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The Letters of Thom Gunn
The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry.
“I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement ).
The Letters of Thom Gunn , edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).
“I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement ).
The Letters of Thom Gunn , edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).
800 pages, Hardcover
Published May 24, 2022
About the author
Thom Gunn
140 books67 followersThom Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004), born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex, and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 2, 2021
Lord Chesterfield, one of the great writers of letters, informed his son that "It is a very great incivilitie not to answer all the letters wee doe receive." That wasn't a maxim followed by Gunn who liked receiving letters far more than he liked replying to them. And this often means that Gunn's letters in this copious volume are filled with apologies and sadly -- lack spontaneity. "Dear Barbara, I'm afraid it is a dreadfully long time since I last wrote, I hope it was this year but I'm not even sure of that." How to make a person feel valued? Often, the letters are fascinating for what is not there: so the letter telling Gunn that his father has died is replied to with no emotion and reads like an extended sympathy card.
Spanning, as they do, from childhood to late adulthood, the letters offer a behind the scene portrait of Gunn which is interesting, but not particularly deep. And more of Gunn's humanity ( a word he uses rather a lot) appears when he is discussing jam making with the aunts (who brought him up) than the letters exchanged with his Cambridge friends. In fact, the intellectual letters are often tedious. Gunn is frequently pompous, and he knows it, and tries to shrug it off with an "Oh, that does sound pompous."
The letters are best read with a copy of Gunn's Collected Poems close by -- the letters do open up some interesting insights into the poetry, not that the editors probe very far in this direction. For example, one of Gunn's finer poems "Yoko", a sort of Cowley-like hymn to canine devotion, springs into new life when one realises that Yoko was Allan Noseworthy's dog and the poem puns on the nose-worthy antiques of Yoko with a quiet, metaphysical wit.
In "Transients and Residents" from Passages of Joy, Gunn diagnoses his letter writing ability with great accuracy:
"In the letters that I send
I imitate unconsciously the style
Of the recipients: mimicking each friend..."
Perhaps, however, he should have written "consciously" for his letters are very conscious products and masked responses from a Protean personality -- they are guarded, staged responses with an eye on the recipient. Some of the letters in the volume are postcards in reality, which is were Gunn said he managed his "mere voice... best." Unfortunately, these pornographic cards are reduced to typescript in The Letters and the humorous collages are neutered.
The Letters are worth perusing, but it would have helped if the editors had actually highlighted some of the non-American personalities and their relevance. A.E Dyson, a lost hero and advocate for sexual reform, and one of the leading poetry critics of the C20 is omitted from the "Glossary of Names" and Gunn's important letter to him on 15, August, 1977, is given perfunctory treatment.
At the end, I was left feeling that I did not know Gunn any the better. And had a sense that this volume had been waiting for people to die, thus avoiding pain and recriminations. A vein of hypocrisy runs through these epistles: Gunn praises Sacks, telling him that he is a writer equal to Dickens and Melville. In another letter, a few weeks later, Gunn describes Sacks as out-dated and sentimental. As Sacks died in 2015, any offence is avoided. Gunn remarks in the letters that -- as regards poetry -- he wrote what he could write well technically rather than what he felt intensely. A commitment to this was behind his dislike for confessionalism and wearing the heart on the sleeve. An identical belief runs through his letters. The only time that Gunn exhibits extreme emotion is on the death of his stepmother, a woman, in his view, who would not go to Hell because it was too good for her! One also suspects that the editors selected letters to show their view of Gunn and preserve their parts within the Gunn legacy -- like flies in amber. This is a two-dimensional collection of letters from Faber that has a musty atmosphere to it.
Spanning, as they do, from childhood to late adulthood, the letters offer a behind the scene portrait of Gunn which is interesting, but not particularly deep. And more of Gunn's humanity ( a word he uses rather a lot) appears when he is discussing jam making with the aunts (who brought him up) than the letters exchanged with his Cambridge friends. In fact, the intellectual letters are often tedious. Gunn is frequently pompous, and he knows it, and tries to shrug it off with an "Oh, that does sound pompous."
The letters are best read with a copy of Gunn's Collected Poems close by -- the letters do open up some interesting insights into the poetry, not that the editors probe very far in this direction. For example, one of Gunn's finer poems "Yoko", a sort of Cowley-like hymn to canine devotion, springs into new life when one realises that Yoko was Allan Noseworthy's dog and the poem puns on the nose-worthy antiques of Yoko with a quiet, metaphysical wit.
In "Transients and Residents" from Passages of Joy, Gunn diagnoses his letter writing ability with great accuracy:
"In the letters that I send
I imitate unconsciously the style
Of the recipients: mimicking each friend..."
Perhaps, however, he should have written "consciously" for his letters are very conscious products and masked responses from a Protean personality -- they are guarded, staged responses with an eye on the recipient. Some of the letters in the volume are postcards in reality, which is were Gunn said he managed his "mere voice... best." Unfortunately, these pornographic cards are reduced to typescript in The Letters and the humorous collages are neutered.
The Letters are worth perusing, but it would have helped if the editors had actually highlighted some of the non-American personalities and their relevance. A.E Dyson, a lost hero and advocate for sexual reform, and one of the leading poetry critics of the C20 is omitted from the "Glossary of Names" and Gunn's important letter to him on 15, August, 1977, is given perfunctory treatment.
At the end, I was left feeling that I did not know Gunn any the better. And had a sense that this volume had been waiting for people to die, thus avoiding pain and recriminations. A vein of hypocrisy runs through these epistles: Gunn praises Sacks, telling him that he is a writer equal to Dickens and Melville. In another letter, a few weeks later, Gunn describes Sacks as out-dated and sentimental. As Sacks died in 2015, any offence is avoided. Gunn remarks in the letters that -- as regards poetry -- he wrote what he could write well technically rather than what he felt intensely. A commitment to this was behind his dislike for confessionalism and wearing the heart on the sleeve. An identical belief runs through his letters. The only time that Gunn exhibits extreme emotion is on the death of his stepmother, a woman, in his view, who would not go to Hell because it was too good for her! One also suspects that the editors selected letters to show their view of Gunn and preserve their parts within the Gunn legacy -- like flies in amber. This is a two-dimensional collection of letters from Faber that has a musty atmosphere to it.
September 24, 2021
Interminably boring
July 9, 2022
One of the special pleasures of published correspondence can be the unedited comments that might have been toned down and lost their punch and flavor if a writer had known they were going to see the light of day. Such tidbits abound in The Letters of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), the British poet who spent most of his life in the U.S.
January 9, 1954: “You must be doing Plato now - isn’t he, finally, awful?”
Feb. 7, 1963: “There is a good play on here, with the rather silly title of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Edward Albee, who strikes me as probably the best man around over here since T. Williams decided that any male whore was Jesus Christ.”
March 18, 1965: “I met Mr. Eliot (T.S.) a few months before he died. He was already rather weak and would start long sentences and get lost in the middle of them. He was an immensely big man, did you know? Very wide, very tall, very large head. He had a signed photograph of Groucho Marx on the wall.” (I’ll not soon forget that final revelation.)
March 31, 1966: “ … what bugs me especially about WBY and TSE (Yeats and Eliot) is their inhumanity, i.e., lack of humaneness, their contempt for ordinary nice rather silly harmless people.”
June 10, 1966: “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 (teaching) job.”
In a November 25, 1966 letter, Gunn refers to Dylan Thomas as D. T. and can’t resist adding: “I think DT are tremendously appropriate initials for Thomas, don’t you?”
Gunn’s February 28, 1975 letter to John Haffenden, John Berryman’s biographer, shows affection and admiration for Berryman, despite what Gunn has to say about him in other letters. Gunn frequently and admirably contradicts himself as he matures and the letters continue.
January 19, 1970, on John Ashbery: ”Totally incomprehensible. And you don’t even feel like wanting to know what he means.”
May 12, 1976: “Gertrude Stein, on receiving compliments, when she was famous but still not taken seriously, ‘Thank you, but are you prepared to say that in print?’”
Oct. 18, 1981, while unhappily teaching at the University of Cincinnati: “Cincinnati drove poor Robert Lowell batty, but then so much did anyway.”
Oct. 24, 1986: “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.”
May 10, 1988: “He {Lorca) is a good poet, though it is interesting to see how much tiresomeness, Bly-ery and Merwinese originates from him.”
August 27, 1988: “I decided to take a plunge and teach Lorine Niedecker’s GRANITE PAIL and (Gary) Snyder’s MYTHS AND TEXTS, which latter I still find very solid after all these years (although I find his poetry since 1970 to consist largely of Buddhist bumper stickers.)” This comment notwithstanding, Gunn’s high regard for much of Snyder’s work is consistent throughout the correspondence.
Feb. 15, 1993: “I do go on. I can’t stop. It’s like multiple orgasm, that is something we envy women for, I think I experienced something like it with mda a few times, but maybe I only imagined it. Isn’t the imagination wonderful?”
Shortly after that, in an April 17, 1993 letter, comes this: “The nice man and at times good poet, Charles Gullans, died the other day I have heard, I think of a heart attack. (I know he had one before: he came to with a handsome paramedic blowing into his mouth, and thought he had died and gone to heaven.)” Gunn’s open gayness and his frank admission of his sexuality into his poetry raised the hackles of certain critics.
Dec. 21, 1996: “We plan on a drug marathon to bring in the New Year. That’s what I did last new year, for 3 days… If I get a heart attack, tell them I died smiling.” (Gunn survived that holiday but died at the age of 74 on April 25, 2004 from polysubstance abuse resulting in heart failure.)
From that same letter: “Louise Gluck … passed her peak with THE TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES, & every poem she writes is a whine — but she whines extremely well.”
I can’t help reflecting, with considerable regret, that collections of correspondence, along with heavily marked up manuscripts, are probably pretty much things of the past. Few any longer write letters, certainly not letters as long as Gunn’s, and writers revise and correct their work online so that there is no record of changes.
I should say that this is probably not a book for the general reader. The name dropping will have little or no meaning for those who don’t know the names, as will the frequent carrying on about prosody.
January 9, 1954: “You must be doing Plato now - isn’t he, finally, awful?”
Feb. 7, 1963: “There is a good play on here, with the rather silly title of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Edward Albee, who strikes me as probably the best man around over here since T. Williams decided that any male whore was Jesus Christ.”
March 18, 1965: “I met Mr. Eliot (T.S.) a few months before he died. He was already rather weak and would start long sentences and get lost in the middle of them. He was an immensely big man, did you know? Very wide, very tall, very large head. He had a signed photograph of Groucho Marx on the wall.” (I’ll not soon forget that final revelation.)
March 31, 1966: “ … what bugs me especially about WBY and TSE (Yeats and Eliot) is their inhumanity, i.e., lack of humaneness, their contempt for ordinary nice rather silly harmless people.”
June 10, 1966: “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 (teaching) job.”
In a November 25, 1966 letter, Gunn refers to Dylan Thomas as D. T. and can’t resist adding: “I think DT are tremendously appropriate initials for Thomas, don’t you?”
Gunn’s February 28, 1975 letter to John Haffenden, John Berryman’s biographer, shows affection and admiration for Berryman, despite what Gunn has to say about him in other letters. Gunn frequently and admirably contradicts himself as he matures and the letters continue.
January 19, 1970, on John Ashbery: ”Totally incomprehensible. And you don’t even feel like wanting to know what he means.”
May 12, 1976: “Gertrude Stein, on receiving compliments, when she was famous but still not taken seriously, ‘Thank you, but are you prepared to say that in print?’”
Oct. 18, 1981, while unhappily teaching at the University of Cincinnati: “Cincinnati drove poor Robert Lowell batty, but then so much did anyway.”
Oct. 24, 1986: “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.”
May 10, 1988: “He {Lorca) is a good poet, though it is interesting to see how much tiresomeness, Bly-ery and Merwinese originates from him.”
August 27, 1988: “I decided to take a plunge and teach Lorine Niedecker’s GRANITE PAIL and (Gary) Snyder’s MYTHS AND TEXTS, which latter I still find very solid after all these years (although I find his poetry since 1970 to consist largely of Buddhist bumper stickers.)” This comment notwithstanding, Gunn’s high regard for much of Snyder’s work is consistent throughout the correspondence.
Feb. 15, 1993: “I do go on. I can’t stop. It’s like multiple orgasm, that is something we envy women for, I think I experienced something like it with mda a few times, but maybe I only imagined it. Isn’t the imagination wonderful?”
Shortly after that, in an April 17, 1993 letter, comes this: “The nice man and at times good poet, Charles Gullans, died the other day I have heard, I think of a heart attack. (I know he had one before: he came to with a handsome paramedic blowing into his mouth, and thought he had died and gone to heaven.)” Gunn’s open gayness and his frank admission of his sexuality into his poetry raised the hackles of certain critics.
Dec. 21, 1996: “We plan on a drug marathon to bring in the New Year. That’s what I did last new year, for 3 days… If I get a heart attack, tell them I died smiling.” (Gunn survived that holiday but died at the age of 74 on April 25, 2004 from polysubstance abuse resulting in heart failure.)
From that same letter: “Louise Gluck … passed her peak with THE TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES, & every poem she writes is a whine — but she whines extremely well.”
I can’t help reflecting, with considerable regret, that collections of correspondence, along with heavily marked up manuscripts, are probably pretty much things of the past. Few any longer write letters, certainly not letters as long as Gunn’s, and writers revise and correct their work online so that there is no record of changes.
I should say that this is probably not a book for the general reader. The name dropping will have little or no meaning for those who don’t know the names, as will the frequent carrying on about prosody.
July 4, 2022
I've never been a big fan of poetry and had never heard of Gunn (1929-2004) until recently. This 700+ page book is impressive in that it tells his very interesting life story in letters. More like a memoir or diary. Amazing that so many knew of and respected him and his talent enough to save them. Being an intellectual gay man, he talks freely to friends and family of sex, critiques other poets and writers, even actors and movies. Being such a long book borrowed from the library, I didn't read every word but focused on those letters to the people he wrote to that particularly interested me. I should think any reader would be able to do the same in that Gunn's circle of friends and colleagues was so diverse, his travels and escapades so extensive, his writing so prolific. His story begins in a sense from the time he (at age 15) and his younger brother discover their mother's body after having committed suicide, setting up his creative mind and bruised heart for all manner of mischief and possibility, which he doesn't for one minute waste.
June 29, 2022
Because City Lights Live! had a conversation about this book on May 25, I borrowed it. After watching, I wondered what I would think about this poet/writer that I knew little about. The program, now on Youtube: https://youtu.be/DEkinOEqN3I didn't give me any clues to Gunn's writing, or even much about his personality.
There is something special about writing and receiving a letter. Writing a really good letter means you've thought a lot about what you want to communicate to the person you're writing to. Letter writing is a lost art. Do people send emails that are as thoughtful as many of Gunn's letters?
This is a hefty book, and I did not read all 734 pages. However, it prompted me to borrow a book of Gunn's poetry.
The question is, why is Thom Gunn's photograph on the cover of both the letters AND the poetry book?
There is something special about writing and receiving a letter. Writing a really good letter means you've thought a lot about what you want to communicate to the person you're writing to. Letter writing is a lost art. Do people send emails that are as thoughtful as many of Gunn's letters?
This is a hefty book, and I did not read all 734 pages. However, it prompted me to borrow a book of Gunn's poetry.
The question is, why is Thom Gunn's photograph on the cover of both the letters AND the poetry book?
June 30, 2022
Amazing that he was able to create incredibe, formally rigorous poetry and have a reading list that would take most people lifetimes, at the same time he was leading a wild and crazy life, replete with sex, drugs and rock n' roll. Only in America? Perhaps that's why he moved here.
January 20, 2023
will be revisiting this the rest of my life 👏🏻
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews