Gay scholar and poet David Bergman called him the gayest poet of World War II, and National Endowment for the Arts chief Dana Gioia called him the best Catholic poet of the latter half of the 20th Century. This is Dunstan Thompson, who has always been one of my favorite poets. But, today, who has ever heard of him?
When I discovered Dunstan Thompson’s poetry, it was actually not very long after I had discovered poetry when I was a young soldier. And I met him only once, unforgettably, shortly after my discharge from the military at the end of World War II. It was a mystery when, after his youthful success with two books of poems published in the U.S. and one in England to extraordinary acclaim, Dunstan Thompson disappeared from the literary world, as dramatically as if a kingfisher flashed electric blue in the sunlight before diving into a pool, never to reappear. I would not learn the story of the rest of his life until many years later.
IN 1943, after Basic Training in Miami Beach, I was in a line of soldiers boarding a troop train for a slow journey of several days across the country to an unknown destination, when a Red Cross lady handed each of us a bag of necessities for the trip, containing toothbrush, comb, candy bar—and a paperback book. The book in my bag was, fatefully, a Louis Untermeyer anthology of great poems of the English language, which I devoured during the long hours of being shunted onto sidings. Three days later, when I got off that train, I knew what I wanted to be: a poet—despite the fact that at age eighteen I had never written a line, and had never known anyone who could conceivably have been called a poet. Of course, in my town writing poetry would have labeled you a sissy. But the army had liberated me from all that.
That anthology was essentially the sum total of my knowledge of poetry until two years later when, wearing my new silver wings, I navigated a B-17, one of the famous Flying Fortresses, across the North Atlantic to an airbase in England. (The trick was not to follow the radio beam the Germans had set up in Sweden to lure you to the wrong destination, and captivity.) My best buddy in another plane in the squadron was a sexy, prematurely bald fellow navigator, with whom I was secretly in love. Dave had gone to Cornell and was cynical about everything. When I confessed to him that Rupert Brooke, the blond, beautiful writer of “If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England,” was my favorite poet, he laughed scornfully and said that the greatest modern poet was T. S. Eliot. I’d never heard of him. When he showed me “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land,” I didn’t have a clue what they were about! My real introduction to modern poetry came on an airbase in the Midlands, two hours north of London, from which I was flying bombing missions over Germany. After an exhausting daylong flight I would go to the Officers’ Club on the base and drink whiskey sours to unwind. There at the bar I met my first real poet ever. A gnome-like young lieutenant with a crooked smile and a beak of a nose that he claimed reflected his aristocratic Anglo-Saxon origins, Coman Leavenworth had already published poems in literary magazines. As a ground officer with a less demanding schedule than us fly-boys, he got down to London regularly, where he frequented London’s famous writers’ drinking club, the Gargoyle. Over drinks in the Officers’ Club I would hang on his reports about the poets he met there, not only the English poets George Barker and Stephen Spender, but the Americans, among them Harry Brown (whose novel later became the film A Walk In The Sun) and Dunstan Thompson. The Americans, in and out of uniform, were working either for Stars & Stripes, the newspaper of the U.S. Army, or for the Office of War Information—appropriately cushy jobs for such talented men from Harvard. Under Coman’s influence I bought their poetry books. I nearly memorized George Barker’s Noctambules, a now-forgotten poem that began, thrillingly in that era of persecution of homosexuals and near-blackout of gay writing, with the unforgettable words: “The gay paraders of the esplanade, the wanderers in time’s shade…” I already knew what he was talking about there, for most of my sexual experiences had been, necessarily, pickups in the dark. I also knew a little book of Dylan Thomas that included the bracing lines, “my wine you drink, my bread you snap.” Stephen Spender, whom I would meet several years later—his hand was on my leg in no time—also became an immediate favorite. But it was Dunstan Thompson’s poems that really knocked me for a loop, with lines like “The red-haired robber in the ravished bed,” “The boy who brought me beauty brought me death,” and “Waiting for the telephone to ring/ Watching for a letter in the box.” And I’m still dazzled by those flagrantly open paeans and elegies to his affairs with doomed sailors, soldiers, and airmen. In December 1945, a year after my arrival in England, a year during which I helped bomb the hell out of German cities and discovered, along with poetry, the vast homosexual underground in the armed services, on and off the base, I returned to America on an aircraft carrier whose flight deck crumpled under battering North Atlantic gales. One of the first things I did after getting home was to contact Dunstan Thompson, who was also now back in the States. Still wearing my silver wings and battle ribbons on my Eisenhower jacket—a recent addition to the uniform that hugged the body fetchingly and led Coman to say with his dirty grin that the top brass must have been horrified when they realized they’d allowed such a seductively revealing uniform to replace the modest, pleated dress jacket—and with a white silk scarf around my neck, a dashing note that fliers had adopted in the War, I met Dunstan for drinks at the l-2-3 Club on New York’s Upper East Side, where a cocktail pianist tinkled away in the background to the subdued conversation at the tables. It was a new world for me, this world of sophistication to which Dunstan belonged. The perfect æsthete, Thompson had a wonderful dome of a head with bulging eyes and a minimal chin, and waved his long delicate fingers expressively—a dead ringer for a drawing of Keats in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I was in awe. He did nothing to disguise the fact that he was gay, justified by his high æsthetic pose. It was only because the poetry world was such a tiny one that he could get away with using the word “gay” with abandon in his poems, though as a word for homosexual it was not yet in general use. More common were expressions “like that” and “queer,” as well as the uglier “pansy” and “fairy.” Dunstan, with his Harvard education, was at a stage of cultural development I could never hope to reach. As it turned out, this cocktail hour was to be our only contact. While being propositioned by Dunstan flattered me, I used to reject most such overtures, preferring casual pickups, however more dangerous. My Officers’ Club buddy Coman also dropped out of my life, though many years later. When I sent him a notice of my first book of poems, he replied with a condescending note that referred distastefully to the book as a commercial proposition. Protected by his family’s money from the “commercial” world of poetry publishing with its rivalries and ambitions, he seems to have kept his purity by retreating behind the protecting walls of his Park Avenue apartment. But I’m sure he went on writing, and it may be that one day his poetry will appear in print. I DON’T RECALL how I heard about Dunstan’s death in 1974, but some time after that I started mulling over the idea of editing a new edition of his poems. For a start, I wrote a brief appreciation, including a sampler of his poems, for Poetry Pilot, the newsletter of the Academy of American Poets, which came to the attention of Philip Trower, Dunstan’s surviving partner. I’d never heard about any partner before, so of course I was curious to explore this further. During a stay in London, after my boyfriend Neil and I had settled into a rented flat, I contacted Trower, who was living in a remote village on the North Sea, and invited him down to London. A kindly man who said he worked as a Vatican reporter for Roman Catholic publications, Trower immediately demystified Dunstan’s disappearance, and told me it was “simply” that Dunstan had returned to the Catholic Church—though it didn’t sound so simple to me. He did fill in some other gaps, however. In 1948, under contract with the British publisher John Lehmann, Dunstan had flown to the Middle East to write a travel book, later published in England as The Phoenix in the Desert, which I still find impressive for the opening sequence describing his early transatlantic flight, as well as its portrait of the luxurious life of the British colonial class in Cairo, soon to be wiped away forever by Nasser’s revolution. It was in Egypt that Dunstan connected with Philip Trower, who was posted there with the British Forces. Apparently repentant after his youthful hell-raising, Dunstan had retired with Trower, who converted to Catholicism himself, to the seaside village of Cley-Next-the-Sea in Norfolk to be near the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. Trower had remained there after his partner’s death. I spoke to him of my puzzlement at never seeing any poems of Dunstan’s in print after those early books, except for one poem in the New Yorker in the 1950’s. Trower assured me that Dunstan had never stopped writing poetry, and that he (Trower) was in the process of putting together a collection of this later poetry. When I finally read the fat, posthumous collection, Poems 1950-1974, which left out the already published work from 1943 to 1949, it was clear that religion had transformed Dunstan from brilliant bad boy to repentant sinner. The formal structure was still there, but gone was the defiant glitter of the language, the outrageously gay love poems to soldiers and sailors and airmen in World War II. Now there was weeping and breast-beating as he reviewed his life, wallowing in his guilt, along with “devout” poems of adoration. I’m still not comfortable with talk of “spirituality” and “the spiritual,” and these later religious poems were not at all to my taste. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of poets bucking for sainthood of a kind, most of them going in for one of the religions of the Orient. But there were others like Dunstan who, unaccountably to me, merely stuck to or returned to the religion they were raised in. I don’t necessarily dismiss them as more misguided than the others, but tend to view them as brainwashed from birth. From the evidence of his later poems, Dunstan Thompson—who was raised a Roman Catholic—after indulging his youthful hormones, albeit with a healthy dose of guilt showing even then, was more conflicted than ever. I suspect he never really resolved the issue of his sexuality and his religion, or indeed his poetry and his religion. But these later poems spilled a lot of beans about his life. He actually came from a world that encompassed wealthy relatives in Newport, Rhode Island, and High Church officials in Maryland. He accompanied his devout mother on visits to these Princes of the Church and got quite an indoctrination into the aristocratic side of Catholicism. On the other hand, once he went away to Harvard, he cut loose, and the riotous atmosphere of the War years abroad gave him a thorough introduction to the pleasures of “Satan.” At Harvard he got to know the aspiring writers Harry Brown and William Abrahams. Brown, like Dunstan, landed a cushy job in wartime London, where my ground officer friend, Coman Leavenworth, met them at the Gargoyle and reported the juicy details to me when he came back to our airbase. Spender claimed he’d had boys in every state in the union. There were stormy scenes in taxis between Harry Brown and his wife Ursula. Brown later wrote the war novel A Walk in the Sun, which was made into a successful film and led to a career as a screenwriter. Abrahams, who spent the war as an MP in Miami, went on to a distinguished career in publishing, with his own imprint, edited the O’Henry Award series for several decades, and wrote historical books with his partner, the Stanford historian Peter Stansky. Dunstan wasn’t quite a recluse in his North Sea village, for his old friends continued to visit him there. Whatever Trower’s “simple” version of Dunstan’s transformation—not “conversion” to Catholicism, he corrected me, but “return”—I couldn’t help but suspect that the only believable explanation for him to have changed so suddenly was that he had to have had a nervous breakdown. Or, I theorized, back in the 50’s, before the Wolfenden Amendment decriminalized consensual gay sex between adults, he may have been arrested, as so many gays in England were—actor John Gielgud and dancer-choreographer John Cranko come to mind—and the humiliation drove him back to the church. But when I dared to suggest this, Trower told me in his reserved manner that was not the case, that it was simply the effect of Dunstan’s turning devout gradually over several years. With the return to the church, Trower assured me, Dunstan had also renounced worldly activities, including his poetry career, and as the new poems accumulated, unpublished, he’d let the memory of his first books, and his growing reputation, fade. In fact, Trower told me, Dunstan made it quite explicit—and this was the bombshell that sunk my idea to rescue his poetry from oblivion—that he did not want his early poems reprinted even after his death, and Trower, his literary executor, was following his instructions by limiting the new volume to poetry from the devout years, 1950–1974. I’m afraid I had already violated Dunstan’s wishes when I published the appreciation in Poetry Pilot. But copies of the early books are, in any case, easily available over the Internet for next to nothing. At the same time, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is Trower who disapproves of those early poems and is preventing their revival. It seems quite curious to me that Dunstan Thompson, who sacrificed his ambitions as a poet to strive for holiness, appears in one of his poems to condemn the equally devout T.S. Eliot, an Anglican, for his success in positioning himself as the King of Poetry, while he supported Conrad Aiken, who believed that he should have been the Anointed One. Aiken, who published many well-received books of poetry in his lifetime and is now pretty much dismissed, justly in my view, is mostly memorable as one of several poets whose lives were scarred by the violent death of a relative: Lucille Clifton, who found her mother murdered in her Baltimore project apartment; Thom Gunn, who came home from school to find his mother hanging in the clothes closet; and Aiken, whose mother shot his father, leading to a messy murder trial during his adolescence. What happened to “the gayest poet of World War II” whose poems almost all had the word “gay” in them? Nothing Trower said adequately explained this conversion. It just may be that the brilliant young poet, the star of my youth, really was struck by a lightning bolt of some kind. Trower, however, made it clear that Dunstan would not have wanted to be included in any anthology of gay poets or labeled such, and I, too, a survivor of that era, am sure that Dunstan would have been opposed to it, as would May Swenson or any of the other gay and lesbian poets of my generation, except perhaps Adrienne Rich. We saw ourselves part of the austere, the greater world, of Modern Poetry. The gay movement, with supremely confident “out” poets would bristle at this as a denial, but I think the literary establishment still would agree that it’s demeaning for a serious poet to be called anything but simply a poet. And as a Catholic poet? Dunstan Thompson in his later mode, when many of the poems were on religious themes, could perhaps have accepted that label—like Gerard Manley Hopkins, being Catholic and gay are hardly incompatible. It’s just that the Church doesn’t seem to understand that yet. Nor did Dunstan himself, who suffered over it to the end. Edward Field’s book, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era (Wisconsin), from which this piece was adapted, will be published later this year.
