The San Francisco poet’s work is richly illuminated by this detailed account of his early traumas, dread of ‘deep emotion’ and addiction to casual sex
One morning in Hampstead in 1944, Thom Gunn, aged 15, came downstairs to find his dead mother slumped on the kitchen floor in front of the oven, having gassed herself. Her husband had deserted her, as had her current lover; a note she left for her two young sons addressed them as “my darlings” and told them to fetch the charlady. “I was made to feel too much for my age,” Gunn later complained when remembering that day, and he was left with a lifelong dread of “deep emotion”. When in 1991 he finally wrote a poem about the trauma, he took care, as he said, “to objectify the situation”. He described it as if it had happened to someone else, and despite the need to find a rhyme for “other”, he refused to use the painful, accusatory word “mother”.
As Michael Nott points out in his fine, frank biography, Gunn’s writing developed as an exercise in denial, a defence against the insecurity and sense of abandonment he felt from that moment on. He donned masks, struck poses and emulated heroes who did not suffer from his own “fragile selfhood”. Shakespeare’s brawny Coriolanus, who boasts of being the “author of himself”, was one of his early infatuations, followed, after his move to the US in 1954, by embodiments of machismo from popular culture: Brando astride a motorbike in The Wild One, Elvis wielding a guitar as a weapon and mobilising his pelvis in a “posture for combat”.
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