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Gunn’s pervasive fascination with disjunction undoubtedly had its origins in his formative years. Nevertheless, the unillusioned, hooded eyes seem to declare that it was equally important to be able to pass as just the sort of hustler with whom Presley had reputedly hung out in New Orleans, or as one of Marlon Brando’s posse of ne’er-do-well bikers in The Wild One. on Wallace Stevens under the equally high-minded Yvor Winters at Stanford, had just accepted from Josephine Miles a post teaching at Berkeley (on whose staff he remained for most of the next forty-two years) along with Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, he was the new next big thing in British poetry. Leavis at Cambridge, had embarked on a Ph.D. Robert Frank was Gunn’s favorite photographer, and in a letter from the mid-1990s he recalls buying Frank’s book The Americans a couple of years after it came out and admiring the way Frank’s pictures “caught a rough-housing, sweet-natured, sexy side of America.” The leather-jacketed and biker-booted Gunn captured posing, one leg provocatively akimbo, against a lamppost on some Main Street in 1958 (the year The Americans was published), evokes all the adjectives that Gunn applied to Frank’s vision of America.īut as is so often the case with Gunn, it is the element of disjunction that we are really being asked to admire: his second book, The Sense of Movement (1957), had just been published to a chorus of admiring reviews he had sat at the feet of the morally exacting literary critic F.R. Gunn’s concept of the pose is strikingly in evidence in the photo chosen for the UK cover of this edition of his letters. The “pose,” whether adopted by Presley or the speaker of poems such as “Carnal Knowledge” (which opens, “Even in bed I pose”), enacts both defeat and victory: if from one perspective it registers as a futile gesture in the face of impossible odds controlled by the vagaries of chance, from another it dramatizes admirable defiance and uplifting chutzpah, turning the spirit of “revolt into a style.” While the knotty, rebarbative aspects of Gunn’s early manner can make this poetic tribute verge on the condescending, or at least guilty of overthinking the primal energies on display in any Presley performance, its heart is undoubtedly in the right place: as he was for the early Beatles, Presley is at once excitingly distinctive and yet available for emulation-“Our idiosyncrasy,” as the poem compactly phrases it, “and our likeness.”
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Presley’s “gangling finery/And crawling sideburns,” along with the guitar that he is described as “wielding,” align him with the combative yet self-conscious personae populating Gunn’s first collection, Fighting Terms (1954). “The pose held is a stance,” Gunn’s poem concludes, “Which, generation of the very chance/It wars on, may be posture for combat.” As is so often the case with Gunn’s early poems, this takes some parsing. By September of the following year, he is considering changing his contributor’s note to read, “Is 27, has been twice arrested, likes motorcycles and Elvis Presley,” before claiming to his correspondent, the gay but much less swinging John Lehmann, editor of London Magazine, that Presley “used to be a hustler in New Orleans.” This is followed by a covert boast: “I have this from his fellow hustlers.” Gunn writes not as one “cat” to another, but as an initiate delivering bulletins from the frontier of American promiscuity to a fuddy-duddy too timid to leave stuffy old Blighty. In “Elvis Presley” (1955), written even before the King’s first album was released, Gunn skillfully incorporates his new hero into the galère of existential toughs whose ability to “pose” he would celebrate and imitate throughout his career. “Whether he poses or is real,” Thom Gunn wrote in one of the first poems inspired by Elvis Presley, “no cat/Bothers to say.” To many British men who came of age during the austere and repressive 1950s, from the formidably erudite and Cambridge-educated Gunn to streetwise Scousers such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Presley embodied a fantasy of American maleness at its most charged and appealing.