An Apprenticeship

Editor’s Note: Thom Gunn—a beloved contributor who appeared in The Threepenny Review forty-five times between the first issue in 1980 and his death in 2004—gave this lecture in May 1977 at Lake Forest College in Illinois. We are very grateful to Michael Nott for finding and typing up the Bancroft Library manuscript of “An Apprenticeship” so it could be published here, as well as to Thom’s two literary executors, Clive Wilmer and August Kleinzahler, for allowing us to print it.

I DECIDED TO talk about myself tonight because it is one of the subjects on which I am an expert. But also for another reason. After poetry readings, one of the questions I am most often asked, and know least how to deal with, is “How and when did you start writing poetry?” The fact that it is difficult to answer doesn’t mean that it is not an interesting question, nor that it isn’t one that I should try to answer.

The first difficulty involves the word start. When I was about five, and before I knew how to read or write, my father, who was a newspaper man, brought me home a dummy newspaper. That is, it said Daily Express at the top, and was divided into columns, but it was all blank. No pictures, no print. So I spent an afternoon very busily scribbling until all the blank areas were filled in with wavy lines that looked to me like writing.

But that cannot be what is meant by starting to write, though, stretching things a bit, I suppose it could be called a creative act. At intervals during my childhood I did little bits of writing, sometimes to please my parents and sometimes for myself alone—poems and stories, the kind of thing many children from literate households were in the habit of doing. When I was eight or so I remember setting out to write character sketches of every boy in my class at school, probably about twenty of them. I found myself just as interested in writing about the boys I disliked or felt indifferent to as in writing about my friends. What was the impulse behind this project? A desire to record? An interest in history? Even a glimpse of the notion that, by writing about something, one commits oneself to a kind of detailed exploration of it that is less easy in mere informal speech? I don’t really know. In any case, the writing of poetry was not in question.

You can already see the possibilities for endless and detailed narcissism that my subject presents. In considering what I call my apprenticeship—and the apprenticeship goes on into the present and way into the future, I hope—I do indeed want to consider my experience closely, but to consider it in such a way that parallels could be guessed at between mine and those of others. It is true that my past is unique, like everybody’s past. I started writing at a certain time and place in England, subject to certain influences of which I wasn’t particularly aware; I moved to California and was subject to other influences, the accidents of my life contributing meanwhile—so that the various ingredients in the mixing bowl ended up by making me a very peculiar kind of pudding.

Yet I insist that what I am going to tell you about is not merely an exercise in egotism. History is interesting, after all, because it shows how general forces work on individuals and how individuals work on general forces. And what makes it even more interesting is that it is an imperfect study, because the influence—whether of a political situation on an individual, or of one poet on another—may not work in any obvious way at all.

Take Gary Snyder, for example. In about 1966 he said in conversation that he considered Bob Dylan the best poet writing in America. (At that time it was a much more original thing to say than subsequently.) But you can search in vain for any signs of direct influence of Dylan on Snyder’s poetry. The great poetry to be found in The Back Country (which I take to be Snyder’s best book) shows Kenneth Rexroth and maybe Pound dimly in the background, but not a sign of Dylan. So just the poet one would expect to be most clearly present as an influence is clearly absent. Influence may be inconsistent, hidden, intermittent, or disguised.

Ultimately what pushes an artist of any kind to do his work is a secret—above all from himself. But he knows that it is there: he protects it and develops it and uses it, without knowing exactly what he’s protecting, developing, and using. I can’t tell you what the secret is, and I’m glad I can’t. Every poet has it in some degree, from Dante all the way down to Neil Diamond. What makes somebody write poetry? Poets seldom get famous and almost never get rich, after all. And what, indeed, makes somebody want to keep a diary? There is a private other self at work, I think, for the poet and for the diary-keeper, a private self who possesses infinite possibilities—a private self who lives as fully as the social self, yet is in touch with the social self. And he is in touch with a lot of other things. What they are is the secret.

So what I can tell you about my literary apprenticeship this evening is at best limited. Let me plunge into it, and try to show you what it was like in my mid-teens—and I am sure that a lot of people here will see something like themselves there.

For most of my adolescence I lived in Hampstead, in the northwest of London. But during the Blitz I was evacuated to a school in the country, where an enlightened English teacher taught from , an anthology edited by W. H. Auden and John Garrett. It was a remarkable selection for a child to encounter in 1941, very different from the poetry books which you got in other schools, and which were all Lord Macaulay and the patriotic speeches from . In the introduction to , poetry was defined as “memorable speech,” still the only workable definition I’ve come across; and the anthology itself emphasized the range and liveliness of poetry, by including mnemonics, popular songs, mummers’ plays, nonsense poetry, songs by Blake, medieval fragments, and at one