'All That Exuberance Again'

One of the pleasures of reading Thomas Gunn’s Letters is learning that he was an enthusiastic, wide-ranging, lifelong reader, and not just of poetry. He loved fiction and often returned to the nineteenth-century classics he first read as a boy or later as a student at Cambridge – Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot (“I have been rereading Daniel Deronda, and had forgot how good it is”). He was good at briefly, in the middle of a chatty, gossip-filled letter to a friend, suggesting why he liked a book or writer, never bogging down in ponderously academic lit crit. Here’s a sample: 

To Tony Tanner in 1970:

 

“I read Janet Lewis’ one modern novel, with the rather awful title Against a Darkening Sky. It is her worst book, but even her worst is pretty fantastic. Her reproduction and analysis of people’s unverbalized feelings is always incredible. She’s about the only person writing in English who ever makes me think of Tolstoy – not in scope, but in her understanding of how beautiful (and interesting) the ordinary person can be. . . . I really think she is one of the best living writers.”

 

In 1982, writing to Douglas Chambers about “the fashion for things archaic this century,” and the writer who most memorably documented it, Guy Davenport:

 

“Have you read his book of essays, The Geography of the Imagination [1981]? It contains some excellent things, a few slightly silly and mannered things, but above all it is useful.”

 

To Dr. Oliver Sacks in 1984 on his A Leg to Stand On:

 

“At times, in the more ecstatic parts of the book, you read like Melville, and I admire Melville tremendously, having read and reread him all through two years ago: it  involves going forward for stretches on your nerves alone and is responsible for M at his best and worst (best Moby Dick worst Pierre).”

 

To Tanner, in 1985:

 

“I feel much oppressed by deaths. First two of my three favorite living poets died within a couple of months of each other, J.V. Cunningham and Basil Bunting. The third is Robert Duncan, who is barely alive.”

 

Writing to August Kleinzahler in 1986:

 

“Richard Yates. I’m very grateful for your persisting in recommending him. The story that sticks most in my mind is ‘Judy Rolled the Bones’ [Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962], but maybe that’s because the sergeant in it so much resembles the sergeant under whom I went basic training . . . The Easter Parade [1976] is very fine but I think falters at the end – seeing Emily go down hill reminds me of seeing Balzac’s heroines (& heroes) go downhill . . .”

 

That same year, to Douglas Chambers:

 

“Rereading Ulysses, and it is wonderful to be embarked on all that exuberance again. That’s what it is, exuberance: that’s why it is so much more than the principles of Flaubert projected to an extreme. It is gorgeous and irritating and brilliant and unstoppable.”

 

Three months later to Chambers, after describing his reimmersion in Marianne Moore’s poetry:

 

“I’m also reading George Herbert, and of course it’s no surprise liking him. To dislike him would be like disliking Mozart or the early Beatles. And also [Henry] James’ most perverse novel, The Sacred Fount, which I enjoy so much, in its unforgivable obscurity that I guess this makes me a literary pervert as much as a sexual one. Also Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale to keep up my French. . .”

 

In 1997, to Chambers:

 

“I was reading Isaac Babel’s Collected Stories and very splendid they are. The accuracy, the kidding rhetoric, as well as the appalling violence. . . . I am especially sorry he never was able to go on with the Odessa Stories, because in some ways they are the best of the lot. He does have a wonderful way of hiding the point of the story in a casual last paragraph which at first sight might read like – oh, a descriptive conclusion to some genre study . . . and is anything but.”

 

In 1998, to Clive Wilmer:

 

“I have been reading Oblomov, as it is about someone like me, terminally lazy and unproductive.”

 

[See The Letters of Thom Gunn, eds. August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott and Clive Wilmer; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.]