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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