Skip to main content
Read page text
page 2
T H I S W E E K No. 6337 September 13 2024 the-tls.co.uk UK £4.50 | USA $8.99 T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T Keith Hopper Somerset Maugham in the movies | John Garth Tolkien’s verse Harrison Stetler The French far right | Maria Margaronis Stoppard on love The wild one Thom Gunn’s Californian odyssey, by Sean O’Brien Thom Gunn, San Francisco, c.1982 © Alan Hillyer/Writer Pic tures In this issue J ames Baldwin declared that “the great problem” was “how to be – in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word – a man”. Ralf Webb’s study of l i t e r a r y mascul i n i t y i n mid- c e n t u r y Amer i c a , S t ra ng e Re l a t i o n s , r e v i ewe d by Ke v i n B r a z i l , d e s c r i b e s a wo r l d o f s e x u a l r e p r e s s i o n a n d unspoken desires. Some British writers, however, discovered new freedoms in the US. As Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A cool queer life records, the precocious star of Cambridge poetry found happi- ness in 1954, when he left for San Francisco with Mike Kitay, his American partner. Decades later Gunn recalled their meeting in his poem “Rapallo”: “That summer I was twenty-three, / You about twenty-one, / We hoped to live together, as we / (Not to be smug) have done”. Gunn also embarked on a series of Dionysiac adventures devoted to “the pursuit of ecstasy, through drugs and sex”. The question of how to be a man seems not to have troubled Gunn. It was society and the critical establishment that had the problem with the poet and his kind – he had to keep his sexual preferences concealed from his university employers. Gunn’s style changed too. Immersed in Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, he experimented with free verse. Neither his new subject matter nor his new style found much favour in the land of his birthplace. As his mentor, the Christian poet Donald Davie, put it, Gunn “once had a British public but seemed later to have only a following”. Belatedly, critical opinion turned: a year before his death in 2004 Gunn was awarded the David Cohen prize in recognition of his lifetime achievement. “The fractured rhythms of modernism” were not for J. R. R. Tolkien, writes John Garth in his review of the Collected Poems, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. The master of Middle-earth’s “preferred verse forms were well est abli shed, often centuries old, or were innovations of older forms”. I like the story about his alliterative poem “Errantry”, published in the Oxford Magazine, which took on a life of its own when transmitted orally in America. “Two decades later”, writes Garth, “a transformed version landed on Tolkien’s desk with a letter asking him whether, as an English professor, he could identify it. ‘I must say that I was interested in becoming “folklore”’, he said.” After media saturation many are “bored of the Rings”, but I owe Tolkien a debt. In airport lounges he kept my children entranced as I narrated his fiction and verse from childhood memory. That was probably what the good professor intended all along. MARTIN IVENS Editor Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement @the.tls @TheTLS To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS, go to timesbookshop.co.uk 2 3 BIOGRAPHY 6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 8 POETRY 9 POEM 10 HISTORY 11 POLITICS 12 PHILOSOPHY 14 ARTS 16 FICTION 18 FILM 22 SCIENCE 23 CLASSICS 24 IN BRIEF 26 BIBLIOGRAPHY 27 AFTERTHOUGHTS 28 NB SEAN O’BRIEN KEVIN BRAZIL Thom Gunn – A cool queer life Michael Nott Strange Relations – Masculinity, sexuality and art in mid-century America Ralf Webb Baudelaire’s opinions, William Morris, Ancient Greek music, etc JOHN GARTH The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien; Edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond RACHAEL BOAST Shouting into the Ground JOHN DARWIN HARRISON STETLER NIKHIL VENKATESH The End of Empires and a World Remade – A global history of decolonization Martin Thomas Des électeurs ordinaires Félicien Faury What We Owe to Future People – A contractualist account of intergenerational ethics Elizabeth Finneron-Burns. Philosophy for an Ending World Tim Mulgan KEITH MILLER MARIA MARGARONIS Tropical Modernism – Architecture and independence (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) The Real Thing Tom Stoppard (Old Vic, London) HOUMAN BAREKAT SARAH CROWN ANDREW VAN DER VLIES Elaine Will Self Liars Sarah Manguso Small Rain Garth Greenwell KEITH HOPPER GRAHAM DASELER Somerset Maugham and the Cinema Robert Calder. Wilde in the Dream Factory – Decadence and the American movies Kate Hext. Peggy Webling and the Story behind Frankenstein – The making of a Hollywood monster Bruce Graver and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum From the Moment They Met It Was Murder – Double Indemnity and the rise of film noir Alain Silver and James Ursini REBECCA TUHUS-DUBROW KATHRYN HARKUP Chain Reactions – A hopeful history of uranium Lucy Jane Santos It’s a Gas – The magnificent and elusive elements that expand our world Mark Miodownik MARY BEARD TOM COOK CRAIG RAINE The Muse of History – The ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present Oswyn Murray An Exorcism – A photo romance Penny Slinger. Kent State – An American tragedy Brian VanDeMark. Wise Women – Myths and stories for midlife and beyond Sharon Blackie and Angharad Wynne. Time of the Flies Claudia Piñeiro; Translated by Frances Riddle. The Giant on the Skyline – On home, belonging and learning to let go Clover Stroud. Scripting Empire – Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic James Procter. Sarah Siddons – The first celebrity actress Jo Willett Albertus – The biography of a typeface Simon Garfield. Baskerville – The biography of a typeface Simon Garfield. Comic Sans – The biography of a typeface Simon Garfield Twain and the vernacular – The vividness of dialect M. C. Internet Archive and its critics, Billy Budd at 100, More pub lit Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk) Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk TLS SEPTEMBER 13, 2024
page 3
B I O G R A P H Y I V E R S I T Y U N S T A N F O R D , I V E S A R C H I V E R S I T Y U N A N D I O N S C O L L E C T I A L S P E C O F D E P A R T M E N T O F C O U R T E S Y ; I T A Y K I K E M O F C O U R T E S Y ; G U N N A N D E R O F C O U R T E S Y , I D S T O N E M A , D U N K A N D ’ A T H D E O F I O S T U D © A long, strange trip Thom Gunn had the conviction that his poetry and life were ‘continuous with each other’ SEAN O’BRIEN THOM GUNN A cool queer life MICHAEL NOTT 720pp. Faber. £25. You can tell when a poet is very famous, because people who don’t read poetry have an impression of the life. It is not yet clear whether Thom Gunn (1929–2004) has reached this point, though Michael Nott’s absorbing book may propel him over the line. More than once Gunn declared himself glad to have avoided the weight of fame experienced by his contemporary Ted Hughes. The Irish poet Paul Durcan once remarked, apropos Andrew Motion’s Life of Philip Larkin: “I hate biography”. This unsparing and exhaustively researched biography of Gunn would hardly make him more enthusiastic. Nott is candid about his subject’s eventual decline into methamphetamine addiction, and about some of the company he kept in his final years. At one point, as a break from the thieves and hustlers for whom he was an easy mark, Gunn sits in the backyard of his house in San Francisco to read a biography of F. R. Leavis, who can scarcely be imagined returning the favour. The closing chapters may excite a certain toldyou-so moral glee in some quarters, but Nott takes Gunn all in all: as a leading poet of the postwar period, as a critic and as a much-admired teacher, a loyal and generous friend, and a man who tried, not without success, to make a life and a family, and to balance the competing claims of insatiable desire (“Boss Cupid”) and his enduring love for Mike Kitay, his partner of fifty-odd years. Gunn’s early life was materially comfortable. Bert, his father, edited the Evening Standard and the Daily Sketch. Charlotte, his mother, a novelist, was intelligent, sensitive and unfulfilled. Gunn described his parents’ relationship as resembling the Wilcox-Schlegel marriage in Howards End. Both had affairs. They divorced and she married the journalist Ronald Hyde, a protégé of Lord SEPTEMBER 13, 2024 Beaverbrook. Charlotte’s relationship with Thom was intense and intimate: at times he shared her bed. When she and Hyde agreed to separate, she immediately changed her mind, but he did not. Four days after Christmas 1944, the teenage Gunn and his younger brother Ander discovered his mother’s body at home when they forced a way into the room where she had placed the gas poker in her mouth. Her death was something Gunn was unable to address in his poetry until late in life, in “The Gas-poker” (2000). Perhaps his dislike for the work of Sylvia Plath, which he called “hysterical”, was because of the manner of both women’s suicides. Although Gunn had good women friends, an irritable misogyny emerges from time to time. What Gunn needed ever after was a secure relationship, a home and a routine where writing and teaching could be clearly demarcated. These protective measures were matched, and sometimes opposed, by a determination to live as he chose. He loved Cambridge, where he found a devoted teacher at Trinit y in Helena Shire, and began lifelong friendships with Tony White, star of the student stage, and the critics Karl Miller and Tony Tanner. Love disrupted Gunn’s smooth academic progress when he met Kitay, a visiting American student. It determined the major decision of his life. In 1954 he moved to America to live with Kitay. The effect of America on Gunn’s poetry was equally dramatic. Problems in the earlier years of his relationship with Kitay arose from Gunn’s need to be both sexually free and securely loved. Kitay, by contrast, was in effect a serial monogamist, for the most part tolerating Gunn’s adventures while making his own more permanent arrangements within the pair’s agreed boundaries. Calm and crisis seem equally important. Gunn’s work, especially in the early books, is marked by the effort to affirm, or understand, or frame, or wield an identity in the face of a world marked by disorder – a condition historically and artistically exciting as well as personally alluring. In the late Elizabethan England of “A Mirror for Poets”, “the boundaries met / Of life and life, at danger”, where “mankind might behold its whole extent”. In San Francisco, the pursuit of TLS Thom Gunn’s mother, Charlotte, c.1923; Mike Kitay (left) and Gunn at Heidelberg Castle, 1953; Gunn in San Francisco, c.1980s; all from the book under review Sean O’Brien’s most recent collection of poems is Embark, 2022 ecstasy, through sex and drugs, and the rituals of S&M among the leathermen appear to be a way of giving form to the chaos of desire. Contradiction was both a threat and a means of control. The city was the arena: as Gunn wrote in “A Map of the City”, “I would not have its risk diminished”. Gunn observed that homosexuality seemed to him as normal as any other orientation, though in the earlier books the speakers’ sexual preferences are left for the reader to infer. Concealment was necessary for him to be able to teach at universities. His teacher and friend Yvor Winters would, he said, have been appalled to learn that Gunn was queer. (Another friend was Donald Davie, the Christian conservative poet and critic.) In an unpublished essay, “Poets and Gay Poets”, Gunn argued that the term Gay Poetry “releases but at the same moment it imprisons”. In the same essay he wrote: “It may be difficult to accept in 1980, but there are larger concerns for a human being than the important one of sexuality”. Nott is painstaking in detailing the comings and goings in the house on Cole Street, as well as Gunn’s innumerable encounters in bathhouses and bars, but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between even the prominent figures. When they periodically re-enter the story, Nott seems to think we know them better than we do. (There are useful biographical notes in The Letters of Thom Gunn (TLS, May 21, 2021), which Nott edited with August Kle i nz ahler and C l ive Wilmer.) To g ive f u l l er a c c oun t s o f e ve n a f r a c t i o n o f t h e d r amat i s personae would have been a Proustian undertaking. We don’t learn all that much about Gunn and politics, either, though at one point he remarked that he seemed to spend all his time marching on City Hall. In 1999, interviewed by James Campbell, he said that he was still a socialist, unlike others who had come of age in 1950, while Labour was still in power in the UK. But he seems most animated by the politics of everyday life, the idea of community, the willingness to help, and his sense that “we walk with everyone” (“Touch”). The hard-earned ordinariness of life was doomed for many with the arrival of Aids in the early 1980s. Nott conveys the horror of the emerging disease 3

Page Text

View plaintext

B I O G R A P H Y

I V E R S I T Y

U N

S T A N F O R D

,

I V E S

A R C H

I V E R S I T Y

U N

A N D

I O N S

C O L L E C T

I A L

S P E C

O F

D E P A R T M E N T

O F

C O U R T E S Y

;

I T A Y

K

I K E

M

O F

C O U R T E S Y

;

G U N N

A N D E R

O F

C O U R T E S Y

,

I D S T O N E

M A

,

D U N K

A N D

’ A T H

D E

O F

I O

S T U D

©

A long, strange trip Thom Gunn had the conviction that his poetry and life were ‘continuous with each other’

SEAN O’BRIEN

THOM GUNN A cool queer life MICHAEL NOTT 720pp. Faber. £25.

You can tell when a poet is very famous, because people who don’t read poetry have an impression of the life. It is not yet clear whether Thom Gunn (1929–2004) has reached this point, though Michael Nott’s absorbing book may propel him over the line. More than once Gunn declared himself glad to have avoided the weight of fame experienced by his contemporary Ted Hughes. The Irish poet Paul Durcan once remarked, apropos Andrew Motion’s Life of Philip Larkin: “I hate biography”. This unsparing and exhaustively researched biography of Gunn would hardly make him more enthusiastic. Nott is candid about his subject’s eventual decline into methamphetamine addiction, and about some of the company he kept in his final years. At one point, as a break from the thieves and hustlers for whom he was an easy mark, Gunn sits in the backyard of his house in San Francisco to read a biography of F. R. Leavis, who can scarcely be imagined returning the favour.

The closing chapters may excite a certain toldyou-so moral glee in some quarters, but Nott takes Gunn all in all: as a leading poet of the postwar period, as a critic and as a much-admired teacher, a loyal and generous friend, and a man who tried, not without success, to make a life and a family, and to balance the competing claims of insatiable desire (“Boss Cupid”) and his enduring love for Mike Kitay, his partner of fifty-odd years.

Gunn’s early life was materially comfortable. Bert, his father, edited the Evening Standard and the Daily Sketch. Charlotte, his mother, a novelist, was intelligent, sensitive and unfulfilled. Gunn described his parents’ relationship as resembling the Wilcox-Schlegel marriage in Howards End. Both had affairs. They divorced and she married the journalist Ronald Hyde, a protégé of Lord

SEPTEMBER 13, 2024

Beaverbrook. Charlotte’s relationship with Thom was intense and intimate: at times he shared her bed. When she and Hyde agreed to separate, she immediately changed her mind, but he did not. Four days after Christmas 1944, the teenage Gunn and his younger brother Ander discovered his mother’s body at home when they forced a way into the room where she had placed the gas poker in her mouth. Her death was something Gunn was unable to address in his poetry until late in life, in “The Gas-poker” (2000). Perhaps his dislike for the work of Sylvia Plath, which he called “hysterical”, was because of the manner of both women’s suicides. Although Gunn had good women friends, an irritable misogyny emerges from time to time.

What Gunn needed ever after was a secure relationship, a home and a routine where writing and teaching could be clearly demarcated. These protective measures were matched, and sometimes opposed, by a determination to live as he chose. He loved Cambridge, where he found a devoted teacher at Trinit y in Helena Shire, and began lifelong friendships with Tony White, star of the student stage, and the critics Karl Miller and Tony Tanner. Love disrupted Gunn’s smooth academic progress when he met Kitay, a visiting American student. It determined the major decision of his life. In 1954 he moved to America to live with Kitay. The effect of America on Gunn’s poetry was equally dramatic.

Problems in the earlier years of his relationship with Kitay arose from Gunn’s need to be both sexually free and securely loved. Kitay, by contrast, was in effect a serial monogamist, for the most part tolerating Gunn’s adventures while making his own more permanent arrangements within the pair’s agreed boundaries. Calm and crisis seem equally important. Gunn’s work, especially in the early books, is marked by the effort to affirm, or understand, or frame, or wield an identity in the face of a world marked by disorder – a condition historically and artistically exciting as well as personally alluring. In the late Elizabethan England of “A Mirror for Poets”, “the boundaries met / Of life and life, at danger”, where “mankind might behold its whole extent”. In San Francisco, the pursuit of

TLS

Thom Gunn’s mother, Charlotte, c.1923; Mike Kitay (left) and Gunn at Heidelberg Castle, 1953; Gunn in San Francisco, c.1980s; all from the book under review

Sean O’Brien’s most recent collection of poems is Embark, 2022

ecstasy, through sex and drugs, and the rituals of S&M among the leathermen appear to be a way of giving form to the chaos of desire. Contradiction was both a threat and a means of control. The city was the arena: as Gunn wrote in “A Map of the City”, “I would not have its risk diminished”.

Gunn observed that homosexuality seemed to him as normal as any other orientation, though in the earlier books the speakers’ sexual preferences are left for the reader to infer. Concealment was necessary for him to be able to teach at universities. His teacher and friend Yvor Winters would, he said, have been appalled to learn that Gunn was queer. (Another friend was Donald Davie, the Christian conservative poet and critic.) In an unpublished essay, “Poets and Gay Poets”, Gunn argued that the term Gay Poetry “releases but at the same moment it imprisons”. In the same essay he wrote: “It may be difficult to accept in 1980, but there are larger concerns for a human being than the important one of sexuality”.

Nott is painstaking in detailing the comings and goings in the house on Cole Street, as well as Gunn’s innumerable encounters in bathhouses and bars, but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between even the prominent figures. When they periodically re-enter the story, Nott seems to think we know them better than we do. (There are useful biographical notes in The Letters of Thom Gunn (TLS, May 21, 2021), which Nott edited with August Kle i nz ahler and C l ive Wilmer.) To g ive f u l l er a c c oun t s o f e ve n a f r a c t i o n o f t h e d r amat i s personae would have been a Proustian undertaking. We don’t learn all that much about Gunn and politics, either, though at one point he remarked that he seemed to spend all his time marching on City Hall. In 1999, interviewed by James Campbell, he said that he was still a socialist, unlike others who had come of age in 1950, while Labour was still in power in the UK. But he seems most animated by the politics of everyday life, the idea of community, the willingness to help, and his sense that “we walk with everyone” (“Touch”).

The hard-earned ordinariness of life was doomed for many with the arrival of Aids in the early 1980s. Nott conveys the horror of the emerging disease

3

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content