The Day I Met Thom Gunn

Like, the whining school-boy, with his satchel

but not so much the shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school,

is how this week I've returned to some desultory work on the Gunn book. I don't mind doing it once I get started but it isn't going to see print and so isn't worth it. It is my Key to All Mythologies, nominally giving me something to say I'm going whether I do it or not.
He has been my subject since the 1970's, being what I read towards the old 'S' level English, then
would have been the subject of my second year dissertation at university except Lancaster's English
Dept in 1979 didn't consider him a big enough subject for one unit of a degree and so I broadened it out to British Poetry since 1945. A few magazine articles and then the abortive first effort at the book in 1999 have delivered me to retirement age with unfinished business and no excuse to not do it. I
reached 30 thousand words before Christmas and awarded myself a rest. I have now reached 1982 and The Passages of Joy and thus an opportunity to insert the story of when I 'met' him. This is the long version.
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A friend at Cambridge invited me there for a few days in November 1979 to take in a rare British
appearance that, it turns out, was in the Graduate Centre on the 14th and not, as I had thought, in
Trinity College. I have issue 2 of The Black & White Supplement, 30p fortnightly, to remind of all that
I've since forgotten.
I went down by train, changing at Leeds, on a bright day, reflecting that Prof. David Carroll had told us in a seminar, that he had realized that George Eliot would be his life's work when he first read her and he went on to edit the variorum edition of Middlemarch. I'm not drawing any parallels between that and my meddling in Gunn Studies. Later in the journey I remember Ely Cathedal dominating the fen lowlands, then the view across the lawn in Downing College. We had dinner 'in halls' one evening, if only to enjoy the rarified atmosphere with a few antique dons presiding at top table in front of a portrait of F.R. Leavis.
What I remember of the reading is the poem Bally Power Play about playing a pinball machine. So I
am grateful to the anonymous, dissatisfied reviewer in B&W Supplement for confirming that the poet's
waistcoat was leather and not suede as I thought it might have been and that his trousers were
corduroy. But he saw it as a celebrity appearance that students attended because they thought they
should and that it lacked immediacy. Well, not me, mate. I'd come from nearly the Lake District to see
him. He also says that afterwards they all drifted away, more interested in being first at the bar than the poems they had just heard. Again, not me.
Intrepidly, and admittedly I was the only one, I approached Thom Gunn and asked him to sign my copy of Touch which he very kindly did and dated it '1979'. Perhaps he was glad that at least one person cared as much as that because he offered the opening conversational gambit that it was his favourite of all the cover designs of his books. But could I ingratiate myself by making an obvious reply that they were some of my favourite poems, too.
No, I couldn't. I blew it, starstruck and not being able to think of the most obvious thing to say, I
shuffled away awkwardly and still regret it 42 years later. Any number of poets I've collared to sign
books at readings elsewhere in the intervening years know that I didn't remain shy for very long.