California, where our westering instincts come to an end, has always been an imaginary place as well as a real one. In the second half of the last century the state became the home, and to some degree the subject, of three remarkable English artists: the novelist Christopher Isherwood, the painter David Hockney, and the poet Thom Gunn. Now that Thom Gunn has died, David Hockney, who spends more and more time here in England these days, is the survivor. He painted a great double portrait of Isherwood and his companion, Don Bachardy; Thom Gunn wrote a poem, "To Isherwood Dying."
It is no coincidence that the three men were homosexual and left England while gay sex between consenting adults was still illegal. So it was in California, but statutes were ambiguously worded and local politicians, Governor Ronald Reagan included, were sensitive to public pressure as well as changing public views. The issue for these artists was not forbidden behaviour but the centrality of sex to their work. This is less true of Hockney whose technical and investigative range is immense. Nevertheless, his best known paintings, the swimming pools with or without bare bottoms, may also be his best. Thom Gunn is likewise fine for being able to make universal what is also specifically gay. His poem "My Sad Captains," just 18 lines of seven syllables apiece, is one of the great sad songs about love in our language. The title is drawn from Antony and Cleopatra and the poem lives up to it.
Gunn published his first work, Fighting Terms, in 1954, not long after leaving Cambridge. He was 25 and a little older than another Cambridge poet, Ted Hughes. They became linked journalistically, though Hughes's debut came three years later. Both seemed confident and tough young writers, not angry young men. If you describe Gunn's early volumes to someone who has not seen them (poetry must look as well as sound), you might seem to be indicating correspondences with the nascent pop art movement. There were poems about bikers, Teddy boys, Elvis, voyeurs, a fallen rake and the leader of the attempted assassination of Hitler, Claus von Stauffenberg. But in formal terms the poems were restrained, neither loud nor attention-grabbing. They were counter-modernist too. This was the age of Philip Larkin and "the movement," of resistance to TS Eliot and Ezra Pound as well as neoromantic poets like George Barker or Dylan Thomas. You had to say what you meant and justify your meaning. No golden age seemed unalloyed:
Shakespeare must keep the peace, and Jonson's thumb
Be wounded (for manslaughter), to the power
Of irons the admired Southampton's power was come.
Above all swayed the diseased and doubtful Queen:
Her state canopied by the glamour of pain.
A useful revision, surely, one year after the coronation and tabloid clucking (Gunn's father was a successful Fleet Street editor) about a new Elizabethan age.
Barely three years into this age Gunn settled in California, though he never changed his nationality. He tried from time to time to break into the "open measure" of the counter-metrical, counter-mathematical poets he admired like William Carlos Williams and the Californian Robert Duncan. Duncan's resolute openness about being gay was also an inspiration, as if freedom in respect of craft paralleled freedom in respect of one's life. But Gunn's poetic tennis always required a net. The special pleasure of his work, some good examples of free verse notwithstanding, lies in a tension between the pleasures of Californian promiscuity (he remained emotionally faithful to one partner) and tight-assed, very British metrical forms. Movement poets were drawn to an Oxford and Cambridge philosophical rigour. In 1973, a Watergate year, he rose to the public occasion with a rigorous poem about the Statue of Liberty:
In Nixon's era, decades after the ferry,
The copper embodiment of the pieties
Seems hard, but hard like a revolutionary
With indignation, constant as she is.
From here you can glimpse her downstream, her far charm,
Liberty, tiny woman in the mist
You cannot see the torch - raising her arm
Lorn, bold, as if saluting with her fist.
Gunn is a neoclassical poet, not a neoromantic one. The term applies in two ways. He takes a classical view of history. Pride, anger, desire are permanent conditions. Events arrange themselves around them. The universe is indifferent. Forces, the gods as it were, are capricious or chaotic and things burn with hard energy, like the stars. But courage and mercy are human conditions also. Even athletic and physically aggressive lovers, straight or gay, melt into each other "like the way the Sa?ne/ joins the Rh?ne at Lyon."
The poet was well into his fifties when the Aids earthquake struck his adopted city of San Francisco, epicentre of America's coming out. He rose to this occasion too. The last volume he chose to include in his 1994 Collected Poems was "The Man with Night Sweats." Harrowing elegies, medically explicit as if parodying sexual explicitness, are housed in rhyming couplets and light verse forms. This decision was intelligent and humane. Going on about your feelings in a romantic way is no tough response to disaster or loss. Rest him.
