Whatever possessed me to read more than 600 pages of letters penned by a poet? I rarely even glance at the poetry The New Yorker publishes every week.
Well, to start with I definitely would have cruised Thom Gunn if I'd seen him standing under that truck route sign and he wrote poems about AIDS, notably "The Man With Night Sweats," which I do recall permeating my philistine consciousness favorably at some point in the 1990s, because it seemed tragically straightforward and resonant. The contours of his life also intrigued me: born in England, educated at Cambridge, expatriated to California, lived in Haight Ashbury during the period when San Francisco became the gay Mecca AND remained HIV negative.
There also was the fact that he was a generation older, and I've always been intrigued by writers--Philip Roth especially comes to mind--whose work can function as a guidepost about what lies ahead.
The news isn't good.
Well, how about this for resolutions? No more speed after the age of 70, no more alcohol after 75, no more sex after 80 (probably not much more available at that age anyway), and die at 85, the last years being full of really good meals and lots of jokes. (February 17, 1997)
In reality, Gunn only made it to age 74. He overdosed on a recreational drug cocktail, including crystal meth, not long after he and his speed freak "boyfriend," three decades his junior, broke up. His family of friends, including Mike Kitay whom he identified as life partner, all hated the guy. Several of them lived together with Gunn and Kitay (who had separate bedrooms) in an unconventional arrangement that reminded me of a share house in the Pines, so it must have been awful for them to witness the behavior of their aimless friend.
I got bored with the gym; and I start drinking cheap wine in the afternoon. (But somehow, I’m not really a lush, probably because it is such BAD wine. My wants are very few: drink, drugs, a mad biker with an imaginative cock and an infinitely hungry hole, a loving family, and a fairly warm climate. Very Horatian.
Throughout, Gunn is completely forthright about his fondness for both drugs (he makes a pretty strong case for acid enhancing his verbal imagery) and sex, although the fact he supported the speed freak suggests that something more than gerontophilia--a life preserver in Gunn's later years--was at play. His relative fame no doubt worked in his favor, too, even if "hunky poet" seems like an oxymoron.
It's difficult not to connect Gunn's insatiable hunger for intoxication to the trauma he and his brother Ander, a beloved, lifelong correspondent, suffered as teen agers when their mother killed herself. Shortly before his death, Gunn published "The Gas Poker," which refers to the tool she used. It's no wonder he, who dishes constantly in these letters about poets living and dead, rarely has a negative word to say about Ted Hughes, similarly abandoned as a result of Sylvia Plath's suicide by the same means, even though the fellow Brit achieved greater rewnown.
Shop talk and the rhythms of an academic year characterize many of the letters; included among the correspondents are August Kleinzahler, a neighbor, and Clive Wilmer, two of the men who put the book together (along with Gunn biographer Michael Nott), which clearly was an act of love and deep respect. For a man who endured more than his share of tragedy, he remains surprisingly upbeat, even comic when writing to his many friends, relatives and colleagues.
Susan Sontag has to KISS me—why? . . . I hate kissing people when I’m not horny. I think it’s an irritating habit of elderly New Yorkers, much preferring a Prussian-type handshake myself, or even a stoned and nonchalant wave of the hand. Hi there, stud, I’d sooner say to SS. (October 4, 1996)
That said, I much preferred his "pen pal" missives to gay men like New Yorker Billy Lux in which we discover that Gunn and Janis Joplin shared the same tattooist, although he got his body (right forearm) inked six years earlier than she. Gunn's love for novels, both classic and contemporary, and pop culture, particularly his sympatico musical taste, surprised and kept me reading longer than I might have otherwise. He sounds like a good hang.
AIDS first rears its ugly head in May 1983, when Gunn was 53. Although he loses many close friends, he also develops a surprising perspective, perhaps due to his age.
“But I do think we—our generation on, that is—have had it unnaturally easy for most of our lives. ALWAYS people have experienced lots of death near at hand until the discovery of antibiotics in WWII—my parents had school friends die, one of my mother’s sisters died of TB while young, both my grandmothers died before I was born. But WE knew hardly anyone dying—if they died, it was of old age or through accident—so we forgot that if we were born to seek out happiness we were also born subject to disease. I’m getting sententious, aren't I? But it has taken AIDS to remind us of what ever previous generation was familiar with, and to be aware that if we personally live to an advanced age, we shall be out there alone and in the cold.” (September 26, 1994)
Both the literary and academic domains must have been fairly forgiving of homosexuality even in Gunn's youth. But he defended himself like a warrior when his preferred tribe--leather men--came under attack from Gregory Woods, a fellow poet.
What I quarrel with chiefly is the way you have read my (sexual and some other) poetry as pretty well exclusively sadomasochistic in content or implied content. To do so you can argue from only two poems: one, "The Beaters," an early and bombastic poem in which I was rather childishly trying to shock, and two, "The Menace" . . . What I was trying to do in this second poem was to release leather bars from the rather crude assumptions made about them by straight people, newspapers and gays who either have never been in one or have only gone to one to find in it what they expect . . .
However, you do at least, so far, have the justification that these two poems are about the subjects you say they are about. The connection between yr (sic) examination of them and the rest of your argument seems to be found in the following remark: 'In the semiotics of cruising, black leather signals a greater or less interest in sadomasochism'. Having said this, you on to find sadomasochism in every poem in which a soldier or a motorcyclist figures. Surely you must know how questionable your generalisation actually is; but even if it were true, the semiotics of cruising is not the same as the semiotics of poetry--at least I hope they aren't. I have in fact said something in my prose about possible significance of the soldiers and bikers in my work, and I am really made sad to think of their being seen one and all as sexual sadists. (It might help you to remember that the movie 'The Wild One' came out at the same time as I wrote 'On the Move': I wonder if you are prepared to take this as being a sadomasochistic film?)
Having established your generalisation, you then go on to take poems that are not sexual in content or implication and interpret them as sexual poems, and to take sexual poems and interpret them as sadomasochistic poems. Many of your readings completely astonish me: e.g. snow in one poem and distant smoke in another become semen for you; you see the Unsettled Motorcyclist making an 'anal' descent into the earth; and the poor wolf-boy becomes a 'catamite' at the end of his poem, the blood on his paws becoming the blood from where he has scratched his lover's body (ugh). Come on now: he drops on four feet because he has turned into a wolf, and his paws (only the back ones, I guess) are bleeding because he has been running barefoot through the stubble (the wound he receives in the one life carries through into the other). He has no lover in the poem; it wd (sic) be a much happier poem if he had. But to understand this poem--or, I wd (sic) say, most poetry--you must possess a firm trust in the literal meaning of language. If you can grasp the the literal situation, then my hope is that you might be able to apply it to other similar situations--even though they are not in the poem and the application is your work and not the author's. Thus, the wolf-boy's situation fully grasped might be seen to apply to that of anyone else leading a double life--maybe sexually divided, or divided in other ways. (October 2, 1982)
What makes this rebuttal even more fascinating is the fact that Woods himself is a friend of Dorothy, who began chairing the Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University 16 years later! Gunn's insistence that "you must possess a firm trust in the literal meaning of language" to understand poetry exposes what I always found to be most frustrating aspect of my college education: hearing a professor's fanciful interpretation of art, literature or music and wondering WTF?!? Where did that come from?
To be fair, Gunn's occasionally alienating fearlessness--"The Beater" above alludes to a dandy's "swastika-draped bed" and he included a series of poems written from the perspective of Jeffrey Dahmer in Boss Cupid, his final collection--isn't for the fainthearted but it's also the mindset that enabled him to tackle AIDS in way that particularized both its horror and the simple humanity of its victims.
While the end of Gunn's life seems profoundly sad--retirement from writing and teaching clearly didn't suit him--his zest for life remained constant as did his crush on Keanu Reeves. After celebrating his 64th birthday with a five-way he wrote:
Age is apparently exactly like youth. How reassuring. (September 3, 1993)
As someone about to turn 72, I'm less sanguine, although I do recognize the legitimacy of his observation: we remain who we always have been.
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