Fifty years ago I picked up a copy of Poetry in a library in Tallahassee, Florida, and discovered nine poems leading off the issue by Thom Gunn, a name I’d never heard before. With their charged conversational voice full of anger and mockery in tightly controlled stanzas, the poems were like nothing I’d ever read. In the contributors’ column I discovered he was English, though nothing in the writing seemed foreign to me except, perhaps, the technical wizardry. These poems—which I later reread in his book Fighting Terms—had a peculiar power to simply carve the moment of their discovery into my consciousness. This has happened perhaps five times in my reading life. I could take you back tomorrow to the battered library desk I was sitting at and say, “There I discovered the poetry of Thom Gunn”; his words had simply exploded in my head. That was the day his name alone took on a kind of magic.
Three years later I met Thom at the home of Yvor Winters in Los Altos, California, where I’d recently arrived to study with the great critic. That day Winters seemed curiously immune to the presence of Thom, perhaps because he was so busy belittling the other Englishman who was present, the poet and critic Donald Davie, whom Thom had brought to meet Winters. The writer Janet Lewis, Winters’ wife, seemed as thrilled as I simply to be in the same room as Thom Gunn. At the time I’d only known Winters and his wife a few weeks, but that was long enough for me to learn that it was Janet whose perceptions into people were the more insightful and generous. After a thirty-minute harangue in which Winters assaulted the entire oeuvre of Davie’s work, the critic grew sullen and silent, turning his attention to the task of filling, tamping, and lighting his pipe. Although the September light was filtering through the curtained living room, I thought that at any moment it might begin to snow. Davie sat in stunned disbelief. It was Janet who finally spoke; she asked Thom how his summer had gone. Thom, who was sitting alone on a window seat as far from the fray as possible, began to talk in a quiet but steady voice about his reading over the vacation, at first focusing on the poetry of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence and finally segueing to a discussion of the kinship he felt with the most recent work of Donald Davie. To use a phrase I later heard from the great Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor when he urged me to stand up to Winters, Thom was showing “some cheek,” though he was not telling “the old man to stuff it,” as O’Connor would have liked.
I always doubted that Thom had any idea how beautiful he was or any sense of the inner beauty that was manifest in his actions. His natural sweetness was overwhelming. I saw him once by accident on the street in San Francisco; I had just come from having a tooth repaired and could barely speak, but he seemed excited to see me. “I just read your poetry last night,” he said, “and it’s fantastic that I should see you now.” I had sent him a book perhaps six months before and wondered what he thought of it. “No, no,” he said, “I read the book ages ago. Last night I was asked to read in a bar, and I was tired of reading my own poems so I read yours.” Could he have known how much that thrilled me? The first time he visited me in Fresno I came back from some family chores to discover him in an animated conversation with my three sons, the oldest of whom was twelve, regarding the recent British rock groups they were just discovering and about which he seemed to know everything. I got the sense that day and on many later occasions that he was at ease with almost anyone. Both his genius and his natural grace came so easily to him—or so it appeared—that I often thought he was unaware of what awed others.
Thom had a profound sense of that tact which is so essential to a poet. We took to exchanging books early, and we felt free enough to comment on each other’s work. I never forgot the advice he gave me after reading my book 1933, which I sent him in 1974. In a letter he wrote, “Be careful, Phil, you are in danger of sentimentalizing the child you were.” Rereading the book after his letter, I saw that I had already done what he was warning me against: that is tact. A few years ago Thom hosted a reading for me and August Kleinzahler at Berkeley High. It was a curious but totally successful event; Augie and I read to a small audience encased in the much larger audience made up of the students who had no interest in poetry. Before the reading started, Thom bargained with a group of large, tough-looking young women—if they would sit quietly in the back of the room or on the window sills and not speak or giggle too loudly as they removed their nail polish, he would not bring the wrath of their teachers and counselors down upon them. And so we read to perhaps twenty-five students directly in front of us who seemed passionate about poetry, while in the background a low tidal wave of voices disturbed no one. The hour ended with all of us pleased. I thought then that Gunn was some sort of angel sent to earth to make us all feel better and sometimes—when he was Thom Gunn the magnificent poet—to feel deeply about our lives as well as the lives we didn’t live or never comprehended until we lived inside his poems.
Philip Levine’s most recent book of poems is Breath.
