by Thom Gunn
(OP, p. 159)
The key words in this passage are ‘freedom’ and ‘energy’. Gunn called his second book The Sense of Movement, conscious that ‘sense’ can mean both ‘meaning’ and ‘sensation’. The ambiguity sums up his poetry. For him, the starting point was the feeling of freedom and the energy it enabled. He would talk of the sensation of feeling full of energy. It was almost like a mystical experience: the consciousness of simply being alive. It caused him to want to turn physical into verbal energy. What the energy permitted in the poems was – to quote again – ‘the contradictions of one’s own emotions’: it allowed him to bring together the animal and the intellectual, openness and closure, morality and hedonism; to believe in ‘the hippie values’ of love, trust and peace alongside a taste for promiscuous, sadomasochistic sex; to draw equally on Elizabethan song and the poetry of the American avant-garde.
Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, on the southern bank of the Thames Estuary. The date was 29 August 1929. His name was registered as William Guinneach Gunn, Guinneach being an old family name on his father’s side, but for most of his childhood he was known as ‘Tom’. His parents were both of Scottish origin. They were journalists and had met while working for a local newspaper. His father, Herbert Gunn, was to become a successful national editor, notably of the tabloid Daily Sketch. Gunn’s relationship with him was to prove difficult; something of his ambivalence is expressed in the monologue ‘From an Asian Tent’: ‘each year [I] look more like the man I least / Choose to resemble, bully, drunk, and beast’ (p. 47). He was by contrast extremely close to his mother. Charlotte Gunn (née Thomson) was the source of Gunn’s enthusiasm for literature; she was also (as he was) politically rather left-wing and inclined to be unconventional. Gunn cherished her memory throughout his life – indeed, two of the key poems in his final collection are directly concerned with her (see pp. 183–85). He once remarked that ‘from her I absorbed the idea of books as a part of life, not merely a commentary on it’ (WS, p. 7). In his conversation he frequently referred to the books he had read with passion as a child and many of these he would reread as an adult from time to time. The ones I particularly remember him mentioning are Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Kidnapped, and, above all, the novels of E. Nesbit. Most of these books had some influence on poems included in this selection. It is my private suspicion that he associated Nesbit – ‘that sensible woman’, he used to call her – with his mother, who shared Nesbit’s utopian politics and her sense of the practical value of literature.
In 1938 the Gunns moved to Hampstead in north London. Hampstead is one of the city’s wealthiest districts and a famously cultured one, so the move no doubt reflected Bert Gunn’s rising income and status. By this time there was a younger brother, Alexander, who came to be known as Ander. The common land of Hampstead Heath became the boys’ playground. Both were later to attend University College School, which was round the corner from their home. UCS was an elite grammar school and Gunn did well there, though he was evacuated to Bedales in Hampshire during the war.
Gunn always described his early childhood as ‘happy’, which it does seem by and large to have been, but in 1940 his parents, always incompatible, divorced. Both of them soon remarried, the boys staying with their mother and her new husband. Before long, however, her second marriage failed and, on 29 December 1944, she committed suicide. Her body was discovered by her sons, an experience later reflected on in ‘The Gas-poker’ (p. 184). There is an extraordinary account of their discovery of the body in Gunn’s diary for that day. I have included it in the notes to this edition (pp. 270–72).
It was accepted that Thom and his father could not get on, so while Ander went to live with Bert Gunn’s new family, Thom lodged with a friend of his mother’s in Hampstead. Weekends and holidays he spent with two of his mother’s six sisters, unmarried aunts who ran what had been his grandfather’s farm at Snodland in rural Kent. Gunn retained feelings of gratitude and affection towards these women throughout his life. It is an important fact about Gunn that – lover of great cities though he was – he had roots and affections in the countryside.
In his late teens Gunn retreated into himself, literature becoming both a passion and a means of escape. A more confident identity began to emerge when, in 1950, after two years of national service in the army and six months working in Paris, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read English. The previous year he had changed his name by deed poll to Thomson William Gunn, Thomson being his mother’s maiden name. It is important to note that this new self-assurance involved the replacement of a name from his father’s family with his mother’s maiden name. He had always been known as Tom, but in what he later recognised as ‘an attempt to become a new person’, he now began to use the spelling Thom (JC, p. 21). The new combination, Thom Gunn, with its two strong syllables and its evocation of ‘tomcat’ and ‘tommy gun’, suggests a highly masculine self-image that was probably at this stage at odds with much in his overt behaviour. He was introspective, highly sensitive and beginning to be aware of his homosexuality. Ander Gunn remembers their father in angry mood referring to his elder son as a ‘pansy’.
Cambridge nourished Thom’s imagination. He began publishing poetry of striking maturity in student magazines and befriended other writers. His passion for Elizabethan poetry was nurtured by a congenial supervisor, the medievalist Helena Mennie Shire, to whom he remained close in later life. He also attended the lectures of the celebrated F. R. Leavis, whose insistence on the importance to poetry of ‘realisation’ helped to shape Gunn’s firm and energetic style. It also reinforced his mother’s lessons about the relevance of literature to life. Under such influences he could think of himself as a modern follower of Donne and Shakespeare, who, as he said, ‘spoke living language to me … one I tried to turn to my own uses’ (OP, p. 173). His confidence in the value of his work was enhanced by the critical interest of student friends, most notably the future critic and editor Karl Miller, and the star actor among a group of theatrical friends, Anthony White.
Gunn’s sense of Shakespeare’s relevance was enhanced by the vitality at this time of student theatre at Cambridge. Peter Hall and John Barton, both undergraduate contemporaries of Gunn’s, were active in it. Their emerging talent and the support of a senior academic, George Rylands, made for high-quality acting and production. Tony White was beguiling and charismatic, with a beautiful voice and a powerful stage presence. He played several great classical roles, mostly in Shakespeare, ‘as romantic-existentialist characters’. Gunn was strongly attracted to him, but White was heterosexual, and his elusiveness, as Gunn experienced it, played its part in the development of his poetry. The elusiveness was not only due to his different orientation. It was part of the existential loneliness that, despite the depth of his dramatic talent, kept him away from what Gunn calls ‘the life of applause’ (OP, p. 168). In the loneliness occasioned by the loss of his mother, Gunn must have perceived White as in some sense an alter ego. They remained close friends until White’s premature and accidental death at the age of forty-five. The sequence ‘Talbot Road’ (pp. 144–50) is a study of his charisma.
As this story suggests, it was in Cambridge that Gunn was able to acknowledge his homosexuality, if only to himself and to close friends. In the same dramatic circles where Gunn met White, he was soon attracted to another handsome young man, an American student named Mike Kitay. They met on 7 December 1952 and quickly fell in love. Both of them were still quite innocent. Before their meeting, Kitay had not been conscious of being gay and Gunn was still without serious experience. The American’s attractions brought in their wake a tenderness and intimacy new to Gunn, even in time a certain domesticity. Kitay was to become Gunn’s lifelong companion and the addressee of many of his poems (e.g. ‘Tamer and Hawk’, p. 9; and ‘
The Hug’, p. 157). Gunn describes him as ‘the leading influence on my life’ and writes of their relationship as long-lasting, deep and complex: ‘his was, from the start, the example of the searching worrying improvising intelligence playing upon the emotions which in turn reflect back on the intelligence. It was an example at times as rawly passionate as only Henry James can dare to be’ (OP, p. 175). They must have looked like complementary opposites: Kitay emotionally open, affectionate, a little needy; Gunn inclined to solitude, inwardly vulnerable, armoured against such feelings as might wound him. My metaphors in that last clause are Gunn’s, of course. See, for instance, the first poem in this selection, ‘The Wound’, the first poem in all Gunn’s own selections and collections of his work (p. 5). Gunn remained in many ways a solitary person. In middle life, though he remained attached to Kitay and dedicated to him as a partner, he opted for a life of sexual promiscuity, and it could be said that in this, paradoxically, his solitude reasserted itself. Certainly in the first three books the ‘romantic existentialist’ (to borrow that description of White) is overwhelmingly in evidence.
By the time he graduated in 1953, Gunn’s first book of poems, Fighting Terms (1954), had been accepted for publication by the small Fantasy Press. The poems explored themes of heroism and masculinity and were dominated by the image of the soldier. Most of them were apprentice work, though a handful – ‘The Wound’ is perhaps the most famous of them – remain among his most memorable. That poem represents the soldier in his full complexity: he is Achilles sulking or angry, he is the disengaged conscript that Gunn had actually been, he is a young man seized by violent emotion who, in his dreams, fights ‘on both sides’.
In the same year as the appearance of Fighting Terms, Gunn was awarded a Graduate Fellowship at Stanford University, California. His aim in applying had been to follow Kitay to the United States, but he had the good fortune, at Stanford, to study under Yvor Winters: poet, critic and charismatic teacher. Under Winters, for a time, Gunn found the discipline he needed for his poetry. That discipline was perhaps a defence against emotional damage, but like the influence (far less personal) of Leavis, it also taught him that poetry could be true to the demands of waking life. Winters is widely thought to have been a chilly, cerebral autocrat. This is quite wrong. Winters’s poems are distinguished, at their best, by formal elegance, moral alertness and what Gunn calls, in his introduction to Winters’s Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2003), ‘the sensory sharpness of Imagism’. He loved great poetry as passionately as it is possible to love it, as Gunn often testified, but his criteria for great poetry had severely narrowed with time. Writing to Karl Miller not long after starting work at Stanford, Gunn says this:
I’m working under Yvor Winters, who has something of the same position in America as Leavis does in England. The same stubbornness, rudeness, feeling of persecution once justified but no longer justified. His critical position is just about that of Dr Johnson if Dr J were alive today – rather too much common sense, and an acute dislike of anything ‘romantic’, which term includes Lawrence, Yeats, & Eliot. So, as you see, he’s a good deal more limited than Leavis, tho I can’t help admiring him, and like him personally a good deal.
(KM, 26 November 1954)
Winters, who had reacted against an early attraction to Modernism, insisted on formal precision and rational order in poetry. He nonetheless urged Gunn to read the American Modernists Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, who were still little known in Britain. Gunn’s own reputation as an anti-Modernist was further enhanced when he was included by Robert Conquest in New Lines (1956), the anthology of the so-called Movement: nine poets, including Philip Larkin and Donald Davie, whose work combined strict traditional form with irony, wit and critical perspectives on modern life. But though Gunn was pleased at being anthologised, he never identified with the Movement poets. He was less conservative than they were, more individualistic, more rebellious and not uninterested in Modernism.
Gunn’s next book, The Sense of Movement (1957), is strongly indebted to Winters and includes a notable tribute to him – ‘To Yvor Winters, 1955’(pp. 25–26) – which is very much in the master’s manner. The debt is partly to be found in the crisply formal versification that Gunn had now mastered, and partly in the severe stoicism, which now added depth to his earlier heroics. The Sense of Movement is distinguished by Metaphysical wit and a strict but elegant formality. Gunn’s love of the big modern city, influenced by Baudelaire and enhanced by his new experience of urban America, is apparent in many of them. There is a poem about Elvis Presley turning ‘revolt into a style’ (p. 21), and in ‘On the Move’ (pp. 15–16) Gunn captures the mood of the time with his image of Californian bikers forging their own direction through an uncertain world: like Marlon Brando in his film The Wild One translated into the language of existentialism. Pictures of Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley joined Donne and Baudelaire on the wall of Gunn’s study.
Gunn had also been reading the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, both the novels and an important essay, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946; translated into English by Philip Mairet as Existentialism and Humanism, 1948). In such poems as ‘On the Move’, Sartre’s philosophy combined improbably with the ideas of Yvor Winters and with W. B. Yeats, whose poetry, not much admired by Winters, Gunn had recently discovered. As Gunn tells us, both Winters and Sartre talked a great deal about will. Gunn later mocked himself by pointing out that they meant quite different things by it, but that he had fused their ideas together with what he called a Yeatsian wilfulness that would not have been attractive to either of them.
Meanwhile, the stoicism and the admiration of masculine strength and will served to express, and simultaneously to mask, his fascination with the gay subculture of San Francisco. He claimed to have been unconscious of the fact that, in Shakespeare’s English, ‘will’ is a common colloquialism for the penis, one which survives in the childhood euphemism ‘willy’. It is difficult to believe that, when he wrote about leather-clad bikers ‘astride the created will’ in ‘On the Move’ and how ‘their hum / Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh’, he was not talking about masculine sexuality, but at the time even his critics somehow failed to notice. The poems had, as it were, a double life. Outwardly they displayed the stern discipline admired by Winters; inwardly they explored desires that in both Britain and America fell outside the law. Much the same applied to Gunn’s personal life, in which he had to keep his desires hidden, like the young man in ‘The Allegory of the Wolf Boy’ (p. 22). At Stanford he wore a suit and tie. When night fell, he changed into the new gay ‘uniform’: white T-shirt, leather jacket, jeans and motorcycling boots. There came to be something of the dandy about him. Before long, he had a panther tattooed the length of one arm, a broad strap of black leather as a watch strap and a bunch of keys hanging from his cowboy belt.
In 1958 Gunn became an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was to teach off and on until 1999. He and Kitay now shared a San Francisco apartment. The year 1961 saw the publication of My Sad Captains, a book divided into halves, the first developing and complicating the heroic manner of The Sense of Movement, the second experimenting with the ‘unpatterned rhythms’ of syllabic verse (OP, p. 179): verse, that is to say, in which the syllables are counted but not the accents or feet. The freer rhythms involved in syllabics allowed Gunn to register observations of a less obviously momentous kind. The poems are no less profound, however. ‘Considering the Snail’ (p. 41), which asks half humorously, ‘What is a snail’s fury?’, provides some sort of an answer to the large questions posed in ‘On the Move’. It is also arguably a finer poem. Under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, Gunn was learning to be more of a humanist and opening himself up to Modernist experiment. As he always insisted, his work in syllabics was a stage on the road to free verse, which he had earlier found difficult to write. This is undoubtedly true, but I think it does not do justice to his achievements
in syllabics to see the work as simply a staging post. As in Marianne Moore’s poetry, most of which is written in syllabics too, the poems seem to uncover the poetry latent in prose, often unsensationally prosaic prose. At any rate, the title poem of his next full collection, Touch (1967), reveals a new Gunn able to write without the overt constraints of either iambic metre or syllabics. This is true free verse and ‘Touch’ (pp. 56–57) is one of Gunn’s finest achievements. In it, for the first time, he is able to write a poetry of process, in which he appears to be thinking aloud, reflecting on his circumstances as they change and develop. Such a poetry is in striking contrast to the monumental closure of his metrical verse. From the mid-1960s on, he made it his business to master both methods.
Why would a poet who moved so confidently in the standard English metres, and insisted, moreover, on the need for discipline, feel this need to work in a new and looser medium? The answer must lie in part in the poetry Gunn had discovered in America: the poetry of Whitman, Pound and Williams, as well as that of Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. There was also a theoretical interest inspired by an essay of D. H. Lawrence’s. In the Preface to his New Poems (1920), Lawrence talks of free verse as pre-eminently the medium of present-tense meditation, of perception in the process of taking form. Most poetry, he says, deals with ends and beginnings, with past and future:
It is in the realm of all that is perfect. It is of the nature of all that is complete and consummate. This completeness, this consummateness, the finality and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite form … But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished.