Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

  Of friendship G says: ‘It seems to me that one of my subjects is friendship, the value of friendship … And if you’re a writer and you have a lot of friends who suddenly die, then you’re going to want to write about it. And then, one of the oldest subjects is how you face the end. One thing I’ve been greatly struck by in the people I’ve watched die is the extraordinary bravery with which people face death. So many of one’s values – for humanist atheists like myself, as opposed to religious people – arise in confrontation with death’ (SL, p. 229). In one poem, ‘The Missing’, G evokes the ‘Image of an unlimited embrace’, of which he says: ‘I mean partly friends, partly sexual partners, partly even the vaguest of acquaintances, with the sense of being in some way part of a community’ (PR, p. 158). That embrace, anticipated by the volume’s opening poem, ‘The Hug’, which is quite unconnected with the epidemic, runs all through MNS. G was ‘profoundly grateful’ for a review of it by Hugh Haughton in the Times Literary Supplement (1 May 1992), in which the critic ‘traced the imagery of touching and embracing and holding hands – and even embracing oneself at one point … That was not planned, it was due to the consistency of my own mind. We all have that kind of consistency of course. It’s a question of opening yourself up to what you really want to say, to what for you is the truth …’ (PR, p. 156).

  ‘The Hug’

  Composed September 1980.

  In Bancroft notebook, 28 September 1981 to October 1983, G writes: ‘OK, Gunny, try to write 10 rimed poems in 10 weeks. Favor irreg[ular] line length (the On my P[icture] left in Scotland form), using rhyme and risk the faux naif for the sake of the complexities of effect to be got from that form. Aim for brilliance, concentration, music, surprise, inclusiveness.’ ‘The Hug’ was the first of these, but most of the others planned came to nothing. ‘On my Picture left in Scotland’ is a poem by Ben Jonson.

  ‘It was not sex’: quoted from John Donne’s ‘The Extasie’:

  This ecstasy doth unperplex

  (We said) and tell us what we love,

  We see by this, it was not sex,

  We see we saw not what did move …

  (lines 29–32)

  ‘The Differences’

  In a notebook dated 9 December 1983–21 August 1984. First called ‘An Other/Dark Ray from Mars’, then later ‘Others./ An Other/Other/We Are Not Each Other’, and later still ‘Difference/The Difference/The Differences’.

  This poem is addressed to Charlie Hinkle, a poet and graduate student to whom G was deeply attached. He was soon afterwards to contract AIDS (see ‘The J Car’, pp. 175–76.) G agreed with the present editor that the poem resembles a Romantic ode: ‘That is exactly what I wanted, and I did at one time think of numbering the stanzas, and would have, if the penultimate stanza hadn’t ended with a comma’ (CW, 28 August 1984).

  The notebook in which this poem is drafted includes the following note:

  Jan 22 (Sat.): I wake beside Charlie. I have slept all night in awareness of his body. We have not slept in a hug, precisely, but always in contact, lightly, an arm about a waist, bodies touching at the hips, or at the farthest with our feet resting against each other. He was there in each dream, he was there putting the bedclothes back over my shoulder exposed to the cold, he was there like me falling asleep again to the sound of small rain. To wake together is a deeply shared intimacy, preceding words. (You can wake with a cat or dog too, & the animal waking with you will stretch and stare trustingly into your eyes, knowing that you understand the shared experience).

  Then to awake to see that tough but pretty face lying on the pillow in its frothing cascade of long blond hair is to waken into a securely grasped excitement – to wake possessed and possessing – into a further more active content, as I grasp your enormous hardening cock[.]

  Line 14, ‘the boy with iron teeth’: ‘I … meant the reader to think of a predatory monster. He actually is a character in a science fiction novel called Ubik, by Philip K. Dick (a wonderful book), but there might be overtones of the Witch Baby in Russian fairy tales, where witches always have iron teeth’ (ibid.).

  Line 37, ‘the will was lost’: ‘This was a very conscious reference back to my overuse of the word will in my early books … [it is] not willed love at all. I’m saying in a sense that I’m no longer the same person as I was then and I’m pleased that I’m not the same person … there is a certain consciousness of themes but, at the same time, there’s a certain blessed unconsciousness’ (PR, pp. 155–56).

  The italicised passage is probably the only piece of verse translation in G’s oeuvre. It is a stanza by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti, for whom see note on p. 230. Cavalcanti was edited, translated and much celebrated by Ezra Pound, especially for the poem translated here, the canzone ‘Donna mi priegha’. This is a philosophical lyric about the ideal of profane love which lies behind Dante.

  ‘Skateboard’

  Begun soon after 28 September 1981. Previously called ‘Stylist on Haight St’ and ‘A Stylist’.

  ‘[S]upposed to go with “Well Dennis O’Grady” and “Outside the Diner” [neither of which has been included here] as a sort of dwarfish triptych of the streets’ (CW, 5 January 1984). But ‘Skateboard’ also seems to be a late response to ‘On the Move’ (pp. 15–16) and ‘From the Wave’ (pp. 92–93).

  ‘To Isherwood Dying’

  Composed 1985, finished (as G tells us) in Christmas week.

  The novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904–86) and his close friend W. H. Auden influenced G in his earliest writings. Both of them ‘were good influences, I think. They write simply and clearly, yet there’s great complexity always there’ (WS, p. 9). As he matured, G grew away from Auden, but continued to be drawn to Isherwood and his transparency of style. He met Isherwood around 1955 and they quickly became friends. There was, no doubt, an element of identification. Isherwood was as openly gay as it was possible to be in his era and, since 1939, had lived in California, providing G with a model of the uprooted, West Coast, Anglo-American writer. See G’s essay/memoir, ‘Christopher Isherwood: Getting Things Right’ (SL, pp. 173–96). This elegiac lyric refers to the period in the early 1930s which Isherwood spent in Berlin enjoying the sexual freedoms of the Weimar Republic. G alludes to the interlinked stories collected as Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), as well as to the memoir Christopher and His Kind (1976).

  ‘The Stealer’

  Begun 1984–85. Originally called ‘The Thief’, then ‘Thievery/ Cupidon/Stealing/The Stealer’.

  In an interview G said: ‘It was so obvious [that desire and death are linked] during those years with AIDS. I hadn’t thought of them as connected before. I don’t think of sex as a self-destructive impulse, but I do view it that way in one or two poems in [MNS], like “The Stealer”’ (CH).

  ‘Nasturtium’

  Completed 1985. A rough draft appears in a notebook dated 28 September 1981–October 1983. It developed through a didactic meditation called ‘Song of the Garden’ to the final version.

  This was originally to have been one of G’s ‘SF sketches’ of the street, such as ‘Skateboard’ (p. 160). The first draft read as follows:

  The city of time:

  he bobs within the grid,

  sleeps in abandoned cars.

  Not young not middle-aged not old

  he fumbles through his unpaved routines.

  Certain agencies keep him alive

  but he’s part of nobody’s scheme,

  not even his own.

  A poor weed,

  unwanted scraggle tufted

  with unlovely yellow,

  persists between paving stones

  bearded face turned toward light.

  (Bancroft, 1981–83)

  It took ‘something like three years, off and on’ for this early draft to become the finished version (SL, p. 221).

  ‘The Man with Night Sweats’

  First drafted autumn 1984; returned to and finished 1985–86. First headed ‘Poem
spoken by a dying man: Night Sweats’.

  G considered himself lucky never to have contracted AIDS, though he must have feared he would do so. The speaker of this poem ‘wakes sweating in the night and assumes he has AIDS, since one of the first symptoms of AIDS may be night sweats’ (‘Poet of the Month’, BBC Radio 3, 5 September 1989).

  ‘Lament’

  Drafted in a notebook dated 9 December 1983–21 August 1984. Early titles included ‘On A Death/Illness & Death/On an Illness’, also ‘The Sickness’.

  Allan Noseworthy, the owner of the dog called Yoko (see pp. 123–25, note on pp. 247–48), died of AIDs in 1985. G agreed to care for him in his last weeks of life. This was the first of G’s elegies for AIDS victims. In the notebook in question (Bancroft 4:5), G writes:

  Now, as when T[ony] W[hite] died I lost the London I had acquired through him, so now AN3 [Allan Noseworthy III] has died I have lost the NY I have acquired thro him …

  The way his humor was not just frivolous in effect, it was part of a total vision that made sense; the way he was fun to be with but more than fun, his goodness. Yet no one will ever make me laugh as much again …

  After his death (June 22): sitting in the yard: it is like being rocketed through a tunnel of days – constant return to the bed in the hospital van – thro the last month & suddenly ending in the still dense heat of this yard, flowers and weeds and bushes rising around me as in a pit of heat – I have come to a grinding halt with extreme suddenness & experience a kind of jetlag.

  … Allan was not ready to die. Tired & ill, yet the illness so recent he was still hungry for life, he did not seem to have a mind in a state of peace or acceptance of death. The full name of what Allan died of is pneumocystis carinii pneumonia[.]

  ‘On ne taquine pas un malade qui dort. On l’inspecte.’ Cocteau …

  In weeks or months after the death, I keep catching myself as I think ‘Yes, that’s something I must tell Allan, that wd make him laugh, or that wd interest him’, suddenly to remember that this is something I can’t do any more, store jokes and stories and tho[ugh]ts away for him.

  Of the poem’s imagery, G wrote: ‘While my friend was dying I was reading [Francis] Parkman’s history of The Jesuits in North America, which – too easily – entered the poem. At some stage, realising that the seventeenth century reference implied was a bit much in a poem which in various ways might already have been a little close to Jonson’s and Donne’s elegies on the dead and dying, I tried to take out the Canadian reference – but it was stuck there, subsequent images depended on it’ (CW, 28 August 1984).

  ‘Terminal’

  Composed 1986.

  In the acknowledgements to MNS, G notes that this poem is about Jim Lay, who had lived in what G jokingly called his ‘queer household’ (PR, p. 140).

  Line 12, ‘Oedipus, old, led by a boy’: a reference to Sophocles’ play Oedipus at Colonus. In an early version, it was ‘King Lear led by a boy’.

  ‘Her Pet’

  Composed 1987.

  The marble monument evoked in this poem is to the memory of Valentine Balbiani (1518–72). It is in the Louvre and was sculpted by Germain Pilon (1525/30–90). It was erected in 1583 and includes a ghastly cadaver, a sculpture of the lady’s skeleton. G came across pictures of the monument in a book on Renaissance sculpture.

  ‘The J Car’

  Composed in the course of 1988.

  The poem began, probably in 1987, as a lament for the four of G’s friends who had died in a single month that year. The first draft is titled ‘These Four’ and has an epigraph from the Ghost in Hamlet, ‘Unhouseled, disappointed, unannealed’, which resurfaces in the finished version in the line ‘Unready, disappointed, unachieved’. Towards the end of the notebook, however, the poem acquires its present title, on one occasion with the subtitle ‘Pastoral and Idyll’, which is perhaps an attempt to place it in the English tradition of elegies for poets who have died young: such poems as Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ and Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’. Later on, the subtitle becomes ‘Pastoral, Idyll, Complaint’.

  The title refers to a San Francisco streetcar route. Of the subject, Charlie Hinkle, G wrote: ‘The approach of death to the young and healthy gives rise in me to the tritest sentiments, but it is so very sad. I keep having the image in my mind of a body being crushed by a mountain, the crushing gradual, complete, and absolutely irreversible.’ Recording Hinkle’s death, he wrote: ‘Of all the deaths, the only time I wouldn’t have minded dying too’ (JH/Bancroft, 1986).

  ‘The Missing’

  Begun 1987. Early titles include ‘The Deaths of Friends’, ‘Plague Years’ and ‘Self Pity’.

  ‘Image of an unlimited embrace’ (line 12) refers to the ‘“gay community” (a phrase I always thought was bullshit, until the thing was vanishing) … I mean partly friends, partly sexual partners, partly even the vaguest of acquaintances …’ (PR, p. 158).

  Line 14, ‘some ideal of sport’: ‘If you use the idea of sport, you think of the violence of the push, yes, but there’s an ambiguity: an embrace can be a wrestler’s embrace or it can be an embrace of love … But if you look at it at any one moment, if it’s frozen, it could be either, and maybe the two figures swaying in that embrace are not even quite sure which it is. Like Aufidius and Coriolanus: they embrace, they’re enemies. They embrace in admiration at one point’ (PR, pp. 158–59).

  Boss Cupid

  Published by Faber & Faber in 2000. G’s final collection is, in many ways, a continuation of his previous book. When he had finished compiling MNS, there were poems left over which eventually found their way into BC. The opening poem, ‘Duncan’, was begun as early as 1988, when he was still involved with writing about AIDS, and it continues the preoccupation with elegy, as does the poem on his mother’s death, ‘The Gas-poker’, from 1991.

  The second section, ‘Gossip’, mainly represents G’s playful side. All the poems are in loose free verse and almost all of them are funny. I found it almost impossible to extract representative samples without making them seem slighter than they are. In the event, I chose the two weightiest of the poems – a self-portrait and another lament for a dead friend, ‘To Donald Davie in Heaven’.

  Despite the range of it, BC, as the title suggests, is primarily a book about love. It is so especially in its third section, which includes two sequences: ‘Troubadour’, (which, despite the brilliance of its opening, I find uneven and have therefore decided not to include) and ‘Dancing David’. ‘Troubadour’ is about the serial murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. ‘Dancing David’ is based on passages in the biblical books of Samuel and Kings. It deals with King David as lover, particularly (in ‘Abishag’) as ageing lover. Between the two sequences come several reflections on love, the word encompassing a spectrum of emotions ranging from Dahmer’s literal hunger for the flesh he desires to the vision of Beatrice among the blessed in Dante’s Paradiso.

  The Cupid who presides over these last poems may remind us of G’s lifelong passion for Elizabethan poetry. He has little to do, however, with refined neoclassical fancies. He is, on the contrary, Boss Cupid: a wilful bully, a trigger-happy Mafioso. The volume that bears his name is perhaps the most carefully planned of all G’s books. It ends with the poet in the guise of dancing David: an old man taking a bow, like Shakespeare through his Prospero bidding farewell to the stage.

  ‘Duncan’

  Composed over a long period. Notes for it appear in G’s notebooks in mid-1988.

  The influence of the American poet Robert Duncan (1919–88) on G’s work is substantial and well documented. There are three essays by G on his work (OP, pp. 118–34; SL, pp. 129–142, 143–170). G writes of him as ‘deliberately a poet of process’, who ‘spoke of writing as a process in which, if you were a good boy, things would come to you during the writing. The most interesting things’ (PR, pp. 173–74). As he grew older, G became more interested in such ‘openness’, though he remained in many of his poems – very strikingly
and significantly in this one – a poet of ‘closure’.