Book Review: ‘Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life,’ by Michael Nott

THOM GUNN: A Cool Queer Life, by Michael Nott

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One version of the life of Thom Gunn might go like this: After a childhood spent in an erratic orbit of Fleet Street journalism, Gunn developed into a remarkably assured young writer and had immediate success as a poet, first in Britain, then in the United States. Openly gay despite the dangers of that identification in the second half of the 20th century, he led a scruffy, cheerfully louche existence (loads of sex with dubious characters, piles of drugs, often with the same dubious characters) while writing poems of elegant astringency. Gunn taught at several universities with conscientiousness, he plunged into leather dive bars as if they were all about to close forever, and he earned a devoted battalion of advocates who viewed him as a world-class writer who, rare among world-class writers, didn’t court the favor of people who use descriptions like “world-class writer.” He died as a prize-bedecked iconoclast, a near contradiction that suited him down to his panther tattoo.

Another version might go like this: A precocious poet but also a haunted, depressive young man, Gunn crossed the Atlantic in 1954 and found companionship and acceptance, particularly in San Francisco, his longtime home. But he could never fully overcome the darkness that had gathered around him since the moment when, at age 15, he found his mother’s body after she’d taken her own life. Though he became a beloved writer and teacher with a strong circle of loyal friends, most notably his longtime partner Mike Kitay, he was driven to risky, compulsive behavior that struck even some of his piratical associates as excessive. He died alone in his bedroom of a drug overdose at age 74, having last been seen “decked out in his leathers like he was going out.”

It’s to the credit of Michael Nott’s new biography, “Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life,” that these versions, and several others, seem equally and sometimes alternately valid. Gunn has always been a puzzle. Incongruity is a primary feature of his poetry, which frequently takes an impersonal, formal stance toward (or against) decidedly informal subject matter; the effect is as if glaciers had somehow been drawn up the slopes of an active volcano. “Venetian Blind,” a poem from the 1980s, begins, “I pull it down while glancing through/Into my neighbour’s room next door,” and quickly moves to sketchier territory: “You know I’m watching. How I wish/You’d come up here, dark sportive sport.” The poem ends:

I study possibility
Through rigid slats, or ordered verses,
Within which border it rehearses
Its partial being, freeing me
Slightly adjusting them to scan
The self-possession that is you,
Who cannot guess at what I do
Here, light-sliced, with another man.

The Elizabethan elaboration of this voyeuristic, exhibitionistic scenario is like being offered a bong by someone wearing a doublet.

There are two basic types of poetic biography: the critical study with biographical elements, and the complete life for scholarly posterity. Nott’s is the latter, with an emphasis on “complete.” If you’d like to know where Gunn went for drinks when he lived in New York in 1970, well, he “still frequented the leather bar Keller’s but also enjoyed new bars: His favorites included the Zoo, on West 13th Street, and the Den, a members-only leather bar at West 12th Street and Greenwich Avenue.” A little of such pulverizing detail can go a long way; I would have been content not to learn, for example, that “Andy,” one of Gunn’s dozens and dozens of unstable, much younger conquests, “ruptured a testicle and spent several days in San Francisco General.” But Nott, who previously co-edited a collection of Gunn’s letters, has set out here to produce a work sturdy enough to support decades of future commentary on Gunn. He’s succeeded — this book is everything you ever wanted to know about Thom Gunn but had not even thought about asking.