Existentialism and Homosexuality in Gunn’s Early Poetry
In the early 1950s, when Thom Gunn began publishing, the reigning ideology among artists who subscribed neither to religion nor Communist politics was Existentialist philosophy. The thinker most often cited as a model was Sartre; and then, because of her connection to him, Simone de Beauvoir. Although Camus had at first been associated with Existentialism, by the late Forties he withdrew from its ranks, whether or not this defection was always known to the general audience. Existentialism developed on the parallel tracks of philosophy and literature, but its influence extended to the non-verbal arts as well. Some of the Abstract Expressionist painters espoused the philosophy and came to consider their work as an exploratory action, not defined in advance by a pre-ordained goal. The canvas recorded a series of choices made in the course of facture—pivotal, collaborative, and cumulative brushstrokes whose meaning became final only when the painting was complete. Some jazz musicians described their performances as Existential as well: beginning with no format or plan, they improvised as they went along, discovering the overall shape and emotional content of the piece gradually and in process. These concrete, aesthetic applications of the new philosophical system may or may not appear sufficiently rigorous to qualify as applied Existentialism, but we can see in them a connection to Sartrean axioms such as, “Existence precedes essence,” or, “man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so….” [from Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a humanism,” lecture given in 1943, published in Walter Kaufman, ed., Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, Meridian Publishing Company, 1989.]
Thom Gunn had no formal training in philosophy, nor was Existentialism taught at Cambridge during his undergraduate years. Nevertheless, it formed a climate of opinion that no...