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 provide no incentive for him to abandon poetry.
When they returned to London in early 1947, Thompson and Trower found a flat together, but it wasn’t long before they realized that Thompson’s inheritance didn’t leave much left over after the expensive city rent. Trower, who had once intended to pursue a career in law, had decided to try his own luck as a full-time writer. So he contacted a cousin who found an inexpensive house for let on the northern coast of Norfolk in the village of Cley next the Sea. Neither Thompson nor Trower imagined at the time that their sojourn to Norfolk would be anything but temporary. But they were to remain there until Thompson’s death in 1975.
Given the course of Thompson’s literary fortunes from this point forward, and his eventual return to his Catholic faith in 1952, it has been tempting for some to conclude that he made some sort of conscious decision to become a recluse. This was not his intention. Travel to London, even by car, was a long and tiring journey, but right up until their move Thompson and Trower had continued to meet socially with the likes of T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, Rose Macaulay, Laurie Lee, Roy Fuller, and many others, indicating the opposite of a desire for retreat. At the same time, it is also true that to some extent, they simply moved into a more settled phase of life together.
There were other signs, however subtle, that Thompson was settling into himself. The poems at the end of Lament for the Sleepwalker, for example, show a dramatic shift from self-preoccupation to a focus outside his immediate experience. Not only that, but there is also a clear move toward simplified diction and direct syntax. In the moving “Sonnets to My Father,” written after his father’s death in 1945, Thompson’s lines have gone from “baroque” to “austere”:
Ah, Captain, you died at peace, although a war
Broke your heart, as once before your son had.
The years like roses darken, die: so fade
The roses on your grave. How the dead are