The Thom Gunn Letters

 Earlier today I think I had the feeling that those first prospectors in the Yukon must have had when they spotted something bright and shiny in the river. I knew there were a few Autumn books that would need ordering soon and found that the new title by August Keinzahler isn't due until November. However, I also noticed him as one of the editors of a forthcoming Letters of Thom Gunn, along with Clive Wilmer and Michael Nott. While being well aware of who August K and Clive W are, I hadn't heard of Michael so looked up what I could find out and found him referred to in one place as Gunn's 'official biographer'.

Good Heavens.

With the letters due in March next year, those of us who care have the prospect of 800 pages to sustain us through a winter I was quite looking forward to but now it might as well rain until March, but it sounds for all the world like there will be a biography after all. Having ascertained several years ago that such a thing was in preparation, I had rather given up on ever seeing it and I'm not sure it's this, either, although who's to say.

With three volumes of letters, three full biographies and various memoirs about Philip Larkin and the biographies of Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate and Elaine Feinstein, plus his letters being well behind us now, Gunn's reputation has not kept up with his 1950's contemporaries with who he made so many of the headlines in English poetry. But perhaps some balancing of the account is eventually to take place. Anybody who thought chess wasn't exciting should have seen the Carlsen-Nakamura match on Chess24 today. Those who think books aren't equally so need to know how excited I am about these far-off, long-awaited publications. The order for the letters is already in place.

I found the news, which is not the sort of story that makes the front page of the newspapers, at an opportune time. Today I also looked at the Word document of my very embryonic idea of a Gunn book that I found last saved 10 weeks ago on 1780 words. It had seemed to me that if you want a job doing, you sometimes have to do it yourself and although not very well qualified for the job, I might cobble together a survey of the poems with some biography from my not-quite-completist shelf of Gunn books. I do at least have one letter that the Faber volume won't have and, having typed 'letters of Thom Gunn' into Google, I see that others have them, too. So, whether my jejune effort at filling what I thought was a gap in the market remains worth pursuing, I don't know. It was a labour of love rather than a commercial project or contribution to scholarship anyway but it now seems a bit premature to spend the winter gradually bashing it out when so much previously unseen material is to become available as soon as the clocks go forward again.

But it's outrageously good news for those of us who have remained faithfully Gunn admirers in times of some dearth of material on the subject. It either saves me a pointless endeavour or it gives my chronic enthusiasm some coat-tails to catch hold of. But since others are showing off their letters from Thom, maybe I ought to share mine. I'm surprised I've not done it before. It now is transparently a polite reply to a fan letter that was implicitly imploring its hero to say something kind about one's own work and he was kind enough to do that at whatever cost to his integrity ( ! ).