One version of the life of Thom Gunn might go like this: After a childhood spent in an erratic orbit of Fleet Street journalism, Gunn developed into a remarkably assured young writer and had immediate success as a poet, first in Britain, then in the United States. Openly gay despite the dangers of that identification in the second half of the 20th century, he led a scruffy, cheerfully louche existence (loads of sex with dubious characters, piles of drugs, often with the same dubious characters) while writing poems of elegant astringency. Gunn taught at several universities with conscientiousness, he plunged into leather dive bars as if they were all about to close forever, and he earned a devoted battalion of advocates who viewed him as a world-class writer who, rare among world-class writers, didn’t court the favor of people who use descriptions like “world-class writer.” He died as a prize-bedecked iconoclast, a near contradiction that suited him down to his panther tattoo.
Another version might go like this: A precocious poet but also a haunted, depressive young man, Gunn crossed the Atlantic in 1954 and found companionship and acceptance, particularly in San Francisco, his longtime home. But he could never fully overcome the darkness that had gathered around him since the moment when, at age 15, he found his mother’s body after she’d taken her own life. Though he became a beloved writer and teacher with a strong circle of loyal friends, most notably his longtime partner Mike Kitay, he was driven to risky, compulsive behavior that struck even some of his piratical associates as excessive. He died alone in his bedroom of a drug overdose at age 74, having last been seen “decked out in his leathers like he was going out.”
It’s to the credit of Michael Nott’s new biography, “Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life,” that these versions, and several others, seem equally and sometimes alternately valid. Gunn has always been a puzzle. Incongruity is a primary feature of his poetry, which frequently takes an impersonal, formal stance toward (or against) decidedly informal subject matter; the effect is as if glaciers had somehow been drawn up the slopes of an active volcano. “Venetian Blind,” a poem from the 1980s, begins, “I pull it down while glancing through/Into my neighbour’s room next door,” and quickly moves to sketchier territory: “You know I’m watching. How I wish/You’d come up here, dark sportive sport.” The poem ends:
I study possibility
Through rigid slats, or ordered verses,
Within which border it rehearses
Its partial being, freeing me
Slightly adjusting them to scan
The self-possession that is you,
Who cannot guess at what I do
Here, light-sliced, with another man.
The Elizabethan elaboration of this voyeuristic, exhibitionistic scenario is like being offered a bong by someone wearing a doublet.
There are two basic types of poetic biography: the critical study with biographical elements, and the complete life for scholarly posterity. Nott’s is the latter, with an emphasis on “complete.” If you’d like to know where Gunn went for drinks when he lived in New York in 1970, well, he “still frequented the leather bar Keller’s but also enjoyed new bars: His favorites included the Zoo, on West 13th Street, and the Den, a members-only leather bar at West 12th Street and Greenwich Avenue.” A little of such pulverizing detail can go a long way; I would have been content not to learn, for example, that “Andy,” one of Gunn’s dozens and dozens of unstable, much younger conquests, “ruptured a testicle and spent several days in San Francisco General.” But Nott, who previously co-edited a collection of Gunn’s letters, has set out here to produce a work sturdy enough to support decades of future commentary on Gunn. He’s succeeded — this book is everything you ever wanted to know about Thom Gunn but had not even thought about asking.
Poetic biographies typically start with a sketch of the parents’ upbringing and proceed chronologically from there. That’s the course Nott follows with a notable exception: He begins with a prologue that details the death of Gunn’s mother, Charlotte. It is a harrowing episode. Charlotte had been disturbed for years — among other things, after she separated from her second husband, she put the 13-year-old Gunn in bed with her every night. She died after barricading herself in the living room and inhaling fumes from a gas poker, a metal tube connected to a fuel line that was once used to start coal fires. When Gunn and his brother, Ander, discovered her body — which she surely knew would happen — they wandered outside in shock, then returned to tend to her. “Thom kissed her legs,” Nott writes.
It can be questionable for a biographer to promote a single childhood event in this fashion, however galvanic it must have been: Poets are not little whirring trauma-reproduction machines. But Nott handles this charged material well, sticking to clear connections and otherwise allowing the reader to make his own judgments. He doesn’t shy away, for example, from the parallels between Charlotte’s death and Gunn’s own, which involved a degree of recklessness that seems noteworthy, but he allows the comparison to be drawn via quotes from Gunn’s friends. Such tact suits this complex figure.
One of the best ways to understand a poet is to ask what essential questions he raises. Gunn asks, among other things, “What is outside, what is inside?” These concepts — which recall two categories he sometimes used for writers, “open” and “closed” — lead to the related idea of a dividing line. Gunn imagines that control of that line can be asserted, but that such control must be absolute; this is why his early work seems so chilled at times. It could be a claustrophobic aesthetic. Yet Gunn was aware of the potential limitations of his approach, and his response to those limitations was to work steadily and humbly at overcoming them, at blurring the line. This, far more than posing with motorcycles in leather outfits, is the value of Thom Gunn’s example. Quiet, constant devotion is what allowed him to produce, as he put it, a “precious half-foot” of space on the bookshelf, and it’s what makes you think, after reading “Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life,” that however many roles this writer inhabited, he was always and utterly the real thing.
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