GLR November-December 2022

Francisco Review of Books. Like Jimmy, he admired Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry; but otherwise there was little overlap in their taste and “lifestyle.” (In his letters he says he doesn’t like any poet who writes elegantly about opera, as both Sandy and Jimmy did, with considerable flair.) The mere fact of being gay isn’t, in itself, sufficient to create a close friendship or inspire admiration for another gay person’s writing. I’d hoped that Thom and I might get to be on close terms, but we never quite did, partly because he didn’t often leave San Francisco, just as I didn’t often get to San Francisco. Also, I think he regarded the poetry circle I belonged to as a bit on the conventional side. None of my friends was into leather bars or the biker scene. On the other hand, Sandy and I were a decade and a half younger than Thom, and back then people often said we were good-looking. Physical appeal (to understate) was something to which Thom was not indifferent. During that first visit, he asked where the john was and went off to take a piss. Sitting in the living room, we heard him whistling some tune or other. Loudly. The exchange of letters (or postcards) continued, though, and eventually, when Thom was awarded a poetry prize from Brandeis University, I was asked to substitute for him at the award ceremony because he didn’t want to make the trip just to pick up a medal. I did, and sent a letter afterward, with a bit of doggerel in it: “Isn’t it fun/ Being a pun/ For Thomson Gunn!” But I’m not so sure he was amused at being part of that equation. There was only one Thom Gunn, full stop. § lunch, telling me to come to his house in the Haight, so I took a bus from the Mission District past brightly painted ginger bread Gothic houses and spherically trimmed camphor trees to Cole Street. The rest of the way I walked, past Parnassus, Waller, and Alma Streets to No. 1216, where I knocked—late to the appointment because of traffic snarls. Thom bounded downstairs and said we should go directly to the restaurant where he’d booked a table. A five-minute walk to a simple place crowded with ferns, where we had a tasty meal. Thom looked a little heavier than when I last saw him, deeply sun tanned, with a small gold ring in his earlobe, which was not so common an ornament at that time. The tattoo on his arm had been there since the early 1960s, long before any non-work ing-class person dared to have one. His voice was resonant, breathier and higher in pitch than you might expect, with an accent that was sort of American-flavored British. I remem ber I was wearing a white polo shirt that clung to my very worked-out chest and noticed Thom’s eyes straying down to it several times. Thom had a certain English reserve, so I had to scrounge for conversational topics, asking him, for example, what he’d been reading. The answer was unexpected: Francis Parkman’s classic history of Canada—also a favorite of my friend David Plante, though I don’t think they ever met. I N THE FALL OF 1984, during a reading jaunt to the West Coast, I had a chance to see Thom on home ground. I was staying for a few days with friends in San Francisco (the Mission District, to be exact) before giving a reading at Berkeley. Thom asked me to

As for his writing, he told me a curious thing: he never gave a new book to his publisher until he had already written the book that would follow it. The reason was that he didn’t want the reception of one book to influence the composition of the next. In fact, too negative a response might discourage him from writing at all. Most writers (fibbing, I suspect) say they don’t read reviews or, if they do, aren’t influenced by them. Books composed in advance were Thom’s solution to this dilemma. We walked back to 1216 and entered an odd living space consisting of connecting rooms on two levels. Mike Kitay was away somewhere, but his collection of enameled metal adver tising signs covered the walls: bright pictures of soda pop bot tles in rainbow colors, with brand names from earlier decades (phallic symbols if you wanted to see them that way). In an adjoining room, there were other collectibles: brand-name beer coasters arranged on a wall in a lozenge pattern and a glass case with little pop culture figures like the comic strip charac ters Dagwood, Paul Bunyan, and Superman. There was a lit tle more casual conversation before it occurred to me I should be on my way before anything awkward happened. I left, turn ing our time together over in my mind. Thom’s life habits were anything but routine, certainly different from mine and my friends’, but they were sincerely bound to his identity and need no apology. The next day I read in Berkeley, with Thom in attendance, I attended, but such occasions don’t allow for in-depth conver sation, and, besides, I may have been a little distracted by meet ing Fenton and his close friend Christopher Hitchens. After that, I only recall one encounter during the rest of the 1980s, a brief chat in the café one level above Grand Central Station’s main concourse. I admit to feeling rather dismissed, but the sugar coating on the pill was Thom’s telling me he very much liked a poem in my most recent book The West Door . “Home Thoughts in Winter, 1778” tells the story of an ancestor of mine, a soldier in the American Revolution who spent the winter with Wash ington at Valley Forge. No one besides Thom has ever compli mented me on that poem; yet it is the only one Thom ever singled out for praise. Perhaps it’s because the poem is about a soldier and mentions his musket, who knows? Writers have un expected takes on each other. § I N 1993, I REVIEWED Thom’s The Man with Night Sweats for Poetry magazine. For many of his readers, it’s his best book, no doubt because of the pathos of his subject, the AIDS epi demic that had ravaged both San Francisco and NewYork over the previous decade. I reread it this month and find its excel lence undiminished. No collection of poems on this subject is but there were so many people crowding around after (including Robert Pinsky, Leonard Michaels, and Brenda Hillman) that Thom couldn’t say much, except to offer compliments before leaving. From there I was scheduled to fly to the next reading at UCLA, so I didn’t see Thom again. However, he came to New York about two weeks later to read at the 92nd Street YMHAwith James Fenton. Needless to say,

Thom had determined that a soul would be most authentic if he lived as an outlier, an unapologetic queer renegade, indifferent to middle-class values.

The G & LR

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