Britain’s Expatriate Poet
Thom Gunn:
Interview with Hank Nuwer
Thom Gunn, the distinguished author of such books of verse as Moly, The
Passages of Joy, My Sad Captains, and Jack Straw’s Castle and
Other Poems, was born in Gravesend, England, in 1929. He has lived in
the United States for many years now, however, and supplements his
writing income with teaching duties at Cal-Berkeley and other
universities. The following interview is actually two interviews: one
conducted in a Reno, Nevada, seafood restaurant, and the other at
Gunn’s comfortable San Francisco digs. Gunn comes across as a
delightful cross between an intellectual and a buccaneer. The poet is
revered in his native England, but he is too often shamefully ignored
by American reviewers.
* * *
NUWER: When you were young, were there deaths in your
family—of people close to you?
GUNN: My mother [Charlotte] died when I was fourteen, in 1944, which
was practically at the end of the war. But I had a very happy
childhood. I don’t want to make it sound as though it
wasn’t. The teens were difficult, but the teens were
difficult for a lot of people, I think, maybe for most people, maybe
for all people. I don’t want to convey that I was unhappy.
NUWER: It’s my impression that a writer or poet knows what
image he wants an audience to have.
GUNN: I was thinking about this interview earlier. I thought,
“What do I want Hank to think of me?” I
don’t want to play games. Nobody wants to play games. As far
as I can I want to be honest about myself. I’m sure there are
certain areas of reticence, but I’ll let you know when we
reach them.
NUWER: Right.
GUNN: Maybe it would help if I told you now that I’m gay, but
I don’t have any clear image of myself. Maybe
that’s a weakness of some sort. I wrote a letter to a friend
who shoed it to another friend in the same city. The second friend
said, “Why don’t you ever write me any interesting
letters like that?” And then I realized that I write to
people the way they write to me. This was an amusing Jamesian kind of
letter—the same way he writes letters to me. The other one
was writing very clipped letters, like lists, one-two-three-four, of
things that had happened to him. So, I wrote back to him the same way.
And to some extent I think I’m a bit anonymous.
It’s so hard to get outside oneself. But I think I borrow so
many characteristics from my friends. For example, my roommates have
such good taste. I have some good taste in putting things up on the
wall, but I can always tell where it comes from.
NUWER: Does this extend to your poetry? Do you find that your books
change considerably from book to book?
GUNN: Well, two things come into play there. First, when
you’re young you start writing. Obviously you’re
very susceptible to whatever the current fashions are. But you
don’t realize this; you don’t work like this
deliberately. When I started writing poetry seriously in my early
twenties, which was back in the early Fifties, all my contemporaries
were a bit older than me and were writing rhyming, metrical poetry.
This was not only the British, but also many of the Americans,
especially the East Coast Americans—Richard Wilbur, Anthony
Hecht, Donald Hall—those people. You know, you think
you’re unique when you start writing. You wouldn’t
write, otherwise. You don’t realize how derivative you are.
But I was very much a part of it, without meaning to be, you know. But
book-to-book, there is a kind of unity to my books, which is not a
deliberate one. I mean, it may be in the last few poems of a book I
realize I have a subject, and I write poems to fill out that
subject. Like with Moly, I realized three-quarters of the way
through the writing that the subject is largely LSD. It
wasn’t my deliberate intention when I started to write the
poems that eventually became that book. Moly came out of my life. It
came out of what I was doing.
NUWER: That didn’t come from what [Gary] Snyder was doing, or
[Allen] Ginsberg was doing, or other poets that you admire?
GUNN: Hardly—although I do admire them—because I
was adopting such a different strategy for dealing with the question of
drugs. It was first unconsciously and then consciously that I wrote
about drugs in very tight forms, and then in my book, Touch, I started
abandoning them. I have free verse and more open forms in that book. At
some stage or another I found I was using these tight metrical
forms—stanza forms and rhyme usually—and I wondered
why. Then I realized I was dealing with something so large; there were
hankerings for the infinite after all involved in taking LSD. I was
taking a structure, a predefined structure, to deal with it. Other
wise, there was a danger of it all floating away. The freeness of the
experience expressed thought free verse might just dissipate it for me.
There are disciplines I must adopt sometimes to tie my subject down.
NUWER: Why do you stick to very structured forms at a time when
you’re practically an innovator, let’s say, in
doing it? Philip Larkin is the only other British name that comes to
mind who is still using them.
GUNN: It’s a tune. Structure, meter and rhyme are like a
tune. And you can be just as free writing to a tune as you can be not
writing to one. Larkin is very deliberately conservative, very
deliberately provincial. He doesn’t even like the idea of
coming to America, apparently, although I’ve never met him
personally. I admire him to an extent. One cannot but admire him. But
it’s not only his forms; it’s also his attitudes.
They’re virtually the ones of somebody who could have been
writing thirty or forty years ago, except for some contemporary
references. The attitude behind it is obviously very old fashioned,
deliberately so. I want to be able to go on writing in both forms, with
a tune and without a tune.
NUWER: I’m curious to know why your books aren’t
reviewed very much by such publications as The New York Times.
GUNN: I don’t know. Maybe American critics feel I’m
too English to be interesting still. I don’t completely
understand, even now, about poetry reviewing in America. For example, a
book of mine in 1961 called My Sad Captains did very well for a book of
poetry, but it got very little review. And a friend of mine, Robert
Duncan, who in an internationally known poet, says that his last couple
of books were barely reviewed anywhere, except in the quarterly
reviews. And, of course, you have to wait a year or more to get into
there.
NUWER: I wonder in your case if it’s because you live in the
West? You’re outside the New York intellectual circles.
GUNN: Both Englishes are known on the West Coast, so I don’t
fit anywhere at all. I don’t’ very much mind the
situation. I don’t think I’m cut out to be a star.
It’s kind of nice to be doing so well in England, but to be
so unknown here. It has its conveniences.
NUWER: It doesn’t affect how you write, either? In your
choice of themes?
GUNN: No, no. I have, in my time and n various places, been reviewed a
lot. And I’ve learned extremely little from reviews. Very
occasionally, someone really good well get on my case and say something
that is very helpful to me. It’s funny with
reviewers. Very often people will like me for what I consider are all
the wrong reasons, and sometimes people dislike me for the wrong
reasons. It’s so good to be liked, or even disliked, for all
the right reasons. One of the most useful adverse reviews that was ever
written about me was by James Dickey. He said some things about me that
made sense, I must say. I learned from him, but mostly, somehow,
reviewers tend to get the emphasis wrong. I wish I was really strong
like Wallace Stevens who, apparently, never read any of his reviews.
(Chuckles) I don’t have that small an ego. One
can’t help having a certain amount of vanity. Also,
it’s interesting to know how people react.
NUWER: How did you get you start as a poet?
GUNN: I came from a very literate household. There were always lots of
books around. I think a lot of children from literary households do
play around writing short stories and poems intermittently. Partly to
please their parents maybe, and partly because if they like reading,
they’re imitating what they like which is natural enough.
Sometimes in my teens I thought that I’d like to be as
writer, although it was then rather generalized. I thought of myself as
being a novelist more than anything else. I went through various sprit
of writing around the age of seventeen of eighteen, not doing any of it
very well; it was all so pathetically derivative, as probably most
people’s work is at that age. Then I went to college and
something happened right around the end of my first year. Some certain
things must have come together, emotionally maybe. I was suddenly able
to write decently and got published first of all in undergraduate
magazines—of which there weren’t a great deal of
there. There were usually three literary magazines at Cambridge. So you
can say in a sense that I didn’t get seriously started until
I was twenty-one, although I had been playing around with writing for
quite a long time before that.
NUWER: Did you come from a wealthy family?
GUNN: When I was born, my parents were lower middle class. By the time
I was in my teens, they were upper middle class. My father died quite a
rich man. He was a journalist. He went from being a small time
journalist to a big editor; he was editor of The Daily Sketch. He
worked for Lord Beaverbrook at the Daily Standard for a long time until
he had an argument with him, apparently to my father’s
credit, so people have told me. Then he was given an ailing paper on
Fleet Street called The Daily Sketch, which he managed, with few
scruples, to elevate into a paper that sold over a million copies. It
was a lot of religion, sex and royalty—the three things he
knew would attract people, and they sure did.
NUWER: Rupert Murdoch’s formula.
GUNN: Oh, very much. Very much.
NUWER: What was his name?
GUNN: Herbert Gunn, or H.S. Gunn, as he once was referred to by Time
magazine. He’s been dead since 1961.
NUWER: Did he encourage you?
GUNN: He wasn’t much of a reader. It was my mother who was a
reader. I don’t think he ever read any of my poetry, although
he was very proud that I published those books. My parents were
divorced when I was about eight. He was appreciative, but in a general
way.
NUWER: Did you live with your father, then?
GUNN: No, I never lived with my father, although I saw him frequently.
My brother Ander went to live with my father who had remarried and
started another family of his own. I lived with friends of the family
and with relatives.
NUWER: Did you feel you were being shifted about? Did you resent this
treatment?
GUNN: No. I didn’t like my father too much. I was happy not
to be with him. We got on better when I was in my twenties.
NUWER: I wonder if you left England to get away from the family?
GUNN: No. Maybe unconsciously, but I don’t know. Yes. Maybe
unconsciously. First, I say “no” and now I say
“yes”. This was not my intention. Originally I came
over for just a year as a student to Stanford. It’s very
funny going back home. I think a lot of expatriates feel this way about
their country. I go back to England and I either feel absolute
depression or I feel very elated, never something in between the two.
I’m never sure what the cause is. As I say, I had a very
happy childhood, but your sixteen-year-old self comes at you from every
corner, and maybe your sixteen-year-old self is not easy to deal with.
NUWER: What kind of visual images come to you about sixteen? Maybe
something that prompted later poetic
images?
GUNN: There’s one poem called
“Autobiography,” which is, more or less,
autobiographical. You can see St. Paul’s in the distance,
standing like a stone thimble. I also stayed with two maiden aunts who
had a mild run in the country. It was very beautiful countryside, in
Snodland, a town as ugly as any small industrial town in England, but
with these very beautiful blue hills rising in the distance. It seems
amazingly old-fashioned now, but we had a pushcart and carried a huge
churn around. I would help them. You’d gat a bucket of milk
from the churn—with a top on it and a scoop inside
it—and you’d go around to people’s
outside back doors. They usually left a pitcher with a saucer on top,
and you’d put the right amount in. It was a village in Kent,
and if they forgot [to leave the saucers], you’d go right
into their kitchens and find a suitable pitcher yourself to put it in.
These were all very poor houses. My aunts were not well off either, so
it was not strictly a middle class life. In fact, for much of my teens,
it was schizophrenic in a way—this contrast between my upper
middle class life in London and my life with my aunts which was lower
middle class and countryish. My aunts’ customers were very
poor people and worked in factories. But I was very attached to my
aunts.
GUNN: I was only sent away to schools during the Blitz. The adults
around me were really very good about the war. I and my brother found
it, at times exciting, and at times, inconvenient. We really
didn’t like going away to a boarding school for a
year-and-a-half, although it was a very nice boarding school. It was in
the country, safe from bombs, but we thought the bombings were quite
exciting. We saw one of the first V-2’s, those pilotless
planes. I remember that we were just about to go to school; this would
have been in 1944. My brother noticed it and he pointed it out to me.
The plane was making a strange, loud noise, such as no noise
we’d ever heard a plane make before, although we had
experience with planes—American, British and German. We
didn’t know what it was until later that day.
NUWER: Were you a loner?
GUNN: I had schoolmates, but I was something of a loner, although
that’s maybe romanticizing myself. The life on an English
schoolboy in the mid-forties was very different from the life of
American people in school at the same time. I went to what would be
called a private school here. I liked it very much; I had a lot of
friends there. I remember every little bullying and very few fights.
The teaching was very good.
NUWER: When did you get into the biker kind of life?
GUNN: Not until I cam here. It’s very romantic. When I came
here it was the beginning of the myth about the biker. The Wild One
came out about 1954. It was a new myth like the myth of the cowboy. I
mean it seems so old right now, and there’ve been so many
lousy movies made of it that maybe it’s difficult to
recapture that kind of excitement. Also, I managed to mix all this in
with the existential hero—the kind of hero in
Sartre’s plays—, which was again kind of new. In
fact, there was a poem I wrote called “On the
Move,” where I was eulogizing a band of bikers, saying they
were not going to any destination. They were always moving toward.
NUWER: Ever have a bike?
GUNN: I had one for one month—which I rode rather badly and
smashed. (Laughter) It would be nice to say that I had one several
years. It was a Harley Davidson; I had a suicide bar. (Laughter)
NUWER: What happened to the bike?
GUNN: Well, I didn’t ever smash it. It kind of broke up on
its own accord. One day it became unridable. I figured by then that I
was being rather phony with all this, so I retired it.
NUWER: Did you hang out with bikers?
GUNN: With people who owned bikes. But not with anyone so glamorous as
outlaw bikers. But I have a built-in sympathy toward outlaws. This is
again romantic, but the very fact that they’re defying is
interesting and attractive. To be honest, I try to love my own life the
way I want to live it. I’ve gotten beyond making gestures,
and even when I did make gestures, they were more rhetorical than
anything else.
NUWER: Can you give examples?
GUNN: (Groans) I knew you were going to ask that! Oh, my best gesture
was when I was about nine years old. At the very beginning of the term
I was evacuated to a very ghastly school in the north. It was a
boarding school called Riley’s. My brother and I found it
very oppressive. The headmaster’s wife was something of an
ogress as I remember. At night we all had to kneel beside our beds. Now
I wasn’t brought up in any religion. I did this a couple of
nights, but I thought it was just silly. On the third night, around
ten, I went up to the headmaster’s wife, who was acting as
kind of matron in the dormitory, and said, “I don’t
want to do this. Could I just sit on my bed while they’re
doing this because I don’t believe in God.” She
looked at me in horror, but she had no choice but to punish me because
of my beliefs. Then, I remember the talk in the dormitory after lights
out. Before I had gotten along bloody well with all of them [students],
but this set me apart from them, that evening anyway. I heard one say,
“I wonder what’s wrong with Gunn. Do you think
he’s a Jew?” And then somebody who was a bit better
informed said, “Oh, no. The Jews pray even more than we
do.” (Laughter)
NUWER: My son is having a bit of similar trouble in school. His teacher
became upset when he demanded to know, “Is God anything like
King Kong?” (Laughter)
GUNN: That’s a great question. (Laughter) I remember an aunt
of mine, one of the two aunts, who had a daughter. One day the daughter
who was six or something came in and said, “What do we think
of God?” And her mother said, “We think God is
silly.”
NUWER: Another time my son, a fan of Sesame Street, visited my mother
in Buffalo who is very Catholic. He toddled into her bedroom and was
amazed to find a gigantic crucifix on the wall.
“Wow!” he shouted. “Look at the big
T.”
GUNN: (Laughter) I love that! That’s delightful.
NUWER: I take it that you never have religious symbols in your poetry?
GUNN: I once wrote a secular poem about Jesus and his mother. I was
just trying to treat them as human beings. It wasn’t
insulting, or at least I don’t think so.
NUWER: can you maybe talk about your youthful poetic influences? Auden
for instance?
GUNN: In my teens I was very excited by [Christopher] Marlowe and all
those good, rhetorical poets. I was very excited by the rhetoric. I was
influenced very much by Auden when I was at Cambridge. My early work,
my first book, really shows that influence.
NUWER: Did you have a mentor or did you spur yourself to go on through
individual effort?
GUNN: Individual.
NUWER: Do you have friends today that you try to impress, as opposed to
impressing reviewers?
GUNN: Since I’ve left Cambridge I always send my new poems to
a few friends to bounce off of them for reactions, because
I’m not that good at self-criticism. There’s always
a chance of total obscurity, of just not getting my point across at
all. They will tell me. I find this very necessary to me.
NUWER: Ever look at a published poem later and feel a sense of
embarrassment?
GUNN: It’s a funny thing that happens when you finish a poem.
When you finish a poem and it’s what you wanted to do, or,
hopefully, better than you wanted to do, it’s really a part
of you. But after several months or several years, it looks like
somebody else’s work with your own name beneath it.
It’s a past self. And sometimes, although I can’t
think of anything specific, it’s a so bad that it really is
embarrassing. Yeah. Yeah.
NUWER: Do you have nay sort of time period—the old nine years
or whatever—that you put a poem away before sending it off?
GUNN: No. No. I don’t have the strength to do that. I might
publish things that later seem awful, but when I feel pleased with a
poem, I’ll send it off somewhere.
NUWER: Do you have any particular revision patterns?
GUNN: Varies incredibly. I vary so much I can make no generalizations.
Occasionally something will come out so right that it’s
virtually done in a single draft. This is unusual. Usually,
it’s about ten drafts. I’ve never counted them, but
it’s something like that.
NUWER: Thurber used to say that his original drafts were like the work
of a sixth grader. How about yours?
GUNN: Very often the tenth version will look incredibly different from
the first version. The original version may just be notations. With
each revision I’ll try to get it out better. Sometimes all
that will survive from the original version will just be a few phrases
in the general scheme of the thing. One of the exciting things about
writing for me is the process of exploration. And often for me the
exploration takes place in successive drafts, with surprises along the
way. Often the poem you end with is going to be different from, and
better than, the first draft or your first notion of the poem.
Sometimes I’ll write a poem and realize that a quarter of it
near the end is the real poem; the rest of it was just preliminaries.
How I tell I don’t know. It just seems genuine, although
genuine is a very ambiguous word. Any writer, any
artist—well, you know, you’re a
writer—you know what you really were getting at, even though
it may surprise you.
NUWER: How do you work? I mean do you write three, four poems in a
short time span?
GUNN: No, no. I work very slowly. But I might get the ideas for several
poems in a single day. In fact I came across a piece of paper the other
day where I was sketching out ideas for what would certainly have been
a very pompous prose book called “The Acid
Garden”—I say it apologetically—which was
written in 1968 or so. And what astonished me was that about ten of
these ideas, which I had jotted down presumably in a day, later became
poems. But I’m very lucky if I ever write two poems in two
weeks. It doesn’t happen very often to me.
NUWER: So you don’t have a set work patter then?
GUNN: No. I’d like to but I’m afraid I
don’t. I write just when I can.
NUWER: I see.
GUNN: I’d hate to bullshit about inspiration or anything, and
certainly when you’re young you just have to get as much
written as possible. But I just can’t make myself write; I go
sometimes six months without writing anything. I used to think,
“Oh God, maybe I’ll just be [Arthur] Rimbaud
without the talent,” and think they’ll say,
“He stopped writing at nineteen.” Now I
don’t worry and I can see these sterile periods are really
good for me. It’s like a pregnancy. It’s rather
like there are ideas working themselves out, becoming less abstract,
and finding embodiment. I say
“ideas”—that covers a lot of ground.
Themes, passions, concepts, actual ideas as well—all of these
things mixing up together.
NUWER: Do you keep extensive notebooks?
GUNN: Yeah, I guess many writers do. It’s my way of keeping
things there. I can’t trust just to memory. I get very
dependent on them really. You note down something that you might not
think about for a couple months at the time when you weren’t
sure why it struck you. But maybe a few months later, you can see how
there’s some potential in it in some way.
NUWER: Do you ever just take a particular image out of context to use
in a poem, unrelated to your original thought, and drop the rest of it?
GUNN: Oh, yes, yeah. I don’t keep notebooks like a diary. I
mean I just write down something when I have a thought that needs
writing down. It will be very informal. It might be an image, or an
idea, and it might not even be in sentences. I keep notebooks for their
very practical use to myself.
* * *
Interview with Hank Nuwer; copyright Henry Nuwer