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229 I’m still not entirely comfortable with talk of “spirituality” and “the spiritual,” which you get a big dose of on the west coast. Throughout the years, I’ve seen a lot of poets bucking for sainthood, most often going in for one version or another of Oriental religions. Frankly, I always preferred Allen Ginsberg in his political activist mode, rather than as a chanting Buddhist. But James Broughton, even in his pose of an illuminati, was a poet of seductive charm and good sense. Another “spiritual poet,” Arthur Gregor, is such an old friend, and a good poet, besides, that I accept his religious side as part of his decidedly romantic character, which includes a good dollop of nuttiness. Along with Dunstan Thompson, Broughton and Gregor represent three different ways gay poets have managed to incorporate religion into their lives. Of course, some people merely stick to, or go back to, the religion they were raised in. To me, they were brainwashed from the beginning but I don’t necessarily dismiss them as misguided. The novelist Joseph Caldwell, a darling little man of bubbling 23 energy with intense, button eyes, as cute as ever as an old party with his frosted bush of hair, eyebrows and mustache, has never wavered in his Catholicism, which works for him, though he’s happily found a priest who will hear his Confessions. Dunstan Thompson, also raised a Roman Catholic, was more conflicted and I don’t think he ever really resolved the issue of his sexuality and religion, or indeed, his poetry and religion. I’d never lost my admiration for Dunstan Thompson’s poetry, after I discovered it during the war, and had long harbored the idea of perhaps editing a new edition of his poems. For a start, I wrote a brief appreciation, including a sampler of his poems, for Poetry Pilot, the newsletter of the Academy of American Poets, which came to the attention of Philip Trower, his surviving partner—I had never heard of Trower before he wrote me. All I knew about Dunstan was that, after his marvelous, well-received books in the forties, he had left the United States to live in England, gotten religion, and unaccountably disappeared from view in the early fifties. So, during a stay in London , I finally seized the opportunity to explore the mystery of his later life. Neil and I had settled into a rented studio flat there, when I contacted Philip Trower who was living in a remote village on the North Sea, and he came down to London to meet us. A kindly man who worked as a Vatican reporter for Roman Catholic publications, Trower immediately demystified Dunstan’s disappearance, and told me it was “simply” that, after his youthful hell raising, Dunstan had returned to the Catholic Church. Devout and repentant, he had retired with Trower, who converted to Catholicism himself, to the seaside village of Cley-Next-The-Sea in Norfolk near the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, where he lived until his death in 1974, and where Trower has stayed on. I spoke to him of my mystification at never seeing any poems of Dunstan’s in print after those early books, except for one poem in the New Yorker in the fifties, but Trower assured me that Dunstan had never stopped writing poetry, and in fact, at the time we met, 230 231 Trower was in the process of putting together a volume of the later poetry. When I finally read the sizeable, posthumous collection, Poems 1950–1974, it was evident that if religion had transformed Dunstan from brilliant bad boy to repentant sinner, it had also transformed his poetry. The formal structure was still there, but gone was the sinful glitter of the language, the outrageously gay love poems to soldiers and sailors and airmen in World War II. Now there was weeping and breast-beating as he reviewed his life, wallowing in his guilt. Whatever Trower’s “simple” version of Dunstan’s transformation —not “conversion to Catholicism” he corrected me, but “return”—I decided that the only believable explanation for him to have changed so radically, so suddenly, was that he had to have had a nervous breakdown. Or, I theorized, he may have been arrested, as so many gays in England were, back in the fifties before the Wolfenden Amendment decriminalized consensual gay sex between adults, and the humiliation drove him into the arms of the church...

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