A Forgotten Master

As a follow-up to my plaintive post yesterday about the iniquitous allotment of space in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, I’d also like to protest a significant sin of omission in the same volume. There is no place in the Companion for even a passing reference to the great and sadly neglected American poet, Dunstan Thompson. A cradle Catholic who lapsed from the practice of the Faith in order to pursue a homosexual lifestyle, Thompson returned to the Faith in the 1950s and spent the remainder of his life as a faithful, practising Catholic. The poetry he wrote following his return to the Church is amongst the finest religious verse of the twentieth century, yet he and his work are almost entirely forgotten.

Over the past few years, the St. Austin Review has championed Thompson’s cause. We also have the only supplies in the world of his collected religious verse, known as The Red Book. This is available exclusively from StAR for $20, plus postage. Orders can be placed via the magazine’s fulfillment center, the details of which are given on this site. Here’s an article by Philip Trower, Thompson’s literary executor, which was previously published in StAR:

Phoenix in a Desert: Dunstan Thompson

A hundred or more years ago, when the method of analysing ancient texts known as the “higher criticism” was at its height, it was fashionable for a time to maintain that Homer never existed.

His epics were attributed to a mob of minor Greek poets whose works had later been stitched together by a series of editors. Editors were then on the up and up. Since that time, thank goodness, sounder ideas have prevailed — at least in Homeric scholarship. Now it is generally agreed that Homer existed and was the author of the poems traditionally attributed to him so that today one can confidently assert — which would have been more difficult a century ago — that all the world’s major poets, Homer included, have been known and acclaimed in their lifetime.

However lower down the scale of poetic perfection or magnitude of production, there have occasionally been exceptions. In relatively recent times one thinks of Herrick and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Even Keats during his lifetime did not enjoy the status which, partly through the efforts of his admirer, the future Lord Houghton, he later came to occupy. And it to this category of the late or slowly recognised that we must assign the American poet Dunstan Thompson.

For a short period, from the time he left Harvard in 1939 until the early 1950s he enjoyed considerable acclaim, which explains the references to him in the New Catholic Encyclopaedia under the heading Catholic Poets. Poems by him will be found in many periodicals and anthologies of that period, particularly the successful anthologies of modern verse edited by Oscar Williams, and what the poet believed to be the best of these subsequently appeared in book form, which won him recognition as a young writer of exceptional talent in the literary worlds of both New York and London.

He became a figure in the London literary world during World War II while working there as a GI in the Office of War Information. In a letter to a friend, the poet Conrad Aiken gives us a glimpse of the impression he made. Aiken speaks of the him as having “astounded Tom (T.S. Eliot ) and everyone else in London by getting to know all the right people in two seconds flat. Which doesn’t surprise me.”

The “right people” meant the best known literati in the London of that time: the Sitwells, the Spenders, John Lehmann, Cyril Connolly. Eliot and Aiken he already knew. In two successive summers before the war ( 1938 and ’39) Thompson had spent a month studying writing and versification at a summer school which Aiken and his wife ran at Rye in England.

After the war came another year in New York. At that time, writes the poet Edward Field, “he was for my young self not far behind Hart Crane, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas as one of the stars of modern poetry.” His first published volume Poems (Simon and Schuster, 1945) had appeared to mostly highly favourable reviews just before his return to the States from Europe. They are very much war poems. The over-riding subjects are love, death, friendship, the sorrow of partings, the joy of reunions, the paradoxes of army and wartime life in general. What among other things attracted attention was their technical virtuosity, startling imagery and arresting analogies.

There followed a six month trip to the Middle East, recorded in a travel book The Phoenix in the Desert, then a second book of poems, Lament for the Sleepwalker (Dodd Mead 1950), and two or three years later, a novel The Dove With the Bough of Olive.

Then what? An occasional poem appeared in the New Yorker or a literary periodical like Marguerite Caetani’s Botteghe Oscure culminating around 1955 in the publication by the Paris Review of a long meditation on the career and personality of T.S.Eliot after he received the Nobel Prize. Following that — as far as the world knew — nothing: a silence lasting for 20 years until his death in 1975 in the remote English village where he went to live in 1948 after his return from the Middle East and which he never left again except for a trip to Rome in 1950, and an occasional visit to London or friends elsewhere in the English countryside.

But the silence was not self-imposed. He continued to write prolifically until within a few weeks of his death and repeatedly submitted collections of these poems to American publishers throughout the late 50s, the 60s and early 70s. The reasons for his lack of success in spite of the efforts of friends in the New York publishing world who appreciated their merit, are difficult to understand. Sudden shifts in public taste often are. But in this case it may, at least partly, have had something to do with his change of outlook and approach to poetry after he settled in England, a topic I will return to later.

The irony of the present state of affairs is that, in the opinion of many qualified people who have seen these later mostly unpublished poems, they are, in their breadth of subject matter, variety of verse forms, and poetic power, greatly superior to the two early books which got him a name. And it is surely no less ironical that it is these later poems, written subsequently to 1950, which he hoped to be remembered by, while he gave instructions that the two early books were not to be reprinted.

After his death, 500 copies of the later poems were privately printed and the fact that each is a volume of 361 pages gives some idea of the scale of his output. In order to distinguish this collection from the two earlier, commercially published books of poems, I will, for the rest of this article, refer to it as The Red Book. The Red Book is really three separate books of poems arranged by the poet himself with a short section of additional poems found in drawers and folders after his death. A few copies are in libraries, the majority of the rest in private hands. It is largely on this little flotilla of paper glue and buckram that his literary survival depends. There remain about 140 unsold copies which, as the poet’s executor, I have donated to Star Magazine, and from which they will be available to anyone interested. That they are a literary curiosity of very great interest seems to me unquestionable. But I believe they will one day be valued for far far more than that.

Reviewing the book in the Hillsdale Review (Vol VIII, No 3.) some years ago, Gregory Wolfe, the editor, after describing Thompson as “a lyric poet of great versatility and depth” goes on to say: “in my opinion, Thompson is easily one of the finest twentieth-century poets of a Christian— and specifically Catholic — sensibility.” He quotes as an example of his exceptional lyric gift the poem Passage (p. 340 ). Four other poems from The Red Book can also be found in Flowers of Heaven, the anthology of Christian verse recently compiled by Star’s editor.

At this point, some paragraphs about the poet’s personality and background will perhaps help to throw light on what I think makes this body of verse special and different from that of some of his more successful contemporaries.

Although he loved his country dearly, neither by temperament nor upbringing was he mainstream American. There was nothing, un-American, of course, in his having been highly intelligent, witty, imaginative or, when what he saw as truth was at issue, morally courageous to an exceptional degree. But at the same time, he was nervous and highly strung, physically far from robust and for the most part almost comically impractical. Some of this seems to have been due to a difficult birth. Organising daily life finally became such a major obstacle to tranquility and peace of mind that towards the end of his New York days he gave up trying to cope with an apartment and lived in the Algonquin Hotel. This had another advantage. He could not bear being alone. In a hotel lounge, he could sit contentedly reading for hours at a time as long as there were other people around.

Reading, indeed, and conversation were not only his greatest enjoyments. One could describe them as occupations. Indeed along with thinking and writing, they account for the greater part of the time allotted him in this world. But unexpectedly, as far as reading goes, his interests were for the most part non- literary. He seldom read novels or anything resembling what used to be called belles lettres. Even poetry, or at least other people’s poetry, he gave up reading towards the end of his life.

History was his great love, particularly the history of the ancient world. But history also included current affairs. His appetite for newspapers and periodicals of every kind, was almost an addiction. It was as though he couldn’t know enough about the mysteries, follies, beauties, terrors and dramas of human existence, which throughout his life both fascinated and amazed him. All this fed his poetic imagination in a very special way, as readers of The Red Book will discover. I can think of no other large body of verse in which so many of the poems have historical personalities or episodes as their subject matter or evoke so successfully the ethos of past epochs. An example of the latter would be the long meditation “Edwardian Seascape with Figures”, about a once fashionable English seaside resort on the eve of World War I and its state of decay after World War II; and of the former the large number of epigrammatic quatrains summing up the careers, vices and virtues of historical figures, many of them, in my opinion, worthy of Belloc. Here, for instance, is one on the Roman Emperor Augustus:

The grace is Greek, the risky stance superb

As, like a charioteer, he bends to curb

Rome and the Senate with a sparkling threat;

Then rounds the circus without one upset.

Also unusual is his use of the sonnet for humorous as well as serious purposes exemplified in the poem “Tradition”. To his gifts as a conversationalist all who knew him have born witness and, as is usual in such cases, what they remember best, especially those who knew him in early manhood, is how much he made them laugh.

But there was more to it than that. From the start, he was never just a clever young man “with a gift of the gab”, as Aiken noted. Under the sparkling surface there were depths which owed their origin in part to that profound sense that nothing lasts or ultimately quite lives up to its reputation which the ancients expressed in the words eheu fugaces and sunt lacrimae rerum and which dominates the Book of Ecclesiastes. At present it is highly unfashionable, which may partly be what eventually turned the publishers’ readers against him. Yet in a sense it ought surely to be a component of every truly poetic and still more every Christian mind, provided it is balanced by faith, hope and charity.

An incident in the 1920s will give some idea how deep it lay in the present case. The future poet was about ten and on holiday in France with his parents where they one day visited Versailles. After seeing the whole works — the palace, the private apartments, the gardens, the two Trianons, the Hameau — the little boy looked up at his parents with a perplexed look and said quite seriously “Is that all?”

Behind or beneath these characteristics lay a deeply, and in a certain sense exceptionally Catholic childhood. Of his parents, he used to say that they would both have died for the faith but would have mounted the scaffold from opposite sides. This was his way of describing their different religious backgrounds.

The father, Terry Brewster Thompson, a naval officer and son of New England convert parents, had been brought up and educated in France where his father was head of the Associated Press. The result of this mixture of influences, French and New England Puritan, was what his son described as an “almost Cistercian religious austerity.”

In contrast, he would describe his mother’s devotional life as “Italian and baroque” and this was what initially prevailed in his own spiritual formation . She, on her mother’s side, came from an old Maryland Catholic family related to the Carrols and Lees — the poet was proud of being descended from Daniel Carrol of Carroltown, the only Catholic Founding Father and of being a cousin of the famous General Lee of Civil War fame— and on her father’s side from Louisiana Catholics with strong French links.

Because of this, from the time he was a small boy, he was used not only to a cosmopolitan family atmosphere but to meeting the higher clergy of the Washington-Baltimore area, kissing the rings of cardinals and archbishops, serving their masses, hearing higher ecclesiastical chit-chat, and taking part in frequent religious ceremonies. Before he was twelve he had been three times to Europe and Rome where he was present at canonisations of St Joan of Arc and St. Theresa of the Child Jesus and of course met the reigning Pope, Pius XI. From the age of 7 he served the daily early morning masses of the Redemptorist fathers at Annapolis when his father was teaching at the Naval Academy there.

Today there are people who would regard such a childhood as a “religious hot-house” or positively “unnatural”. But he seems to have absorbed it as naturally and without damage as another boy would have being taken constantly to football and ice-hockey matches. It did not prevent him enjoying the company of other children, or being popular at school. The natural and supernatural orders were intertwined in a way that made them a single whole, of which one day being a priest seemed a more or less inevitable part. He did not of course become a priest. But eventually, after intervening disasters, this total immersion in the traditional practices of centuries of Catholic life and culture accounts in large part, I believe, for his having died a Catholic.

However, even stronger than his mother’s influence on his life and outlook was eventually to be that of his great-aunt Mrs Edward White, wife of the only Catholic Chief Justice of the United States so far. The White’s were childless and regarded the poet’s mother as a surrogate daughter. Because of this, and because his father was often at sea, the poet sent a large part of his boyhood at her house in Washington next to what is now St Matthew’s cathedral, with holidays in the summer at the house she took every year in New London.

The short lyric “Summertime” captures some of the intoxication he felt on the yearly journey northward to Connecticut.

Suddenly the sea was there

Sparkling like a different life

Deep blue and white —

A small boy watching while the Pullman swayed

Close to where the waters were so dashingly arrayed.

Surely, the first look Of Heaven

Will be like the sea at Saybrook.

Aunt Leita, as she was called, was a major influence on his life in two respects. She provided him with an experience of stability, security, ordered love and predictability which came in retrospect to seem like a foretaste of heaven, and when she died she left him enough money to live on for the rest of his life without having to take a job. It was not riches. But it was enough to keep him afloat in reasonable comfort provided he handled it wisely. That was in 1936. The poet was 16, and there were no doubt members of his family who predicted that giving a young man financial independence so early in life must certainly lead to disaster. And at first they would have seemed to be justified. Yet as things turned out, Aunt Leita proved right. Given his impracticality, it was his independent means which kept him afloat until God came to the rescue.

Rescue became necessary because some time between his final year at a Catholic prep-school in Connecticut and his first year at Harvard he lost his faith and adopted what was eventually to be a highly promiscuous homosexual life style.

The years after Harvard were the years of his public success as a poet and writer. But by 1948, throwing off the faith was proving not to be the intoxicating access to freedom and happiness which it had seemed to promise at first, as can be seen in the small number of poems from this epoch with a Baudelarian sense of desolation. The sonnet (p.299) beginning “In rain, in loneliness, the late despair….” perhaps best describes the desolation, while the poem (p.351) in which “Eros, his plumes bedraggled by the snow/came on me walking in the frozen park,” conveys the chilling experience of an encounter with total lovelessness.

But there was light enough to see his face,

Those eyes of ice, that mouth impassioned stone,

The whole expressionless, as though a place

Where happiness and suffering were not known.

Here by contrast, in the poem “Fragment for Christmas”, is the situation 20 years later.

Dear Lord, and only ever faithful friend,

For love of us rejected, tortured, torn —

And we were there; who on the third day rose

Again and still looks after us; descend

Into each wrecked unstable house; be born

In us, a Child among Your former foes.

But this is not the place for the story of his return to the practice of his religion, which took place in 1952, and which needs an article to itself. Here I am concerned with him chiefly as a poet, about which I will make one final point.

Although his return to the Church and the faith did inevitably change his outlook in significant ways and is responsible for the high calibre and large quantity of religious verse in The Red Book, a change of content of a different kind and still more of style and technique had already begun as far back as 1945.

With regard to the content, there is an enormous broadening of subject matter which makes reading The Red Book like a journey of adventure through a new country, in addition to being, what is more usual on taking up the work of a new poet — an encounter with a fresh poetic sensibility.

As for style, what is chiefly remarkable, I think, is the vast variety of verse forms it incorporates, old as well as new. The early poems, in spite of their technical originality, have a certain uniformity of style in the sense that almost all bear the stamp of the poetic “modernism” which, from the 1920s, reigned almost unchallenged for the rest of the century. This does not mean that in the later poems Thompson rejects the positive acquisitions of poetic “modernism”; I am referring to its greater use of free verse and its abandonment of a special kind of diction, subject matter and sentiment, considered as being alone appropriate for good poetry. But one could speak of a return to the “grand tradition” and an opening of it up to the benefits of poetic modernism while leaving behind that movement’s defects as passing peculiarities of a bye-gone age.

In a recent article on the English poet John Heath Stubbs, a contemporary of Thompson’s, the English author and critic A.N. Wilson spoke of Heath Stubbs as having done something similar. If this is true, both poets, I suggest, deserve a long and loud Salute. But for that actually to happen in Thompson’s case, the contents of The Red Book will first have to become as widely known as I believe they deserve to be.