The first diary entry Thom Gunn (1929–2004) ever made was dated December 29, 1944: “Mother died at 4.0 A.M, Friday.”

Gunn was fifteen and living in the affluent North London district of Hampstead with his mother and younger brother. Charlotte Gunn had killed herself overnight, as the new year approached, by inhaling from a gas poker, a once-familiar flutelike implement used to ignite domestic heaters. Her rakish second husband, Joe, whom Gunn and his brother Ander never took to, had walked out days earlier. The boys’ father, a London newspaper editor whom they disliked for different reasons, had also deserted Charlotte. “But oh! Mother,” Gunn continued in his account of forcing the parlor door, finding her body, and calling a neighbor for assistance,

from the time when I left you at eleven on Thursday night until four in the morning, what did you do? . . . My poor, poor mother . . . . Never will you be sad again! . . . You knew we didn’t like him! But we would rather you had 10,000 Joes in our house, rather than you had killed yourself.

The notebook in which he wrote these words on the day of her death turned out to be the first of many; the habit of disclosing intimate thoughts to the private page was maintained until his death from an accidental overdose of recreational drugs in April 2004.

Gunn came of age as a poet in the mid-1950s, as the fashion for confessional poetry was taking hold. Life Studies by Robert Lowell, the volume that defined the movement, was published in 1959. John Berryman’s elliptical Dream Songs began to emerge in the same year. The first collection by Sylvia Plath appeared in 1960. Both she and Berryman died by suicide, Plath by gassing herself in the kitchen of her London flat. Gunn did not think highly of Plath. “The trouble is with the emotion itself, really,” he wrote to his friend and protégé Clive Wilmer; “it is largely one of hysteria.”

In spite of holding the right qualifications, Gunn resisted the confessional impulse. In the work he wrote for publication, he inclined towards restraint, both in the exposure of emotion and the manner of framing it. Most of the poems in his debut, Fighting Terms, published by a small English press in 1954, were written while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, but poetic maturity is marked by The Sense of Movement in 1957. About the only thing that unites that book and the unsparing revelations found in Life Studies is that each in its own way is notably original. Otherwise, older and younger poet could scarcely be more different. Still in his twenties, Gunn was immersing himself in literary heritage; Lowell was sloughing it off. The elder poet had sought to relax the dense constraints that had measured earlier collections, such as Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). Meanwhile, Gunn attended to his meters obsessively, tightening the screws of his iambs the better to harness whatever remnants of adolescent psychodrama still haunted him. Of emotion there was plenty, but “emotionalism” was not his thing. (Gunn came to admire Lowell greatly, but his preference was for the style of the later, more traditional, For the Union Dead.) Gunn’s stanzas strive to pack in as much thought as any self-respecting quatrain can hold. The tendency is evident in “On the Move,” his paean to American motorcycle gangs:

In goggles, donned impersonality,

In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,

They strap in doubt—by hiding it, robust—

And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

It is hardly stretching things to say that the “impersonality” is as attractive as the leather jackets, and that strapping in “doubt” is common cause between Hell’s Angel and English poet. The poem is representative of a nice paradox of the early Gunn. While shape and tone are purposefully conformist, subject matter points at youthful rebellion. At times, the effect is not unlike that of neat, wittily rhymed popular song. One of the poetic nostrums of the era was “Form is never more than an extension of content,” as voiced by Robert Creeley. Gunn was not exposed to the truism until later (he reviewed Creeley enthusiastically for The Times Literary Supplement in 1983), but at times he is willfully approaching things from the opposite direction. In the strong-arm syntax of “Elvis Presley,” written after Gunn heard “Hound Dog” or “Heartbreak Hotel” on a Texas jukebox in 1956, one can sense the lines begging for mercy:

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.

Gunn had the good fortune to come to the fore together with a number of similarly precocious talents. Ted Hughes was a Cambridge contemporary whose first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in the same year and by the same company, Faber, as The Sense of Movement. Plath was also with the firm, where T. S. Eliot still reigned as poetry editor. Philip Larkin was some years older than that trio and was published as early as 1945, but what we recognize as the Larkin voice came through at about the same time as theirs, a decade later. Gunn and Larkin, together with Robert Conquest, better known as a historian than a poet, and Kingsley Amis, primarily a novelist, were grouped together (with some others) as The Movement.

It was a time of groupings. Lowell’s generous admiration extended to the captain of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Gunn’s to Gary Snyder. In Britain, the Movement poets were apt to be loosely associated with the mainly prose-and-drama Angry Young Men. There was even a group called The Group. Many of the writers brought together in these bands had next to no social contact. In letters, Larkin was apt to be disobliging about Gunn. To Conquest, for example: “What a genius that man has for making an ass of himself.” Larkin, Conquest, and eventually Amis tacked to the right, whereas the Angry Young Men were on the left. As for Gunn, his early poems were less likely to be infused by politics in the ordinary understanding than by steely philosophical and sociological positions—in particular, some basic existentialist attitudes gleaned from Jean-Paul Sartre. Pop existentialism leaked into films such as The Wild One (Gunn’s epigraph for “On the Move” was borrowed from Marlon Brando) and Rebel Without a Cause. Sophistication in extraliterary matters held little intrinsic appeal for Gunn, who was drawn to the stagey “posture for combat” of rock and roll (later, the Grateful Dead and the Doors). “Pose” was likely to have a part in whatever he did.

By the time he reached his early twenties, Gunn had come to terms with his homosexuality, and in 1954 he began making plans to move to California to be close to Mike Kitay, an aspiring actor whom he had met at Cambridge. They remained together, in their idiosyncratic fashion, until Gunn’s death. (Each had many affairs; while Gunn was willfully promiscuous, Kitay tended to serial monogamy.) It was still the love that dared not speak its name, though, and the early volumes contain a number of poems that are unspecific about gender. One of the more daring is “Carnal Knowledge.” Addressed to a woman, it returns to the furtive refrain, “I know you know I know you know.” Know what? As if you need to ask. “I am not what I seem, believe me . . .” How could anyone have missed it, even in 1954?

Other paradoxes emerged. Having rapidly achieved a modest prominence in the English literary world, Gunn made immediate plans to leave it. Rejecting conformity in sexual matters and turning his back on the middle-class norms that helped make him, he was conventional in poetic conduct and, where it mattered, everyday behavior. Gunn was anything but a goody-goody but was not apt to play the bad boy (that arrived later). When it came to writing for literary magazines—his essays occupy two volumes, with more pieces awaiting collection—he was happier in the company of the seventeenth-century Robert Herrick than the modernist Wallace Stevens. He compiled popular editions of the poems of Ben Jonson (1572–1637) and the enigmatic Fulke Greville (1554–1628), who served as a statesman under Elizabeth I. His favorite novelist was Henry James, with what now seems a self-explanatory weakness for What Maisie Knew.

For Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life (the subtitle is derived from Thomas Hardy, allowing for wordplay), Michael Nott has benefited from unlimited access to Gunn’s papers—including the notebooks from which he quotes freely—and has enjoyed the cooperation of Mike Kitay and many close friends.¹ He does an excellent job of tracing the younger Gunn’s character and superimposing its outlines on the familiar picture of the mature man. He yokes the accelerating phases of the career to the wayward march of an unorthodox social life (what Larkin saw as “making an ass of himself”). Soon after Gunn’s arrival in America, this took the Jekyll-and-Hyde form of committed poet and teacher by day—Gunn started teaching at Berkeley in 1958 and continued, on and off, until the end of the century—and leather-bar prowler by night. Mr. Hyde’s potion was what Nott refers to repeatedly as “tricks,” and the drugs that made the often bleak encounters glow with addictive heat.

A few years into his move to California, Gunn became slightly more delinquent in poetry, too, as he set about making the transition to free verse. It was not an easy conversion for one whose thoughts and feelings were accustomed to being bound in meter and rhyme, and so he approached the task by pursuing an arcane system of “syllabic” versification. This involved devising line length by syllable count (typically eight or nine, consistent throughout the poem) rather than by the deployment of poetic foot and stress.

He launched the project in My Sad Captains (1961), the collection that followed The Sense of Movement, and he did so with typically considered artistry. The first half of the book continues in his old-fashioned way. It has a European air—introduced by one of Gunn’s most beguiling poems, “In Santa Maria del Popolo”—while the second part settles in the New World, with titles such as “Flying Above California” and “Lights Among Redwood” treated in the more informal style of syllabics. None of the poems comes close to what Lowell was doing in Life Studies—which is another way of saying that parental desertion, sexual confusion, and December 1944 remained unavailable as subject matter. The poem that introduces Part Two of My Sad Captains, “Waking in a Newly Built House,” appears to be determined not to confess anything at all. The purposefulness is practically therapeutic. But a second glance suggests something else. In the last two stanzas, morning light falls on the speaker as he stirs in the house of the title, its first inhabitant, a man liberated from past winters:

There is a tangible remoteness

of the air about me, its clean chill

ordering every room of the hill-

top house, and convoking absences.

Calmly, perception rests on the things,

and is aware of them only in

their precise definition, their fine

lack of even potential meanings.

There are hints of budding enthusiasms here. William Carlos Williams was the unofficial king of this hilltop, presiding over the doings of Creeley, Ginsberg, and Snyder. Gunn admired and wrote on them all, though without indulging in the habit of direct imitation. He never tried to write “a Ginsberg poem” or to adopt the jerky, improvised line of Creeley.

It is only three years since Nott coedited a substantial volume of Gunn’s letters with Wilmer and August Kleinzahler. This similarly weighty biography is bound to seem in places like a return to familiar paths. Both volumes can be split into two parts. The division may be illustrated by reference to a few pages just before the halfway point in the biography. In 1966, Gunn put the finishing touches on his latest collection, Touch, and sent it to his principal publisher in London, Faber. At the same time, he mailed a batch of the poems to the man who had greeted him at the beginning of his great career in California, the poet and critic Yvor Winters—at Stanford, to be precise, where Winters was a professor of English and Gunn arrived on a fellowship in 1954. Winters now represented to Gunn what F. R. Leavis had at Cambridge: a dedication to rigor in literary endeavor. It involved not just writing but reading (almost too light a word). Literature was not to be taken as one of a varied life’s diversions but as an essential limb of bodily existence.

In response to the new poems, Winters wrote in October 1966:

Your dissipated adventure in syllabics (or something) has weakened the whole texture of your perceptions. Your rhythms, when I can find them, are uninteresting; the diction is genteel but unimportant. . . . You simply approach polite journalism.

Gunn’s reaction says a lot about the former student. As Nott relates:

When Thom replied, two months later, he conceded that Winters was “probably right” about the poems and reassured him that he had given up free verse “since I don’t seem to be doing very well with it, and am going back to meter.”

Touch turned out to be his least favorite of his books. He erased the title from his Collected Poems, substituting as a category heading “Poems from the 1960s.”

Winters died shortly after this frank exchange. Gunn remained loyal to his memory, but the pupil had moved far from his master. By now the dissipated adventures were not only with syllabics (it’s hard not to smile at Winters’s parenthetical “or something”). Here, Nott locates Gunn in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco a few months after Winters’s death:

Several of Thom’s friends were serious dealers, and he had easy access to marijuana, psilocybin, and lsd. The center of his drug life was Clara Street, an alley between Fourth and Sixth, parallel to Folsom and Harrison. Chuck Arnett had left Pierce Street and moved to 32 Clara (now demolished), where he “maintained a ‘salon’ upstairs, while Jere Fransway did the same downstairs,” recalled Thom’s friend Mike Caffee; “they ran a 24-hour party-pad and sold pot, lsd, and whatever drugs were currently popular.” Thom found it “like home industries, the whole week there were guys in the kitchen putting the white powder into capsules (and licking their fingers and getting loaded), the phone went continually, people kept dropping by to pick up their ‘lots.’”

Nott writes that towards the end of 1968, “Thom’s use of lsd began to decline.” In the next sentence, however, he reveals that, after an acquaintance had “manufactured a large quantity of pure acid,” Gunn “bought 100 [doses] to sell half.” From heavy drug user to light drug dealer—another instance of that man “making an ass of himself”? Perhaps not altogether. Before opening his eyes in the newly built house, he might have envisaged his own fifteen-year-old head beside him on the pillow, sleeping through the night from December 28 to 29, 1944, as he had seen it on other nights. (He dreamed continuously of his mother.) As he put it in a later poem, drugs “help me if not lose then leave behind,/ What else, the self.”

And he believed, at least for a time, that they might lay the foundations for a different self. In January 1970, he told his English friend Tony Tanner that he had “dropped acid for Christmas Day” and

discovered something quite interesting: that I have been idealizing the situation when I was a child after Father left home—I must have found the household of my mother and Ander and me very comfortable, so comfortable in fact that I have succeeded in reconstructing it now—Mike as my mother, Bill [another housemate] as my younger brother.

Although Gunn was as serious as ever about the lines he committed to the printed page, he was becoming a less career-minded public poet. In the 1970s and ’80s, his reputation was kept aloft in Britain not so much by the books that followed My Sad Captains—namely, Moly (1971), Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), and The Passages of Joy (1982)—as by the lucky happenstance of being one half of a concocted double act with Ted Hughes. (Faber’s original idea was to have a trio, with Larkin included.) Selected Poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes (1962) was made a set text for students of A-level English at the peak of their secondary-school careers. The lines of “On the Move” and “In Santa Maria del Popolo,” strapped in by the urgency of the will yet swaddled in meditative metaphysics, became part of the formative experience of any young British person with an interest in poetry. The two names still roll off the tongue sweetly in alphabetical order. Gunn—like Hughes, like Plath, Larkin, and a little later Seamus Heaney—became unavoidable.

Nott supplies enough about both sides of Gunn’s character to satisfy the interested reader, probably too much for some about what Gunn himself referred to in another context as “the Great Dejection.” Tricks, acid trips, leather bars, and long-distance group-sex sessions fueled by speed dominate some three hundred pages. A similar stress on the “dissipation” of the poet’s later substance upset the balance of the Letters. There need be no suggestion that these phases of Gunn’s life be painted over, but greater selectivity would have quickened the pace of both books. This paragraph from the biography catches the poet’s dejection in microcosm. The time is the mid-1990s:

In the week before he finished “To Cupid,” Thom had taken “most of 5 quarters” of a gram of speed and had ended up “clearly drunk, shamefully so” at the Lone Star Saloon, a leather bar on Harrison. Later that month, after another speed marathon, he experienced his first aural hallucinations, “endless imaginary dialogs between made-up characters—aloud. But I was alone, so that was OK.” Speed had become an ever-greater part of his own “amorous scripts”; rest had become more difficult to obtain; risk, so long balanced with discipline and order, had begun to take over. Thom knew that his writing life was coming to an end. He must also have known, on some level, that his pursuit of desire, already obsessive, would come to push family and poetry to the fringes of his life.

It so happens that in the same decade Gunn’s reputation rose again. The aids crisis of the 1980s and ’90s was a catastrophe as devastating in its present terms as the death of his mother had been forty and more years earlier. It gave him what is generally regarded as his best book, The Man with Night Sweats (1992). The Anglo-American poet was in receipt of rich prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, including a MacArthur grant in 1993. He declined honors, too, including in that year the Queen’s Medal for Poetry offered by Hughes, who was then Poet Laureate.

I first met Thom Gunn in 1997 and last saw him in London in 2003, a year before his death. I’m not fool enough to contradict Nott and his well-informed witnesses, and maybe I was simply blinded time and again by Gunn’s charisma, but to me he was not the desolate figure who moves through the dismal second half of A Cool Queer Life. We sat for an entire afternoon on our first encounter in his house on Cole Street, me with his cat on my lap (immortalized in the poem “In Trust” from his last book, Boss Cupid) and a bottle of cheap white wine between us. (It had to be cheap: refined in so many ways, Gunn loved vulgarity in drink and music. “I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men,” he wrote in The Passages of Joy.) It counts as one of the most memorable conversations of my life. At intervals, he would rise to take down a book from the shelf, to read a poem in order to illustrate or affirm an enthusiasm. I remember him saying that he had a direct entry into poetry. Where he encountered barriers, he usually knew how to overcome them. He believed that Boss Cupid would be his final book, but his illuminating introduction to a short selection from Ezra Pound made in 2000 proves that his “writing life” continued in other forms.

In 1998, I asked if he would consent to be interviewed for a series of radio programs for the bbc. A producer had already agreed in principle. He submitted to several long afternoons of questioning at Cole Street, interspersed by readings, his intelligence matched by his good humor. The programs were given the title Between Moving Air and Moving Ocean and were broadcast over five evenings in the course of a week in the spring of 1999. It was a different sort of honor than that offered by Hughes, but perhaps worthy of a line in a biography with relatively little literary incident in its later phase. Gunn mentions it more than once in the Letters. The scripts resulted in a short book.

One of the poems Gunn read into the microphone was “The Gas Poker,” which casts back to what it is now clear was the defining event of his life. The poem was published in Boss Cupid:

One image from the flow

Sticks in the stubborn mind:

A sort of backwards flute.

The poker that she held up

Breathed from the holes aligned

Into her mouth till, filled up

By its music, she was mute.

It had taken him over forty years to write about Charlotte’s death. “The way to do it,” he said in Between Moving Air and Moving Ocean, was

really obvious: to withdraw the first person, and to write about it in the third person. Then it came easy, because it was no longer about myself. I don’t like dramatizing myself.

It could stand as an epitaph to the life and art of Thom Gunn. Or take the final line of another poem about Charlotte, written at the same time: “I am made by her, and undone.”

1. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life, by Michael Nott; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 720 pages, $45. ↩