'Make "Humaneness" a Requirement'

The Letters of Thom Gunn is an entertaining cinder block of a book and a reminder that Gunn (1929-2004) was, yes, a gay hero to some and certainly a rowdy fellow but more importantly a great poet. Its 734 pages will remain on the bedside table for at least the remainder of the summer as it is, for us non-scholars, what Max Beerbohm calls a “dippable-into” volume. 

Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, and, in a reversal of the eastbound journeys made earlier by Henry James and T.S. Eliot, emigrated in 1954 to the U.S. to teach at Stanford and study with Yvor Winters. He lived in the U.S., mostly in San Francisco, for fifty years. I’m particularly interested in his relationship with Winters. Gunn’s devotion to him as man and poet will surprise some readers. In The Passages of Joy (1982) he included “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” and in 2003 edited Winters’ Selected Poems for the Library of America.

 

In a 1966 letter to Tony Tanner, the critic of American literature he had befriended at Cambridge, Gunn writes that he finds T.S. Eliot, dead the previous year, “rather inhumane and at worst (rather a lot of the time ) a bit boring.” He continues:

 

“Maybe one is wrong to make ‘humaneness’ a requirement, but I certainly find it difficult to have much liking for a writer who doesn’t possess it. Eliot is as much of an egotist as Milton, and I find it pretty well impossible to read much of Milton any more (though I would never admit this when looking for a job).”

 

Gunn goes on to list other poets he judges humane: William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence [!], Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and, occasionally, Ezra Pound [!!]. An odd and rather inexplicable assortment of “humaneness.” Then he tells Tanner:

 

“Samuel Johnson is a humane writer, and maybe a better example than any of these – because ultimately he (1) doesn’t set up his own world as the only world there is, and (2) he realizes there may be certain situations into which one must collapse into pure feeling (e.g. the famous remark about the end of Lear).”

 

That’s acute critical judgment. Nice to see Gunn citing the passage about Lear and Cordelia I recently quoted. In 1980, in a letter to his friend Douglas Chambers, a Canadian professor of English, Gunn explains how he arrived at the title The Passages of Joy:

 

“(Samuel Johnson, The V of H Wishes: ‘Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, / And shuts up all the Passages of Joy’ . . . . Nice, since it seems to refer to the ear-hole and the cock-hole and the nose-hole as well as other possible meanings of the word passages.)”

 

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

'Everything Put to Use'

In March 2000 I interviewed Wendy Lesser, founding editor of The Threepenny Review, at her office in Berkeley, Calif. I was working on a freelance newspaper story about the Bay Area as a literary hub, starting with Twain, Harte and Bierce, moving on to Hammett, the Beats, City Lights Books, Wendell Kees and the rest. I asked Lesser if, in her judgment, any “world-class” writers were still at work in greater San Francisco, not really expecting an answer. (Edgar Bowers had died the previous month.) Her reply was immediate: “Thom Gunn.” Somehow, I had forgotten we had a first-rate poet in our midst. 

It's important to remember Gunn is not merely a “gay poet,” as he seems to have been myopically pigeonholed. His best poems transcend mere demographics. It’s also important to know that, despite his reputation for being a reckless wild man, he remained a grateful former student of Yvor Winters at Stanford. In the Autumn 1981 issue of The Southern Review, Gunn wrote of Winters:   

 

“The complete disinterestedness, the modesty, the lack of anything self-serving, only made his character more seductive and his personality more inadvertently charming. It is difficult to explain his diffident sweet-naturedness to those who know his personality rather through the prickly and often eccentric footnotes of Forms of Discovery. His manner could be, in Marianne Moore’s word for it, `bearish’; it could be brusque, intolerant, even brutal; it could also be generous, good-humored, and relaxed. His wit was quiet and disarming. But he had to feel at ease with you first.”

 

No doubt that will surprise Winters-haters. I’ve been reading again Gunn’s 1982 collection, The Passages of Joy. Gunn takes his title from Dr. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes”: “Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, / And shuts up all the Passages of Joy.” We can hear a sexual echo in the final phrase but Gunn is more concerned with human passages through life. Some poems amount to miniature short stories, portraits of San Francisco’s hustlers and street people, as in “Sweet Things.” Some of the poems are rhymed and metered, others are free. Here is a sonnet about a sonneteer, “Keats at Highgate”:

 

“A cheerful youth joined Coleridge on his walk

(‘Loose,’ noted Coleridge, ‘slack, and not well-dressed’)

Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk

Of First and Second Consciousness, then pressed

The famous hand with warmth and sauntered back

Homeward in his own state of less dispersed

More passive consciousness–passive, not slack,

Whether of Secondary type or First.

 

“He made his way toward Hampstead so alert

He hardly passed the small grey ponds below

Or watched a sparrow pecking in the dirt

Without some insight swelling the mind’s flow

That banks made swift. Everything put to use.

Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose.”

I’ve written about the serendipitous Keats/Coleridge encounter here. That year, 1818, Keats would go on to write his six great odes, surpassing anything Coleridge ever wrote: “Everything put to use. / Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose.” In 1956, Gunn, born in England and still new to the U.S., taught briefly in San Antonio. He planned to tour the country and eventually return to Palo Alto. In a July 21 letter, Winters writes to Gunn:

 

“Beware of rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, alligators, Mississippi dogfish, bad liquor, and characters out of Faulkner. Beware also of tellers of tall tales. Do not allow your speech to be corrupted, no matter what strange predicament you may encounter. And above all, keep a diary, so that you may read it to me next fall.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]  

`A Habit of the Time'

After working with me periodically for almost a year, a high-school teacher mentioned on Thursday that her father is a professional Elvis Presley impersonator. He sells a little real estate but for 20 years has earned most of his living performing as the man who would have celebrated his 75th birthday today. She showed me some online photos and played a video of her Dad backed by the Jordanaires, the quartet that accompanied Presley starting in 1956. I was hoping for a sweaty, campy act, a parody I could laugh at and feel superior to, but her father is a dead-ringer for the not-quite-corpulent Elvis, circa 1971. In photos he’s utterly convincing and in a blindfold test his voice would fool a lot of fans. In other words, he’s not a caricature but an uncanny re-creation, a respectful trompe-l'œil Elvis.

“There’s a lot of old ladies who think he is Elvis. It’s embarrassing. They ask my mother very embarrassing questions,” the teacher said. What impressed me was her matter-of-factness. She felt no need to defend her Dad or launch a preemptive joke attack against him. Her father impersonates Elvis the way mine was an ironworker. Her attitude mirrors my own toward the real Presley -- neither fan nor hater. An aunt who lived in Olean, N.Y., gave me the single of “Hound Dog” for my fourth birthday, in 1956, the year Elvis recorded it. I thought it was a novelty song about a puppy, and that was last Presley recording I owned until I bought the great Sun sessions a few years ago. His death in the summer of 1977, when we also lost Nabokov and Groucho Marx, is still sad and tawdry, even to a tepid listener.

In his second book, The Sense of Movement (1957), Thom Gunn, born in Gravesend, Kent, but already transplanted to the Bay Area, included “Elvis Presley,” surely among the first poems about rock and roll:

“Two minutes long it pitches through some bar:
Unreeling from a corner box, the sigh
Of this one, in his gangling finery
And crawling sideburns, wielding a guitar.

“The limitations where he found success
Are ground on which he, panting, stretches out
In turn, promiscuously, by every note.
Our idiosyncrasy and our likeness.

“We keep ourselves in touch with a mere dime:
Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs
He turns revolt into a style, prolongs
The impulse to a habit of the time.

“Whether he poses or is real, no cat
Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance,
Which, generation of the very chance
It wars on, may be posture for combat.”

The title of the volume suggests Gunn’s move to the U.S. in 1954 and the energy he found in his newly adopted country. It also hints at Elvis and his once-lascivious moves. Written as unrhymed free verse, the poem couldn’t work. The substance must press against the form. Only that tension can suggest Elvis’ energy, still so fresh: “He turns revolt into a style, prolongs / The impulse to a habit of the time. Twenty-five years later, in The Passages of Joy (1982), Gunn includes another poem about Presley, “Painkillers”:

“The King of rock ‘n’ roll
Grown pudgy, almost matronly,
Fatty in gold lame,
mad King encircled
by a court of guards, suffering
delusions about assassination,
obsessed by guns, fearing
rivalry and revolt

“popping his skin
with massive hits of painkiller

“dying at forty-two.

“What was the pain?
Pain had been the colours
of the bad boy with the sneer.

“The story of pain, of separation,
was the divine comedy
he had translated
from black into white.

“For white children too
the act of naming the pain
unsheathed
a keen joy at the heart of it.

“Here they are still!
the disobedient
who keep a culture alive
by subverting it, turning
for example a subway
into a garden of graffiti.

“But the puffy King
lived on, his painkillers
neutralizing, neutralizing,
until he became
ludicrous in performance.

“The enthroned cannot revolt.
What was the pain
he needed to kill
if not the ultimate pain

“of feeling no pain?”

This is a bad, paint-by-number poem, a string of pop-psychology and counterculture clichés that rationalizes and romances a junky’s self-destructiveness and mourns his inner child. If “Elvis Presley” is my friend’s Elvis-impersonating father, “Painkillers” is the guy I saw at a county fair with the jumpsuit-encased beer gut and sweat-stained armpits. My friend’s father, at age 53, has outlived his model by 11 years.

`His Attention Has Become Prolonged'

“He reads,
He reads, until the chapel clock strikes five,
And suddenly discovers that the book,
Unevenly, gradually, and with difficulty,
Has all along been showing him its mind
(Like no one ever met at a dinner party),
And his attention has become prolonged
To the quiet passion with which he in return
Has given himself completely to the book.”

Seasoned readers will understand. Good books –books we reread and even buy, for ready access – are suffused with mind. We anthropomorphize them, turn them into neighbors, friends, family. I know many books smarter and significantly better company than many people I meet, at dinner parties and elsewhere.

At the junior high school where I’m working for the next month, during a lull when my student was collaborating on a story with another, I tried to finish rereading Transparent Things, a favorite among Nabokov’s novels, one I received as a present for Christmas 1972, one I was nudged by Nige into rereading:

“It seems a perfect condensate of Nabokov's genius, his late masterpiece, containing a hint at least of everything that makes him great, while striking out in what seems a novel and strange direction.”

The boys were getting louder, attracting attention, egging each other on with increasingly violent plotlines for their story, riffing on shards of Star Wars, H.P. Lovecraft (they loved saying “Cthulu”), Monty Python (“holy hand grenade of Antioch”) and what I took to be video games. I was irked, having reached that point late in Transparent Things when I was moved effortlessly by the narrative but dreading its imminent conclusion – a state, like life, sweet and tormenting. I had to step in because the boys, seated beside a rack of public-health pamphlets in the classroom, were working some of the titles into their story – “What I Really Mean When I Say No to Sex” and “Abstinence and Oral Sex.” The teacher was sweating and I couldn't finish the Nabokov until I returned home.

The lines quoted at the start of the post are from Thom Gunn’s “His Rooms in College” (from The Passages of Joy, 1982). The last three lines suggest the erotic pull a book can wield – “quiet passion,” “give himself completely.” Nabokov writes in Transparent Things:

“A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment.”

`The Unteachable'

First-period high-school biology. Dawn-dark outside. The teacher lectures on enzymes and writes on the board a definition of “denatured”:

“When the shape of an enzyme (or protein) changes, preventing the protein/enzyme from carrying out its job.”

My student, whom I have just met, talks endlessly about body building, protein supplements and not having a girlfriend because he’s fat. He’s not fat but walks like Walter Brennan, the result of pulling a muscle in his lower back while lifting weights over the weekend. “I look like an old grandpa,” he says, again and again. His tongue protrudes as he writes and he carries hard candy in the pockets of his hooded sweat shirt.

He works with another boy on a laptop to finish a quiz on lactase and lactose. The other kid does all the work and my student is smooth enough to leave his partner feeling the effort has been equitable. After class, I ask if he understands the material and knows what proteins and enzymes are. “Naaaah,” he says. “My back really hurts.”

In “As Expected” (collected in The Passages of Joy, 1982) Thom Gunn writes:

“…if the unteachable
can teach themselves, it follows
they can be taught by others.”

I hope so.