http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04wmhbc
The radio highlight of the year came early with Colm Toibin introducing this 45 minutes on the life and work of Thom Gunn. For the first time in many years, I sat and took notes although the introduction here on the Radio 3 website provides a good synopsis.
There are enough of Gunn's friends and associates still around to provide first hand accounts (Mike Kitay, August Kleinzahler, Clive Wilmer and the others listed at R3) but one small improvement might have been if recordings of Thom reading the poems could have been used in preference to his friends because nobody produces the cadences or the accent of Thom's reading like the original. It's possible, of course, that someone owns the copyright (like Faber) and didn't allow it but I hope that wouldn't be so.
The main theme emerging from the programme, which was new to me, was the idea that all his poetry in some way came from the trauma of his mother's suicide when he was a teenager. While not explicitly writing about it until his final book, Boss Cupid, the suggestion was that the experience lay beneath all that came after. Neither had I known that he was named William and adopted Thomson as a first name, which was his mother's maiden name. So, why had I thought there was some connection between Thom being called Thomson and his brother, Ander, Anderson.
The tension between his rigour as a poet, influenced by F.R. Leavis at Cambridge in the early 1950's, and his 'wilder' subject matter was examined from different angles. He used strict metre to express desire, violence and, later, the fugitive experience of LSD. It might also be seen as a 'guard against subjectivity' and, at a time when it was fashionable for poets to be prominently present in their own poems, Thom is allegedly noticeably absent from his. Thus, form for him was 'cognitive and generative' but, as long as you are not working on a Ph. D., phrases like that are some you can manage without..
August Kleinzahler followed up his insights from the introduction to his Gunn Selected Poems, in which he regarded the first two books, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement as juvenilia with the observation that he offered Gunn that 'he was no good until he took LSD', but after that he put something that was not precise in a precise way. But those first two books, that include Tamer and Hawk and a number of other early masterpieces, are quite some 'juvenilia'. I'm sure that legions of poets would be happy to have poems of that calibre listed among their finest.
Moly, both the poem and the book it gives its title to, are regarded by August and others, as the coming of age, with some aggression against the father, some stamping on the ground and where Gunn comes into his mature period whereas, we were told, some British critics of the time deplored the move to California, the free verse and saw the whole enterprise as the waste of a great talent.
I don't see the need to downgrade either part of his work to that time. An artist benefits from a restlessness that makes them move on and throughout his career, there are surely tremendous poems (as well as a few less tremendous) in each new book. All of them are worthwhile and, by the same token, none are to be regarded as secondary to the others. It is the way that, having worked towards free verse, Gunn could move between that and strict metre which makes him such a virtuoso and could, as the well-chosen title of this programme suggests, take the 'appropriate measures'.
Among other biographical detail, we heard from the proprietor of the Hole in the Wall bar in San Francisco, which was a favourite of Thom's and that he slept on a board in a room without decoration. Also that he regarded Lament, from The Man with Night Sweats, as his own best poem. All such things seem so valuable to know but quite how Thom reached that verdict will have to remain a mystery. Not that it's not a great poem- but there are a lot of other worthy candidates.
But the reports of his last days are quite harrowing to hear. His poems, his essays and what I took to be confident demeanour (having only met him briefly for an autograph once and not been confident enough to take up the conversational gambit he offered), had seemed to me to present someone very much in control, knowing, cool and not in the least traumatized. I perhaps even thought that his poems took us above and away from our own bad dreams. But it seems that might have been what they did for Thom, too. His disguise and early interest in 'pose' had more beneath them than some of us were to know.
It was said he 'went off the rails' after retirement and giving up teaching. That he had never given up on the 1960's style drug habit came as no surprise and neither did the interest in 'rough trade' and (their words, not mine) 'low life', apart from the extent of it. But his speech could be slurred after a weekend on speed and a 'deep unhappiness' resurfaced, possibly after the compartmentalised life that the discipline of work and a separate other life had offered. For one who had previously, and is, the subject of many anecdotes of being good company, with a great laugh and sense of humour, as well as such obvious great erudition, he became 'difficult' in his behaviour. So difficult that his housemates were reluctant to disturb him when he was apparently staying in his room all day with the TV on until Mike, was it, eventually decided it was time to go and see if he was okay and found he was dead and had been for some time, the homeless man with whom he had been having a 'heroine-fuelled tryst' having disappeared into the night.
More than one witness was not prepared to accept that it was any kind of suicide but there was some consensus that he wasn't worried about allowing himself to get close to death, that the possibility of dying didn't frighten him.
From some other source, I remember hearing a story in which he found 'disinterested' defined in a dictionary as 'not interested' and he didn't really want to live in a world where that had happened, which is a story I prefer.
The autopsy put the cause of death down to heroine and speed.
On a more literary note, it was pointed out that the last lines of the last poem, Dancing David, in his last book, 'leap past some existential barrier',
The ultimate moment of the improvisation,
A brief bow following on the final leap.
and perhaps they do but it is not as if many other lines in many previous poems didn't do something similar.
The programme is an excellent contribution to the available work on Thom Gunn. If it said Thom wasn't exactly 'sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, he was just sex and drugs', I'd prefer to play up the idea that he was the C20th's John Donne, a poet who was both specifically of his own time but also, more than any of his contemporaries, consciously a part of a much longer tradition that was based in English Literature and inevitably became more American. But who would want to be bound by any such national or literary definitions when the poems are there to speak so eloquently for themselves.
It almost seemed if this was as much as is required and a 'last word' but it isn't and won't be. I look on Amazon regularly to see if Clive Wilmer's annotated edition of the poems is due any time soon. I see that the Hagstrom Bibliography has been updated to an edition that covers up to 2004. I did ask of August K a few years ago if any biography would be written and he said someone was talking to all the relevant sources and working on such a thing but there is no sign of it yet. My question about any poems written after Boss Cupid has received two slightly different answers but the one that said Thom had 'dried up' and there are none seems inceasingly likely to be right.
I don't think there is any point in me trying to make any sense out of the first draft of the short book I wrote circa 1999/2000. There are plenty of people better placed and with the time to produce much more worthy volumes than that calamitously dreary and mistake-strewn mess.
So, thanks to Colm Toibin and all those who contributed to this treasure. It was much appreciated.
