Suspended taut between two equal fears I was like to be torn apart by their strong pull:
What, I asked, if I never hear my call?
And what if it reaches my insensitive ears?
This expresses not only the pain of self- division but the need for insensitivity, another recurring theme in Gunn's poetry, from "all the toughs through history" whom he praises in "Lines for a Book", through the "resilient chilly / hardness" of the speaker's skin in "Touch", to the lonelyhearts advertiser in "The Search" who seeks a lover with a "cab-driver's build . . . insensitivity a big +".
The denial of feeling can be understood in several ways. There is Gunn's sexual taste for the hyper-masculine: the leather jackets, the motorbikes, the muscle-building. There is also his taste for poetical "hardness", as celebrated by Ezra Pound in his essay "On the Hard and Soft in French Poetry": for firmness of outline, clearly delineated images and avoidance of emotive language. And behind these preferences can be glimpsed the need of a sensitive and wounded teenage boy to harden himself. The loss of an adored parent in such dreadful circumstances, moreover, must have represented some failure on his part: an elder son approaching manhood would have felt he had a duty to protect and care for his single mother. He might even have seen his adoration of her as responsible for her failures in marriage and therefore indirectly for her death. At the age of seventy Gunn was still trying to exculpate his mother from the charge of inflicting pain on her sons, when he told Campbell: "She killed herself, and my brother and I found her body, which was not her fault because she'd barred the doors . . .". To deal with guilt and pain he created an identity that could never suffer so deeply again, but the identity inevitably overlays a delicate inner self.
Why else would Gunn have allowed himself the crudity of language and feeling in "Lines for a Book", written when he was (as he later jokingly put it) "a Shakespearean, Sartrean fascist"?
It's better To go and see your friend than write a letter; To be a soldier than to be a cripple; To take an early weaning from the nipple Than think your mother is the only girl; To be insensitive, to steel the will . . .
But the truth is that Gunn never did stop thinking his mother was "the only girl". The evidence for this runs all through his work from first to last. I would argue that his feeling for his mother and the effect on him of her death play a determining role in many poems from "Lofty in the Palais de Danse" and "Jesus and his Mother" through "Phaedra in the Farm House", "Autobiography" and several others to "My Mother's Pride" and "The Gas-Poker" in Boss Cupid (2000), Gunn's last collection. There is even among his juvenilia a poem called "Mother Love". Furthermore, Gunn's oedipal antagonism towards his father is a feature of three of these poems, "Rites of Passage", "Phaedra in the Farm House" and "Being Born", and the entire focus of "From an Asian Tent", which combines resentful loathing with a hint of repressed desire.
Particularly interesting in this context is "Lofty in the Palais de Danse". This is one of a group of Gunn's poems that, largely through appearing in A. Alvarez's anthology The New Poetry (1962), helped to shape the poetic taste of the 1960s and 70s. In its self-consciously formulaic structure, its avoidance of rhetorical gestures and its tone of disenchantment, it plainly belongs to the 1950s, the decade of the Movement, which soon adopted Gunn as one of its own. At the same time, it anticipates a later era in risking a range of emotional material that was still largely taboo. Its sexual frankness hovers uneasily between posturing and vulnerability. This is largely passed off through the creation of a persona - the clumsy, bored, unpolished National Serviceman, who figures in several of the early poems. I suspect that Gunn had been reading Robert Browning and blended Browning's dramatic method with that of a deeper and more enduring influence, the John Donne of the Songs and Sonets and Elegies. While Lofty's unashamed misogyny and sexual boastfulness - "I've got another muscle you can feel. / Dare say you knew" - are reminiscent of Donne in cynical posture, the circumstantiality of the poem is indebted to Browning, especially in the use of an interlocutor, the girl whom we take it Lofty has picked up. The value of the dramatic method for Gunn was that it enabled him, much as it had Browning, to adopt a pose he could easily disclaim. Yet he himself had only recently finished National Service. Being tall and slim, he could have been "Lofty" to the NCOs. We have it on his own account, moreover, that he had been trying his hand at attracting women and, as a repressed gay, invariably ending up in disappointment. All of which is to say, the speaker's mask is hopelessly transparent.
