Thom Gunn was a great genius who had no interest in the pose-striking or the selfishness called up by the word “genius.” He was above such stuff (or as he might prefer, to the side of it).
Professors or poets sometimes explain their own importance to the young. Not Thom: many a Berkeley undergraduate knew Professor Gunn was a terrific teacher, without knowing that their instructor wrote poems, let alone great ones. Graduate students who read all sorts of assigned claptrap did not know The Man with Night Sweats or Moly —or the seminal essay “Thomas Hardy and the English Ballad,” which should have been required reading for them.
His virtues of charity and modesty were as unsentimental as his observant, cat-like gaze. The charity came from Thom’s unillusioned and unshowy comprehension of how shitty even the best of people can be, and very likely have been. He accepted the defects of other people as he accepted his own. His modesty came from his confidence: he had a master artist’s genial, understated contempt for self-importance.
Toward literary scholars or experimentalist poets who puffed themselves up, Thom displayed a tolerant, bemused interest—no more judgmental, though less passionate, than his attitude toward the street-whores and pushers of San Francisco.
Thom showed these qualities to me, and taught me a lesson, when we were colleagues in the mid-1980s. At the time, a clever lunatic was making phone calls to poets, pretending to be various other well-known figures, or a composer interested in setting some work by his victim. I can remember this character singing passages of my poem “History of My Heart” to me over the phone, in a Texas accent that I thought at the time might be fake, though vanity and caution kept me from saying so. To his discredit, this demented son of a bitch also tormented Robert Duncan, in Duncan’s last years. I think I identified him as a phony when he called me pretending to be Duncan. One theory or rumor at the time was that he actually was a certain notoriously unstable East Coast poet of reputation, but that was never proved.
During this same period, I came home to Berkeley one day, from a week out of town, to find a series of brief daily messages from Thom accumulated on my answering machine: three or four days in a row that polite, innately ironic voice saying he was calling to see how I was, was I doing all right?
This was puzzling. Thom and I were friends, but we didn’t talk on the phone every day or necessarily every week. I phoned him, thanked him for his messages.
“I wanted to see if you were feeling any better,” he said.
I had just gotten over an annoying flu, but how did he know that, I asked him.
“Well, you didn’t sound so well the last time we talked.”
It emerged that the Phantom Caller had called Thom claiming to be me — drunk, at a Telegraph Avenue phone booth, unable to go home because my wife was in bed with a biker.
“Thom, it wasn’t me, it was that guy. What else did he say?”
“That the world picked on you because you were Jewish. So I said, come on: everybody has some reason they might be picked on. I’m gay. Then you said—or he said—so am I.”
“Thom, what were you thinking?”
“Well, that you were lying about the gay part.”
The conversation turned into a discussion of these phone call hoaxes, how they had actually disturbed Duncan while he was ill, and so forth. Gradually, I realized that something more about Thom’s narrative was bothering me, and when I brought it up he gave me some instruction.
“Thom, I appreciate your caring about me and phoning every day, but…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I have to say it disappoints me a little that you could believe it was really me—that you could believe this stuff about me.”
“Robert,” he said mildly, “how well do you think I know you? How well does anyone know anyone, for that matter?”
“But—that paranoid babble…”
“Well, you know”—he spoke with a mild, absolute authority—”alcohol toxicity can have quite the same symptoms as a bad LSD trip. They can be exactly the same. How could I know if you might be an alcoholic or not? People are.”
It was like being put down by a kindly Zen master. I realized that Thom was slow to think ill of anyone because he assumed the worst was in all of us, as I imagine religious adepts might do. I think he was embarrassed by his own generosity of spirit, so that after accidentally disclosing it, he would hurry to add some scandalous joke or a bit of nasty gossip or self-indictment, partly to cover it up. Or it would be in the reverse order: he’d say something devastatingly funny about some jerk, then quickly confess to having the same qualities, or worse, himself.
He told me a story that he thought was about what people really mean when they say, “What kind of poetry do you write?” He met a woman in a bar—nothing sexual, but they chatted amiably for half an hour, told about themselves and their lives. Work, love-life, hobbies, pets. When they parted, the goodbyes were friendly, and she wished Thom good luck with his poetry: “I hope you get published some day,” she said.
Thom thought the point of this anecdote was: When people ask what kind of poetry you write, they mean “Does it get published?” But for me the point of the anecdote is that just about every other poet I know would, sometime in the course of that conversation, be uncool enough to drop in some phrase like “my editor” or “my publisher” or “one of my books.” Not Thom: as with the Berkeley students, no need to; a kind of hip inward balance so that he did not dip toward that need.
He was flamboyant and self-contained, solitary and communal. He was a leather boy and, as his friend Donald Davie once said of him, he was also “the sensible Englishman with his pipe.” He was a great celebrator of mind-altering substances and a conscientious, ethical teacher. He liked bath-houses and he edited the poems of Fulke Greville. His work subsumes contradiction. Subtle and clear, his poems are all, one way or another, about that mixed and surprising subject, human nature. Gunn’s poetry approaches the subject with a tentative yet penetrating lucidity, pressing beyond the twin shadows of the glib and the obscure, to the heart of the dilemma.
Robert Pinsky’s newest books are Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry and Invitation to Poetry. He teaches at Boston University.
