The Letters of Thom Gunn by Thom Gunn

Author:Thom Gunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

1. The Ambush (1973–86) was a South of Market leather bar, art gallery and informal community centre on Harrison Street, frequented by TG.

2. Michael Tolliver is a major character in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City; the EndUp is a nightclub in San Francisco’s South of Market neighbourhood.

TO Douglas Chambers

TLS Toronto

Monday 4 October 1976

1216 Cole St.,

San Francisco,

Calif. 94117

4 Oct 76

Dear Douglas,

Here is that terrible correspondent again. Thank you for your letter of return, and I suppose you are hard at work again by now.

Interesting what you say about the boys of the thirties, because they were still the main influence on me and my friends when we started at Cambridge in the early fifties. Somehow we couldn’t use Dylan Thomas in the same way we could Auden. The great thing about Auden was that he could speak about absolutely everything, and he made you feel that it was easy. So I owe a great debt to him, and so do a lot of my contemporaries, though it is far from fashionable to praise him. But ultimately my reservations about him are terrific: he talks easily about everything, but so much of it is too easy. The book where he really let go, and the one I still read with most pleasure, is The Orators – which he wouldn’t allow to be reprinted until the end of his life, perhaps less for the political reasons he gives in the prefatory note than for the fact that it’s a dead give away about his (homo)sexual fantasies. But it is a fascinating book, darling – almost like Cocteau (of all the unlikely people).

Isherwood, in the long run, seems to me to outdistance him. He too has an easy style, but it is not, like A’s, mannered, and it allows him to go much deeper into things: I think particularly of the end of A Single Man, and the first few pages of the last Berlin Diary (in Goodbye to Berlin). Boy, that simple prose is doing so much. It has always seemed to me that people have underestimated Isherwood because he is so easy and entertaining to read – you could read one of his shorter books on a plane trip. I have a strong suspicion that his best books are ultimately much better than, say, Faulkner’s best books.

I seem to be pontificating.

[…]

I will look up the Carruth book.1 He loathes my work, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t like his. Let me recommend a book to you: The Names of the Lost, by Philip Levine (Atheneum, NY). Very recent. He is someone I have known and liked for twenty years, but I found his early poetry rather dull. Recently, though, each book has got better than the last. His style is very bare, beautifully so, but is able to take on ALL the complications of being human. My comment is pompous, but he is not. I wish I could do the kind of thing he can, I feel the tremendous vulnerability of people, but I don’t seem to get it into the poetry.

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