The Letters of Thom Gunn,
edited by Michael Nott, August
Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022,
$45.00 cloth.
In his poem “Duncan,” Thom Gunn juxtaposes two versions of a story about companionship. Late in the poet Robert Duncan’s life, his effervescence compromised by illness and fatigue, he collapsed outside after giving a reading at UC Berkeley. In Duncan’s retelling of the story, which Gunn presents first, someone was poised to catch the frail master: “Fell he said later, as if I stood ready, / ‘Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn.’” Gunn lets us have the securing pleasure of those double spondees for a moment, then offers a corrective:
Well well,
The image comic, as I might have known,
And generous, but it turned things round to myth:
He fell across the white steps there alone,
Though it was me indeed that he was with.
Characteristically, Gunn seeks a rawer account, even when it brings him closer to self-criticism: “I hadn’t caught him, hadn’t seen in time, / And picked him up where he had softly dropped, / A pillow full of feathers.” That day he was indeed with his friend Duncan, but could only accompany him up to a point. There is an essential boundary—call it separateness, call it solitude—that the poem insists upon. Even when we are together, each of us remains a distinct self, “separate in the same weather,” as Gunn puts it in the poem “June.”
In one sense, Gunn’s poetry early and late was a technology for discovering and affirming boundaries, for chiseling distinctions. “Remember how their lives were dense / With fine, compacted difference,” he wrote in an epitaph for the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park. Perhaps Gunn’s awareness of boundaries, and the roles made possible by them, developed early out of an instinct for self-protection. Readers of The Threepenny Review may already be familiar with the dramatic outlines of his life: his mother Charlotte’s suicide when he was fifteen (Thom and his younger brother, Ander, found her body); his surge of self-discovery, including coming out to friends, while in college at Cambridge; the immediate fame brought on by his first book, Fighting Terms; his move from England to California at age twenty-five to follow Mike Kitay, who ended up as his life-long, though not monogamous, partner (Gunn hated the word and preferred “lover” instead); his quasi-apprenticeship under Yvor Winters at Stanford; his experiments with consciousness-changing drugs beginning in the 1960s; his decades teaching Renaissance and modernist poetry at Berkeley; his role as mourner and survivor during the AIDS crisis, which resulted in much of his finest work; and his enthusiastic membership in the world of casual gay sex. Across several memorable eras, Gunn played in one person many people, to quote his beloved Shakespeare.
But as this biographical sketch suggests, Gunn was also invested in the work of disassembling boundaries, a value he shared with his adopted Bay Area. “I liked LSD because it broke down categories,” Gunn told an interviewer. (Several interesting letters from the 1960s and 1970s describe the insights that trips afforded him.) His 1971 book Moly seeks transformation from its initial couplet onward: “Something is taking place. / Horns bud bright in my hair.” Walt Whitman, that celebrant of merging, became a natural hero, both poetically and politically. “Anyone who chooses may come in past the barriers,” Gunn wrote in a paean to San Francisco’s street life.
There’s something unsatisfactory in talking about Gunn’s work in terms of closure and openness, though Gunn himself employed the dichotomy. Too many reductive associations adhere to each pole, making it easy to forget that Yvor Winters, that spokesperson for reason and rigor, was the one who introduced Gunn to William Carlos Williams, who became an exemplar of freedom for Gunn. So it was refreshing to open The Letters of Thom Gunn and find the twenty-four-year-old poet writing to his Cambridge friend Tony White, back in 1954:
This evening being alone, & feeling bad, I couldn’t think of a single person I could go and see. And apart from everything else I’ve virtually stopped writing. So I suppose there’s a chance that after 5 yrs or so in another country I cd get back that balance between outer and inner that makes for friends and poems. And fit Mike in with them, by starting with him as something they have to be built around. – I wouldn’t have believed before how much that sort of balance I referred to so loosely above really matters.
Though the passage expresses loneliness, and bemoans the writer’s block that visited Gunn throughout his life, you can sense a clarifying purpose when Gunn identifies “that balance between outer and inner that makes for friends and poems.” That early, Gunn had his finger on the creative conditions that he would pursue for fifty years. Poetry would not subsume life, but poems would emerge out of the same generative tension between the internal and external afforded by the rest of his experience.
Visiting Rome earlier that year, Gunn latched onto the city’s logic of opposites: “The right proportions of good looking buildings to slums, the right complications.” Decades later, reflecting on his unlikely friendship with Duncan, Gunn wrote, “He is in many ways my opposite—prophetic, learned, diffuse… I feed on him in a way that I can’t feed on somebody I’m much more like.” One of the elegies in The Man with Night Sweats (1992) celebrates “The whole rich process of twined opposites, / Tendril round stalk, developing in tandem.” It’s not so much a shift from closure to openness that defines Gunn, but the complicated texture those two impulses, both present from the beginning, enable. Writing in 1968 to Tony Tanner, another lifelong friend, Gunn vouchsafed, “I am at my best when I am trying to reconcile opposites.”
As many changes as Gunn went through, from the coat-and-tie-clad disciple of Winters to the chain-mail-wearing stud of Golden Gate Park, the letters show him pursuing “the right complications” with remarkable consistency. In part because of that consistency, you may not find many revelations in these 678 pages. The letters don’t home in on a contested field of poetics, like Duncan’s and Denise Levertov’s exchanges about political writing during the Vietnam War; nor do they offer the titillation of a personal breakdown, like many correspondences of Gunn’s contemporaries; nor do they form an imaginative continuity with his poems, like the letters of Keats or Hart Crane. There’s also the fact that letter writing, as a cultural practice, was nearing extinction by the end of Gunn’s life. Doorstop volumes such as this one and James Merrill’s letters, which came out in 2021, feel like an endangered species. What Gunn’s letters do offer are fascinating glimpses into the way a first-rate poet managed to keep a precarious gift at the center of his life, while also fully living that life.
Some of the most compelling letters find Gunn embroiled in decision-making, trying to keep that tricky “balance of inner and outer” in play. First, as he mulled over leaving England for California, then, as Mike Kitay weighed moving from New York to San Fran-cisco to live with him, we see Gunn fussing over his writing: “I honestly don’t think it worried you that I didn’t—couldn’t—write a line…the whole time you were here. I don’t think it was selfishness on your part, I think, it just didn’t strike you.” In the same letter he told Kitay, “If I do not arrange my life according to [poetry] I simply do not have a chance.” Still he managed to build a life with Kitay, as he had envisioned. Though at a certain point their sexual relationship ended, they purchased a house in Haight-Ashbury in 1972 (for $33,000!) and together constructed a chosen family of roommates, including friends and other men that he and Kitay were in relationships with. “A family in which the children will not disappear into college or marriage,” Gunn called it.
Almost as soon as Gunn began teaching—first during their year in San Antonio (where Kitay, serving in the Air Force, was nearly court-martialed due to his sexuality), then at Stanford and Berkeley—his letters ponder getting out of it. He liked his students but balked at the obligations of a fulltime academic post. Finally, as if compromising with himself, in 1966 Gunn gave up tenure at Berkeley in order to teach only one semester a year. The decision sacrificed health insurance and long-term financial security, but it meant fewer meetings, as well as more extended time for his own poems and pursuits on the other side of the Bay. The choice also made Gunn a more enthusiastic teacher. Looking back, he referred to giving up tenure as “the cleverest thing I ever did.”
Most consequentially for those of us who love his poems, Gunn’s letters detail his counter-intuitive scheme to let the manuscript of The Man with Night Sweats, with its section of elegies responding to the AIDS crisis, gather dust in a drawer for years. “I have almost enough for another book, but since I have a tendency to dry up for a couple of years [after publishing]…I’m just going to put it away till 1992…and hope I can cheat the tendency that way,” he told Donald Davie in 1987. It’s hard to imagine many poets in our age of social media exercising such restraint, especially when sitting on work so topical. But the trick worked. When The Man with Night Sweats finally came out, Gunn was well launched on Boss Cupid, a book about the complications of eros, but also one whose subject he described in a notebook as “aliveness,” the song of a man who had come through.
We also glimpse Gunn making choices within poems themselves, seeking the help of a few reader-confidantes. In the first half of Gunn’s life, these were his English friends White and Tanner. In 1966 he wrote to Tanner, “I’ll enclose 1 1/2 new poems. ‘Touch’ I hope comes off. I think it may be the best free verse I have written… On the other hand maybe it is too cliché, too fashionably bare. I’m in a real fix, style-wise: I think you are right that I do best with meter.” Despite Gunn’s hesitation, the poem “Touch,” one of several poems he wrote about the fugue state between waking and sleep, turned into a beauty. Demonstrating the new influences of Marianne Moore, Williams, and perhaps Robert Creeley upon his prosody, yet rooted in Gunn’s own gift for fertile abstraction, it ends:
What I, now loosened,
sink into is an old
big place, it is
there already, for
you are already
there, and the cat
got there before you, yet
it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.
Tanner was a literary critic and academic, while White, an actor who also worked as a translator, pub-guide, and lobsterman, lived more colorfully. White’s death in 1976, from a blood clot following a leg break in a soccer game, left Gunn reeling. “You have always been so helpful with my poems—nobody else has the practical insights you have had into what I was doing over the last twenty years,” Gunn told White the year before his accident. “You were my subject matter,” Gunn wrote after he died. Considering the letters as a whole, I wonder whether this second early death prepared Gunn, in some small way, for the onslaught of AIDS a decade later. In the late summer of 1987, Gunn lost four friends in one month, including his lover Charlie Hinkle, a thirty-year-old writer who became the subject of “The J Car”: “Unready, disappointed, unachieved, / He knew he would not write the much-conceived / Much-hoped-for work now, nor yet help create / A love he might in full reciprocate.” Surveying the destruction the following winter, Gunn musters a disturbingly jaunty tone in a letter to Tanner: “I have written an awful lot about death…but then I think of Emily D[ickinson] who seemed to write ONLY well about death, so I suppose it’s a good large subject… I have rather few friends left, but a greatly increased wardrobe.” Along with the new clothes, Gunn had added twenty poems to his oeuvre in the last twelve months.
By the late 1980s, Clive Wilmer, who taught at Cambridge, and August Kleinzahler, who happened to be Gunn’s neighbor in the Haight, had become friends to whom Gunn could show his new work. I suppose that Wilmer, a poet and critic ensconced in academia, compiling Gunn’s birthday festschrifts, and Kleinzahler, the afternoon movie-and-martini partner who occasionally played poète maudit, appealed to different parts of Gunn’s temperament.
Wilmer and Kleinzahler now act as Gunn’s co-executors, and each has written perceptive essays on Gunn and edited their own, quite different, selections of his poems. Together with Michael Nott, a younger critic who is writing Gunn’s biography, they selected and edited these letters (“around a tenth” of Gunn’s extant correspondence), introduced warmly by Nott and appended with a helpful chronology. Gunn was not always in favor of such a project. Leaving the house of a deceased friend in 1984, Gunn wrote that he had found an “enormous bundle” of his own letters and “dropped them in a dustbin outside.” Later he remarked to Wilmer, “I certainly wouldn’t want my letters to be published immediately after my death, or ever.”
Thom Gunn had no patience for the tiers of power that American poets in the academy, like island diplomats, had self-seriously organized by the end of the last century. He had small tolerance for poets’ gatherings in general. “I’ve never been good at meeting poets,” he responded to a critic inquiring about his relationship with John Berryman. “I do not want to become one of those people who go to Poetry Conferences,” he said to his nephews. Another letter finds him comically out of place in a week of New York literary parties: “Susan Sontag has to kiss me—why?” Perhaps because fame had come to Gunn early in England, boxing him in as a poet before he’d had time to develop, he always found too much recognition unsettling. Even decades after Fighting Terms, he wrote of a recent trip to England that “I am a good deal too famous there to be comfortable.” In one of many replays of his one-night stands, Gunn told Douglas Chambers about a young man who discovered that he happened to be fooling around with a major poet. After saying to Gunn, “Oh, I like your poetry,” the man “marvellously didn’t even refer to the matter again during the entire night.”
The modesty was genuine, remarked upon by many who knew Gunn. But of what, specifically, did his modesty consist? Certainly not a renouncing of excess or ambition. Rather, a belief in the power and necessity of emotional restraint, a disdain for self-dramatizing, and a fundamental sense of ontological obscurity (“I’m far too unsure of what I am,” he disclosed, at age forty-five, to Tanner). As a result of these values, “Gunn appeared not to have a distinctive voice,” Wilmer writes in an essay, recapitulating a consistent criticism of Gunn’s poetry. Readers who miss “a distinctive voice” in the poems won’t find it in the letters either. Of course Gunn’s voice is everywhere, but it’s amalgam and protean. He acknowledged this versatility in a poem, “Transients and Residents,” that is partly about his correspondence:
In the letters that I send
I imitate unconsciously the style
Of the recipients: mimicking each friend,
I answer expectations, and meanwhile
Can analyse, or drawl a page of wit,
And range, depending on the friend addressed,
From literary to barely literate.
I manage my mere voice on postcards best.
Impersonality is a difficult concept to espouse these days, hardly made easier by T. S. Eliot’s requirement of it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Closer to Gunn’s constellation of “mimicking,” “range,” and “mere voice” is Keats’s remark in a letter that “A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence…he is continually in for, and filling, some other body.” Any number of critics today would suggest that Keats’s poetic ideal—a withholding of one’s own identity, while overleaping it into otherness—is impossible in a material sense and fraught with ethical peril. We cannot escape our social locations or our histories. Yet something like Keats’s notion of being “in for” other bodies seems like a necessary element of any politics of solidarity, it seems to me. In a recent essay, “The Banality of Empathy,” from The New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell searches for a more politically enlightened way to describe the connections fostered by literature. Serpell begins by questioning our culture’s assumed link between empathy and social change, excoriating the cheapness of white people’s engaging with otherness as “a kind of amusement that has no bearing on…ethical behavior.” But her essay ends by affirming the enlargement a poem or novel can offer, by allowing us to visit (as opposed to emotionally inhabit) different perspectives: “You achieve this ‘general standpoint’ by enlarging your mind to encompass the positions of others… One can only bring the experiences of others to mind if they are made imaginatively available to us.”
Surely the different roles and social circles that Gunn cultivated kept him open to others’ experiences in a way that enlarged his writing. Just as surely, his other roles helped him keep his poetry separate, its own world of experience whose access Gunn could control. I imagine Gunn nodding along to James Merrill’s description of Eliz-abeth Bishop’s “lifelong impersonation of an ordinary person.” But perhaps the poet and translator Jim Powell best captured the shape of his friend’s selfhood: “Thom Gunn had no side (except when he chose to deploy it), leading many to mistake him for his garb (which was not front but surface), or for his stance, for his reserve. What he did have was depth, gulfs of it.”
The letters also raise a few questions, in the course of filling in this depth. Gunn mostly wrote to, about, and for men. Belle Randall, a former student, Wendy Lesser, who consistently published Gunn in this magazine, and two older relatives make up the main female correspondents in this volume. Gunn’s milieu skewed male, obviously. But his early take on Marianne Moore in 1954 reeks of misogyny: “From what I’ve read of M.M. I think I’ll hate her. Typical woman writer.” (Gunn was to thoroughly revise his stance on Moore in later years.) And it’s hard to read a jokey passage in a 1995 letter to August Kleinzahler, where Gunn suggests that women matter because “they cook us cakes,” without cringing.
Gunn’s poems that consider women do so at a notable distance, ranging from the condescending—the churchgoers who feebly pray in “In Santa Maria del Popolo”—to the more nuanced, in “Jesus and his Mother.” Early and late, there are weak, older women who don’t get it (see “Well Dennis O’Grady”). The outlier to this attitude was the first woman in Gunn’s life. Charlotte Gunn was a journalist, staunch Communist, and free spirit who was “a bit too chic” for us, Thom remembered to his brother Ander. In his introduction to the letters, Nott argues that Gunn’s mother, despite her early death, “had the most enduring influence” on him. In Boss Cupid, Gunn’s final volume published in 2000, he was finally able to write two poems about Charlotte, to devastating effect: “I am made by her, and undone.”
In 1994, ten years before his death from a drug overdose, a sixty-five-year-old Gunn wrote to Chambers, “I am having a difficult year and I don’t even know why… I feel tired and discouraged much of the time.” In his last decade, the literary element of Gunn’s correspondence—poets and novelists he’s reading, lines he’s fussing over— diminishes significantly. In place of the poetry, we get more and more sex and drugs. A letter from the period written to Billy Lux, a young photographer from New York who became one of Gunn’s most dedicated correspondents in the 1990s, begins by describing “come on the toe” of a boot of someone Gunn had picked up, and ends with a discussion of Walter Raleigh’s “Walsinghame.” This mixture is vintage Gunn. But the “slave to cock” stories start to pile up: there are three-ways and birthday five-ways, sex in clubs and porn sessions at home. Amphetamines were often involved. Gunn had thought through his ethics of casual sex: “No, I don’t think promiscuity necessarily involves using people,” he wrote to Belle Randall back in 1979. “Short relationships can be just as full of reciprocity as long ones.” But the promiscuity and partying took on a different tone in Gunn’s later years; at least three times he acknowledged some variation of “I’ll probably kill myself doing this kind of thing.”
In a 1983 notebook, Gunn had wondered, “Why is my impulse to write poetry so closely connected—so much a part of—my sexual impulse?” Even when writing about non-sexual subjects, Gunn felt that poems “derive[d] from an energy that is sexual energy…concentrated excitement that lights up everything in a lighted area.” It is no surprise that, as his poetic gift was winding down, related appetites would take its place. Still, there is something monotonous and very un-Gunn-like in the way his later correspondence treats the hook-ups, suggesting they were no replacement for the charge of poetry.
I found myself contrasting the late letters’ droning on about sexual exploits with the riskier consideration of a tryst in Gunn’s poem “A Wood Near Athens.” Gunn envisioned the poem as a modernist collage, set within Boss Cupid’s wide-ranging, and sometimes shocking, erotic compendium. “A Wood Near Athens” ends by juxtaposing a lover’s anecdote with an image of angelic worship borrowed from the end of Dante’s Paradiso.
Once a young man
Told me my panther made him think of one
His mother’s boyfriend had on his forearm
—The first man he had sex with, at thirteen.
“Did she know about that?” I asked. He paused:
“I think so. Anyway, they were splitting up.”
“Were you confused?”—“No, it was great,” he said,
“The best thing that had ever happened to me.”
And once, one looked above the wood and saw
A thousand angels making festival,
Each one distinct in brightness and in function,
Which was to choreograph the universe,
Meanwhile performing it. Their work was dance.
Together, wings outstretched, they sang and played
The intellect as powerhouse of love.
Gunn’s careful questions to the young man mirror our immediate shrinking back from the story. Surely the encounter represented a violation by the mother’s boyfriend on several levels. But at the end of the stanza, Gunn lets stand the man’s continued claim of happiness about the affair—“The best thing that had ever happened to me”—which, by implication at least, becomes included as one of the diverse acts of praise to the godhead in the last stanza. It’s an unsettling move, but a risk worthy of eros. Unlike in much of Gunn’s correspondence, here sex takes on its fuller dimensions of confusion, power, and renewal, “the right complications” indeed.
Of course Gunn saved his best stuff for the poems. He had been practicing how to do so, how to manage a life inside an art, for half a century. What the letters argue for, in the end, is the worthiness of such a pursuit, the returns of such complicated decision-making. In 1996 he wrote to Kleinzahler, “You get so absorbed in the experience of writing the poem, and take the occasional risk you hope is worth it—no, that’s wrong, you take constant risks, every line is a risk. And the personal investment is so great you finally have little idea of what you’ve done.” Have there been many other postwar poets in whose hands poetry feels like such an adventure, so serious and fun? “You start with a great idea & when you start working on it all sorts of wonderful things you never anticipated move into it,” Gunn recounted to Wilmer in 2001. “And you finish it thinking, in all modesty, what an astonishing poem for me to have ended up writing, it’s so much better than I planned.”
Nate Klug is a poet and the author, most recently, of Hosts and Guests.
