The Victorian house, in the Upper Haight neighbourhood of San Francisco, where the British-born poet Thom Gunn lived for more than thirty years and where he died, in 2004, at the age of seventy-four, is as pretty as all the other houses on Cole Street. It was purchased in part with a Guggenheim grant that Gunn received in 1971, and he shared it with his long-term partner, the theatre artist Mike Kitay, and various of their respective lovers and friends. In his queer home, Gunn, who is best known for his profound 1992 collection “The Man with Night Sweats,” a series of meditations on the impact of aids on his community, established a discipline of care that was a source of stability and comfort to him during the seismic changes in gay life that occurred during his years there. “Three or four times a week someone cooks for the whole house and guests,” Gunn wrote to a friend not long after moving in. “I have cooked for 12 several times already. . . . So things are working out very well: it is really, I realise, the way of living I’ve wanted for the last 6 years or so.”
One’s experience of Gunn’s poetry—which is, by turns, conversational, formal, and metaphysical, and often all three at once—is deeply enhanced by the life one discovers in “The Letters of Thom Gunn” (expertly co-edited by Michael Nott—who provides a heartfelt and knowledgeable introduction—and Gunn’s close friends the poets August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer). Gunn’s letters are a primer not only on literature (he taught a rigorous class at U.C. Berkeley on and off from 1958 to 1999) but on the poet himself, who had a tendency to hide in plain sight. “I’m the soul of indiscretion,” he once told his friend the editor and author Wendy Lesser, but he had an aversion to being seen, or, more accurately, to confessional writing that said too much too loudly. (In a 1982 poem, “Expression,” Gunn made droll sport of his exasperation: “For several weeks I have been reading / the poetry of my juniors. / Mother doesn’t understand, / and they hate Daddy, the noted alcoholic. / They write with black irony / of breakdown, mental institution, / and suicide attempt. . . . It is very poetic poetry.”)
“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / Not in silence, but restraint”: so wrote Marianne Moore in 1924, and those lines came to mind again and again as I read Gunn’s letters, where he reveals himself, intentionally or not, by not constantly revealing himself. “You always credit me with lack of feeling because I often don’t show feeling,” he wrote to Kitay in 1963. “I’m sure that my feeling threshold is also much higher than yours, but also I don’t particularly want to show it. . . . I admire the understatement of feeling more than anything.”
