Thom Gunn,
Boss Cupid (London: Faber & Faber, 2000)
From
its title onwards, this is a bizarre and rather lovely book. To my
mind, it is Gunn’s best collection since the dreadfully underrated
Moly (1971), but I wonder how many readers will agree.
Certainly, there are individual poems here which rank with Gunn’s best.
Among them I would include ‘The Gas Poker’, ‘In the Post Office’ and
two short sequences, ‘Troubadour’ (about the gay American
serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer) and ‘Dancing David’ (about the biblical
myth of King David).
But it is as a whole collection that
Boss Cupid really triumphs. To read it for the first time, even
if already familiar with some of the poems it contains, is to be led
through an unpredictable sequence of changes of direction in topic,
technique and tone whose initial effect was, for
me, one of thrilling bewilderment. On subsequent reading, however,
everything falls into place. What might have seemed perverse, or even
out of control, at first, is suddenly entirely logical, precisely in
keeping with the whole of the rest of the poet’s
career.
We have seen such variety before. It has opened Gunn to adverse
criticism in the past, often from readers who were uncomfortable with
the insufficient loftiness
of syllabic and free-verse poems from the middle period—usually poems
about sex or drugs or rock’n’roll. Well,
Boss Cupid contains poems from the loft and the cellar, as well as a playroom or two in between. This is some edifice.
Having reached the age of seventy, Gunn is availing himself of frequent
opportunities for retrospection. The collection opens with a poem
about Robert Duncan,
in the 1940s when he was starting out as a poet and in 1988, the year
of his death. Conveniently, while setting out a broad time-span, this
piece immediately locates not only Duncan but, for the rest of his life,
Gunn himself in San Francisco. Other poems
then revisit Gunn’s own childhood in England; the Second World War; a
sexual encounter in Central Park in 1961; the height of the gay
liberationist bathhouse subculture in 1975 (‘that time is gone’); a G.I.
seen briefly from the top of a bus in Richmond in
1943; Jeffrey Dahmer’s serial killings in the 1980s; a visit to Rapallo
in the 1950s. In that order. The latest date mentioned is New Year’s
Day, 1997.
Many of the poems, in one way or another, deal with the relationship
between youth and old age. Gunn’s consistent interest in and liking for
many aspects of popular
culture is one of the factors which maintain his link with the young.
So, of course, is sexual desire. He is forever being startled by the
affectionate gifts (in both senses) of young men. We have seen boys
like these before, ‘armored in hide that / adorns
to hide / every fallibility, / cruelty or awkwardness / with the smooth
look / of power’. But these days Gunn's poems are much more likely
than they once were to observe moments in which the armour of
masculinity is transfigured into sensitive skin by acts
of kindness. When a homeless youth does him the unexpected honour of
slipping his penis into Gunn's hand (‘a lovely gift to offer an old /
stranger / without conditions’), Gunn is neither affronted nor
particularly turned on. But he falls for the cuteness
of this young man's unwitting corruption of the phrase dog-eat-dog: he
says this is ‘a doggy-dog world’. All the cuter for the fact, as Gunn
goes on to show us, that it is sometimes literally a man-eat-man world.
I suppose this is the most sexual of all Gunn's books, more so even than
Jack Straw’s Castle or The Passages of Joy. Its epigraph
is peculiar—‘Well, it’s a cool queer tale!’ from a Thomas Hardy story.
The adjectives ‘cool’ and ‘queer’ acquire a distinctly un-Hardyesque
tone when heard in Thom Gunn’s voice. Together
they amount to a combination of chic, detachment, oddity and
homosexuality. This is a blend which has fuelled Gunn’s work since the
beginning of his career, but there is a new openness in the use of the
word ‘queer’ to denote something more complex than the
mere ‘lifestyle’ of being gay. It is an identification with
marginality, but with margins (poverty, sexuality) which are—if anything
is—universal.
The last collection,
The Man With Night Sweats (1992), mesmerised the critics with its
explicit attention to AIDS, which they seemed to find both exotic and
reassuring. Virtually none of the reviewers showed any sign of knowing
that anything else had ever been written about
AIDS, or that gay culture had itself, for virtually a decade, become an
enormous cultural festival of mourning. AIDS is present here, too, but
as a calamity survived. For all that it has killed so many, it has
left life intact. Place Gunn’s version of the
catastrophe next to (say) that of Larry Kramer and you could imagine
you were looking at a different epidemic. Gunn’s approach is wistfully
temperate. He brandishes his own equilibrium with a slightly startled
modesty which serves as a representative tribute
to the dignity and maturity of the communities and subcultures which
responded to AIDS when others chose not to.
In the poem ‘In the Post Office’ Gunn speaks of himself as a survivor.
Living where he does when he did, there must have been times when he
imagined survival
was not on the cards. Gunn’s recent writing is pervaded with a
discreet sense of relief that it is still possible for him to continue
recording the lives and deaths of those who were less lucky than he.
The collection is all the stronger for the vulnerable triviality of
some of the free verse in the central section, ‘Gossip’ (much of which
was published as a chapbook
called Frontiers of Gossip in 1998). These poems of bars, boys
and the promise of uncomplicated pleasure (‘The democracy of it: /
eventually everyone / can hope for a turn / at being wanted’) are
sketchily efficient—not so much gossip in itself as
the materials out of which gossip might be made. This section saves Boss Cupid
from a formalist tendency that might otherwise have threatened to
ossify. Gunn is always a very literary poet—not just in refinement of
technique, but in his allusiveness--and
he uses his apparently casual free verse to remind us that his main
inspiration arises in what an earlier collection referred to as ‘the
sniff of the real’.
His characteristic designation of sex as ‘play’ sits uneasily—and
deliberately so—alongside the later sequence of poems spoken from the
point of view of the serial
killer, which are both beautiful and bleak. He no longer writes with
the blustering virility of those early poems which hero-worshipped men
like Alexander of Macedon and ridiculed Stephen Spender. The
identification with Jeffrey Dahmer, here, is much quieter
and more fully realised. Unlike the posturing nihilism of Bret Easton
Ellis’ novel
American Psycho, Gunn’s sympathy for Dahmer seems derived from a
there-but-for-the-grace-of-God sense that the essential ingredients of
the murderer are not uncommon or extreme. They can be counted among the
raw materials of common humanity.
The serious attention Gunn pays to the perverse idealism of the sexual
assassin then reflects back on the nonchalant banality of erotic poems
from earlier in the
book, as when ‘Classics’ ends with the lines: ‘I could have killed /
for a chance to chew / on those jumbo tits’; or when, in ‘Coffee Shop’,
two lovers are kissing ‘mouth to mouth, / Where mutually they start to
feed’. Clichés like ‘good enough to eat’ are
disturbingly transformed from dead metaphor into deadly intention. Sex
has become—as it always was, anyway, before the discovery of
antibiotics—a game that is, for some of its players at least,
definitively unsafe. In its delineation of ‘The obsession in
which we live’ and ‘The intellect as powerhouse of love’ (both phrases
from a wonderful poem called ‘A Wood Near Athens’), Gunn’s imagination
maps out a contingent universe in which the obsessiveness of intellect
is reassuringly constant. This is most evident
in the rational balance of the more obviously personal poems.
The dispassionate involvement of ‘The Gas Poker’, Gunn’s poem on his
mother’s suicide, is achieved by the use of the third person to
refer to himself and his brother and by a characteristically deft,
informal, rhymed iambic trimeter. There have always been moments when
his sang froid threatened to teeter over into cold-bloodedness. This is
one of them. The effect is one over which Gunn
is the complete master. It is not the control so much as the lightness
of touch with which he exerts it that is so impressive. It is not the
intensity of emotion so much as the diffident quietness with which he
expresses it that is so moving. His obsessions,
for all that they may not be the same as the reader’s, are delivered
with that quiet authority we have come to expect from Thom Gunn, an
authority to which it is hard not to submit.
[This review first appeared in
PN Review 133 (May-June 2000), pp.67-68.]
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