Andre Bagoo
Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life (Faber, 2024) begins with the seed of an idea. Over the course of its 720 pages, that seed builds into an overwhelming crescendo. The idea, never stated but left to interpretation, is this: the death of Gunn’s mother by suicide when he was just 15 profoundly shaped him, including his final years, when, having attained success as a poet that most can only dream of, he was no longer able to write and eventually died of substance abuse at 74.
That the biography opens with the death of Ann Charlotte Hyde signals its primacy in the poet’s life. It was Ann Charlotte who lit Gunn’s passion for books. She read him Yeats and Walter de la Mare, encouraged him to read Jane Austen and E.M. Forster. He wrote a novel for her as a birthday gift and started writing poetry just to please her. But childhood trauma need not be the sole organising principle behind Gunn’s life. Some have also pointed to his penchant for a kind of toxic masculinity and the internalised homophobia it implied. In truth, both strands do not conflict: the death of Gunn’s mother before he fully inhabited his sexuality denied him an answer to the question of whether she would have accepted him. That room for speculation left open the door to shame and a cycle of self-flagellation. His rejection of the effeminate was possibly a means of seeking approval and a sense of control, as well as expiating a sense of guilt.
These kinds of ideas arise from this important book. They demonstrate how Gunn’s life was one that defies categorisation. Here was a poet once mentioned in the same breath as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes (Gunn was published in a joint volume with Hughes in 1962; he also met Sylvia Plath), who was awarded the inaugural Forward Prize, the David Cohen Prize, the Sara Teasdale Prize, the Robert Kirsch Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize for The Man with Night Sweats, a Rockefeller Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. Yet, such acclaim rested on the strength of work often concerned with life on the margins that was sometimes ambivalently reviewed. At one stage, Gunn was the poet of leather bikers and surfer dudes, of drug use and counterculture. He seemed suspended between several poles: hedonistic experience and poetic constraint; the body and transcendence; the Academy and popular culture; England, where he was born, and America, where he lived. His was sometimes an outward mask of affability that fooled no one: there is testimony from multiple individuals in this biography who say his trademark raucous laughter never convinced. They felt him touched by a profound sadness. Even in death, Gunn remains an enigma: for all the prizes he won, he is not as well-known as his acolytes would like. Nott’s is the first major biography of him.
Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is written with the same kind of restraint that its subject matter exemplified in his poetry. For instance, in the opening chapter, the author remarks: “The summer of his birth was extraordinarily hot” and it is left for us to take up that symbolism or not. Of the dawn of the poet’s sense of sexuality, he makes simple statements like: “When Thom reached puberty, his body began to change.” You get the sense that the biographer, who also co-edited The Letters of Thom Gunn (Faber, 2021) in which the voice of the poet emerges magnificently, prefers to let Gunn and the facts speak for themselves; to avoid waxing lyrical in a way that distracts. Aside from the opening prologue and a key closing passage, there are no grand narrative gestures. Analysis is reserved for moments that merit it. The result is a laser-sharp focus that makes this book move breezily along as it veers from passages of joy to desolation. There is no varnish. The image of the contradictory life presented is as direct and crisp as the photograph of Gunn on the cover.
Another component of the book’s power comes from the insights it gives into Gunn’s poetry and process. For instance, we learn one of his most memorable poems, ‘The Allegory of the Wolf Boy’, was written in 1956 not in a leafy British suburb, but in San Antonio, Texas, which Gunn once described as “a horrible town”. Nott convincingly aligns this poem to Gunn’s preoccupation with doubles, divided selves and secret lives, noting the allegory itself is left open. Gunn, he notes, later acknowledged the poem was about being a homosexual and found “there was power in this approach”: he believed it best to follow his maxim “do not state, but make clear”. ‘The Gas-poker’, a poem about his mother’s death which the poet published at the very end of his career, follows the same principle to devastating effect, closing with the image of the device rendered as “a sort of backwards flute”, its “holes aligned / Into her mouth till, filled up / By its music, she was mute”.
The book deftly chronicles how Gunn’s writing was a kind of escape from experience. If for him the distinction between sex and drugs grew blurrier in his final years, his ability to use poetry of painstaking formality (syllabics, meter, rhyme) to keep at bay unruly emotions was a delicate equilibrium destined to be upended. “The only way I could give myself any control over the presentation of these experiences, and so could be true to them, was by trying to render the infinite through the finite, the unstructured through the structured,” he said. Like an Oulipian constraint, restriction generated momentary freedom.
It is unsurprising Gunn was dogged by an inability to get over his mother’s death throughout his life. For years, he suffered depression. “Maybe originally I wrote as a way of getting out of that,” he later said. But well into his adult years, he had recurring nightmares about her. He kept the key to the front door of the house where Ann Charlotte was found. Born William Guinneach Gunn and called simply Tom at home, he assumed the name Thom in a subsequent period in which he sought “to be somebody new”. He armed himself against vulnerability, becoming aloof, leading to difficulties in some of his personal interactions. His love-hate relationship with England and later adoption of San Franciso might be seen as a fleeing of the site of trauma. One of his final poems, ‘My Mother’s Pride’, published alongside ‘The Gas-poker’, concludes with the line, “I am made by her, and undone.”
Gunn’s unravelling in his final years presents us with a quandary: do we view his life as a tragedy or triumph? Sensing the vitality of his body waning upon retirement, his creative writing dried up. This was more than just a case of the jitters that come with following up a great success, as his 1992 book The Man with Night Sweats had been. In a poem from that book, ‘In Time of Plague’, he wrote: “I am confused / confused to be attracted / by, in effect, my own annihilation.” In the wake of the AIDS epidemic, he had survived so much loss around him. Yet, given the havoc drug use was wreaking on him in his 70s, some concluded he had a death wish. If his judgment was impaired, it remains an open question as to why. Writing had for so long kept demons at bay. Now that Gunn had “dried up” was he at the mercy of other imperatives? Or was it a step forward, in Gunn’s mind, to be finally disconnected from the need for language, to transform, like the mythical beast in his great poem ‘Moly’, into something completely devoted to the sensory world? Nott concludes the book with the suggestion that having lost his mother, Gunn did not wish to endure the loss of the other love of his life: his partner Mike Kitay. What is clear from this essential biography is that Gunn’s was a queer life that refuses to settle into any neat narrative. Because of love, he was a creature transformed.