The Man With Night Sweats - Thom Gunn

National Poetry Day

I’ve seen a lot of art this week, but as it’s National Poetry Day today we will start with my visit last night to Wilton’s Music Hall to see a Dead Poets Live event where Rupert Everett read from Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats. Check out this gorgeous reprint of the collection by Faber, with the etching, Two Boys Aged 23 or 24 (1966) by David Hockney gracing the cover. Like Hockney, Gunn was a gay man, tired of the constraints of a conservative England who moved to California to find himself. Both men flourished artistically and personally in their new, chosen land and this delicate, unabashedly sexual and beautifully tender drawing is the perfect choice for the collection.

Last night was an amazing experience and a lucky find. I decided to poke about on the Wilton’s website to see if there was something Jason and I might go to and found this instead. I was convinced there would be no tickets left because I didn’t even look until last week, but amazingly there were. I went on my own because my family fear poetry and didn’t know who Rupert Everett was until one of them said: ‘Oh! Didn’t he play the headmistress in St. Trinians?’ and they all started nodding and smiling. I shook my head and wondered how I got here, with this lot.

Gunn was an English poet who studied at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, a man who didn’t much care for emotion and was all about rigour, discipline and fiercely technical poems. This approach suited Gunn, who as a necessarily closeted gay man with a tragic past, did not feel the need to pour his life into his poetry, raw and unedited. A contemporary of Ted Hughes, they were often lumped together by critics but their paths and careers diverged when Gunn emigrated to California after meeting and falling for his partner, Mike Kitay who he lived with until Gunn’s death in 2004.

I first came across Gunn in my last year at university. I signed up for a class studying Plath and Gunn, interested only in Plath, who I was obsessed by. At first I didn’t ‘get’ Gunn, or why we were studying the two poets together when they seemed so radically different to each other. Plath was one of the poets F. R. Leavis warned against. Fiercely confessional, open about her life and emotions and willing to break through the constraints of tradition and technical form. Gunn seemed to be all about the structure and his use of language was often opaque. Where Plath was out in the open, Gunn was hidden, but as the weeks went on I began to want to seek Gunn out. I wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes. What was he not saying?

I came to see those early poems like diptychs. One one side was the poem on the page with all the clues to unlock what was on the other side, the things he really wanted to say but couldn’t or wouldn’t. And I began to see why Gunn and Plath worked together. Shared themes and preoccupations are explored in different ways but often to similar effect.

I ended up writing my final paper on Gunn, not Plath. My tutor came to find me afterwards and congratulated me on my work, saying that I had made him see Gunn in a different light. As we had spent three years negotiating a thinly veiled hostility and it was plain that he hated my guts, that cost him dearly and I have never forgotten it. He could so easily have said nothing. Gunn’s poetry had allowed us to negotiate a truce that I only wish had come earlier in our fractious history but which was welcome nonetheless.

For me, the key to understanding Gunn was his penultimate poetry collection, The Man With Night Sweats. His poetry had begun to change with his move to California and his work with his mentor Yvor Winters at Stanford. Encountering American poets like E. E. Cummings who were exploring form and structure in a radically different way and whose language was so concrete and often pedestrian also helped him start working towards a new style of writing, one which allowed him to finally marry the inside man to the outside form. Night Sweats, for me, is the apotheosis of this.

At this point, Gunn was settled in San Francisco, living in an open relationship with Mike in a place that let them be exactly who they were. Their house became a kind of commune for waifs and strays, some passing through, some lingering longer. Gunn was in a place where his interests, his sexuality and his work all aligned. This is reflected in the poems, where images, interests and themes he had long explored are given new vitality through a confidence and openness that up to this point had been somewhat hit and miss.

Like Hughes, Gunn had always been interested in the natural world, often using it as a metaphor for his more animalistic desires and needs. In this early poem, Tamer and Hawk we see images Gunn went on to explore more directly in his later work.

I thought I was so tough,

But gentled at your hands,

Cannot be quick enough

To fly for you and show

That when I go I go

At your commands.

Even in flight above

I am no longer free:

You seeled me with your love,

I am blind to other birds—

The habit of your words

Has hooded me.

As formerly, I wheel

I hover and I twist,

But only want the feel,

In my possessive thought,

Of catcher and of caught

Upon your wrist.

You but half civilize,

Taming me in this way.

Through having only eyes

For you I fear to lose,

I lose to keep, and choose

Tamer as prey.

It is clear that this is a poem about a relationship between two lovers, but Gunn not only transposes the relationship into the animal kingdom, he avoids using any gendered pronouns. The poem is about a hawk and a tamer. It is about I and You. It is never about he and she. He does this repeatedly in the early love poems. There are richly sensuous kinaesthetic poems, poems which focus on the movement of hands and bodies, minds and thoughts. There are always abstractions which are so beautiful and so complete that we are tricked into forgetting that there is something unspoken sitting in the middle of it all.

Tamer and Hawk is one, gorgeous extended metaphor. Metaphor is another way of both explaining and concealing, a trick which Gunn uses to great effect. A metaphor is way more powerful than a simile because what a metaphor does is say, look at this. This thing is exactly the same as this other thing. There is no gap between them. This tamer is you. It is not like you. You are the same as it. You are yourself AND you are this. A simile goes, look at this. You are like this thing. You are mostly yourself but sometimes you are like this. A metaphor inhabits the thing it describes and is indissoluble from it. Metaphors are powerful and Gunn is a master of wielding them. He doesn’t give you room to doubt him. There is no hesitation here. No point at which you can question the right of what he is saying. He tells you what is and it is only later that you find yourself in a position to examine the trick of it all and what he isn’t saying.

Here, the poem revels in this concrete ambiguity. This is a poem of desire, control and submission. It starts with submission. ‘I thought I was so tough,’ but you have changed that and now ‘When I go I go at your commands.’ By the end though, things have changed again. The I of the poem is but ‘half’ civilised and the last line: ‘Tamer as prey,’ turns the whole concept on its head. The desire and control have flipped, like the poem itself, from certainty to ambiguity. It’s done with such control, both linguistically and technically. The form, the structure, the tropes and the language all lock into place to make the poem itself an extended metaphor. And as a final flourish, the I and You of the poem is not just a metaphor for the lovers but also for you the reader and Gunn as the writer of the poem. It’s masterful.

In The Man With Night Sweats we still encounter the natural world and indeed all Gunn’s well tested tricks and tropes but here they are being used in a different way. In the poem, To A Friend In Time of Trouble we see the subject of the poem living in a cabin somewhere wild that Gunn describes as separate than but linked to him, as ‘a sort of home’. Where there was no room between tamer and hawk, here there is air and space and uncertainty. In the second stanza we encounter a very different bird of prey:

Between the redwood tops carrying away

Some small dark bundle outlined in its claws.

The certainty, the ease with which it draws

It's arc on blue…Soon the protesting shriek,

The gorging from the breast, the reddened beak,

The steadying claw withdrawn at last. You know

It is not cruel, it is not human, though

You cringe who would not feel surprised to find

Such lacerations made by mind on mind.

This bird doesn’t even have a name. It is barely recognisable up there in the sky, far from any human hand that might want to gentle it. There is a widening gulf between man and nature in which only snatches of beauty and horror can be accessed.

Tamer and Hawk is a poem that contains an unspoken but mutually agreed cruelty, a relationship based on ownership which shifts along the interplay of both subjects in the poem, moving from line to line and stanza to stanza. It hints at at pleasure in both dominance and submission. Here there is acknowledgment of a different kind of cruelty, a line is drawn between the hunger of the bird and a human hunger that can only be sated by sacrifice and a kill that has nothing to do with the innate nature of a being and everything to do with the deliberate, brutal ‘lacerations made by mind on mind.’ The subject of the poem is neither a tamer nor a hawk, but a broken man standing outside of the natural world in which he once felt so at home, exiled by experiences he cannot control.

The sense of control and release, desire and submission, beats through Gunn’s work but in The Man With Night Sweats there is an acknowledgement that this control is largely illusory. Gunn wrote these poems during the AIDS epidemic that was systematically wiping out his friends and lovers. There is a strong feeling in these poems of disconnection from the life before and where it is alluded to, it is with regret and longing. There are cracks which can no longer be papered over by form or beautiful language. What is happening is not part of the natural order of things, and as the book progresses we see him begin to cast off the images and tropes that once served him so well or at best, subvert them linguistically or through distance. As more and more men die, his language strips down to a starkness that leaves playfulness and ambiguity far behind.

I shall not soon forget

The greyish-yellow skin

To which the face had set:

Lids tight: nothing of his,

No tremor from within,

Played on the surfaces.

He still found breath, and yet

It was an obscure knack.

I shall not soon forget

The angle of his head,

Arrested and reared back

On the crisp field of bed,

Back from what he found neither

Accept, as one opposed,

Nor, as a life-long breather,

Consentingly let go,

The tube his mouth enclosed

In an astonished O.

This poem, Still Life, is clear in a way that the earlier poems are not. It is, as its title suggests, a painting rendered in words. It has the light and clarity of something by Vermeer. It thrums with a stark, terrifying beauty. Here, Gunn takes what would have been a portrait and describes it as a still life. This illness has robbed this man not just of his health but his humanity. He has become an object to be studied. The colours of disease, the greyish yellow skin laid across the ‘crisp field of bed,’ work a clinical palette across an image that gives us nowhere to hide. The man in the bed can close his eyes to what is happening but cannot stop it. We as the reader and Gunn as the writer do not even have that comfort. We are compelled to bear witness to this emptiness.

This is not an easy death. There is a stark humour in the last stanza as Gunn plays with the image of his friend struggling for the breath that he has taken for granted as a ‘life-long breather,’ but it is one that makes us catch ourselves in the act of laughing, horror stricken at what we have done. Unlike in Tamer and Hawk, where consent and power are play things in a world of pleasure and sexual exploration, here the subject is one of stillness of powerlessness. This is something that has been forced upon him. He has no name. His human identity is leaching away and he has no voice to stop it. The breathing tube in his mouth has taken his capacity for speech. He is mute in the face of death. What was a game in Tamer and Hawk is now deadly serious. Here, the game has played out and the player has lost. His mouth ‘an astonished O’.

When Gunn was a teenager, his mother committed suicide by putting a gas poker into her mouth. Gunn and his brother found her and that loss became a defining moment of his life. He alludes to it obliquely in a few earlier poems but here, it is impossible to ignore the connection between the men he loved and lost and the loss of his mother. His mother willingly inhaling death and his friends, fighting to get oxygen to their collapsed and drowning lungs. Their silent, pleading mouths shocked at the inexorability and cruelty of a death they didn’t want and she went towards so gladly.

After this collection, Gunn found it harder and harder to write, publishing only one more work, Boss Cupid. Surviving where his friends did not, he found himself flirting with death in different ways. He was drawn to derelicts, down and outs and runaways and increasingly to using more and more drugs. He died, aged seventy four of acute polysubstance abuse. You don’t have to be a psychologist to figure out why.

Gunn may have lived his life in the shadow of tragedy and it certainly informed his writing and his death, but it also made him compassionate, thoughtful and blackly funny. It would be a disservice to him to only describe him as a tragic poet, so I’ll leave you with this, from The Man With Night Sweats. It’s called, Lines For My 55th Birthday:

The love of old men is not worth a lot,

Desperate and dry even the it is hot.

You cannot tell what is enthusiasm

And what involuntary clawing spasm.