This review appears in the July/Aug 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review
Thom Gunn. New Selected Poems. Ed. Clive Wilmer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 284 pp. $30.
Thom Gunn (1929–2004)—like Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and David Hockney (the last three homosexual)—was an English expatriate inspired by long residence in California. Gunn’s description of hopeful young lovers in “The Discovery of the Pacific”: “They lean against the cooling car, backs pressed / Upon the dust of a brown continent, / And watch the sun, now Westward of their West, / Fall to the ocean. Where it led they went,” offers an idyllic contrast to the apocalyptic menace of “Once by the Pacific” by the San Francisco–born Robert Frost: “There would be more than ocean-water broken / Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.”
Thom Gunn’s two-shot, Tommy-gun name and fierce public image—living on the dangerous edge of things with leather jacket and roaring motorcycle—belied his gentle, private character. When I visited him on Cole Street in San Francisco in March 2002, two years before his death, he looked handsome and rugged, and was charming and gracious. He moved like a panther, “With boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour,” and with no suggestion of illness. His conversation was relaxed, his attention intense, and though we’d never met before he greeted me with “Nice to see you again” as if we were old friends. He’d bought his tall, narrow town house, in the Haight-Ashbury district, for a low price nearly fifty years ago. Renovated in a neat and tidy way, it was sparsely furnished with many odd curios and modern pop art. He thought my projected book of original essays, Poets on Plath, was a good idea and would sell. Though the modest fee was not an obstacle, he didn’t want to contribute, and rightly predicted that I would not be able to capture Frieda Hughes or Geoffrey Hill. He signed six of his books with his name only, and was in no hurry to end our leisurely talk.
Gunn’s poems explore existential will, street life and violence, stoicism and heroism, homosexuality and intimate touch, AIDS and brain-scraping drugs, Nazi atrocities and his mother’s suicide, and the transcendent inspiration of Renaissance and modern art. He achieves what D. H. Lawrence called “the poetry of the immediate present”: “brilliance, concentration, music, surprise, inclusiveness.” Gunn uses the pure diction and strict forms, the irony and wit of his beloved Elizabethan poets. In San Francisco “High fog holds back the sky for days”; “waves that, as if frozen in mid-roll, / Hang in ridged rows. They cannot fall.” The snail’s fury and its protective shell are metaphors for covert homosexuality: “the castle that every snail / must carry around till his death.” Sex is always ambiguous and potentially self-destructive. He advises a young hustler, “Your looks looked after you. / Look after them,” and emphasizes the double entendre of “had” in “I forgave myself for having had a youth.” AIDS victims “stare down with large abstracted eyes” until the fatal moment they go blind: “This optic nerve would never be relit; / The other flickered, soon to be with it.”
Clive Wilmer, the editor of this volume, New Selected Poems, is Gunn’s most devoted and judicious, perceptive and illuminating critic. The sources for his extensive introduction and notes include Gunn’s unpublished papers, notebooks, diaries, and letters in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. But Gunn’s poetic mine is so rich with allusions and echoes, which enhance and fortify his work, that more ore can still be found:
Open City, Italian film (1946); Gunn p.151, “Open city.”
The Tender Trap, Frank Sinatra film (1955); 18, “the tender trap.”
Guys and Dolls (1955), “Call it hell, call it heaven”; 94, “Call it heaven, call it hell.”
Shakespeare, Sonnet 129, “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action”; 43, “lived only to / renew the wasteful force they / spent with each hot convulsion.”
Othello, “drowsy syrups”; 23, “lazy syrup.”
Donne’s epigram: “John Donne—Anne Donne—Undone”; 183, “I am made by her, and undone.”
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, “cover her face; mine eyes dazzle”; 110, “a dazzle in which / the ground of dazzle / is consumed.”
Pepys, Diaries, “And so to bed”; 116, “And so to bed.”
Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees”; 73, “and hurled / In endless hurry round the world.”
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 3.3, and D. H. Lawrence, letter of April 30, 1915, “to insects—sensual lust”; 22, “insect lust.”
Freud, the greater the obstacles to sexual pleasure, the greater the pleasure when those obstacles are overcome; 132, “We know delay makes pleasure great.”
Yeats, “Among School Children,” “O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer”; 98, “Great seedbed, yellow centre of the flower.”
Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” “on extended wings”; 192, “wings outstretched.”
Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Deferential, glad to be of use”; 151, “obliging but not subservient.”
Eliot, The Waste Land, “Speak to me . . . Speak”; 74, “What is it? What?”
Auden, “September 1,1939,” “darkened lands”; 5, “valleys darkened”; 36, “darkening the land”; 41, “darkened the earth’s dark.”
An adolescent during World War II, Gunn recalls Nazi atrocities to exemplify the horrors of the modern age. With terrifying objectivity he describes an affectless German soldier witnessing a barbaric act: “He stood near the Russian partisan / Being burned alive, he therefore could behold / The ribs wear gently through the darkening skin / And sicken only at the Northern cold.” These atrocities were bravely opposed by the severely wounded Count Claus von Stauffenberg, the rational man who tried to assassinate the crazed Hitler in the disastrously failed bomb plot of July 1944:
The maimed young Colonel who can calculate
On two remaining fingers and a will,
Takes lessons from the past, to detonate
A bomb that Brutus rendered possible.Over the maps a moment, face to face:
Across from Hitler, whose grey eyes have filled
A nation with the illogic of their gaze,
The rational man is poised, to break, to build.
In a notebook Gunn answers Orwell’s question about collective guilt, “Does one ‘accept’ the concentration camps?” by stating, “One accepts them in the sense not of approving them but in the sense of acknowledging that one is part of them—they are a room in my castle.” The first section of Gunn’s “Misanthropos,” about the last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, is called “The Last Man,” echoing the original title of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—The Last Man in Europe. When I wrote to ask Gunn about Orwell’s influence on his work, he replied on October 19, 1998, that the expression of Orwell’s ideas was as important as what he had to say: “He meant a great deal to me in the 1950s. I liked the essayist and the social chronicler more than the novelist. . . . I especially admired him as a model for prose writing, and taught Homage to Catalonia repeatedly in my freshman writing classes at Berkeley from 1958 onward. He knew how to qualify his beliefs and to show how they were qualified by his experiences—maybe the next most important thing to having beliefs at all.”
In a published interview about AIDS, Gunn said that it became obvious during those years that desire and death were connected. In “The Missing” he recorded his agonizing survivor’s guilt and his journal of the plague year with its ghastly cry “Bring out your dead!” Gunn echoed Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies,” in “Now as I watch the progress of the plague, / The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin, / And drop away.”
Gunn rejected Confessional poetry and remarked, “I don’t like dramatizing myself. I don’t want to be Sylvia Plath,” whose “rambling hysterical monologues” were occasionally redeemed by “some incredibly beautiful passages.” In “Expression” he satirized his students’ fake and feeble imitations of Plath’s poetry:
They write with black irony
of breakdown, mental institution,
and suicide attempt, of which the experience
does not always seem first-hand.
It is very poetic poetry.
But the reasons for Gunn’s disdain (not noted by Wilmer) are more complex. Both Gunn’s mother in 1944 and Plath in 1963 gassed themselves, after a broken marriage and during a harsh London winter, leaving two children behind. Plath’s children were infants; the fifteen-year-old Gunn and his younger brother forced the blockaded door and actually discovered the corpse of their mother. A childhood friend recalled that after Gunn’s mother killed herself, “He seemed to retire into a world of his own, like some damaged creature hurt beyond help and condolence.” Forty-eight years later—using a more distant third-person narrator—he finally portrayed the greatest trauma of his life in “The Gas-Poker”:
Coming back off the grass
To the room of her release,
They who had been her treasures
Knew to turn off the gas,
Take the appropriate measures,
Telephone the police.One image from the flow
Sticks in the stubborn mind:
A sort of backwards flute.
The poker that she held up
Breathed from the holes aligned
Into her mouth till, filled up
By its music, she was mute.
The harsh drafts of gas stopped her breathing, and the pipe-like music silenced her. The life-rejoicing Gunn once recorded a surprising insight, “the (sudden) unavoidable realization of how self-destructive I am.” On April 10, 2004, following his mother’s tragic example, he “died of a drug overdose, with methamphetamine, heroin, and alcohol in his system.”
Three of Gunn’s best poems portray the redemptive power of art. In Lucian Freud’s Painter Working, Reflection (1993, private collection) the seventy-one-year-old artist faces the spectator, completely naked and vulnerable. Aged but not exhausted by hedonism, time and toil, the once-handsome man displays his sagging muscles and knobby knees, his pendulous genitals and open, unlaced boots that reprise his open legs. In “The Artist as an Old Man” the seventy-one-year-old Gunn describes Freud’s self-portrait as
Muscled and veined, not
a bad old body
for an old man.
The face vulnerable too,
its loosened folds
huddled against
the earlier outline: beneath
the assertion of nose
still riding the ruins
you observe the down-
turned mouth.
Gunn concludes with a riddling passage from Judges 14:14 about the honey found in the carcass of a lion, “Out of the eater / came forth meat / and out of the strong / came forth sweetness,” to suggest the physical pain Freud suffered to produce great art.
The French statesman René de Birague commissioned the Mannerist sculptor Germain Pilon to create the white marble tomb of his Italian wife Valentine Balbiani (1574, Louvre). The tomb was originally placed in the chapel of a Paris church that was destroyed during the Revolution in 1783. The title of Gunn’s poem on this effigy, “Her Pet,” emphasizes her faithful dog, mentioned four times as a leitmotif. The idealized upper part of Valentine’s tomb shows her gracefully reclining and resting her head on her left arm, supported by two tasseled cushions. Gunn vividly portrays
Her curls tight, breasts held by her bodice high,
Ruff crisp, mouth calm, hands long and delicate,
All in the pause of marble signify
A strength so lavish she can limit it.
She will not let her pet dog catch her eye
For dignity, and for a touch of wit.
By contrast, the sarcophagus below—perhaps to record the shock of her husband’s devastating loss—shows her frightening change from elegant beauty to emaciated cadaver. The cushions now support Valentine’s bare skull, and her skeletal hands clutch the cerements to hide her private parts. Gunn morbidly describes
Her big ears, and her creased face genderless
Craning from sinewy throat. Death is so plain!
Her breasts are low knobs through the unbound dress.
In the worked features I can read the pain
She went through to get here.
Gunn’s poem is an incisive verbal equivalent of the visual tomb and a brilliant evocation of the memento mori theme and inevitable fate of all mortals.
In the last stanza of “In Santa Maria del Popolo,” inspired by Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul (1601, Rome), Gunn, changing perspective but hardly enlightened by the religious experience, is moved by the art but unable to believe in the comforting Christian myth. The gullible old women praying in the dark interior of the church rest their heads on tiny fists and tired arms, in striking contrast to the illuminated, open arms of the newborn saint. Yet in Gunn’s view, Paul reaches out to embrace not faith, but the nothingness of Sartre, an early influence on his poetry:
I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
To the dim interior of the church instead,
In which there kneel already several people,
Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
—For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.
The action of the poem progresses with visual images—“I see,” “I see,” “the painter saw”—which provide a striking contrast to Saul’s blindness, and the poet’s turning in the last stanza is set against Paul’s conversion. The poem also moves from chiaroscuro in the painting to dimness in the church while subtly suggesting parallels between the biblical Saul’s encounter with God and the modern poet’s encounter with the Baroque picture. Unlike Saul, another hard case, Gunn does not accept religious belief. In this account of the poet’s celebration of aesthetic pleasure, rejection of religious illusion and acceptance of doubt, the solitary modern man reaches out both to embrace and resist nothingness. It is no accident—in this work of sight and insight, mystery and revelation—that the next poem in My Sad Captains is suggestively called “The Annihilation of Nothing” and begins with the devastating word “Nothing.”
This valuable edition places Gunn with the finest postwar British poets: Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill.
