Dinesh K. Shukla - Dream Passion

Dinesh K. Shukla, Dream Passion, A Study of the Poetry of Thom Gunn (Adhyayan Publishers)

Eng. Lit. is an international industry, of course, but it was still interesting to see this book on Thom Gunn from 2009 coming from India. One has to have such a thing, and the only obstacle to getting it was persuading oneself that twenty five pounds was going to be thus well spent. Reading it has been an extraordinary experience but a decision on the monetary value of the book is not really possible to estimate.
It would have benefitted from some thorough proof reading. While there is no indication that it is a translation, it reads like one. Not only do references to, for example, Blake Morrison equally often appear as Black Morrison and titles often get misquoted but the academic argot of the text is strangely evasive due to typographical, idiomatic or spell-check mis-use.
While one can get the sense of the argument, it is ironic that a discussion of a poet as erudite and precise as Gunn can be quite so fugitive in its resultant blurring of sense. It is not a comfortable book to read as one regularly goes back over a sentence to make sure, or try to ascertain, excatly what was said, like a bike ride on difficult terrain where one's concentration is so much directed at staying on the bike that one doesn't enjoy the scenery.
The index is madcap. It doesn't contain references to Gunn's collections, like The Sense of Movement, but one can be directed to 'Unquestionably' on page 34, where we are told,
Clive Wilmer's plea in Gunn's favour is praiseworthy, 'His first person like Ralegh's, or Johnson's or Hardy's is unquestionably that of a particular person, but a man who expects individuality to be of interest insofar as it is a quality that reader shares with him'.
The text makes no reference to perhaps Gunn's most successful volume, The Man with Night Sweats, or his last book, Boss Cupid, not even in the bibliography but we are not tempted to think that it was written before their publication because it does mention a 2003 book of 'inspirational' essays, The Passion Driven (Faber), that I have tried and failed to find any mention of on Google, Abebooks, Amazon or the British Library catalogue.
That is curious. Although having summarized only some major curiosities of what is surely a Ph. D. thesis put into hard covers, there is a very worthy, perceptive and sometimes profound approach to Gunn to be detected in amongst this unorthodox presentation.
One can appreciate the analysis of the 'Movement' while feeling that it takes pains to show how Gunn was not an authentic part of it when, each for their own different reasons, neither were any of the other names associated with it. It is much easier and more useful to argue that there wasn't a 'Movement' at all.
The chapter on the early Gunn books argues that he was more 'Romantic' and less 'C18th' than other 'Movement' poets, but that denies his obvious debt to Shakespeare and Donne. And, later, when making a case for Gunn as a 'contemporary' poet, it continues to ignore the sense he always had of being a poet with deep historical predecessors.
Shukla seems to still think that Gunn should be bracketed with Ted Hughes, as they once were, 50 years ago, on account of a shared interest in latent violence but Hughes is the most significant among many who since realized that Gunn was a poet of gentleness. Gunn's early interest in tough guy swagger was a 'pose' and knew it was at the time whereas Hughes' primitive forces were from nature. They could hardly be more different.
The chapter on Touch and Moly is more convincing with its emphasis on sensory experience, the inability of language to capture the 'thinginess' (sic) of things, and Gunn's way of expressing what the limits of language suggest it can't express. There are paradoxes and ironies in such things as Gunn's reversion to strictly structured poems to deal with his LSD experiences and it is dealt with quite well in Shukla's account.
He is regularly quick to praise Gunn's poetry, the talent and 'genius', the lucidity, the philosophical position of the ethical individual in a post-holocaust world. And yet, in conclusion, we are told, quite remarkably,
A poet naturally endowed with poetic genius Gunn, should not have stressed the creative impact of unnatural sexual behaviours as homosexuality and masturbation. His drug addiction has also considerable impact on creative faculty.
( ! ).
But the conclusion insists on the existence of Passion Driven (2003), a book that 'deals with basic issues of human life, written few months back his death'. These essays are, we are told, 'deductive and prophetic.' (If anybody knows where I can get a copy, please write).
It is ostensibly a very sincere and well-meaning study. Just because it falls outside of what one might regard as critical orthodoxy is not a reason on its own to discount it; it makes a contribution to the pile of work on Gunn and is welcome as such.
But, even given that it comes from India (and why shouldn't it), I don't think I've read a stranger book.