Thom Gunn, Poet: Convokes Absences

Mr. Gunn, once just another Auden, has now turned towards Donne and Antony. In the process, he has developed a sustained unity of expression.

THOM Gunn's third and latest book of poems takes its title from a jaded but "treble-sinew'd" Antony's invitation to "one other gaudy night" before the reeking dishonor of Actium. Insofar as this volume has a central theme, it is a study in types of heroism, which are finally indistinguishable from what Mr. Gunn calls "modes of pleasure." On one side stand the byrnied and terrified warriors of the age of Ethelred and such perennial noblemen of the suicidal beau geste as Claus von Stauffenberg. Different only in degree are the tattooed and/or black-jacketed hoods, the "brave, terrible" queers, "fallen from/ The heights of twenty to middle age," such classic, superannuated hustlers as Rastignac, and "a few with historical/names"--Baudelaire, Caravaggio. Within them all persists the sullenness and flabby dignity of Shakespeare's besotted bed-athlete. Some like him are still determined to "fight maliciously . . . set my teeth, and send to darkness all that stop me." All "mock the midnight bell" with their varied assertions of tarnished individual worth even in the private hell, the public abattoir.

With his first two volumes, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, Mr. Gunn became famous in England (though not, to our disgrace, in his adopted America) for toughness of diction, the swiftness and healthy outrageousness of his far-reaching, quasi-"metaphysical" conceits, and the organic tightness of his stanzaic units. In My Sad Captains epigrammatic audacity has largely given way to a sustained unity of impression. There is less concern with patterened formality here; the use of false- and half-rhyming, for example, hase become so ubiquitous that Mr. Gunn's "schemes" are mainly of assonance. If in 1954 Mr. Gunn startled and delighted a reading public which thirsted simply for "another Auden," he shows signs in his cautious and strangely hesitant present volume of a process of deliberate self-transformation into an individual voice of permanent value.

Those readers who insist upon filing contemporary writers to the pigeonhole of a convenient tradition will have no difficulty in detecting the intellectual habits of the school of Donne in such poems as "The Value of Gold." To expand categories slightly, Mr. Gunn's whole milieu resembles that early-seventeenth-century world of religious nightmare, alchemical daydream, and academic short-circuit, in which an inherited logic grinned at itself and morbidity became bumptious. In one of the 1954 poems, "A Mirror for Poets," Mr. Gunn described that age, so obviously like our own as to make the comparison banal, as a "violent time" which demanded its right to be taken seriously by whispering to the writer, "For feel my fingers in your pia mater. I am a cruelly insistent friend:/ You cannot smile at me and make an end." But when the explosion of tradition and the routini- zation of expression coincide, when the scenery falls down, the audience packs up, and all dialogue, even the best, reduces itself to threatening, because patterned, gibberish, the quality of dramatic action becomes infected by a kind of eccentric Spieltrieb, the aesthetic play of the "humorous" cripple. To act upon the assumptions of a rejected humanism is tonic, or at least good for kick, and wry glimpses of a hypothetical salvation may still be achieved in the pick-up bed. This is the mother vein of romantic irony, clowning in the densely-populated limbo between "infinite will" and "confined execution."

It is probably not sufficient to relate Mr. Gunn's heroes to the convention of the "broken Coriolanus," or more contemporaneously and thus more deceptively, that of the cardiac Sisyphus. The quality of "starriness" central to the title poem and one other, entitled "Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt," is that "disinterested, hard energy" by which Nobody holds Nothing-at-all at bay. Mr. Auden's "ironic points of light" flashed out among a decimated signal corps on the last battlefield of love; Mr. Gunn's stars are self-sufficient. Where Donne tossed and scrambeld known quantities and academically-sanctioned categories, where Shakespeare talked of giving "local habitation" to "airy nothing," Mr. Gunn's landscapes, in his own words, lack "even potential meanings" and are modes of "convoking absences." His captains, like the painter in the first poem in the volume, expend their lives "resisting, by embracing, nothingness," until the night in which they are strangled by one of the "pudgy cheats" who are the objects of their passion, the models for their imagery.

The final importance of Mr. Gunn's work lies in what it preserves from the little that is left to a self-parodying culture and an exploited language. The artistic temperament revealed by the best of these poems is that of a compassionate Webster, a Byron without pose. My Sad Captains should be bought by anyone who understands and cares about the rawest, oldest, and bravest tradition of them all