Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life

 Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life (Faber)

You wait for what seems like half your life for the book you most wanted to read to be first written and then published and by the time it is its subject has been deposed from his undisputed position as your favourite poet, specialist subject and maybe even, I might have once precariously thought, 'role model'.

The book turning up exactly on time, once it was due, was still a major event but its sub-title made me dubious and wary. 'Cool' means 'detached' but is also a vague term of vogue approval; 'queer' is a derogatory term reclaimed in an act of defiance by those radical and upfront enough to do so, which it would have been dangerous to do in the 1950's, 60's and later. Both epithets can reasonably be applied to Thom Gunn with all good intentions but putting them so prominently on the cover does him no favours. He was much more than that in his day and if by now he's been reduced to such a definition, his work is diminished by them. 

In PNReview, Volume 16 Number 2, November - December 1989, Donald Davie wrote that,

I have in the press - to use that portentous phrase - a book about British poetry since 1960. And as I put it together I was surprised by how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre-stage.

And that's what he was, or looked like, then - a central figure encompassing long, historical perspectives in poetry as well as contemporary references; one who moved from highly discplined, metrical forms to 'freer' lines and one who set himself up as 'impersonal' in manner and removed from the 'confessional' excesses of some of his contemporaries although it is now increasingly difficult to say where any such boundary lay. To reduce him to cool and queer, as if he was a little bit Miles Davis and a little bit Walt Whitman but mostly poetry's Lou Reed isn't good enough. And the photograph on the front cover doesn't help much, either.

Few biographies resemble psychological case studies as much as this but few people spent quite so much time ostensibly analysing themselves, their relationships with others and the world. In a book advertised as being 'no holds barred', though, one still wasn't expecting to find that young Gunn shared his mother's bed after her second husband left and that Gunn was on the outskirts of being investigated regarding the assassination of JFK, via his friend Don Doody. Soon, though, these extraordinary details don't seem so extraordinary after so many chapters of drug excesses and compulsive promiscuity and, for such apparently streetwise geezers, his entourage do seem alarmingly prone to 'falling in love'. Michael Nott begins, though, with the suicide of Gunn's mother, to who he was so attached, which clearly had an enormous effect on him.

Gladly, though, Nott doesn't lose sight of the work that made Gunn famous, regularly tracing the real people and occasions into the poems. While Gunn was most insistent that he was not 'confessional' in the style of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, that's a matter of opinion. His pursuit of 'impersonality' in his poems was to be admired but it's more in the detached attitude of his language than any escape from self that he achieves because, in a very Gunn-like paradox, that attempt looks more and more like a New Age 'search for himself'. Whether consciously or not, Nott compiles a long litany of writers that Gunn takes as role models as if his thesis is that Gunn was a highly talented tabula rasa, like David Bowie became in pop music, who assimilated almost all he was from precursors - Shakespeare, Donne, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Camus, Sartre, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound. 

What he did try to achieve, in common with other 1950's poets, was the avoidance of 'bad principles' although not all of his reveiwers from My Sad Captains in 1961 onwards agreed that he was successful in that. He can be seen to become himself in a Damascene moment on a dusty road in France when all his reading, thinking and inwardness are illuminated by a sense of release which might be identified as where the adventure begins but time and again it becomes apparent that he was only at home in restlessness, that 'love' - for want of a better word- was a strategic enterprise and a hedonism that defied reasonable limits was his primary motivation. At an early stage it was remarked that,

"He laughs too loud, as if he's got something to prove...that was a bit too self-dramatizing..that isn't actually quite true to yourself."

For all that he might have thought poetry could provide some ecsape from himself, it was a brave attempt that didn't work whereas Larkin's manifold ironies that accepted his lot for the most part did pace Gunn's respect for his technical excellence but derision of his lack of ambition. 

Given his lifestyle, Gunn might be counted as lucky to survive the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's. He lost many friends who were memorialized in his 1992 volume The Man with Night Sweats, the book that restored him to more generalized critical acclaim after the perceived difficulties of his 'middle period', and most of those tributes were metrical. While there are free verse and syllabic poems to admire, that is also where more of his less successful or lazier attempts are and metre is overall what he did best.

He did not go gentle into any good night but propelled himself headlong into his decline with as much commitment as he had embraced life in what retrospectively looks like a programme of self destruction but, having given up work, he was bored, may not have wanted to live and became increasingly difficult to live with. His death at the age of 74 was entirely foreseeable although the heroin found in his body had not been known to be part of his regular diet.

Books are more significant if they change our minds rather than merely confirming what we thought already. In one way it's a dull book, detailing repetitive episodes of compulsive behaviour but for the vast majority of us who have led more sheltered lives it offers a view of a sub-culture which we might not have known quite how thoroughgoing and established it was. It also makes it more difficult to argue against Gunn being understood as a 'gay poet' because first and foremost it makes clear that that is what he always was.