What's in a name? For Thom Gunn, everything was
The late Tom Gunn could not, it seems to me, have been better named. When I first read him in the early 1960s, the two strong syllables seemed to create a sturdy presence, especially with the "h" in Thom: a touch of uniqueness as it seemed then, if perhaps a shade affected. There were many reasons why the name seemed appropriate: for one thing it virtually rhymes with "John Donne", who was Gunn's first important poetic model - without Donne, we could not have had "Carnal Knowledge" or "On The Move" - and for another, the poet who as a boy had delighted in Robert Louis Stevenson and who liked to look piratical as a man would have enjoyed the echo of Ben Gunn from Treasure Island. In a writer preoccupied with soldiers, moreover, the hint of a firearm behind the forceful spondee seems more than fitting, and indeed, during his teens, he published a poem as "Tommy Gunn".
It is, as the adolescent must have been gratified to notice, a very masculine name, even a phallic one. Tom is one of those names like Jack and Will that denote masculinity. "Tomcat" comes to mind - in the late sequence "Gossip" an ageing macho boaster is an "old cat" with a "tattered ear" - and the poet of Fighting Terms cannot have failed to remember Tommy Atkins, the traditional nickname for the English soldier. There is "tomboy", too, with its associations of sexual ambiguity, relevant to a gay man with a strongly masculine image. Gunn must have had such resonances in mind when he gave the title "Tom-Dobbin" to his "centaur poems": in these metamorphic hallucinations, the mind observes the body having sex, with Dobbin as the centaur's horse-like body and Tom as his human head. The title may have been connected for Gunn with Beatrix Potter's character Tom Kitten, who, pampered by his mother though he is, anticipates the wildness of the tomcat in his mischievous adventuring. As a child Gunn identified with Tom Kitten, especially in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. In that story, the kitten disobeys his mother to explore the hidden recesses of the house and, climbing up inside the chimney, is seized by rats, who turn him into a roly-poly pudding. It is perhaps the darkest of Potter's darker moments and was one of the sources for Gunn's nightmare poem "Jack Straw's Castle", Jack in that case doing service for Tom.
These observations have a certain interest, I imagine the reader thinking, but how can they have any deep significance? A name, after all, is given, not created. And so I would have thought myself until, last year, writing the entry on Gunn for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I discovered the name on his birth certificate. Born August 29, 1929, the elder son of Herbert Smith Gunn, journalist, and his wife Annie Charlotte (nee Thomson), also a journalist, is there recorded as William Guinneach Gunn. There is no mention of "Thom".
According to his younger brother, the photographer Ander Gunn, he was always known as Tom, though when or why that started no one seems to know. The Gunn family seems to have been fond of playing with names. Ander is a Scottish contraction of Alexander, the name of his mother's father, and she herself was variously known as Ann, Annie, Nancy, Nan and Charlotte. Thom's earliest extant poem, published in a school magazine, is by T. W. Gunn - before he became Tommy. Identity tends to be fluid during our teens, but there were circumstances in Gunn's personal life that made the adoption of a new and firmer one exceptionally compelling.
When he was about ten, Gunn's parents divorced and both of them soon married other partners. Some four years later, his mother, whose second marriage had failed, committed suicide. The brothers' experience of finding her dead is the subject of a powerful late poem, "The Gas-Poker". The loss and the shock of discovery cannot have been other than overwhelming. A boy with the coolest of family relationships would be haunted for the rest of his life. But Gunn's relationship was far from cool. He was deeply, even passionately, attached to his mother and the loss of her intensified a growing dislike for his father, whom he looked on with fear and suspicion. On their mother's death, Ander went to live with his father's new family. Thom spent his weekdays in London with a friend of his mother's, but weekends and holidays with two of his mother's sisters, who ran a farm together in rural Kent.
Surprisingly, his schooldays were successful, partly because books provided an escape route from the trauma. Charlotte Gunn - which is the name he knew his mother by - had encouraged his love of reading, and the habit stuck; long before she died he was writing poems and stories. After school, he spent two years doing National Service and in 1950, after six months living in Paris, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. Reading English there, he began to thrive. Accepting that he was gay, he fell in love with an American named Mike Kitay, with whom he was to share the rest of his life. He began publishing poems and, by the time he graduated, was beginning to be recognized nationally as a poet of the new school. In 1954 he published his first book, Fighting Terms, and soon afterwards adopted a new life with Kitay in California. In a BBC radio interview with James Campbell, Gunn affirmed the importance to him of his three years at Cambridge. "It was an escape into my life. It was then that I started to spell my first name with 'h'. It seemed to me to be nothing more than a delightful affectation when I came to Cambridge, but I can now see that this was an attempt to become a new person; it was my announcement that I was going to be somebody new." How new, he did not then say, but in 1949, just before he left the Royal Army Educational Corps, Sergeant William Guinneach Gunn changed his name by deed-poll to Thomson William Gunn.
Why would a young man just coming of age seek legal sanction to confirm an established nickname? The answer lies, I believe, in his relations with his parents, both of them of Scottish origin. Guinneach is the Gaelic form of Gunn and must have represented, on the part of his father, some family and local piety. Its abandonment in favour not of Thomas, as it might have been, but of Thomson, his mother's maiden name, cannot be read as other than a rejection of his father. One function of the "h" must have been to suggest that the name was not simply short for Thomas. It remains "Tom" to the ear, however, and here is the paradox: this heavily masculine nomenclature - T(h)om added to the father's forceful surname - encodes the name of the poet's adored mother. Where he seems most masculine he covertly gives his allegiance to the female. He retains "William", moreover, and "will" in the first three books is his talismanic word. When I interviewed him for The Paris Review in 1992, quite unaware of his name's significance, I asked him about his insistent use of "will" and Shakespeare's obsessive punning on his name:
