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B I O G R A P H Y and the growing list of casualties. Gunn did his share of caring for the sick. In 1991 he made a list of thirty-seven friends who had died, or were to die, from HIV/Aids. He was inclined to attribute his own escape from infection to a preference for oral sex, but maybe he was just lucky. Lucky or not, he wrote some of his best work about the dead and dying. Gunn liked teaching, mostly, once he got into the classroom with students and a poem to discuss. His approach was practical, encouraging and helpful. Though he never became a disciple, he admired Leavis’s close readings at Cambridge, sharing the conviction that poetry and life were continuous with each other. Clearly teaching was a vocation, but at times Gunn was inclined to renounce it and resisted the lure of tenure. When the enormous McArthur Fellowship arrived in 1993, he gave some of it away, insisting that his material needs were few. But his need for this sort of work was more than financial: planning his teaching and going into college reliably to deliver it gave him a shape for part of the year, with the rest of the time to devote to writing, sex and taking drugs. Of these activities, writing was the hardest to sustain. We hear of many dry spells and a fear that poetry may be finished with him. The drug-taking began in the alle gedly prelapsarian 1960s, when LSD appeared to offer enlightenment, often achieved while listening to San Francisco bands such as the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane. Gunn took a great deal of acid before the charm wore off. He was at the Altamont concert in December 1969, the grim finale of all that, when a Black man, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death by a Hells Angels while apparently brandishing a pistol. Gunn himself saw no trouble, though he thought the Rolling Stones were “crazy” to hire the Hells Angels as security. Perhaps they hadn’t been paying attention. The Grateful Dead, the quintessential San Francisco band, were on good terms with the Angels and recommended that they be hired. Payment was in beer. Hunter’s autopsy found methamphetamine in his blood. In later years speed was to become Gunn’s drug of choice. For one thing it enabled sex to go on for entire weekends. In the end it got to him as to many another. In retirement he had nowhere much else to go, no obligation to break the cycle of indulgence. Towards the end he was injecting – or being injected with – rather than snorting the drug. He felt old and unattractive. His wind was gone; he was stooped, neglectful of domestic tasks and in effect paying dubious characters to have sex with him. “Brave, terrible, the will awaits its gradual end”, he had written of the elderly rake in “Modes of Pleasure 1” (in My Sad Captains, 1961). He was found dead in his room on Cole Street in 2004, aged seventy-four. Was it, as he hoped, in a phrase adapted from Hardy, “a cool queer life”? Perhaps. It was certainly, as the Dead put it, “a long, strange trip”. But what about the poems, without which there would be no biography? Which of them persist in the reader’s imagination? Gunn is extremely quotable. What is it that remains so exciting about “The Wound”, the first poem in his first book, Fighting Terms (1954)? I lay and rested as prescription said. Manoeuvred with the Greeks, or sallied out Each day with Hector. Finally my bed Became Achilles’ tent, to which the lout Thersites came reporting numbers dead. It is partly a matter of the energetic calm with which the lines drive through the monosyllabic rhymes. Even as each stanza is discrete, the verse remains in motion, while the past tense merely emphasizes the speaker’s deepening immersion in the Iliad – an experience as present to him now as when it began. It brings to mind, though it doesn’t much resemble, Ulysses’ speech to Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, with which it shares a kind of practical swagger. A high bar. Ted Hughes was at work in territory not far removed, but with a more ungoverned rhetoric. It is easy to see why Gunn’s early readers were “Gunn took a great deal of acid before the charm wore off 4 TLS excited: here was a formalist whose poems had dramatic vigour and artful urgency. Goodbye Poetry London and Apocalypse. Goodbye Dylan Thomas, though Gunn did like his work. Yet re-reading the book now, its reach (understandably) exceeds its grasp. The movement of thought is sometimes unclear, the occasions are too often willed and the sense of an animating world behind and inside the text is intermittent. (Gunn came to place a high value on this quality.) It’s a book of anticipations: plans and contingencies and departures loom large. If a pickup in the Palais de Danse turns out not to “really do”, the soldier Lofty proposes, “we’ll get it over now outside”. The alleged callousness of the speaker is studied, tried on for size. In “The Beach Head”, should the speaker seek to overwhelm the object of desire in a single act? “That way achievement would be history.” This remarkable line incidentally describes Gunn’s need to keep shedding his poetic skin once The Sense of Movement (1957) had secured his early reputation. The feeling that the achievement of his early formalist work wouldn’t “really do” led Gunn to syllabics and to free verse. Yet he regularly turned back to form, for example when his implacable friend and mentor Yvor Winters, having read the manuscript of Touch (1967), commented: “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 admission that Winters was “probably right” cannot have been without cost, but Gunn could be brutal with himself as well. There is in fact some fine work in Touch: “The Goddess”; the grim Sartrean comedy of “In the Tank”; and “Berlin in Ruins”, with its nightmarish glimpse of the mind, corrupted by Nazism, waking “bathed in poison”, though Nott seems to underrate this poem. By the time Gunn assembled his Collected Poems, his own doubts meant that the volume’s title was omitted from the list of contents. He was grateful to Winters for helping him to hear William Carlos Williams’s metre, but the mobility of Williams’s verse often seems to have escaped the Englishman – although all phases of Gunn’s work have eloquent advocates, such as Clive Wilmer and August Kleinzahler. As befits his task, Nott, a completist, finds something of interest in almost everything Gunn wrote. The reader without that level of obligation may struggle with Moly. Yet it contains the astonishing “Sunlight” (first appearing in 1969): Great seedbed, yellow centre of the flower, Flower on its own, without a root or stem, Giving all colour and all shape their power, Still recreating in defining them, Enable us, altering like you, to enter Your passionate love, impartial but intense, And kindle in acceptance round your centre, Petals of light lost in your innocence. Here, once more and triumphantly, is the Gunn who immersed himself in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry. The poem is both beautiful and terrifying, close to commending an ecstasy of nihilism, the voiding of meaning in the very moment of understanding, while the measured voice seems to carry a note of resignation inside the acceptance. If “Sunlight” is in a sense the apotheosis of the aesthetic, t h e s t r e e t s a r e s t i l l l i t t e r e d w i t h c a s u a l t i e s , murderers and monsters – by-products, in part, of the complacency of psychedelia. For some of them the face of the sun might be that of Charles Manson. While Kleinzahler commends the whole run of books from My Sad Captains, in his personal selection with Faber (2007) he’s sparing with poems from Jack Straw’s Castle (1976) and The Passages of Joy (1982), and this seems about right. If, in the words of Gunn’s Life Artist, “Whatever is here, it is / Material for my art”, it is also the case that material alone is insufficient to galvanize the art. To do that would require a tragedy. When, in 1991, Hughes wondered whether to publish what would become SEPTEMBER 13, 2024
page 5
B I O G R A P H Y Birthday Letters (1998), Gunn advised him to do so for the sake of his “mental health”. But when the book appeared Gunn was unimpressed, judging the work “bombastic” and wondering if Hughes had “forgotten all subtlety of approach”. The book’s reception had little to do with poetry, which was displaced by the biographical interest it offered to a public more interested in people than poems. Birthday Letters was a significant moment in the process by which testimony has in some places come to replace art as a measure of poetic achievement. How much of the importance ascribed to Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats (1992) can be attributed to subject matter rather than to the quality of the work itself ? The Man with Night Sweats, it is clear, is an exceptional book. Its central subject, bearing witness to the effects of Aids among those he knew and mourning the dead, seems to have led Gunn to recognize where his strengths lay – in verse movement, in exactitude of tone and in the emotional discipline and fidelity that let the world display its horrors uncorrupted by sentimentality. In embryo these qualities are present in his early work; if he sometimes seemed on the brink of discarding them, he is drawn back to admit that, for him, formalit y is a power. To these was gradually added the rich and exact observation of people, place, detail, gesture, the dailiness of being by which he affiliated himself to those around him – friends, lovers, people in the street and on it. Introducing the republished volume, Colm Tóibín suggests that the poems in The Man with Night Sweats are “sharper, plainer, starker” than the earlier poems. Gunn at sixty is in a sense more relaxed than in his youth: he doesn’t need to reassure himself by turning up the volume. “Looks”, for example, allows its human subject room to reveal himself rather than hurrying to assign him a meaning. The man, a writer, is also “an actor”, playing a small, embittered role forever, taking out his fury on his lovers without grasping their individuality. “Alert / Always to looks – and they must look like prizes – / He blurs further distinction, for he knows / Nothing of strength but its apparent drift, / Tending and tending, and nothing of repose / Except within his kindled gaze, his gift.” The sense of observant authorit y i s compelling. Gunn draws on the qualities that he also celebrates in “Enmeshed with Time” (1991), his brilliant essay review of Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, where he discusses “In mourning wise”, Thomas Wyatt’s lament for the five men executed as Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers – “And thus farewell, each one in hearty wise. / The axe is home, your heads be in the street”. With a combination of sympathy, resignation and horror, and of attention uncorrupted by its occasion, the executed men are dignified, despite their fate. A comparable imaginative intelligence is also at work in “Still Life”, where the Wyatt-like refrain “I shall not soon forget” adds a lyric note that only emphasizes the dreadful indignity inflicted on a man dying of Aids: “I shall not soon forget / The angle of his head, / Arrested and reared back / On the crisp field of bed, // Back from what he could neither / Accept, as one opposed, / Nor as a lifelong breather / Consentingly let go, / The tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished O”. The attention to detail reveals a sympathy that is powerless to help, but offers instead a scrupulous fidelity. In “Rastignac at 45”, from My Sad Captains, we hear that Rastignac’s irony and distaste have given him a facial tic, but that living with it “has, for him, diminished the horror”. In Gunn’s case, neither the risk nor the horror is reduced. Michael Nott has done honour to his complex subject. This, and the Selected Poems edited by Wilmer, as well as Kleinzahler’s selection, are good places for new readers to begin, and for the rest of us to look afresh at this remarkable and at times exemplary poet, while awaiting a revised and expanded Collected Poems. n SEPTEMBER 13, 2024 Another country American writers at a dark period in the history of masculinity KEVIN BRAZIL STRANGE RELATIONS Masculinity, sexuality and art in mid-century America RALF WEBB 352pp. Sceptre. £20. Ralf Webb’s Strange Relations takes as its theme what James Baldwin called “the great problem”: “how to be – in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word – a man”. In mid-century America, this problem preoccupied not just Baldwin, but also Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and John Cheever, four writers whose lives and works Kevin Brazil is the author of Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, 2022 TLS are explored here in four loosely connected chapters – with McCullers feeling slightly lumped in among the male authors. These writers have “immediate relevance to our contemporary crisis in masculinity”: male mental health, loneliness, suicide, violence against women and queer people. It’s a strained claim that makes for an awkward start. The “crisis” behind the appeal of Andrew Tate, 4Chan, Donald Trump et al is the seductive power of male heterosexuality: the kind that is also behind the warping violence explored by writers such as David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk or Norman Mailer; that is to say, writers who, just like their subjects, are rarely pleasant to read or read about – but are perhaps all the more necessary for that. If Strange Relations stumbles out of the gate with a bid for relevance, it almost veers off track with an opening section on Walt Whitman: a poet who has a lot to say about masculinity, but whose relevance to our present, or to the writers under discussion, is barely argued. So it is a relief when the book finally settles down into what it clearly wants to be: an earnest and often charming stroll through the lives and works of four well-known writers for whom Webb has an evident enthusiasm. Mid - c en t u r y Amer i c a was i ndeed a s t r ange moment in the history of masculinity. On the one hand, the fixed identity of the homosexual and heterosexual had been defined by medicine and psychoanalysis in their most pseudo - sc i entific modes; on the other, Gay Liberation’s reclamation and questioning of these identities had yet to take place. And so Webb shows currents of repressed and unnameable desires rippling through McCullers’s novels and Williams’s plays, currents that he shows are so defining for a play such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) precisely because they could not be precisely named. The chapter on Cheever gets closest to this conflict between what men want and what they think they are. In Cheever’s journals and stories we see a man torn between his desire to be a husband, father and middle-class Yankee, and a sexual desire for other men that he can only see as “aberrant and stained”. Webb gets into the erotic specifics of how this war played out: the fixation on the athlete’s body in “The Swimmer” is a hymn “to bygone youth and beauty … incommensurate with the adult world”. Sing Sing prison – where Cheever taught classes – provides inspiration for the one world in which he could depict explicitly love between men taking place. The metaphor for what heterosexuality does to men couldn’t be clearer. These kinds of close readings, bringing together sensitively the authors’ lives and works, are the most enjoyable and illuminating aspects of Strange Relations. Less enjoyable is the decision to write the biographical sections in a rapid-fire present tense: “John Cheever stands guard over a group o f pr i soners, holding a l oaded gun”; “Carson McCullers is looking at herself in the window of a Fifth Avenue bookshop”. This doesn’t just read like an unnecessary attempt to make these lives “exciting” when they are plenty exciting enough. In a sparely footnoted book that names none of the biographies from which it draws, it introduces uncertainty about what these authors thought and said. “Writing to Tennessee is tantamount to breathing”: says who? Williams, or Webb in imaginative flight? Cheever’s “writing process is tantamount to a painful, physical purge”: was it? How these writers understood how they wrote is a not insignificant matter, and even a minor stylistic tic raises questions about accuracy that undermine the book as a whole. Ralf Webb traces a distinct moment in the literary history of masculinity, one arguably darker than he can admit. Alcoholism and depression run through these pages. None of these authors found a way to live, or live with, the masculinity they desired, and their works offer a critique of how things are rather than an inspiration for how things could be. Maybe this is the real point Strange Relations wishes to make: that solving the “crisis in masculinity” is a task that won’t be achieved by literature alone. n 5

B I O G R A P H Y

Birthday Letters (1998), Gunn advised him to do so for the sake of his “mental health”. But when the book appeared Gunn was unimpressed, judging the work “bombastic” and wondering if Hughes had “forgotten all subtlety of approach”. The book’s reception had little to do with poetry, which was displaced by the biographical interest it offered to a public more interested in people than poems. Birthday Letters was a significant moment in the process by which testimony has in some places come to replace art as a measure of poetic achievement. How much of the importance ascribed to Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats (1992) can be attributed to subject matter rather than to the quality of the work itself ?

The Man with Night Sweats, it is clear, is an exceptional book. Its central subject, bearing witness to the effects of Aids among those he knew and mourning the dead, seems to have led Gunn to recognize where his strengths lay – in verse movement, in exactitude of tone and in the emotional discipline and fidelity that let the world display its horrors uncorrupted by sentimentality. In embryo these qualities are present in his early work; if he sometimes seemed on the brink of discarding them, he is drawn back to admit that, for him, formalit y is a power. To these was gradually added the rich and exact observation of people, place, detail, gesture, the dailiness of being by which he affiliated himself to those around him – friends, lovers, people in the street and on it. Introducing the republished volume, Colm Tóibín suggests that the poems in The Man with Night Sweats are “sharper, plainer, starker” than the earlier poems. Gunn at sixty is in a sense more relaxed than in his youth: he doesn’t need to reassure himself by turning up the volume. “Looks”, for example, allows its human subject room to reveal himself rather than hurrying to assign him a meaning. The man, a writer, is also “an actor”, playing a small, embittered role forever, taking out his fury on his lovers without grasping their individuality. “Alert / Always to looks – and they must look like prizes – / He blurs further distinction, for he knows / Nothing of strength but its apparent drift, / Tending and tending, and nothing of repose / Except within his kindled gaze, his gift.” The sense of observant authorit y i s compelling. Gunn draws on the qualities that he also celebrates in “Enmeshed with Time” (1991), his brilliant essay review of Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, where he discusses “In mourning wise”, Thomas Wyatt’s lament for the five men executed as Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers – “And thus farewell, each one in hearty wise. / The axe is home, your heads be in the street”. With a combination of sympathy, resignation and horror, and of attention uncorrupted by its occasion, the executed men are dignified, despite their fate.

A comparable imaginative intelligence is also at work in “Still Life”, where the Wyatt-like refrain “I shall not soon forget” adds a lyric note that only emphasizes the dreadful indignity inflicted on a man dying of Aids: “I shall not soon forget / The angle of his head, / Arrested and reared back / On the crisp field of bed, // Back from what he could neither / Accept, as one opposed, / Nor as a lifelong breather / Consentingly let go, / The tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished O”. The attention to detail reveals a sympathy that is powerless to help, but offers instead a scrupulous fidelity. In “Rastignac at 45”, from My Sad Captains, we hear that Rastignac’s irony and distaste have given him a facial tic, but that living with it “has, for him, diminished the horror”. In Gunn’s case, neither the risk nor the horror is reduced. Michael Nott has done honour to his complex subject. This, and the Selected Poems edited by Wilmer, as well as Kleinzahler’s selection, are good places for new readers to begin, and for the rest of us to look afresh at this remarkable and at times exemplary poet, while awaiting a revised and expanded Collected Poems. n

SEPTEMBER 13, 2024

Another country American writers at a dark period in the history of masculinity

KEVIN BRAZIL STRANGE RELATIONS Masculinity, sexuality and art in mid-century America

RALF WEBB 352pp. Sceptre. £20.

Ralf Webb’s Strange Relations takes as its theme what James Baldwin called “the great problem”: “how to be – in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word – a man”. In mid-century America, this problem preoccupied not just Baldwin, but also Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and John Cheever, four writers whose lives and works

Kevin Brazil is the author of Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, 2022

TLS

are explored here in four loosely connected chapters – with McCullers feeling slightly lumped in among the male authors. These writers have “immediate relevance to our contemporary crisis in masculinity”: male mental health, loneliness, suicide, violence against women and queer people. It’s a strained claim that makes for an awkward start. The “crisis” behind the appeal of Andrew Tate, 4Chan, Donald Trump et al is the seductive power of male heterosexuality: the kind that is also behind the warping violence explored by writers such as David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk or Norman Mailer; that is to say, writers who, just like their subjects, are rarely pleasant to read or read about – but are perhaps all the more necessary for that.

If Strange Relations stumbles out of the gate with a bid for relevance, it almost veers off track with an opening section on Walt Whitman: a poet who has a lot to say about masculinity, but whose relevance to our present, or to the writers under discussion, is barely argued. So it is a relief when the book finally settles down into what it clearly wants to be: an earnest and often charming stroll through the lives and works of four well-known writers for whom Webb has an evident enthusiasm.

Mid - c en t u r y Amer i c a was i ndeed a s t r ange moment in the history of masculinity. On the one hand, the fixed identity of the homosexual and heterosexual had been defined by medicine and psychoanalysis in their most pseudo - sc i entific modes; on the other, Gay Liberation’s reclamation and questioning of these identities had yet to take place. And so Webb shows currents of repressed and unnameable desires rippling through McCullers’s novels and Williams’s plays, currents that he shows are so defining for a play such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) precisely because they could not be precisely named.

The chapter on Cheever gets closest to this conflict between what men want and what they think they are. In Cheever’s journals and stories we see a man torn between his desire to be a husband, father and middle-class Yankee, and a sexual desire for other men that he can only see as “aberrant and stained”. Webb gets into the erotic specifics of how this war played out: the fixation on the athlete’s body in “The Swimmer” is a hymn “to bygone youth and beauty … incommensurate with the adult world”. Sing Sing prison – where Cheever taught classes – provides inspiration for the one world in which he could depict explicitly love between men taking place. The metaphor for what heterosexuality does to men couldn’t be clearer.

These kinds of close readings, bringing together sensitively the authors’ lives and works, are the most enjoyable and illuminating aspects of Strange Relations. Less enjoyable is the decision to write the biographical sections in a rapid-fire present tense: “John Cheever stands guard over a group o f pr i soners, holding a l oaded gun”; “Carson McCullers is looking at herself in the window of a Fifth Avenue bookshop”. This doesn’t just read like an unnecessary attempt to make these lives “exciting” when they are plenty exciting enough. In a sparely footnoted book that names none of the biographies from which it draws, it introduces uncertainty about what these authors thought and said. “Writing to Tennessee is tantamount to breathing”: says who? Williams, or Webb in imaginative flight? Cheever’s “writing process is tantamount to a painful, physical purge”: was it? How these writers understood how they wrote is a not insignificant matter, and even a minor stylistic tic raises questions about accuracy that undermine the book as a whole.

Ralf Webb traces a distinct moment in the literary history of masculinity, one arguably darker than he can admit. Alcoholism and depression run through these pages. None of these authors found a way to live, or live with, the masculinity they desired, and their works offer a critique of how things are rather than an inspiration for how things could be. Maybe this is the real point Strange Relations wishes to make: that solving the “crisis in masculinity” is a task that won’t be achieved by literature alone. n

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