Thom Gunn gave me a poem for the first issue of The Threepenny Review, and he gave me forty-three other pieces of his marvelous writing, poetry and prose, in the twenty-four years that followed. It is quite possible I would have been hesitant to include so much poetry in Threepenny if Thom had not agreed, from the beginning, to be my poetry advisor; and it’s certain that the magazine would have had a different stamp without his presence in and around it. The last thing he wrote for me was a contribution to the “Symposium on Buddenbrooks” in 2003. He was supposed to write a little piece for the “Symposium on Realism” a year later, but he called me apologetically in early March of 2004 to say he just hadn’t been able to do it, and promised instead to write something on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, one of his favorite novels. A day or two before he died, toward the end of that April, Mike Kitay saw him sitting out in the sun in their back garden rereading the Flaubert novel, so I know he really did intend to keep his promise.
It is the least of my regrets. Even if Thom had never written another word (and he was worried, sometimes, that he never would write another word), he would have remained one of the most important writers to me, and the fact that he is dead has not changed that feeling at all. Thom had a habit, in his own library at home, of moving a poet’s books from one side of the room to another when the poet died—he had different alphabetical or chronological categories for the dead and the living. I do not feel this way, at least about Thom’s poetry. In my own mind, it has not budged.
But the loss of his presence is a tremendous one. So it is that presence, or the feeling it gave to the rest of us, that I will try to evoke here.
I say “the rest of us” as if Thom were the same to everyone, and there was a great deal about him that was the same: I can easily recognize the man portrayed in all the other accounts printed here. But there was also a way in which he was different with each one of us. With me he was gallant, and enthusiastic, and funny, and eager to talk about books and movies and television and our respective childhoods; but he was also fondly amused and perhaps the tiniest bit exasperated by my cautious, self-protective, obsessively planning, overly rational side. (A shorthand version of this—the way we would have put it in speaking to each other, perhaps—would be to say that he did drugs and I didn’t.) He was, I think, always hoping to do or say something that would shock me. But I suspect that he also felt an affinity with that side of me, because he too was a planner of an obsessive sort.
It made me feel better that there was someone like him in the world, for Thom was a wild man as well as a planner—a reckless risk-taker with a huge gusto for life, as well as an obsessive detail-mongerer who carefully kept chaos at bay—and the fact that someone could combine these two sides made me think there might be hope for me yet. Thom wore his wildness on the outside and kept his planning pretty well hidden, so that only those of us who knew him over time could detect just how strong a tendency it was. I remember he once said to me, “I love the idea of being spontaneous, but I just can’t manage to do it, so I figure out ways around it, like writing in my pocket diary a week ahead of time, ‘Remember to spontaneously ask Mike out to the movies tonight.’ “
After Thom died, of causes that may well have stemmed from his own treasured recklessness, Mike asked me and August Kleinzahler, who was one of Thom’s closest friends, to go into Thom’s study with him and see what was there. We found drawers of file folders containing every draft of every poem he had ever published, all sorted into book-manuscript order and each clipped to the finished, printed version of the poem; and we found schedules of every reading he had given for the past four decades, each with the list of poems to be read that night typed out neatly in Thom’s recognizable typeface. “What a maniac he was,” I murmured to August as we looked at this record of obsessiveness, and August nodded, “Yes, he was.” It was part of what we both cherished about him, but it was rarely visible in such a naked form.
Something else that I think we all responded to was his goodness. Thom was not boringly, cloyingly good. He had a sharp tongue and a cold eye, and he could use them to scathing effect. He also adored misbehavior, and tried to practice it himself, though often his innate courtesy and his sense of decorum held him back. He would have liked to be worse than he was, and I’m not sure he would have liked being called good. But that’s what he was.
His goodness came out partly in the form of well-concealed generosity. For most of his life, Thom had very little money, but when he finally came into some (he won a five-year MacArthur Award in his sixties), he began to give it away like mad. He even gave some of it to me, or rather, to The Threepenny Review, which he supported at a far higher level than he could afford. And he began sending regular checks to a brilliant, erratic poet of our acquaintance, a man who was often, or always, out of work—he felt that the poet needed money and he, Thom, had it to give. He told me about the checks in confidence, and said he didn’t want anyone else to know about them, but now that he is dead I feel I can expose his generosity. When I first learned that he had died (quite suddenly, in the night), I wondered about all the other secrets he had taken with him.
Because Thom was so good, people loved him wholeheartedly, even though we knew him only partially, at best. He put more of himself into his poems than he did into his daily conversation, or rather, he put into them a side of himself, the self-knowing, self-analytic, painfully aware side, that he did not care to show to the people around him. Did not care to, or couldn’t: I’m not sure which. This habit of enclosure made him seem a bit removed from things, a bit inaccessible, even when he was at his warmest and jolliest. (He had a huge laugh; I can hear it still, if I try.) He was a very important friend to me, but I’m not sure I would have called the friendship intimate. I think he loved me, though, and I know I loved him.
One of the things he always used to say, a sort of commentary on the nature of our friendship, was that we had both been brought up as agnostics. It was as if this made us special, and different: we had never had a shred of religious belief, but had come by our atheism naturally and originally, without having to react against piety and discover disbelief by default. Something about our shared irreligion, and something about the way he died (probably of a heart attack, almost certainly after taking drugs—not suicide, but a choice of a different kind; endlessly searching for pleasure, disregarding the effects of speed on a seventy-four-year-old heart, not particularly wishing to grow old ungracefully; alive in his garden rereading A Sentimental Education one day, and gone, completely gone, the next), and something about the wholehearted quality of my feelings for him, which were not fraught and complicated like my feelings for most people, but gentle and consistent and undivided—all this has made his death, for me, somehow simpler to take in. I was shocked when I heard about it, and I was very sad for many months after, and I still feel sad whenever I hear or see or read something I would have liked to tell him about. But I very soon came to the realization that though his death was a bad thing for those of us he had left behind, it was not a bad thing for him. He was simply non-existent: not at peace, not with God, not enjoying eternal rest, not haunting his former life, not looking down on us from above. Nothing.
Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of six books of nonfiction and a new novel, The Pagoda in the Garden.
