Thanks to the efforts of his longtime partner and literary executor, Philip Trower, and the investigations of a few literary sleuths, a much more complete and nuanced version of Thompson’s story has begun to emerge, leading many of the poets and critics who have rediscovered him to hail Thompson as a lost and unsung American master. At the same time—even in the early days of this revival—Thompson’s biography and poetry have generated controversy, as will become clear. Among his current admirers there has been a tendency to claim him in the name of a larger cause or worldview. But it is to be hoped that the publication of this book will temper the debate over—and deepen the appreciation of—Thompson’s oeuvre by offering a fuller account of his life and gathering much of his best work written over the course of four decades.
Encountered in a single volume, these poems demonstrate that while there are clear differences in style and subject matter between the two major phases of Thompson’s writing life, there are also unities of theme and expression that have yet to be fully grasped and valued. In William Blake’s beautiful image, there is a “golden string” winding through Thompson’s poetry that is worth tracing.
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall....
Finding that golden string will require a revision of the received wisdom. The sketchy version of Thompson’s story—the one that has lodged in the minds of the few who have even heard of him—begins with Thompson as a young poet who made his mark at Harvard University in the late 1930s and the New York literary scene in the early 1940s. The next chapter recounts the publication of two volumes of highly acclaimed “baroque” poetry that explore both the experience of World War II and the complex emotional territory of homosexual desire. In the words of poet Edward Field, he and others of his generation considered Thompson one of the rising “stars of modern poetry,” worthy of comparison to Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas. Then, without warning—so the story goes—Thompson, who had been a lively fixture in the literary circles of both New York and London, disappeared from the scene. There were rumors that he had reverted to the Catholic faith of his youth, renounced his gay identity, and gone to live as a recluse in rural England, never to be heard from again.
The epilogue to the tale was added when a collection of his later poetry—Poems: 1950–1974—was published posthumously.1 The collection provided evidence not only that Thompson had returned to Catholic faith and practice, but wrote insipid devotional poetry that abandoned the flamboyant style of his youth for a wan, bookish classicism. Just as Robert Browning lamented William Wordsworth’s turn from youthful radicalism to a more conservative vision in the poem “The Lost Leader,” so Thompson has been characterized as a self-hating homosexual who embraced a faith that suppressed his true identity and genius.
Alongside this version of the narrative lies its inverted mirror image, espoused by Catholic and other religious readers who have hailed Thompson as a champion of the true faith who rejected a hateful way of life and utterly self-absorbed, decadently romantic poetry for a noble austerity of style and vision.
Like all such pieces of received wisdom, these parallel versions of the narrative I have recounted are caricatures, ones that perhaps few hold in such extreme forms. But in the absence of more available information about Thompson’s life and ready access to his poetry, these and other two-dimensional accounts have left a strong impression. This can readily be seen in the recently published book Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master, edited by D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer. The editors demonstrate a gracious desire for inclusion by publishing essays from the entire spectrum of opinion about Thompson—noting, however, that the result is a “cacophony.”
No doubt that cacophony will continue, but in making the best of Thompson’s poetry from all periods of his life available in a single volume, it may be possible for readers of every persuasion to detect the glint of a golden string that runs through this newly restored tapestry.
Terry Dunstan Thompson was born on August 30, 1918, at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London, Connecticut.2 His background has been called “patrician,” but that is misleading on several levels. Certainly there was some wealth in the family on his mother’s side, and professional and literary distinction on his father’s side, but his immediate family had limited means, and Thompson’s relationship to exalted social circles was marginal at best.
His paternal grandfather, Charles T. Thompson, spent most of his career on the staff of the Associated Press, rising to chief of the Paris and Washington, D.C., bureaus. Among Charles’s crowning achievements was detailed reporting from the Italian front during World War I, including the retreat from Caporetto (an episode made famous by Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms), which he later chronicled in book form. For his reporting, the French government made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and the Italian Army gave him a decoration. A sophisticated man of the world, Charles was something of a bon vivant, equally at home in news rooms and casinos.
Charles’s wife, Flora McDonald, was also a journalist and writer. According to Trower, she was more of an intellectual than her husband. Flora wrote both political tracts (one of which elicited a response from pioneering feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton) and fiction. At one point she was asked to write a book attacking the Catholic Church, but in the course of her research she was won over by her supposed enemy and received into the church. Charles, too, became a Catholic, though whether before or after his wife is not known. The marriage eventually became strained and the couple lived apart. Flora spent her later years in Washington, D.C., where she became the hostess of a salon for Catholic clergy and cultured lay people. Though he may have been too young to experience this salon, Dunstan would certainly have inherited an awareness of Catholicism as a living tradition, capable of generating serious intellectual thought and dialogue.
Thompson’s father, Terry Brewster Thompson, was one of Charles and Flora’s three children. Thanks to Charles’s job, the family lived in the town of Giverny, near Monet, but to Thompson’s regret, his father could remember little of the painter other than catching glimpses of him at work en plein air. Terry attended schools in France and England, where he seems to have imbibed a highly traditional sense of moral rectitude and public duty.
One of the few family stories that survives about Charles—and which provides some insight into the differences between father and son—is that when he was asked to look after his grandson Dunstan, he ended up taking him to a casino, where the child found much to amuse himself. Thompson’s father was likely not amused.
Indeed, there is some evidence that Terry reacted against his father’s worldly, cosmopolitan way of life. He chose a more regimented life as a career naval officer, specializing in naval engineering, and his Catholic spirituality has been described by Trower in his unpublished memoir of Thompson as “French Cistercian”—referring to the austere order of reformed Benedictine monks.
Thompson’s mother, Virginia Leita Montgomery, came from a wealthy Catholic family that had its roots in Louisiana but became well established in Washington, D.C. Through her mother, Leita was related to the Carrolls and Lees, pioneering Catholic immigrant families who had arrived in Maryland in the late seventeenth century. Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. His cousin Daniel Carroll was a signer of the U.S. Constitution.
According to Trower, Thompson’s mother “was shy, devout, innocent, and unworldly in a way now difficult to imagine.” He continues: “his mother unwittingly imbued him with many of her fears and anxieties as well as her shyness and nervousness.... When I think of Dunstan and his mother together I see, not so much a mother and child, as two children deeply entwined emotionally, struggling to cope with the adult world, and with the younger child often having to take the initiative.”
Leita experienced a number of miscarriages before and after the birth of her son. Sensing that she would not be able to bring another child to term, Thompson’s parents adopted a girl named Betty when he was about seven years old. Given their difference in age and Thompson’s eventual