RaveThe Times Literary SupplementQuite rightly, the focus of this well-presented and helpfully annotated selection of his correspondence – merely a tenth of all the letters which the assiduous editors have turned up – is what the introduction calls \'literary interest\'...Gunn seems to have been one of those rare good writers who is almost completely self-conscious about his own processes and predicaments, and it is perhaps suggestive that many of the most illuminating passages of self-reflection here are written to people who taught literature at universities (Tony Tanner, Donald Davie, Clive Wilmer, Douglas Chambers)...At the same time, his literary evaluations could be robustly non-professional: Richard Murphy is \'an egotistical prick\'; \'if there hadn’t been a Seamus Heaney, the critics would have had to invent one\'; \'the new Formalists are talentless slime\', and the like...Gunn comes across as performative, boisterous, amused, repeatedly anxious not to be a bore or to appear pompous, and delighted by his own candour...His love affair with San Francisco, especially its sex and drugs, comes through loud and clear; and, in contrast, the horror of the AIDS plague is vividly depicted, with Pepys-like perceptiveness, too...Gunn once told an interviewer that he led \'a very mundane, ordinary life\'...I suppose the truth of that depends what you mean by “ordinary”...\'It’s very good living in San Francisco\', he wrote to Christopher Isherwood, \'though I do occasionally feel a bit like Lord Rochester\'...\'I am the W of Babylon herself,\' he cheerfully admitted to another friend...He certainly threw himself into things: \'I had a 36 hour sexual epiphany with a certain John Ambrosio\' is not the sort of remark you find in the correspondence of every man of letters approaching seventy. \'All this speed at my age will probably kill me soon,\' he wrote in 2000, correctly.
