushner, in town to deliver a lecture following the great success of Angels in America, told me that the person he most wanted to meet was Thom Gunn, so I arranged a lunch. In Kushner’s view, “He is certainly one of the greatest poets in the English language. I find his work very scary and disturbing and sexy and beautiful.”)

  “Who’s that?” I say, pointing at the photograph.

  “That’s my mother,” says Thom. “With me, as a baby.”

  Thom’s parents were divorced when he was eight or nine, and after that he was on fairly distant terms with his father (a successful journalist who went on to edit The Daily Sketch at the height of his career). But even before the divorce he was closer to his mother. His given name, Thomson, was the name of his mother’s family, and he identified with that side of his heritage. “My mother was one of seven children, all girls,” he has written, “and all of a very independent turn of mind.” One of Thom’s childhood memories is of his mother “wearing an orchid pinned by a brooch in the shape of a hammer and sickle. From this distance the combination sounds like a cliché of the thirties, but it wasn’t: other women wouldn’t have done something so outrageous.” He also recalls being lost at the age of about four in Kensington Gardens and being asked by a policeman to describe his mother. “A proud woman,” the little boy answered.

  When Thom was fifteen his mother committed suicide; he and his younger brother found the body. For most of his writing life he could not directly address this fact. (In his one published fragment of autobiography, the tragedy takes place between sentences, as it would in an E. M. Forster novel.) Then, in 1992, Gunn published a poem called “The Gas-Poker,” which begins:

  Forty-eight years ago

  —Can it be forty-eight

  Since then?—they forced the door

  Which she had barricaded

  With a full bureau’s weight

  Lest anyone find, as they did,

  What she had blocked it for.

  The two boys who are the poem’s “they”—“Elder and younger brother”—go outside to walk and cry and try to understand what has happened to them. Then:

  Coming back off the grass

  To the room of her release

/>   They who had been her treasures

  Knew to turn off the gas,

  Take appropriate measures,

  Telephone the police.

  Borrowing the strategy he had used in the poems about LSD, Gunn relied on rhyme and meter to organize an experience that would otherwise be incomprehensibly, uncontrollably painful. “Take appropriate measures”: it’s in the very impersonality of the phrase (echoing, as it does, the expressive “who had been her treasures”) that the sense of personal loss comes through most strongly.

  “The surprising thing about one’s dead,” Thom Gunn said to me many years ago, “is that your relationship with them can change over time. Even after they’ve been dead for years, you still find your feelings about them changing, or growing. And that makes them seem to alter, too.”

  I asked him recently if he still feels that way. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Exactly. The longer people are dead, the more your relationship with them changes.”

  ELEGY FOR MARIO SAVIO

  e wasn’t, in the strictest sense of the word, an author. He never published a book. He was even a bit wary of publishing, as I learned when I set out to print one of his commemorative speeches in a 1995 issue of The Threepenny Review. He confessed to me, with an almost painful nervousness, that he hesitated to engage in any sort of publication for fear of losing the copyright, and when I assured him that I was acquiring one-time rights only, and that he would retain all further copyright, he explained to me the source of his anxiety. Early in his career he had allowed some of his speeches to be published, only to discover that in doing so he had unwittingly given away the rights to them. That such a thing was possible—that he could be deprived of the possession of his own sentences—surprised and wounded him. He had thought of speech as something free; it shocked him to see it treated as a salable commodity, a product divorced from its maker.

  But if he was not an author in the book sense of the word, Mario Savio was nonetheless a poet. He was the only political figure of my era for whom language truly mattered. He was the last American, perhaps, who believed that civil, precisely worded, expressive, emotionally truthful exhortation could bring about significant change. He was the only person I have ever seen or met who gave political speech the weight and subtlety of literature. The irony is that his power lay entirely in the spoken word, so that what he said on any given occasion could never quite be captured in print. His voice—the very sound of it, its accent and emphasis and pitch—was physically a part of the meaning of his words. And with his death on November 6, 1996, that voice was silenced.

  I hardly knew Mario Savio (and in this respect I was unusual in Berkeley, where half the population seemed to consider him an old friend). I met him only once, talked to him on the phone about printing his speech, saw him occasionally at a rally or a memorial service. I wasn’t even around to hear his fiery early speeches, because in 1964, when he was making history as part of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, I was still a junior high school student in Palo Alto, down on the quiet Peninsula, away from all the action. But I heard about him then, and when, twenty or thirty years later, I saw videotapes of his speeches, I instantly understood what I had missed. Like most people my age, I had heard an endless number of protest speeches in the late Sixties and early Seventies, but I had never heard political speech like Mario Savio’s. He spoke without notes of any kind, and he spoke at length, directly addressing his audience with passion and imagination. But that, in a way, was the least of it. The sentences he spoke were complicated and detailed, with clauses and metaphors and little byways of digression that together added up to a coherent grammatical whole. When he spoke, he seemed inspired—literally so, as if he were breathing thought through language. That’s how natural it seemed.

  Apparently he had stammered in his youth, so much so that he was nearly unable to deliver his own valedictorian speech in high school. It was not until he came to Berkeley that he found his gift, and he was to lose and find it more than once after that, for the times weren’t always right for someone of his strengths and vulnerabilities. He brought an innocence to the world—a pure, ingenuous, trusting sense of righteousness and compassion—that the world was ill equipped to handle. Sometimes, even before he died, I would think of him as a sainted Dostoyevskian fool, like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Since I have always been a confirmed atheist, such thoughts do not come easily to me, but when I think of Mario Savio I find it difficult to conceive of him in any other way. It goes against my grain to think in terms of martyrdom, but something of the martyr’s unusual power is there in his story. He did not set out to be a martyr, certainly, but he was willing to lose in the name of justice; there were more important things to him than winning. “We are moving right now in a direction which one could call creeping barbarism,” he said in 1994. “But if we do not have the benefit of the belief that in the end we will win, then we have to be prepared on the basis of our moral insight to struggle even if we do not know that we are going to win.”

  He was gentle, even to those who behaved brutally, and he was decent, even when he was angry. In 1964, when he clambered up on a police car to protest the arrest of a fellow student, he took off his shoes first so he wouldn’t damage the car. Such gentleness did not prevail in American politics. In that sense, Mario Savio had no direct inheritors. His was a political pathway that led nowhere, a dead end in our evolutionary development. This is our loss. We were unable to learn what he had to teach us, because we were unable to conceive of political language that could be truthful rather than just persuasive. Mario Savio’s literary gifts were intimately tied to his political perceptions: he could not have cared about fairness or equality or humanity in exactly the way he did without caring about language in exactly the way he did. Yet such precision came, in the practical world of politics, to seem irrelevant, inconvenient, worse than useless. A complexity of language meant a complexity of thought, and a complexity of thought meant that you couldn’t win an election. But Mario Savio’s politics weren’t just about winning elections; they were about changing the way people thought about each other and the world.

  He died of a heart attack, shortly after a debate with the president of his university over the issue of raising student fees. (Ironically, and typically, it was the president’s heart he was worried about when they finished the stressful debate.) Raising student fees at the state university would, he argued, make it increasingly difficult for poor kids to go to college. He knew exactly what he was talking about: Mario Savio, the son of a machinist, had earned all his degrees at state universities. The student-fee problem was something that everyone else at the university probably would have swept under the carpet, if Mario Savio hadn’t singlehandedly turned it into a cause. He was always making extra trouble for himself, finding causes where other people found only problems to ignore. He couldn’t help himself.

  “At least he died fighting,” said my husband, who works at the same university where Mario Savio taught remedial math, formal logic, and physics. “There are worse ways to go.”

  “I think it’s more that there was no other way for him to live,” I said.

  His death has moved and upset me more than I could have predicted, considering how little I knew him. I feel as if something very old and valuable, something irreplaceable, has been taken away from me and destroyed. I feel as if the last surviving member of a rare and beautiful species has disappeared from the earth. I take the loss personally, and I long to hear the kinds of comforting words that Mario Savio himself could have provided, in his secular-humanist, quasi-religious, saintly-priestly way. But the only voice that could have offered such comfort is one that we won’t, any of us, hear again.

  MY IMAGINARY NEW YORK LIFE

  or many years I thought that living in California was just a phase. One day I would move to New York and become a grown-up: a real editor, a real writer, in the place where such careers had both a tangible and a mythical force.

  This was unlike the other, briefer, ima
ginary habitations that we all occupy at various times. When my son, for instance, first saw Amsterdam at the age of ten, he said, “I could live here.” He had taken instant possession of it and reserved it for one of his possible futures, just as I had fallen for other beautiful cities: Edinburgh, London, Jerusalem, Perugia. I was reminded of this fleeting habit when, a few years ago, I revisited Boston and sat in a North End café with my family. Looking around at the old red-brick buildings, I remembered the college student who had planned to take an apartment here someday. “Planned” is perhaps too strong a word: she had a vision of herself living alone in such an apartment, a vision that came to her during a Sunday jaunt from Cambridge. Recalling that vision, I was surprised to discover how thoroughly that young woman—at least, that particular aspect of that young woman—had ceased to exist.

  But the lure of New York was stronger. Many of my friends from college had settled there, and in the years after college I would go to visit them. At the beginning we were all rather poor, in a bohemian and generally undesperate way. One of the apartments I sometimes stayed in on my visits had, as its only guest area, a closet-like space we called “the Raskolnikov room.” On one winter’s visit I became so sick, lying there in the Raskolnikov room, that I had to be rescued by family friends living on Park Avenue. Propped up on the white couch of their eighteenth-floor living room, wrapped in a mohair blanket and sipping chamomile tea, I looked out the window and thought: I am too young and poor to live in New York now; I’ll wait until my friends have become rich and famous before I move here. (I can’t imagine why I thought the wealth and fame of my friends would automatically be transferred to me, but in our twenties, in the Seventies, we were all more prone to confusions of that sort.)