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Something Almost Understood: The Friendship of Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2014.0089

1939-9774

Colm Tóibín,

Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis

Something Almost Understood:The Friendship of Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn Colm Tóibín (bio) I. Grief and Reason In the month or so after Thom Gunn died in April 2004, I formed the habit at the end of my own day’s work of going into the back room of my house in Dublin, the room with the books, and taking down his Collected Poems and reading a poem. I remember thinking on one of those nights that the poems which seemed most powerful to me were the ones that dealt with solitude, and that there was a sort of loneliness in all of Gunn’s diction, which could easily be misunderstood as just spareness or plainness. One night I noticed a small book beside the Collected Poems called Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell. I took it down and, casually, not having read it before, began to read it. On page 19 I came on the following passage that made me sit up for a moment. Campbell asked, “Your new book, ‘Boss Cupid,’ contains some new poems about your mother. Is this the first time you’ve written about her?” Gunn, in his reply, mentioned a short poem also in the new book called “My Mother’s Pride” (which ended with the line “I am made by her, and undone”) and went on: The second poem about my mother is called “The Gas Poker.” She killed herself, and my brother and I found the body, which was not her fault because she’d barred the doors, as you’ll see in the poem. Obviously this was quite a traumatic experience; it would be in anyone’s life. I wasn’t able to write about it till [End Page 439] just a few years ago. Finally I found the way to do it was really obvious: to withdraw the first person, and to write about it in the third person. Then it became easy, because it was no longer about myself. I looked at the words again: “Obviously this was quite a traumatic experience; it would be in anyone’s life.” And then I crossed the room and burrowed among some books and found the quote I was looking for. It was in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet, and it was from a letter that Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Anne Stevenson in 1964: “Although I think I have a prize ‘unhappy childhood,’ almost good enough for the text-books—please don’t think I dote on it.” In that letter, Bishop wrote about her mother’s mental illness. “One always thinks that things might be better now, she might have been cured, etc. … Well—there we are. Times have changed. I have several friends who are, have been, will be etc insane; they discuss it all very freely and I’ve visited asylums many times since. But in 1916 things were different. After a couple of years, unless you cured yourself, all hope was abandoned—.” “Well, there we are.” I looked at the words again and put them beside Gunn’s: “Obviously this was quite a traumatic experience. It would be in anyone’s life.” And then I put “please don’t think I dote on it” beside “to withdraw the first person, and write about it in the third person.” And then I found another book, by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, whose title essay, “On Grief and Reason,” dealt in some detail with Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial.” “So what was it that he was after in this, his very own poem?” Brodsky wrote. “He was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language’s most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink.” And now I had come across it in Bishop and Gunn, grief masked by reason, grief and reason battling it out. I did not need to look for the introduction to my own book Love in a Dark Time, written some years earlier, in which I had named Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Mann, and James Baldwin as four [End Page 440] writers I was reading in my late teens with...