Here at Last is Love. Dunstan Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ late in high school or soon after arriving at Harvard. There seems little doubt that this loss of faith coincided with the beginning of his liaisons with men. As the poet Katie Ford notes: “It seems that it was not a crisis of faith that drove Thompson into a ‘lapsed’ period of Catholic practice. Perhaps sexual and social, what was forbidden created a crisis of desire, not of belief.”5 Trower adds that Thompson’s memory of the period was of living in an anguished limbo: he attempted to play the fashionable skeptic, but retained an instinctive sense that belief was vital to human flourishing. And yet he could not embrace the only two grand belief systems that seemed open to him in the late thirties: Catholicism and Marxism.

      Perhaps this underlying turmoil contributed to Thompson’s academic troubles, for despite his brilliant literary achievements at the Monthly, he regularly failed to attend classes and pass examinations. To the surprise of his peers, he dropped out of Harvard in 1939 after his third year, a move that Trower believes was intended to forestall expulsion.

      Rather than sink into depression and lethargy, Thompson traveled. He had already been going on trips abroad the previous summers, including visits to Ireland, England, and Mexico. In the summer of 1938, he had spent a month in England studying with the poet Conrad Aiken, who was considered a major writer at the time. He returned in the summer of 1939 to spend another month with Aiken, who gave him a personal introduction to T.S. Eliot. Writing to a friend, Aiken described Thompson as the “cleverest” of his students, “a great rattler and improviser, a real gift of the gab, raconteur, mimic, clown, somewhat in a hurry but shrewd too, adaptable and imitative...but honest and psychologically alert.”6

      After this trip, Thompson established himself in New York City—effortlessly, it would appear. His connections and literary gifts quickly placed him in the center of the city’s cultural life. He befriended many of the leading lights of the period, including George Barker, Horace Gregory, Marya Zaturenska, and the eminent critic and editor Malcolm Cowley. One of the most valuable connections he made was with Oscar Williams, the editor of widely read poetry anthologies—being included in those volumes gave Thompson’s work valuable exposure.

      Beyond writing and publishing his own poetry, Thompson’s most ambitious project during this time was the founding, with his Harvard friend Harry Brown, of a “little journal” devoted strictly to contemporary poetry, called Vice Versa. It “exuded the austere and practical tone of a reformist enterprise,” according to poet and critic Dana Gioia, who also notes the “mordant humor and youthful high spirits” that were on a par with The Harvard Monthly.7 Setting the tone of Vice Versa were its slash-and-burn reviews, which gleefully took down luminaries like E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and W.H. Auden. But at the same time, Brown and Thompson were able to publish original poetry by the likes of Auden, Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, Weldon Kees, Edith Sitwell, and George Barker.

      Vice Versa was funded by Thompson himself, but in spite of the legacy he was now receiving from his aunt Leita’s estate, the money wasn’t sufficient to cover all the printing bills and other costs associated with the magazine. Then came Pearl Harbor, and it became clear that Vice Versa would have to cease publication after three issues.

      Everything was about to change.

      Many years after the war, Thompson wrote to a friend: “I had a gallant war record—carrying Coca-Cola bottles to sergeants, and writing the Colonel’s letters to his friends back home. I used to mess up the grammar afterwards to make it sound more authentic.” He adds that he really shouldn’t make fun since the officer in question had been quite kind to him. The humor here is not that much of an exaggeration in some ways, since none of his wartime assignments brought him near combat and most were tedious. He eventually ended up working for the Office of War Information in London, the branch of the war effort responsible for both information and propaganda. While his role there might have drawn upon some of Thompson’s literary skills, the experience could not have been that interesting, since in the many years he and Philip Trower spent together after the war Thompson never found anything worth recounting about that job.

      At the same time, the stresses and strains of the war—and some of its horrors—were never fully absent from his experience. In particular, he was present in London for much of the Blitz and impressed more than one friend with his fearlessness during bombing raids. A couple of his friends were working in London, which helped to break up the tedium between bombings. Throughout these years he continued to have furtive, short-lived sexual relationships with other men, including many in the military—but never with anyone who might be considered one of his close friends. The pattern of these encounters can be traced in his early poetry: brief, intense infatuations followed by a sense of indifference or betrayal, whether on his part of that of his partners.

      He must have been buoyed by the publication of his first collection, simply entitled Poems, in 1943 by Simon & Schuster. The reviews were mixed, but where some saw “selfish egotism” and poems full of “private symbols,” others praised the poems’ “dash and splendor” and the “living, speaking voice of youth enmeshed in war.” One critic who panned the collection nonetheless held that “the violence of his vision of the inner world, compounded of war, death, incertitude, isolation, reflects the cataclysm which traditional modes of thought and feeling are undergoing in the world today.”8

      After his demobilization in December 1945, Thompson returned to New York, where his reputation had grown. But even as he prepared a second collection of poems, which would appear as Lament for the Sleepwalker (1947), he had to contemplate what his post-war adult life would look like. He set himself up at the Algonquin Hotel and was often seen with friends and acquaintances and a martini in hand. But there were signs that he was going through some internal strife. One of his best friends, Howard Turner, wrote that during this period Thompson was “nervous, sometimes intemperate, argumentative—I came to feel wary in his presence, unsure of his moods, wondering where he was headed.”

      He decided that he would do what successful authors did: propose a book and get an advance from a publisher to live on for a time. He’d conceived the idea some time back of traveling to the Middle East and writing a book of reflections about it. Thanks to the efforts of Margot Johnson, his literary agent, Dodd, Mead and Company agreed to publish the book, and he traveled to Cairo in 1946.

      There he reunited with someone he had met in London in early 1945, Philip Trower, to whom he had been introduced by a mutual friend. Trower was serving in Cairo in a branch of the British Foreign Office known as the Political Intelligence Department. After a couple of American diplomats vacated Trower’s Cairo apartment, Thompson moved in. This was the beginning of a relationship that would continue without interruption for the better part of three decades.

      Five years younger than Thompson, Trower had been educated at Eton and then completed a war-shortened BA in history at Oxford University. He joined the army in 1942 but was wounded at the battle for the Anzio bridgehead in Italy and returned to England to recuperate. His army service obligation was for five years, which his work in Cairo enabled him to complete.

      In Trower Thompson not only found an admirer and a lover, but also someone of fierce loyalty and great kindness. It was to become the first and only stable, long-term relationship that Thompson would ever experience. Though he was the younger man, Trower had an education equal to that of Thompson and his own literary and intellectual ambitions. They were well matched.

      Thompson’s experiences in the Middle East were rich and varied, but the book that came out of the six months he spent there, The Phoenix in the Desert, not published until 1951, was really more of a collection of sketches and impressions than a serious inquiry into the history, culture, and politics of the region. In the same way, his one published novel, The Dove with the Bough of Olive (1954), would not catch fire with readers. Drawing on the satirical fiction of writers like Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it was made up primarily of conversations rather than extended description, character development, or attention to plot. The limited success of his two prose books would СКАЧАТЬ