If this were a biography of any of the other great 20th-century poets, one might open a review by contrasting the new publication with other books that had appeared about them. How does this one measure up? Does it present information hitherto unknown? In the case of Thom Gunn, no such body of work exists. To piece together from scratch the fragments of Gunn’s life, that is Michael Nott’s mission here.

It has been twenty years since Gunn died of acute polysubstance abuse, aged seventy-four. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Gunn’s friend Clive Wilmer, who edited his Selected Poems in 2017 and, with Nott and August Kleinzahler, his letters in 2021, as well as other academics such as Stefania Michelucci whose own critical study of Gunn’s poetry was published in 2009, he’s been having a bit of a renaissance. It’s odd that he needed one at all – that he didn’t sit on the same shelf as those he came of age with, such as Ted Hughes (Faber brought out a hugely popular joint collection in 1962) and Philip Larkin. One factor is Gunn’s decision to relocate to the United States. I remember once chatting about Gunn with a renowned biographer who said, ‘Oh, but he’s just so terribly American, isn’t he.’ In the years after I started reading him, it often seemed that Gunn was stranded somewhere in the middle of the ocean, too American for the English, too English for the Americans. He was thought too queer, too structurally formal. One of Nott’s successes in this biography is to take the contradictions and idiosyncrasies and treat them not as problems but as the foundations of a three-dimensional portrait of Gunn as man and poet. 

Gunn offered glimpses of his reading in the prose collection Shelf Life. Wilmer, in his introduction to the Selected Poems, gave us the closest we’d yet had to a biographical profile. Reviewing The Letters of Thom Gunn in these pages, I praised the editors for giving us the chance to move closer to Gunn and know him better. With this meticulously researched biography, we don’t so much move closer as move in with Gunn and shadow him through his life.

Nott opens his biography with one of the central episodes of Gunn’s life, his mother’s suicide, which readers encountered in his haunting late poem ‘The Gas-poker’. In the early pages of the book, we move through ‘Beginnings’, ‘Itinerancy’ and ‘Hampstead’, which provide insights into the makings of Gunn, both familial and cultural. The sheer amount of detail Nott is able to hang on the Gunn family tree is remarkable, with information about houses and streets and different relations giving a more vivid sense of Gunn than we’ve ever had before. We travel with him to Cambridge, where he met his lifelong partner, Mike Kitay, and then to Stanford, San Antonio, Berkeley and San Francisco, the place with which so much of his later poetry would be associated. Nott never loses sight of Gunn the poet, showing us the drafting of the poem he dedicated to his Stanford teacher Yvor Winters on a long train journey from Stanford to San Antonio in 1955 and the emergence of ‘Sweet Things’ during a period of three months’ solid writing, which followed a difficult time of writer’s block. Nott characterises ‘Sweet Things’ as a ‘street-life poem about running into an old trick and knowing “delay makes pleasure great”’. Gunn’s own thoughts on his poems, both when they were written and later, are combined with details about their composition and Gunn’s wider life.

This biography is subtitled ‘A Cool Queer Life’. The coolness is provided to some extent by leather, which was part of an ‘outlaw sexuality’. Wearing leather contributed to the ‘tough, masculine image’ that Gunn sought to cultivate; one ‘fuckbuddy’ recalled, ‘Thom’s principal (and perhaps only) physical fetish was, as far as I could tell, leather itself. Wearing it, touching it, using it.’ In a chapter called ‘The Stud’, we see Gunn’s views about a well-known leather bar shift from dislike to devotion. For eighteen months, it became ‘the center of Thom’s San Francisco’. Towards the end of the biography, Nott writes movingly and forensically of Gunn’s use of speed and the other substances that would contribute to his death in 2004. 

What becomes clear is how much of a revolutionary life Gunn lived. ‘By his early teens, Thom knew he was attracted to men,’ Nott writes, though it wouldn’t be until much later that this would make its way explicitly into the writing. In 1975, after working on his own ‘prose autobiography’, Gunn published ‘The Release’ in Gay News. This represented ‘his first London appearance as a gay poet’. Nott describes the poignancy of the moment: after ‘years grappling with identity and autobiography, Thom felt ready to be himself’.

There are two parallel tracks to Gunn’s ‘queer life’, the poems and the person, though of course they can’t be fully separated. One of the things I’m fond of telling my students is that nothing in anyone’s life has ever happened as in a poem. Writing is a process of smoothing, selection and invention. Life is messier, has no line breaks or syllabic control. 

Gunn’s life is chronicled beautifully here, particularly the sometimes difficult relationships he had with family members and lovers. The 1980s are captured in chilling and tender detail by Nott. He starts with a description of a fire that began at the site of the Barracks bathhouse and ‘ripped through the mostly wooden warehouses and apartment blocks on Hallam and Brush, a cul-de-sac behind Folsom’; soon afterwards, deaths from an illness first called ‘gay men’s pneumonia’ and later ‘gay cancer’ started to be reported. Gunn bore witness to this time in the elegies published in The Man with Night Sweats (1992), a collection that won him the Forward Prize for Poetry.

Some of the poems in The Man with Night Sweats are addressed to specific people. The spare and stark ‘To the Dead Owner of a Gym’, for example, with its simple conclusion that 

Death on the other hand
Is rigid and,
Finally as it may define
An absence with its cutting line

Alas,
Lack’s class

is about Norm Rathweg. Other poems speak poignantly and more broadly to that time, such as ‘The Missing’, which opens with the haunting ‘Now as I watch the progress of the plague,/The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin/And drop away.’ 

Towards the end of his chapter ‘The Missing’, a title taken from the poem, Nott notes that in December 1987 ‘Thom made a list of thirty-seven friends he had lost, or would soon lose, to AIDS’. He ends the chapter by recording the names, along with the dates of birth and death. Some of the figures we know from the poems; references to others, like the ‘red haired man w/ the jeep on this block’, are heartbreakingly fleeting. 

In his early explorations of poetry, Gunn fell for Keats, ‘as you do for the first poet who really means something to you’, and ‘liked him all, without discrimination’. So it was for me, as a sixteen-year-old reader, with Gunn. To coincide with the publication of this biography, Faber have reissued The Man with Night Sweats, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín, in which he describes the poems therein as ones which ‘dramatise the body itself, as though it were a country in revolt that was once a place of ease or even ecstasy’. We can only hope that both works will bring a new generation of readers to Gunn. 

In this book’s cover image, the poet stares out at us, lips parting on the right in the beginnings of a smile, his eyes covered by reflective sunglasses in which we see the photographer peering at his subject. Nott has given us a view of Gunn we never had before, sending us back to the poems. Peering in close, we might see ourselves, caught in the act of looking.