1216 Cole Street,
San Francisco,
Calif. 94117

15 July 76

Dear Donald,

Thank you very much for the offprint of your article. I don't know whether it is exactly the same as the article you published in the TLS or a revised version, in any case it has far more impact on me at this reading. It strikes me as a classic statement, and that you are making ~~a~~ distinctions of the utmost importance for all of us. And I say this quite apart from my pleasure at being used as an example in the last section: that is highly flattering, as it always is to be praised for what one indeed set out to do. (In *Moly*, precisely, I was assuming that trying to filter the unstructured through a structure.)

Et cetera. The discussion and definition of rhetoric is
amazingly far reaching.

I will have a new book out in a few months time. What you
(or anyone) will think of that I have no idea.

Belle came round yesterday on a very short visit to California.
She seems completely committed to the country life and a Pennsyl-
vanian young man now, and pretty happy. She is teaching in a
junior college, and I must say it is a lucky junior college that
has someone of her caliber. She is reworking her novelle into
a novel, with some excitement. Doesn't seem to be writing poetry.
The young man seemed a good deal more human than any of the
spouses or boyfriends of the past, so I hope this really is it
for her and she can keep the whole thing going.

I am reading The Heart of Midlothian with great pleasure, the
first Scott for me apart from an unfortunate encounter in my teens.
After one or two more I look forward to reading your book about
him. Amazing that it was published a couple of years after Emma.

Love to yourself and Doreen,

Thom

at Cincinnati (Dept of English),
but back to San Francisco in 2 weeks

Nov 19, 81

Dear Donald,

I may not write, but I often think of you and Doreen, all the more
as you too once spent a term in this pretty but rather lonely city.
Good art collections, no doubt, but I find it more and more difficult
to spend a long time away from home and "family" and friends. In my
20s I found it exciting to be on my own in a strange town, but it becomes
rather hard to see oneself as a Stenhalian hero at the age of 52.
I gave a lecture on Bunting two nights ago, it was necessarily an
introduction as very few in the audience had so much as heard of him
(the teachers in the English Dept meeting me in the hallways would
politely ask "but who is Basil Bunting?", in the weeks before the lecture,
pronouncing Basil in the American way, which indeed makes him sound
very unfamiliar), but of course you often came to my mind because it
was from you I first heard of him and from you that I received a copy
of the Spoils in 1965 or 1956. (Must look up the date on your inscription
when I get home.)

Also I reread your second Pound book, and admired it more than ever
(except for some of the last chapter, the business about conception etc.
But I think I see my way to answering that, on this reading, and maybe
one day will get round to doing it; but I assure you it will be in the
friendliest fashion). It is simply amazing what you get into 100 pp.,
as somebody says on the cover -- but those 100 pages deserve reading as
slowly as if they were 3 times as many. This isn't an idle compliment:
you really do say things that one needs to turn over and consider before
reading on. I am especially struck by your chapter on rhythms in the
Cantos -- so few people dare write about rhythm at all, and you write
boldly and rightly.

Anyway, the occasion of my writing is to correct a frequent misquotation of yours, both once in this book and twice in *Trying to Explain*, which I've also been reading. You misquote poor old *Verlaine* as saying " we must take literature and wring its neck." But (this is in his poem "Art Poétique") he doesn't say *literature* he says *l'éloquence*. (Conrad Aiken, in the one line I can remember from him, translates this cleverly and I think rightly as *rhetoric* -- that is, *rhetoric* in our modern sense.) Maybe you misremembered this line because of the last line of the whole poem, which is (contemptuously) "Et tout le reste est littérature." But even that is not trying to do away with literature; he is, I think, using the word in a special and sarcastic sense. He has, after all, been describing the *right* things to do in poetry, and ends up " and all the rest is Literature". (that is, dead stuff, for the pedants, the academies --- the old-fashioned!) My point is, I don't see him as making the kind of anarchic protest you indicate, but rather simply the kind of protest every generation makes against what it considers the dead poetry of previous times which it has decided not to include in its own tradition. (What *Verlaine* is emphasizing is "music", quite like Bunting in one of his interviews; but in other recommendations he sounds more like Poe "calculating" effects semi-scientifically.)

Forgive me for correcting you, but by the third time I came to the
misquotation I began to feel that none of your readers had read this
rather famous poem for themselves, so it was up to me to remind you.

I'll have two (2) books out together next year, and I'll send you both,
so don't buy them. One is my first prose book!!!!!! (actually about half
quite trivial scraps, but it does contain the Hardy essay.) Liked your
thing on YW in the Southern, amongst all that idolatory. Love to Doreen

May 17, 82

Dear Donald,

I have delayed answering you so long because I had so much to say; but more turns up to say all the time, so I'd better write now while I still remembered the original things I wanted to talk about. I got back from Cinti feeling properly guilty about not having been to visit you -- I really didn't realise you were that near. Morals: 1) I shd look more at atlases and maps; 2) I shd categorise less, for example thinking the 'Mid West' is distinct from and thus not close at its edges to the 'South'. I did find Cincinnati awfully boring, but it is a pretty place and my one real solace was the presence of Don Bogen and his wife Cathryn, who I'd known when they were graduate students at Berkeley: both generous and lovely people. He is a good poet, a fact I've known some years, and is getting better. Doesn't have a book out yet, though he has had a ms going the rounds for several years.

Back here I haven't really been doing much poetry writing. Fiddling with the unfinishable, mostly, and looking forward to the end of the fallow period. I think I operate on the Three Field System, something I used to diagram pretty slickly when I was seven, for history classes (bet you had to do that too) -- I go fallow for about one year in three. So I'm writing lit crit: at least I can write (that sort of) prose by an act of will. Just received the magnificent complete Mina Loy which Jonathan Williams has at last brought out, after it was promised ten years ago. It is absolutely wonderful, and there are poems (late ones) that I never guessed existed. So I want to get round to writing about her later in the year, once I get over the difficult novels of Coleman Dowell (Island People is a masterpiece, and I know almost no one who has read it), which I somehow promised I would write about. I have a vague idea that I'd like to write a book entirely about really good unread writers, but I'll probably never get round to doing it all.

You will be receiving a copy of my new book from England. Also my US publisher has said they have or are going to send you a copy of bound proofs. Rather pushy of them, not my idea. Please don't take any notice of any note inside that may say reviewer's copy.

My repeated thanks for 'Hope for the Best', of which you shd be receiving a printed copy at the beginning of June. I am proud to have been instrumental in getting it for the 3p Review. I am not the poetry editor but an editorial adviser, and am a great bully as a result. But I am not responsible for at least half the poetry which appears in it (Ruth Fainlight, for god's sake): I go on advising (or bullying) because though the Review is pretty imperfect it's about the best we have out here.

Also, of course, thank you very much for the lovely book Three for Water Music. I am most pleased to have a copy of The Shires, which I had read (a library copy) but never possessed. About these, and 'Hope for the Best' and 'Pastor Errante'. I find them extraordinarily good when they are in iambics, e.g. 'As massive and dispensible' 'A boy turned into a newt', etc. I don't think I say this simply

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from a bias for iambic forms: your poetry in such forms has not only the tightness anybody's poetry has in them but also a quite wonderful energy, which shows up some of the other sections of these 5 long poems where the conversational tone, and diction, and meter can make for a considerable slowing down. The weakest of such sections seems to me all that is not in italics in 'Pastor Errante', which is rather diffuse in the manner of the late Auden: it is not only loose in its form but qualified by such phrases as 'no doubt', 'if you agree with me' etc. (I have recently declared a private war on all poems that parenthesise 'I wonder' between commas). No doubt you intend the diffuseness but the parts in italics are in such strong and nervous free verse that they show up the rest. Of course, what you are saying (or is it Leopardi in translation? I'm not sure) is very different -- more imagistic, a more passionate tone (I love 'undying bride'). Elsewhere, if I can go on in this unfair way treating five different poems as text for one sermon, I like your use of the Shellyan meter, which you use with a skill I don't think I could ever bring to it (Arethusa), and the Mauberley form of 'Son of Isaac', a form you have often done well before, using it with many variations (I think I find a touch of it in part 2 of 'Wild Boar Clough'). I think I get uneasy when you use a lot of anapastic substitutions and feminine endings (tho you did both startling well in the Stopping Train poem, as I remember). I think my uneasiness has to do with the form in such parts (and the unitalicised parts of Pastor Errante are still my best example of them), but such parts also have a diffused and conversational content (and diction), so it might well be a matter of the form alone. What I am saying is that I like you best when you write in a tightish form or in real free verse, and I'm probably being pedantic, confusing, and patronising all at the same time, in which case take no notice.

Thank you for the offer to come to Sligo in 1983. I don't think I'm up to it. I've never been to Ireland, and when I do go I'll go as a simple anonymous tourist.

About the last chapter of your Penguin Pound book. The bit on abortion and creation of poetry/ having children is, I thought on both readings, a small irritant in a magnificent book of criticism. Maybe you were simply teasing out the implications of EP's position, but it looks remarkably like an importation of your own opinions into a book that is far from opinionated in every other way. Yes, Pound thought that homosexuality was a form of usury; it is an improper use for one's seed, but then if he was logical he would have gone on to say that so is contraception.¹ 'Creation' as a term for the production of literature is merely a high falutin metaphor, after all: Pound, you, and I know that whatever we are doing when we write a poem we are not acting like gods. I needn't remind you that there is an even better tradition for calling poets makers.

No, I don't think I've ever thought of you as a scourge of the gays. But perhaps be more careful what you write in private letters to Marjorie Perloff. She shows round her letters (not to me, I hasten to say, since I don't know her). She showed one to Robert Duncan, in which you thank her for her book about O'Hara, and apparently go on to say that you don't think that a homosexual (except, you rather sweetly said, for me) could write good poetry. I've thought about this statement for several years, and I still don't understand how you could deny the title of poet to say Marlowe or Whitman. But of course it is unfair for anybody to show around private correspondence, which is intended in a specific context; and also one shouldn't gossip, as I have just done.

¹ Perhaps he did somewhere.

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I do bring up the letter to Marjorie Perloff not for the purposes of gossip but because it does strengthen my feeling that your writing in that page or so of the Pound book is perhaps more personal than you believe. Might one also hazard a guess that you do not approve of abortion?

I am sure you have been asked to be editor of the Southern Review. So far as I can tell, everybody has been asked to be editor of the Southern Review (I wasn't but only because I scotched -- or scorched, of course -- the suggestion before the suggester was able to make it to Louisana). I fully believe that the author of Dick Tracy has probably been canvassed as well.

The yard is at its best. I have found a flower called nemesia that won't stop flowering for about three months. Probably too late for you this year, but Doreen might try it early next year, if it can stand the heat down there. I'm not sure I have any of the herbs still that she so kindly left at my front door a few days before you left California, but perhaps the rosemary bush (a very sturdy one) comes from a Palo Alto origin. It must have been nice to be one of the contributors to the Georgian anthologies and make up whole stanzas out of the names of flowers.

Lord Annan lectured at Berkeley a month or two ago. It took me back thirty years when he was just Noel Annan. But he _should_ be a lord: he looks like a lord, and he speaks like a lord. And his lectures were as good as ever -- they seem like first-rate theatrical entertainment, but after the lecture you find you have learned a lot!

Love to both,

Thom

1216 Cole Street,
San Francisco,
Calif. 94117, USA

July 29, 1982

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your letter and the review. Quite likely I would
not have seen the review if you hadn't sent it. I'm sorry I can't say if
my letter was intemperate and inquisitorial, and I am grateful that
you took the claims of friendship as being more important to you
than what you found objectionable in the letter. More than grateful,
moved. I get defensive on the subject, and I apologise. Yes,
my justification does have to be by Enlightenment principles, but
then so does the justification for the Bill of Rights and for much
else that I (we?) believe in. However, when I say this, please
don't think I don't take notice of what you say: I do, and shall
go on doing so, in that it strikes me that you and Duncan (utterly
different as you are) are about the only contemporaries from whom
I have much to learn.—If your letter is generous, your review is
princely. Friends in England have sent me a few other reviews,
and — quite apart from whether my books were liked or disliked —
yours is the only one that addresses itself responsibly to
questions of style and subject matter. So I thank you from the
bottom of my heart: it may be good to be praised, but it is even
better to be taken seriously. Reviewers so much prefer to speak
about some earlier book or of something curious but untypical in
the book under review — or in England they particularly like to be
bitchy. (I suppose I shd be grateful for Peter Porter rather than
Ian Hamilton — better King Log than King Stork, after all.)

So may points to speak about I'm not sure I can answer them all
— Yes, my Hardy omission is unforgivable.— I don't regret saying
what I do about WCW: if anything I wd speak much more highly of
Paterson, now that I understand the Cantos better.— I have liked an
admired Pound for some time, by the way, certainly since
Dekker and you, in books, helped me into the Cantos. I was teaching
his Selected Poems, all of them, including the selection of Cantos,
to a large and enthusiastic class at Berkeley in 1966. But I think
I would still say that his principles for Imagism were (in part)
fuzzy. But the fuzziness is in the remarks about abstraction, One
added. could point to 'feline leisure' from Canto II as a good counter to
'dim lands of peace' or, nearer *k* in time, to 'the apparition (abstract)
of these faces (concrete)' as an example of the way one simply can't
talk *w*ithout abstractions. I'm beginning to sound like YW. And
also with the first of the 'Don'ts': 'an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time' is not *p*erhaps as clear as it might
be — one moment it seems to make sense, the next it doesn't.
...Yes, I haven't heard a word of Rod Taylor in years. I find it
difficult to believe that he stopped writing poetry altogether. His
career as a singer didn't lead anywhere: he simply wasn't much of
a singer and his songs were derivative and second-rate.

The subject of camp : whew, you really do take on the big subjects!
Well, you're right, somebody has to be daring. I wonder what you
think of the relation that Isherwood establishes (or tries to establish
between camp (high camp) and the Baroque in the bit that I quote
from what is admittedly his worst novel. I think it is a conn-
nection worth taking seriously, i.e. de idoneo of 'camp' as play. Is in my BonJonsen essay

- 2 -

Pinsky is an interesting case of something. Maybe of my changing
my mind about a poet's value. When I first read him I was really
excited, but I certainly don't find he wears well on a second reading.
He would never believe with Bunting that a poet's best friend is his
wastepaper basket. When I get down to it, it really is true that
dichten equals condensare as Pound quotes BB in the ABC of Reading.
I've just been reading Lorine Niedecker -- all of her, I think, unless
something posthumous turns up (with appreciation for yr pages on her
in the PNReview)-- and I am so delighted by her condensations, her
lack of verbosity, the way every word or phrase is marvellously
framed with margin so that one has to stop and consider.

A copy of the Threepenny Review must have been sent to yr
American address, but I enclose a couple of pages for you meanwhile.
I'm thinking of writing about Mina Loy's poetry and also Janet Lewis'
-- different articles, of course. The later Mina Loy is something
of a revelation. I'm reading and rereading a lot of Melville these
days, finding it interesting how the sheer talent for language
emerges in the early books, by its own energy raising itself into
life even when it is following the most dreadful models. Your
new house sounds great. My best to you and Doreen, and I thank you
again for your loving letter.

Thom

(GUNN)

December 10, 82

Dear Donald,

I am writing to thank you for These the Companions. I'm belated I know, but I didn't get to read it until this week. I'm a slow reader at best, and am never sure whether the slowness is something I should be sorry for or not. Perhaps it helps me to hear words better, but on the other hand it means I take a long time to get round to reading what I want to read.

It is a wonderful book: talk about packing each vein with ore! I'm not sure that it isn't your best, except for the imaginary volume of the Gunn selection of Davie's poetry. My first thought was, how complicated you are (in an entirely complimentary sense, let me say): my second, how fair you are. I remember Susan Sontag saying that the main objection she had to the founder of EST was that he disapproved (or perhaps even forbade) the use of the word but. (Everything had to be positive, and also unchallenged.) "But", she goes on to say, "the word but is the beginning of all thought." And I recall her remark especially in reading yr book: it's wonderful how you complicate and qualify. I've found it with my attempted prose, but I autographica! excursions, and even in a few poems, that reading them through later on I seem to have oversimplified so, I seem to have surrendered half of what made something important in the effort to delineate it in clear language. But you recover rather than surrender -- your qualifications and reservations are precisely what make each memory specific and exact. I must say I finished the book hungry for more: I hope one day you may might find your way to double the number of chapters and fill in the gaps. (Not that it isn't complete in itself, but there is room for expansion.)

One thing that interested me in the book of course was in noticing how similar and dissimilar our experience has been. After, there's not many people who can share with us the combination of first FRL and then YW. (Also, to take a small detail, I do remember Inspector Hornleigh!) On the other hand, the Cambridges you went to, twice before I got there in 1950, and then once after I'd left there, were not quite the Cambridge I went to.

There's little I can disagree with in the whole book. You state your case so lucidly and in such human terms that it would hard to deny the truth of what you say. It's only

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with a few of your briefer asides that I wd feel like challenging
you (on *Ulysses*, on *Paterson*, on Whitman), but the book inspires
such confidence in you as a whole that I wouldn't challenge
you, because you wd probably make your case in such persuasive
terms that I'd be left feeling that my challenge didn't
amount to much.

I love it when you say you are a prig. You aren't, you
know. The fact that you say you are and you aren't, even
though you genuinely believe you are, does however (whatever
you may wish) make you guilty of a certain amount of charm,
which I must say I don't always consider that irrelevant
a thing to have.

I was in NY so read the NY Times and saw Louis Simpson's
review. Well meaning, but it didn't look as if he had really
understood yr book. He is such an opinionated man, I
have always found (he was a colleague of mine for about 6
years). Once he met me in the corridor at Berkeley and
it appeared was on his way to teaching a class on Tennyson:
"Why was Tennyson such a bad writer?" he asked me with such
irritation I began to think he had me confused With Alfred
himself. Actually, what I shd have said was that the
trouble with Tennyson was that he wrote too well. But
perhaps that was what he meant.

I still don't agree with your interpretation of Verlain's
line. He was objecting not to literature, I think, but
to over-wrought 'rhetoric' (in the modern sense). Still,
that's a small point.

My love to you and Doreen (that's a fine picture odf her
in the book),

THOM GUNN

1216 COLE STREET
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117

March 14/87

Dear Donald,

Thank you so much for your article in The Journal, and for the
Milosz book. I read the first at once, and haven't had time for
the second -- and won't I think until the end of term. I have time
for little besides my students during the term I'm teaching, the
work seems to grow greater, not less, but at least it's all
interesting, and I can't imagine liking a university more than
I do Berkeley. I do think the cleverest thing I ever did was
to give up my tenure here in 1966, and teach here only one
semester a year -- I don't think I'd be writing poetry otherwise--
even though I shall have no retirement when I retire in nine years
time. But sufficient for the day etc! Meanwhile I'm glad I still
do have these bursts. I have almost enough for another book,
but since I have a tendency to dry up for a couple of years on the
publication of a collection, I'm going to just put it away till
1992 (ten years from my last, arbitrarily chosen date), and hope
to find that I can cheat the tendency in that way! We'll see.

Thank you for your kind words about my Vendler review -- you will no doubt be thoroughly tired of the damn thing by now, having seen it reprinted in both Scripsi and the PNReview. And indeed I saw yours and was delighted that we were saying the same thing. (I also liked your little point about the word poetess!) Yes, it is all very tiring, the lack of comprehension that the British have, on the whole, and most of the EastCoasters here, that there has been a larger world of poetry than their own comfortable little one, Auden, and Kipling, Anthony Hecht (their modern American, poor man, that the English dote on), and crumpets for tea. And perhaps one, but no more than one, token Modernist. The worst thing of all, I suspect, is the continued neglect of Bunting. The British pay him lip-service, but it's clear that they would sooner read James Fenton -- and do! The Americans mostly haven't heard of him, or if they have they are committed Poundians or whatsoever, and think he was doing the same kind of thing as Charles Olson, whose work he apparently greatly disliked! Well, one could go on for ever like this.

My great delight this last year has been to discover how very
good Marianne Moore is, once you have separated her early work
(Observations) from the later. You probably knew this years ago!
To do Vendler justice, she once wrote a good essay on MM -- at a
time before her, Vendler's, style had yet been corrupted by high-
minded thoughts about Keats and Stevens.)

Poor Duncan had a complete kidney failure 3 years ago, and has
dialysis 4 times a day. He is amazingly alert and perceptive in
mind, but his work is over -- he'll never write another poem,
the poor man cannot even finish a real book any longer, he who
once said that he read as other people are gluttonous at food!
I go to see him, take him for walks when he is strong enough, and
I must say I admire his tremendous cheerfulness -- he is still
good company -- because he has nothing to live for besides the brute
fact of life.

But he could go on like this, probably, for years.

And I suppose life can still be enjoyed in such circumstances.

I can't believe you are retiring. But then I can't believe my own age, either!

THOM GUNN

1216 COLE STREET
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117
USA

August 10, 88

Dear Donald,

My brother retired to a certain Daisy Cottage somewhere in Cornwall, and you just about the same time to Silverton in Devon. Well, if I had to choose I'd certainly prefer the soft bosomy landscape of Devon to the dour windswept Cornwall. I wonder how it feels to retire: I would imagine that the first reaction is as after the second part of the Tripos: "Oh dear, do I have to start something all over again now?" But you must have got over that, if indeed you ever felt it, and are probably back delightedly writing poetry and prose with less pressure behind you. Yes, I know about the festivities at Vanderbilt, and in fact was asked to them, but I couldn't get away just before my own exams. Of course you deserved them: if they were unique, then they celebrated a unique career. Glad you liked my piece in the Festschrift, and truly happy you consider it scholarly: it was written in blood, as it were. Never, I think, have I had so much difficulty writing -- the real trouble being that I had no less than 4 friends dying last August, and many of my afternoons were spent at hospitals, while my mornings were spent with my three hard women! Of HD, I agree with you: her later stuff is wretched (after about 1920, I'd say) and just because that silly Trilogy was neglected doesn't mean that it didn't DESERVE **all** the neglect.

No your treatment of Williams didn't <u>offend</u> me. I didn't agree, but I thought you put the case well and only overstated a few times (notably about absence of punctuation -- everybody wrote without punctuation at that time, it was a fad), and I thought your point about his using his charm a most telling one. You are certainly right about that damn plums poem -- that is not the Williams I value, and that is unfortunately the side of Williams that has been of most influence. But your article annoyed me, in quite a healthy way: I hope we shall remain vigorous enough in intellect for many years (I'm going to be 59 this month) to annoy the world at large, as well as each other, mildly, by our endusiasms and exclusions.

Meanwhile I must thank you for the second great gift you have given me. The first was Bunting, when you and Doreen presented me with a copy of The Spoils, many years ago when you were still at Stanford; and the second is Milosz, whose work I only started to come to grips with after reading your wonderful book. All that you say of M seems true, but I am still exploring...

My other belated discovery was of Rilke last year. I had tried reading him (in translation, because my German is rudimentary) since I was fifteen or something, but never got anywhere until the Stephen Mitchell translations (Selected Poems) which actually sound like good English poetry. I am very interested in the way his long sentences seem to touch some point from which the imagination and the literal experience are both accessible simultaneously. I'm not sure that that last sentence means anything, but perhaps you can see what I am trying to say.

You should probably have received two pamphlets I sent you, one of them *Undesirables*. They both contain poems which will be in my next book, which I have just about finished, but which I shall not be publishing until 1992 (!). There are also poems not worth including. I am delighted you liked the Dejection poem, and interested when you speak of Milosz. Actually,

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One English friend, whose childhood books were evidently different from mine, and who disliked the poem a good deal, said the poem sounded like Eeyore speaking. I think there is a touch of Whitman behind the poem, & a touch of the Bible (remember, I may be unreligious, but I went to an English school, so I know the Authorized Version pretty well). Also there is an outright steal from the first pages of Great Expectations -- of Cooling Churchyard, where Dip meet Magwitch. I am writing of those marshes, the North of Kent, though Dickens calls them Essex, and know all those little churchyards pretty well. If you look up Great Expectations and compare it to my poem, though, my poem seems very barren in invention by comparison, and you can't help realising what a tremendous poet Dickens would have made if he had seen the kind of thing that could go into his poem. But he thought a poem was bumpety-bump and so all he wrote in verse are those interminable songs that he fits into Pickwick. But he could be a great stylist -- and I know you know this already, I know how you admire him. Anyway, as I say, the best things in my poem are stolen. No need to thank me for these pamphlets.

I'm trying to persuade Faber to bring out Marianne Moore's *Observations*, a duplicate of the 1st edition, but I'm sure they won't. It is the only way for anyone to understand what she was like before she turned into a fussy eccentric in a tricorne, what Eliot and Winters and Pound and Williams saw in her: to isolate that good early stuff from the New Yorkerish trivia she wrote afterwards, at the same time revising half the virtue out of her early work. I'm getting sidestepped!

Anyway, my warmest love to you both on High Street, Silverton,

Than

THOM GUNN

October 5, 1989

Dear Donald,

I want to thank you very much for your contributions to the PN Review's celebration of my birthday. The kind of satire in the poem seems to be new -- how wonderful to be branching out in fresh ways even after retirement. (You might say: it is *especially* after retirement that it is necessary to keep fresh!) But also your prose piece, which made me happier than any of the other contributions. I hope you know that, though I don't often wonder about people's reactions to my poetry, I do often think of yours. You have -- often implicitly -- set me high standards, and I am often (in writing, or in planning what I want to write) hoping to show you the ways in which I am trying to live up to them. I am moved as well as grateful when I read what you write about me, and I am not alone in this reaction, I should tell you.

I am glad you make the point about my admiration for Bunting. Do you know I learned that in the four years that they published BB over here, Moyer Bell have had only two teachers in the U.S. order his books as texts for classes -- you and me?! (This was so at the end of last year, anyway.) I suppose they're all teaching Larkin...

Clive Wilmer sends me books of English poets he likes. I don't always concur, but I certainly like the last one he sent me, Stephen Romer. Perhaps the age of proud provincialism is at last over -- he actually refers to Rilke and Corbière! He seems as a result to have room for different kinds of subject matter, and reactions to it, than what I find in most of the comparatively young British poets. And he's very talented also. I expect you got as far as him in your forthcoming book.

My love to Doreen. I hope you are snug in your Devon house. I haven't been to England in ten years now, seeming not much to even leave the street I live on, except to teach in Berkeley. I'm a fine one to complain about the provincialism of others!

THOM GUNN

1216 COLE STREET
6AN FRANCISCO, CA 94117

May 19/90

Dear Donald,

You will think me very backward in not having written to
you before about *Under Briggflatts*, but in fact I couldn't
get hold of the book until quite recently (very handsome in
its Chicago edition). I read it right away, but then found
myself eye-deep in end-of-term papers, and immediately after
in final exams, from which I have only just gotten myself free.
You remember how it is. Anyway, now that I *am* free, I want
to thank you for your essays about my poetry, which I find
all the more flattering because I approve so of the premises
from which they come -- if I don't share all of those premises,
I at least understand them and consider them important ones.
And to thank you also for your fairmindedness. I don't know
if you believe me, or put it down to the inflations of gratitude,
but I have said in the past, and continue to say, that what
you say about my poetry matters to me, as almost no one's
critical remarks (kind or unkind) matter to me, and that it
is with you in mind that I often find myself writing. In
a sense, my next book is an attempt to answer the reservations
of your second essay -- an attempt to write a gay poetry as
solid and as central to what we'd consider the tradition
as any heterosexual poetry could be. The "next book" has at
last been sent off and I suppose will be out in about 18 months.

Two footnotes: I am excessively pleased about what you say
of my Slowworm essay, since I always feel rather unsure about
my prose.—Interesting what you should say about "Aha" in the
poem you quote. When I showed the poem to Winters, he said
that the word wasn't necessary, but its presence was not an
actual *flaw* in the poem...

I was also very pleased to see you spending so much time on
Kenneth Cox, who has for long been one of the relatively few
critics who has a lot to say to me. I agree with you about
the fact that Larkin's influence has been baleful because
completely limiting (Pinsky called much of his poetry "sour"). An appropriate word, I think). I have got a volume of Ivor
Gurney, and his poetry is going to come first in my June reading.
I am only sorry you didn't find a place in your book for your
essay on how NOT to read *Briggflatts*, which as I have told you
before I think one of the best essays ever written (but perhaps
it has been reprinted elsewhere, or perhaps you thought it was
devastating to Michael Schmidt).

It is a pity about Neil Powell. What it comes down to is
that he doesn't know a good poem from a bad one. He apparently
has a limited concept of what poetry can do: thus he puts the
Fuller boys at the top of his class and excludes Bunting
from it. But he is not alone among the English in disallowing
Modernism. And indeed it is their loss: English poetry has
to become less literalistically glum, more adventurous in
accepting technique (and that means opening itself up to new orders of
experience, becoming more inclusive in subject matter, I hope --
at least that is what Pound did for himself, and Eliot, and, in
her lesser way, Marianne Moore).

THOM GUNN

USA

May 5/92

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your generous invitation to stay overnight. Knowing the customary hospitality of the Davies, I was hoping for it, and gladly accept! I'll arrive during the afternoon of Wednesday, July 22, probably by train in Exeter (I'll phone a couple of days before to tell you the time), and leave the following morning.

I'll try to persuade you, while I'm there, to start writing poetry again. It is amazing how it can all come back after a time without practice.

I'm delighted that you should skewer Alvarez, but surely he doesn't matter any longer. I had read your article, as a matter of fact, and numerous of the answers, including most recently Michael Schmidt's, but it does seem to me that there are too many issues gathered here for me to be able to easily disentangle -- some of those issues I have decided views about, but others (in my ignorance of even a word of Slavic languages) I don't even have opinions about... Milosz I have of course read, and I am everlastingly grateful to your book on him for having pushed me into it. I love his at best, but he can also be pompous and silly. I find him personally a bit difficult to take, though he was perfectly well-behaved to me. No one could claim that he is a modest man! I preferred his wife, and wish he had given her a chance to say something that evening. Or me, for that matter.

No, I have never had anything to do with the Threepenny Review, except that one issue, about ten years ago, when I solicited poetry for it (and in fact managed to wheedle some out of you). I do contribute to it, frequently, but Wendy Lesser is responsible for every choice, and a very good editor she is, though I wish she didn't think Ruth Fainlight was worth printing!

Yes, Clive has become a good friend -- in so far as one can have a friendship over 6000 miles. He just sent me 6 poems better than any others he has written. I shall be seeing him (and Tony Tanner) when I visit Cambridge early in July. It will certainly be strange to come to England after 13 years, I feel a mixture of dread and excitement. Of course, it is all excitement in anticipation of you and Doreen at Silverton,

XX

Th

1216 Cole,
San Francisco,
CA 94117
USA

August 10/92

Dear Donald,

I want to thank you and Doreen very much for the wonderful time I spent with you in Devon. You seem to be having an ideal retirement, and it was good to see you so busy and restless! I had just had the best visit in twenty years with my brother, finally he has a little peace of mind with his second wife—more conventional but more loving than the first; and then it was so good to come into the next county and find you so alertly hospitable! The Carcanet party was a hoot, as I knew it would be: the "third largest garden in Highgate", huh? I can't quite imagine the scale of the other two. I met more poets than I had known existed: all just for seconds! (I was glad with some of them that I didn't have to talk with them longer, though I did like Brian Cox, as I had always known I would). Mr. Gavron said "We never have to go to the country": well, you can understand why!

I have been, so belatedly, reading and thinking about *To Scorch or Freeze*. Of course I don't have to be a Christian to understand it any more than I do to understand *The Temple*. It seems to me mainly intent on *defining* terms. Having thought myself clever to have summed up the book so, I am struck by the thought that maybe one cd refer to almost any book of poetry: but what I'm talking about is the last five lines of "Ordinary God", and the poems in which you define irony, witness, angels, etc. So there is this element of the handbook to it. Fine -- I like poetic handbooks. Herbert, Rimbaud, and your enemy Blake all wrote handbooks. But the best ones are those which transcend ordinary definition or footnoting -- for example "Vengeance is Mine" and "Bowing the Head", which latter I find the most moving in the whole book. (I love the Lothario bit, where you appeal to the pun the body itself makes.)

I find it interesting that you consider irony so intimately related to evil, and thus presumably that your own ironic tone (which is so frequent in this book, as elsewhere) is a sign of original sin. I want to quarrel with you about this (not "quarrel" you understand, rather argue). I know what you mean, and I think this is connected with your distaste for much of Auden and for O'Hara (though there is more of knockabout comedy in them, especially O'Hara, whose poems have been known to make me laugh aloud): irony=trivialisation = evil. But surely irony is a far more varied and proper response to life than that -- isn't it Samuel Johnson's device quite as much as Bloomsbury's? Forster and Strachey cannot enjoy the world without being clever about it, without their knowledge that they are superior to it -- their irony is just a tic; but Johnson's irony is wisdom laughing, and it is just as real an irony. (This judgment is more selective than theirs, and undoubtedly more subtle.)

Oh yes, the other thing I admire -- enormously -- about the book is that you manage to fit a range of language, modern colloquial and Biblical intimately entangled -- and of course to the fact that you do is exactly your purpose in undertaking the whole thing.

the