Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

  Section 1, lines 1–3: probably an allusion to Baudelaire’s ‘L’Ennui’: ‘Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux’ (I am like the king of a rainy country). Section 9, line 10 also seems indebted to this poem.

  Section 2: ‘a transcription of something I heard through my bathroom window’ (JH, p. 52).

  Section 8, line 15: ‘inventions of Little Ease’: In his introduction to Selected Poems of Fulke Greville (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), G quotes a passage from Greville’s Caelica CII, in which ‘strange witchcrafts, which like pleasure be / … do at open doors let frail powers in / To that strait building, Little-ease of sin.’ G comments as follows on this passage:

  [A]s part of fallen Nature, we contain our own confusions. The possibility of a hell in the human mind anticipating the Hell after death is a constant theme of Greville’s. Another theme, an almost universal preoccupation of medieval and Elizabethan writers, is that of the mutability of all Nature … If you put your trust in the temporal and the finite, you are putting your trust in what will inevitably fail you.

  The last observation was not new, nor was it confined to Elizabethans. Similarly [Albert] Camus called life in a temporal world without sanction ‘absurd’ … Interestingly enough, Camus also used the image of Little-ease (le malconfort), the cell where one cannot stand, sit, or lie, for the state of a man constrained by a sense of guilt in a world where there is no god and thus where there can be no redemption for that guilt … Camus’s great contribution is less the analysis of the sickness into which we are born than in the determination to live with that sickness, fully acknowledging it and accepting it as the basis for our actions.

  (OP, p. 67)

  Section 11, last line: ‘Jack’s ready for the world.’ ‘[T]he point is that Jack is speaking about himself in the third person, and when do people do that? – when they’re not very sure of themselves. Richard III says “Richard’s himself again” [a line included in Shakespeare’s play by the eighteenth-century actormanager Colley Cibber]. There’s a certain bravado in that last section, since he’s uttering conditional clauses: there’s no certainty he won’t have to make the nightmare journey again’ (JH, pp. 51–52).

  ‘An Amorous Debate’

  Begun spring 1971. ‘Leather Kid and Fleshly’ was originally the title.

  The amorous debate is a subgenre of Elizabethan poetry. Such poems purport to be philosophical discourses in which the speaker attempts to persuade a young woman to abandon her virginity. Examples include John Donne’s ‘The Extasie’ and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. G’s poem is a playful tribute to such poems, which often involve a touch of self-parody. In Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis, where the goddess plays the male seducer’s role, she reclines on a ‘primrose bank’ and urges Adonis to ‘Bid me discourse’. She does so ‘gleamingly’: ‘Love is a spirit all compact of fire, / Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire’ (lines 145, 149–50).

  The ending of G’s poem appears to allude to the French Renaissance poet Maurice Scève (?1501–c.1563). This seems probable, though when I mentioned it to G, he did not remember having read Scève. This is the passage in question:

  N’apperçoy tu de l’Occident le Rhosne

  Se destourner et vers Midy courir,

  Pour seulement se conjoindre à sa Saone

  Jusqu’à leur Mer, ou tous deux vont mourir?

  (‘Have you not noticed how the Rhône changes its westward course to run towards the south, just to unite with its [tributary the] Saône and flow to the sea together, where both of them will die?’)

  ‘Autobiography’

  Composed August 1972. An alternative title for the first draft was ‘If I Wrote my Life’.

  In the early 1970s G began working on an autobiography and, in a notebook of 1972, he wrote the opening pages, set out his plan for it and wrote a few reflections, such as the following: ‘I want to get the feel of a single, complicated, interesting experience, keeping nothing back at all (for the completeness, not for the egotism) … behind the events, then : (1) interpretation of the events (2) reproduction of the “atmosphere”, i.e. the sniff of the air (3) the public events of the time (4) the seeming digressions … that shd add to the inclusiveness of the moving picture dominated by the consciousness whose activity is continually aiming at further inclusion’ (1972, Bancroft). The idea was eventually abandoned, but some of the material went into three essays – ‘My Suburban Muse’ (1974), ‘Cambridge in the Fifties’ (1977) and ‘My Life up to Now’ (1979), all reprinted in OP – and some, such as the above quotation, into poems in the third part of JSC.

  ‘Yoko’

  Composed 1974.

  G wrote: ‘“Yoko” was a Newfoundland dog. The poem takes place on July 4, in New York, hence the fireworks’ (CP, p. 491). ‘I wanted to write a poem that is completely doggy, since so many poems about animals – by [D. H.] Lawrence, Marianne Moore, or Ted Hughes – are marvellous, but the subjects are dealt with from a human point of view’ (JH, p. 53). Yoko’s owner was Allan Noseworthy, the friend mourned in ‘Lament’ (pp. 167–71).

  The uncharacteristic versification of this poem is indebted mainly to Lawrence and Lawrence’s master, Walt Whitman. ‘It seems to me that a good deal of D. H. Lawrence’s free verse is very close to prose. I like it for that. Some is more incantatory, some is more biblical, but some of it is not’ (PR, p. 164).

  Line 32, ‘I can place it finely’: ‘I was delighted that I could even find a Jamesian phrase at one point when the dog is sniffing a turd’ (JH, pp. 53–54).

  The Passages of Joy

  Published by Faber & Faber in 1982. G described it as a book full of other people. ‘I like the idea of a populated book. I’ve always liked the idea of a book of poems as a kind of … if not a world, a country in a world’ (PR, p. 183). It is also a book about friendship: ‘That was quite self-conscious … [Friendship] must be the greatest value in my life … I write about love, I write about friendship. Unlike Proust, I think that love and friendship are part of the same spectrum. Proust says that they are absolutely incompatible. I find that they are absolutely intertwined’ (PR, pp. 184–85). The title – also the epigraph to the sequence ‘Transients and Residents’ – comes from Samuel Johnson’s melancholy satire

  ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’. G intended ‘passages’ as a pun. As Johnson uses it, it means periods of passing time. For G they are also physical passages, in particular the orifices of the body as the sources of physical pleasure. The following quotation from a notebook of G’s from this period also bears on the title:

  for a Mine Shaft [examination?]

  I have images of transition

  anterooms

  ladders

  staircases

  passage ways

  trapdoors

  These are all places in between (images of foreplay)

  PJ is also very much a book about middle age, about time passing and joys still living, though soon to pass. Most of the friends are old friends, witnesses to change and decay. ‘Transients and Residents’, a poem about old friends, and as often critical as affectionate, is balanced by ‘Talbot Road’, G’s tribute to his most valued friend, Tony White, who died prematurely in his forties.

  PJ is in three parts. The poems about friends, much the weightiest in the book, occupy its third part. The first consists of anecdotal poems, mostly ‘to do with ordinary life’, all of them in free verse. Not many of these are included in the present selection. A plan for the poems in the second part is set down in the notebook just quoted from (Bancroft 3:39, 29 May 1989–May 1990). Their style, G says, is to be ‘song-like, tending to the accentual, song-like but a touch gnomic, limited in a certain sense (in that they are not ample and reasonable like the verse of [Wallace Stevens’s] Sunday Morning), but capable of leaps and jumps and good mysteries. I should like the content … to deal with night life and the compulsive and allusive life of the senses (as opposed to the level and everyday life of the poems in Part One). The sur
face is always interesting, because we live there so much, but it is also interesting just beneath the surface – still conscious but rather wilful and not very moral or “healthy” always.’

  ‘Expression’

  Begun May 1977 as two lines: ‘The massive indifference of the altarpiece to Self, / They are expressionless.’

  Writing in praise of Yvor Winters, G remarks: ‘It would have seemed to him an insult to the poem that it could be used as a gymnasium for the ego’ (OP, p. 176).

  ‘Sweet Things’

  Composed mid-1978. Initially called ‘On my Street’.

  One of G’s many poems about ‘the life of the street’.

  ‘June’

  Composed 1980.

  About G’s relationship with Mike Kitay.

  ‘San Francisco Streets’

  Begun 1979.

  G loved Elizabethan song and in several poems throughout his life drew on its manner and conventions. This is a fine example. (Cf. ‘Tamer and Hawk’, p. 9, and ‘Street Song’, pp. 94–95.) He was also keen on the lyrics of contemporary pop songs and wrote a short article about those of the Beatles and their contemporaries (‘The New Music’, The Listener, 78 (2001), 3 August 1967, pp. 129–30).

  ‘Transients and Residents’

  Begun about June 1979 and completed (or interrupted) 1980. ‘Crystal’ came first, then ‘Falstaff’ soon afterwards. ‘Crosswords’ was started early in 1980, and ‘Interruption’ (originally called ‘Delayed Preface’) in the middle of the year.

  For the epigraph, see headnote to this collection, p. 249 above.

  In a letter to his Faber editor, G writes: ‘I envisaged this [sequence] as being rather ambitious, maybe as many as twenty poems, each one dealing with somebody I know’ (SL, p. 222). In the event there were only four, the first three about old friends – Jere Fransway (‘Falstaff’), Chuck Arnett (‘Crystal’) and Don Doody (‘Crosswords’) – and the fourth about G himself.

  ‘The first four poems are about distance, tho w[ith] DD [i.e. Don Doody] the distance is not from me, it is from an earlier part of his life…. Interruption … is part of the procedure of the series. (Interruption is the subject as well as the form of the poem.)’ (Bancroft, 1978–79).

  ‘Talbot Road’

  The first draft of this poem seems to have been written quite fast, all five parts of it, towards the end of 1979. It was then taken up again in the summer of 1980 and revised.

  G spent the academic year 1964–65 in Britain. He rented a flat in Talbot Road in the Notting Hill district of London, not far away from his friend, the former actor Tony White, who was then working as a translator from French and writing a guide to London pubs. White died as a result of a footballing accident in 1974 at the age of forty-five. While he was in London, G completed ‘Misanthropos’, which he perhaps refers to when he says at the end of section 1, ‘I too tried / to render obscure passages into clear English’, the passages there also alluding to the title of this collection. Discussing the hidden lives of gay people and the relief of coming out, G referred to a metaphor in this poem ‘where I speak about the canals which are there all over London, but you never know they’re there unless you happen to be on top of a bus: they’re hidden behind walls and fences mostly’ (PR, p. 177).

  Of the form, G writes: ‘I am trying to use the old English 4-stress line as a kind of base, which can be moved away from into a barely related free verse, but is always returned to, so is meant to be hovering in the background. I suppose I get this idea from Pound’s second Canto and Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts …’ (JH/Bancroft, 1980).

  Of the styles, he writes: ‘I wonder if I wasn’t trying for something less memorable in the sense of taking away striking phrases like a squirrel taking a pretty stone to gloat over in its nest. I think I was aiming at something, a discourse perhaps, of a less dense and so less priable-apart texture’ (ibid.).

  Section 2, line 12: ‘the rich are different from us’ – an allusion to the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story ‘The Rich Boy’ in All the Sad Young Men (1926): ‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.’ G greatly admired Fitzgerald’s prose.

  Section 2, line 17: Lucio in Measure for Measure says: ‘By my troth, Isabel, I lov’d thy brother. If the old fantastical Duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived’ (4.3.151–53).

  Section 5, line 18, ‘the just and the unjust’: cf. ‘your Father which is in heaven … maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust’ (Matthew 5.45).

  ‘Night Taxi’

  Begun mid-1980, finished by October 1981.

  Dedication: Rod Taylor was a creative writing student of G’s who published one exciting collection of poems, Florida East-Coast Champion (San Francisco, CA; Straight Arrow Books, 1972), then disappeared from San Francisco, leaving behind both literary friends and the world of poetry publishing. His disappearance was of a piece with the mobile Californian lifestyle his poetry exemplifies, and which G, from SM onwards, admired. The insistent Whitmanesque ‘I’ of G’s poem and its versification owe something to Taylor’s work.

  Line 1: ‘Open city’. On first arriving in California in 1954, G fell in love with the city that was to be his home: ‘I went several times into San Francisco. It was still something of an open city, with whore-houses flourishing for anybody to see. A straight couple took me to my first gay bar, the Black Cat. It excited me so much that the next night I returned there on my own. And I remember walking along Columbus Avenue on another day, thinking that the ultimate happiness would be for Mike and me to settle in this city. It was foggy and I remember exactly where I thought this, right by a cobbler’s that still stands there’ (OP, p. 176).

  The place names in this poem are all in San Francisco. ‘It thrilled me to write a litany of names in “Night Taxi” … There are two lines where I take four extreme points in the city: “China Basin to Twin Peaks, / Harrison Street to the Ocean.” I loved doing that. It’s pure litany; it’s not meaningful. But it gave me a feeling of possession or achievement – to have found a place for those names’ (PR, p. 184).

  G wrote: ‘the driver must be glad, at the end of the poem, that rain will bring him more business’ (CP, p. 491), and ‘Did you spot my little theft from Keats at the very end … He has some bleak elm-tops somewhere in his unrhymed sonnet called I think … What the Thrush Said’ (CW, 19 October 1981). Keats’s line is ‘And the black elm tops ’mong the freezing stars’.

  The Man with Night Sweats

  Published by Faber & Faber in 1992. The impact of this collection was greater than that of any of G’s later books. The last section of it represents his response to the AIDS epidemic, which in the mid-1980s hit San Francisco in particular. In the course of it G lost many friends and innumerable acquaintances. He describes the experience of living through this plague in a letter to the poet Belle Randall, dated 9 October 1987. (Charlie is the poet Charlie Hinkle, with whom G was in love.)

  I was touched by your letter, which was loving and reassuring. No, I don’t have AIDS, and appear to be in splendid health, as does every surviving member of the house. I say surviving, because we did lose Jim … he lived upstairs but ate with the rest of [G’s household of gay men], for about ten years, but died last Christmas Day. It was a horrible illness and a painful death (at home), but I am beginning to realize that death (not just from AIDS) is almost always painful and difficult, and that the image that us sheltered children have always had of dying sweetly in one’s sleep is one most seldom realized in experience. I have had other friends die at other times, but the worst was from August 8 to September 9, during which time I lost four friends – friends and acquaintances – two of them on the same day. After the first three I thought I was holding up surprisingly well, bu
t the fourth one – poor Charlie who was only thirty, and so full of promise – really did me in. So I have been having a rather hard time, which I tell you about not so you should feel sorry for me but so you may know what has been happening to me and also the reason for my silence!

  … I’ll throw in some poetry with this letter. I sure have been writing a lot of it this last year. Death has a way of concentrating the imagination, certainly.

  (BR/Bancroft 1:3, 15 January 1984–9 October 1987)

  In an important introductory essay to a US reissue of MNS (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), the poet August Kleinzahler associates the voice of G’s mature poetry with the influence of Elizabethan poetry, particularly that of Ben Jonson. In Jonson’s work, he argues, ‘there’s no identifiable personality to the “I”, the voice in the poetry. Even in the most intimate of poems, the voice is detached, impersonal.’ He goes on to describe G’s admiration for those poems of Jonson’s that are written in ‘the plain style’: ‘clear in diction and movement, devoid of rhetoric and poetic figures, inclining toward the way people speak without sounding colloquial’. Kleinzahler then quotes G’s essay on Ben Jonson, in which G defends Jonson against the charge that his poetry is merely ‘occasional’: ‘All poetry is occasional, whether the occasion is an external event like a birthday or a declaration of war, whether it is an occasion of the imagination, or whether it is in some sort of combination of the two’ (pp. x–xi). The deaths of friends, patrons and his own children were among Jonson’s most frequent occasions, and it is impossible to read G’s elegies without recalling Jonson’s ‘On his First Sonne’, ‘An Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet’, ‘To the Immortall Memorie, and Friendship of that Noble Paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison’ and many others: for their valuation of friendship and different forms of attachment, for their unadorned manner, for the deep poignancy of their stoical reticence.