The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  There is something very appealing about Thom Gunn’s assumption that everyone is exactly like he is. But then, there is something boyishly appealing about Thom Gunn in general. His friends often entertain each other with stories about his curious mixture of ingenuousness and sophistication. August Kleinzahler—a younger poet whom Gunn considers a close friend as well as a helpful poetic advisor—gave me one such example.

  “I was giving a reading at UC Berkeley,” Kleinzahler recalled, “you know, in the Maud Fife Room. And I was extremely nervous. Thom was walking me to the room, down those long, empty corridors, and I felt like James Cagney in The Public Enemy—I could hear the click of my heels on the floor. Then Thom turns to me, very earnestly and solicitously, and says, in his most dulcet Oxbridge tones, ‘Do you think you’ll be wanting to have a wee-wee?’”

  Something of Thom’s youthful manner is apparent even in his looks. Though he’ll be seventy soon, he’s still thin and energetic, bounding up and down two flights of stairs at a moment’s notice to retrieve a forgotten jacket or fetch a spare copy of a poem. His face is strongly lined, and his hair is the salt-and-pepper combination of Richard Gere’s in Internal Affairs, a movie he much admires. (Actually, Thom hastens to point out, it would be completely grey if he didn’t color it. “I think it’s okay to dye your hair if you tell people it’s dyed, don’t you?” he says, in a confiding tone, to everybody.) But along with the greying hair he sports a gold ring in his left ear, a dragonish tattoo snaking up his right arm, and a wardrobe that consists mainly of T-shirts and black jeans—not your typical senior-citizen getup. Even his laugh is sudden, open, and childishly joyful, as well as loud enough to triumph over the din at any public gathering spot in San Francisco, the city he has made his permanent home since 1960.

  Thom Gunn has always had a big loud laugh. Karl Miller, a classmate of his at Cambridge University in the early 1950s (later the founder of the London Review of Books), wrote of those Cambridge days: “A great pleasure of the place was to watch Thom Gunn, of the sounding, crashing laugh and lumberjack shirts, become a poet.” The lumberjack shirts are rarely seen these days, and the process of becoming a poet has been satisfyingly, definitively accomplished, but the laugh remains as fresh and raucous as ever.

  The spotlight has been on Gunn from a relatively early age. By the time he was twenty-five he had published his first book, Fighting Terms, and had been welcomed into the company of a new generation of British poets that included Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and Britain’s current poet laureate, Ted Hughes. (It is perhaps a sign of Gunn’s achievement that by now all his contemporaries in this group are either famous or dead, if not both.) In 1989 a prominent critic putting together a book about British poetry since 1960 kept noticing “how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre-stage.” At least a few of Gunn’s poems made it into virtually every anthology of contemporary British verse, and some were even included in the standard O-level and A-level tests that determined a student’s passage from secondary school to university.

  If you know a well-educated Englishman of a certain age (say, forty to sixty-five), he is likely to be able to recite from memory at least a few lines of Thom Gunn—the likeliest being a passage from the famous “On the Move,” the lead poem in his second collection. The poem describes an alluringly ominous group of Hell’s Angellike bikers, and it starts:

  On motorcycles, up the road, they come:

  Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys…

  As if to signal that he too was on the move, Gunn himself briefly rode a motorcycle (though not until after he’d written this reputation-making poem). “I rode it to show off,” he now says, “and I had it less than three months. I shouldn’t be trusted on the road. That’s why I don’t drive a car. I think my reflexes are funny.”

  One Englishman who has been a fan of Gunn’s since the 1950s is the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. “My battered copy of The Sense of Movement goes back to—let’s see, 1958,” he told me. “Jonathan Miller, who was a friend of mine, said, ‘You must read this.’” Dr. Sacks subsequently ventured to San Francisco for a couple of years of medical training, choosing the location in part because Thom Gunn was already there. “I met him in 1961,” recalls Sacks, who now lives in New York, “and I saw a fair amount of him during my brief San Francisco days, which ended in 1962. But I’ve kept in touch with him since. And whether as a grand poet or the best of friends, he’s someone I very much love and admire.”

  But in contrast to the English, most literate Americans—even most American fans of poetry, a far smaller group—had barely heard of Gunn. Elizabeth Bishop, writing to Marianne Moore from San Francisco in 1968, felt obliged to explain who he was, even though by that time he had already published five books. “One poet I’ve met here, almost a neighbor, I like very much, Thom Gunn,” she wrote. “His poetry is usually very good, I think; he’s English but has lived here for a long time.” Gunn’s opinion of Bishop was equally enthusiastic. “She was jolly and hearty and liked a good joke,” he remembers. “And she gave the only really good literary party I ever went to.” (Thom’s dislike of literary parties has always been notorious, but his hermit-like behavior has increased in recent years, so that it now requires Herculean efforts to tempt him over to my house for a six-person Sunday lunch, even with people he likes. This is not because he is a homebody—he will take a one-hour busride on a rainy night to attend a friend’s reading at a bookstore—but because he has clearly lost patience with most kinds of conventional social gathering. If he ever had it, that is: conventionality has never been his strong suit.)

  When I first met him, in 1977 or 1978, Thom Gunn was eking out a living as a part-time lecturer in UC Berkeley’s English department, having given up a tenured position there because he couldn’t stand being on committees. He had no health insurance, no retirement plan, not even a single credit card (until, in the 1980s, he finally acquired one so as to be able to purchase airline tickets over the phone). He lived frugally, almost never buying new clothing or hardcover books. His only tangible asset, a house in the Haight-Ashbury district, had been purchased in the mid-1960s with a $3,300 down payment carved from his $10,000 Guggenheim grant; he shared out the mortgage among several rent-paying housemates.

  This is not, however, a tale of penurious merit ultimately rewarded, of ascetic renunciation for the good of “Art.” This is the tale of choices consciously made on the basis of immediate as well as lasting desires; of pleasures experienced and enjoyed; of a life explored and inhabited so as to render up its manifold possibilities. During all those years, Thom Gunn was having a ball—particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, San Francisco’s hippie heyday.

  I am unusually resistant to the allure of that period, having come of age in its midst, but Thom won’t let me relax into my comfortable prejudices. “I liked LSD because it broke down categories,” he tells me. “But that was what I liked so much about the Sixties anyway. By your mid-thirties you can get a bit smug, and the Sixties—and by this I mean the drugs, the concerts in the park, all of it—turned over my assumptions, delayed my middle-aged smugness a little.” He manages to say this without animadverting to my middle-aged smugness, so I don’t really feel it as a rebuke; rather, a stated difference between us.

  The poems that came out of Gunn’s period of discovery and self-discovery—poems about LSD, communal orgies, gay bathhouses, rock-star deaths, fragmentary memories, nightmarish visions, and the Northern California landscape, both urban and rural—took up much of the space in his next three books, which were published between 1971 and 1982. And these books did not endear him to his English public. The prevailing sense (as wittily summarized by Glyn Maxwell, a younger British poet) was that here was “a man of decorous, skillful, metrical verse who had for his own reasons become absorbed into an alien culture that gave him alien subjects (like sex), alien backdrops (like sunshine) and, most vexing of all, made his strict forms melt on the page. No longer could he be Our Man Out
There like, say, Auden in New York or James Fenton in the Far East, because he seemed to have become Their Man Out There.”

  To an extent, this was the point of the whole endeavor: to escape being English. The freedom Gunn gained in 1960s San Francisco was in part the freedom to stop being what he had been brought up to be and become something else, something far less easily defined. He says as much in the last few lines of “The Geysers”:

  torn from the self

  in which I breathed and trod

  I am

  I am raw meat

  I am a god

  Or, if not a god, then at any rate a Californian; at the very least an “Anglo-American,” as he now calls himself, in imitation of the other models of ethnic immigration—Italian-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American—that can be found so profusely in California.

  It’s not true, however, that California made all of Gunn’s British strictness melt away. As a teacher at UC Berkeley he makes his students memorize passages of poems, learn the crucial publication dates, and recognize prosodic forms; I know this because, although I’ve never been one of his official students, I’ve audited a couple of his poetry courses. Joan Acocella, the dance critic, told me that he was much the same when she took his English 100 course as an undergraduate in 1965. “He was extremely rigorous,” Joan remembered. “He made us write a two-page paper every week—he was very strict about the two-page limit—and he always expected from us more sophistication than the other professors did. He gave us idiosyncratic material—more difficult, less lovable than the usual—and then he gave us his reasons for liking it, which were bound up with his moral personality: his reserve, his distance. I’ll never forget what he taught me.”

  The students also found Gunn himself idiosyncratic, and that too may have appealed to them. “He was different from the other professors,” Acocella said. “He wore leather, he was a poet, he was gay, and we knew that he took the bus back to San Francisco every day.” (To this day, Thom Gunn takes the bus back and forth one semester each year to teach at Berkeley. He hasn’t allowed any of his recent fellowships to interfere with his scrupulous, devoted teaching; once, in fact, he nearly turned down a three-year fellowship when it seemed he would have to stop teaching to accept it.)

  The rigor which characterized his teaching was also there, if less obviously, in his California-influenced poetry. He may have ceased to be wholly British, but he could still produce “decorous, skilled, metrical verse.” Though the three books of the Seventies and Eighties contain a great deal of free-verse experimentation, they also contain a substantially higher proportion of rhyme and meter than most American poets were using at that time. Even in the lines I’ve quoted from “The Geysers,” you can hear both the rhyme (of “trod” and “god”) and the old-fashioned, Shakespearean, five-beat iambic pentameter (“I am I am raw meat I am a god”).

  Explaining why he chose to use meter when writing about his LSD experiences, Thom Gunn has written, “The acid trip is unstructured, it opens you up to countless possibilities, you hanker after the infinite. The only way I could give myself any control over the presentation of these experiences, and so be true to them, was by trying to render the infinite through the finite, the unstructured through the structured.”

  But this particular use of structure did not appeal to those who had praised Gunn’s energy and adventurousness when he applied similar metrical forms to subjects like soldiers, bikers, and figures from Greek myth. What really bugged the British critics was Gunn’s unashamed focus on pleasure and enjoyment; “good news is no news,” as one English reviewer wryly put it in the TLS. It was not until Thom Gunn’s next book, The Man with Night Sweats (which came out in England in 1992, ten years after The Passages of Joy), that the British wanted to hear what he had to report.

  “Now that HIV and AIDS have turned Gunn’s home into a place where we do send correspondents, at least when we feel up to it,” the same review continues, “there he still is, an exceptional and fascinating poet with a formal range to rival Auden’s, a sensuality equal to Ginsberg’s, and a profound yet daily humanity that surely surpasses that of any other poet of our time.”

  I read this praise aloud to the fiction writer Leonard Michaels, who had taught with Gunn at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. Lenny and I have many literary tastes in common, and one is our zeal for the poetry of Thom Gunn. Hearing the TLS’s ringing endorsement of our position, he shrugged with disdainful pity for the previously unenlightened. “Haven’t I been saying exactly that all along?” he said with his characteristic Lower East Side inflections. Another shrug, as if to say, Who could miss it?

  Apparently nobody, at the moment. After he won the $369,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 1993, the word “genius,” in large, boldfaced type, appeared next to Thom Gunn’s picture in several California newspapers, while the Observer in London headlined its interview with him “A poet who’s still firing on all cylinders” (either a reference to those everlasting bikers, or else the standard pun on his last name). And then, in 1994, the publication of his Collected Poems resulted in that rave review in the TLS, a public reading with Rita Dove at Grand Central Station in New York, respectful notices in Sunday book sections across the country, and—to Thom Gunn’s great delight—a one-page profile in Spin magazine, featuring a photograph that Robert Mapplethorpe took of him in 1980.

  Thom was particularly pleased by the attention from Spin because he himself has long been an aficionado of rock music and an avid watcher of MTV. “The people at Spin thought I was terribly old-fashioned because I read Rolling Stone,” he tells me with sly self-deprecation, all too aware that I know vastly less about rock music than he does. By my standards, Thom Gunn is frighteningly up-to-date. When he’s not rereading Victorian novels or discovering Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (the best book he read in 1991, he announced), he’s spotting the latest good television show. “NTPD Blue, of course, I adore,” he said a few seasons ago. “It doesn’t worry me that it’s violent any more than that King Lear is violent. I love the way it preaches—it preaches so well.” He also watched Seinfeld (“like everybody else”), but noted that The Simpsons, which he once admired, had “lost its edge.” Recently I asked him about Brooklyn South, and was not surprised to hear that he and Mike Kitay were avid fans. They’ve liked all the cop shows Steven Bochco has done since Hill Street Blues, as have my husband and I. In fact, the four of us may be the only people in America who loved Cop Rock: we mourned its speedy demise by watching the last episode together over dinner.

  Thom habitually ferrets out the best in every genre, from Philip K. Dick to Thomas Hardy, and eagerly recommends a movie like the Harvey Keitel sleaze-fest Bad Lieutenant, praising its “hilarious Dostoyevskian humor.” I can’t say I always agree with his taste. The other night, watching a rented video of The Fifth Element purely on the basis of his hearty recommendation, I said to myself, “What can he have been thinking?” But I do agree with the principles that guide his judgments. Thom takes pride in his refusal to distinguish between a nineteenth-century novel and a recent potboiler, between a pop song and a classical composition. “I hate the distinction between high art and low art, and I have since I was in my teens. Dickens had the audience of Judith Krantz in his time—Trollope held him in rather low esteem because he was too crude and too popular,” he gleefully points out.

  Such attitudes by no means prevent Thom from having strong opinions about the quality of any given artwork. When he and I get together for lunch every couple of months, much of the conversation centers on which books (and movies, and TV shows) we have loved or hated. We both read for pleasure; at the same time, we both believe in applying words like “good” and “bad” as if they have a larger evaluative meaning, beyond our own immediate mood. Whether I think this way in part because Thom does, or whether we arrived independently at our position, is by now too complicated for me to figure out.

  Before he got the MacArthur I used to worry about how Thom would survive his retireme
nt. As a part-time lecturer, he worked for most of his academic career without accruing any pension. When he did accumulate any savings, he would spend the money in some nonsensical way, like paying cash for a city-mandated structural repair to his house when he could have taken out a no-interest loan. This kind of thing used to drive me crazy, but Thom was never anxious about his finances. “I always said, when people asked how I would support myself in my old age, that my public would take care of me. And now it has!” he laughed after getting the MacArthur. The unexpected windfall also paid for him and Mike to take a special trip to Venice, where they hadn’t been since they were in their twenties, and Prague, which they saw for the first time in 1993. Recently they went back to Venice to celebrate the final year of the MacArthur fellowship. “Mike said it was like walking with his ninety-year-old mother,” Thom reported to me. “He would walk very quickly, and I kept wanting to sit down every hour and have some more wine. But I think we covered just about every street in Venice.”

  Remarking on his good fortune to a British journalist who interviewed him after he won the first Forward Prize in 1992, Thom Gunn said, “I’ve travelled, I’ve been happily in love for forty years, and I’ve read The Brothers Karamazov three times.” The joke at the end (which is only partly a joke: Thom takes his reading very seriously) undercuts the sentiment a bit, but it is true that he has been in love for more than forty years. He met Mike Kitay, an American studying at Cambridge, in 1952. Because Kitay had returned to America to do his military service, Gunn came to Stanford for graduate work in 1954. The two of them eventually settled in San Francisco, where Mike had a job scriptwriting for television.

  “It is not easy to speak of a relationship so long-lasting, so deep, and so complex, nor of the changes it has gone through, let alone of the effect it has had on my writing,” Thom Gunn has written about his life with Mike Kitay. “But his was, from the start, the example of the searching worrying improvising intelligence playing upon the emotions which in turn reflect back on the intelligence. It was an example at times as rawly passionate as only Henry James can dare to be.” (He’s not kidding about Henry James. Gunn rereads The Wings of the Dove every few years, and The Awkward Age is one of his two favorite novels of 1899; the other is Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.)