The Thom Gunn Letters

 The Letters of Thom Gunn, ed. Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer (Faber)

It was said in the 1950's that three new poets were the new dominant figures in the English poetry being written then - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. Since then, if some of Larkin's lines have passed into the language and Hughes has continued to be regarded as 'major', Gunn's reputation has been less secure.

Larkin has had three full-length biographies, three selections of letters, a minor industry of critical studies, various memoirs from those who knew him and even the 4-CD set of his favourite jazz records. Hughes has been the subject of two biographies, a large volume of letters and been played by Daniel Craig in the film of Sylvia, in whose prolifically documented life he also has a major part. Some of us for who Gunn was at least as important if not more so might have thought he was worthy of at least something like the same sort of coverage. We have waited until now for this significant step in the right direction and I'm sure we are grateful. The introduction makes it clear it is not a biography but it serves much the same purpose. Having seen Michael Nott designated as the 'official biographer' on the internet, that might be still to come but there isn't much to complain about now we have this to put alongside Clive Wilmer's annotated Selected Poems and those autobiographical essays that Gunn himself provided. There would be some justification for a Complete Poems, and even Complete Prose, because the notes here and the bibliographies show that much remains uncollected but, in the same way that one can be made to wonder if one should be reading other people's correspondance that might have been meant to be private, it might not be fair to read poems that the poet didn't see fit to collect. Larkin wasn't done any favours by his Complete Poems and can be regarded as the better poet if only because his three major books represent something not far from his Selected, it's just that his selection process took place at a much earlier stage and was more fastidious.

If the Hughes letters are tormented by grief, overrun by superstition and forever trying to organize lucrative collector's editions of his work, Larkin's were firstly deliberately politically incorrect before he was revealed as a sentimental cartoonist of cute animals to the foremost among his girlfriends and then slavishly devoted to his mother. If I've long thought there were reasons to find Gunn closer to Larkin than to Hughes in their poems in some ways, it has always been obvious that they couldn't have been much further apart as personalities. Larkin is by now well-documented as the fogey retreating into social awkwardness, provincial, becoming more cynical and insular, some of which was both pretence and a means of defence whereas Gunn is nothing if not adventurous, becomes more attuned to America than England and makes his way towards a deep sympathy and humanity. We most of us knew about the drugs and the promiscuity if we took the time to care but I certainly didn't appreciate the scale on which it happened. Don't let anybody tell you the 1960's were exaggerated. It wasn't just The Grateful Dead. Once Thom Gunn was involved he kept it going for himself with great dedication for the rest of his life.   

If Larkin and Hughes in their different ways appeared 'right-wing', Gunn calls himself 'socialist', is genuinely anti-Republican and liberal but above all his agenda is hedonist. If we are all ruled by our compulsions, Gunn is increasingly devoted to his convulsions. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. By the end we might be bored by the unending procession of 'tricks' but he's still exhilarated. In December 1993 he writes of his drug intake,

I'll probably kill myself doing this kind of thing one of these days. Still, it's worth it

 

and in 2004, that is what happens - doing both of those things, the evidence seemed to suggest.

 

Seeing the poems mentioned as they are written and collected into books serves to emphasize that the trajectory of the poems was entirely autobiographical, from the Existentialist angst, through the LSD, hippy culture, gay liberation and AIDS to mature retrospectives. Not all poets' work lends itself to quite such direct associations with the life but for one who valued, prized and exemplified 'impersonality' in his work, he is more concerned with himself in it than one might have expected. He reflects in 2003,

I may not be a modest person, but I do believe in modesty in poetry.   

Perhaps it's not easy being one of the most talented of one's generation - most of us wouldn't know - and he employs a leitmotif of studied self-deprecation throughout his life before realizing he is a 'minor celebrity' in his later years. 

He is an exacting and forensic critic of other poets, expressing considerable reservations even about those he is happy to nominate as best, like Wallace Stevens, but his sympathies shift, as inevitably they will, from early admirations for Yeats and Auden to amendments of initial dismissals of Pound and Ginsberg to praising them in the highest terms later. Of his contemporaries, he accepts Larkin's expertise who in 1954 was 'fifteen times as good as me' but not what he employs it to say and never has a bad word for Hughes. His discriminating tastes never prevent him from, or possibly allow him to, some savaging of those things he finds fault with. 

Of his own work, the 'stylistic uncertainties' identified by Edward Lucie-Smith in 1970, as Gunn moved to free verse via syllabics, had already been acknowledged in a letter to his mentor, Yvor Winters, in 1966,

I have decided to give up free verse (I gave up syllabics two years ago), since I don't seem to be doing very well with it.

Free verse was due to return later but what might have looked like Lucie-Smith not appreciating Gunn's development towards being a poet equally adept in either form, he successfully read Gunn's mind at the time. Not that he got any thanks for it. The Poetry Wars were being fought vigorously then and Gunn wasn't above it all.

An insight into the economics of poetry at a time when not all poets had academic posts in university Creative Writing departments is offered by Gunn's reaction to winning £10k for the inaugural Forward Prize in 1992 for The Man with Night Sweats, which made his arbitrary decision to delay his next book until then also a lucky one. An amount like that made a difference to him and allowed him to think of retirement but in the event he continues teaching until 2000, when he is 69, by which time he can be offered $80k for a term of ten lectures and talk about whatever he likes and the property he bought in Haight is worth $1m, compared to the $33k he paid for it in 1971 due to the proximity of Silicon Valley and resultant gentrification of San Francisco. But, most laudibly, as one would hope, money wasn't the point of it for a 'poet', such rarified angels as they like to be.

 

700 pages took me a week to read, which is very good going by my standards. It was admittedly a book I've wanted and anticipated for longer than its editors conceived it, I dare say, but their scholarship has made it worth the wait and it's not obvious that a separate biography would add much more. There is no longer any excuse for not 'getting it'. It is all here. It might not have done Gunn any great favours in adding to my own regard for him as iconic but nothing about the life can detract from the paragon examples of his best poems. The wording of the law clearly states 'between consenting adults in private' and private is maybe where some of this material could have remained but the effect of the Gunn letters is only equal and opposite to that of the Larkin letters. I don't regard myself as strait-laced but some of the later pages here served as something of an education. 

As Sean O'Brien wrote in his tribute,

The only rule was endless latitude.

Let the unready falter and retire -

 

and, as so often, he's right. It might be either this or Mr. Bleaney. But most of us find a position somewhere in between.