17 pages • 34 minutes read
Thom GunnOn the Move
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Analysis
A number of photographs of the young Thom Gunn can be found on the internet, in which he wears a leather jacket and jeans and looks at the camera with a stern expression, almost as if he had just stepped out of “On the Move” or The Wild One. If Ysenda Maxtone Graham is to be believed, in her 2021 review of The Letters of Thom Gunn for Britain’s Daily Mail, Gunn could often be seen in the 1960s and 70s “cruising round San Francisco on his Harley-Davidson in tight Levi’s and a leather biking jacket.” Obviously, Gunn enjoyed the motorcycle culture, and “On the Move” went a long way in making his reputation and tagging him as a young poet in touch with the new anti-authority, motorcycle, and rock ’n roll culture of the 1950s.
Initially, Gunn was pleased with “On the Move.” He wrote in the Times Educational Supplement in 1956 that “it is the only time I have written adequately on one of the really important subjects: the poem is about movement as an experiment, and about ‘the search for value’ as a value in itself” (Quoted in New Selected Poems: Thom Gunn, edited by Clive Wilmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, p. 208). Four decades later, however, in a 1999 interview with James Campbell, Gunn’s view had shifted, and he offered a candid and surprisingly critical view of “On the Move”: “There are many things to dislike about [it],” he said. One such thing was “the constant use of the word ‘one,’ which I find very stilted now. Now I would use the word ‘you’ rather than ‘one.’” He also said that he disliked the poem’s “enormous formality.” By this he was referring to the regular meter and rhyme of “On the Move”—a type of poetry he favored early in his career before turning to more experimental forms.
Gunn was also blunt about the final line of the poem: “One is always nearer by not keeping still.” He said he was “not sure that the last line means anything […] Nearer what? Well, yes, the motorcyclist is nearer the destination, but what’s the destination of human beings? It’s a question that seems to answer itself but doesn’t.” Campbell quoted the line “It is a part solution, after all,” and asked Gunn, “A part solution to what?” to which Gunn replied, “There’s another reason there’s something wrong with the poem. It’s unnecessarily well-known and anthologized” (Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell, London: Between the Lines, 2000, p. 29).
Historical Analysis: Motorcycle Culture and The Wild One
Gunn was inspired by the iconic movie The Wild One (1953). The film was directed by László Benedek and starred Marlon Brando as Johnny, the leader of a gang of about 40 motorcyclists who roar into a small California town and disrupt the quiet lives of its inhabitants. Early in the movie, when the bikers make a nuisance of themselves during a motorcycle race in Carbonville and are told to move on, the sheriff asks a local man where they are from. “I don’t know,” the man replies. “From everywhere. I don’t even think they know where they’re going” (akin to the motorcyclists depicted in “On the Move”). They go where the mood and the road lead them. They have zero respect for authority or anyone older than themselves. When they show up in the next small town, Wrightsville, the local sheriff is too weak to rein them in. When a girl asks Johnny what he is rebelling against, he replies “Whaddya got?” suggesting he is likely to rebel against anything at all—the whole of society, perhaps. Mayhem begins when a rival biker group shows up in town, and the bikers virtually take over the town—drinking, frightening the young women, and disrespecting the local citizens. As the gang leader, Brando is morose and menacing in a quieter way than his more raucous buddies, and of course he exerts a strange fascination over the young ladies. Brando was an actual motorcyclist and rode his own bike, a Triumph Thunderbird 6T, in the film.
The Wild One was a box-office success, and thousands of boys and young men who had seen it went out and purchased black leather jackets and motorcycles to show their identification with Brando's character and his ilk. The film also faced some hostility. Many people felt that it glamorized unruly behavior and would lead to a rise in juvenile delinquency. In England, the movie was banned for 12 years (until 1968). Gunn was aware that these free-spirited motorcyclists were also belligerent, lawless hoodlums, but he was nonetheless fascinated by the romantic myth surrounding this lifestyle and used it for his poetic and philosophical purposes.
Existentialism
Gunn was interested in the philosophy of existentialism and acknowledged that it was in his mind as he wrote the poems in The Sense of Movement. Existentialism posits that god does not exist and human beings are alone in an absurd universe—that is, a universe that has no purpose or rational order but is merely chaotic. Human beings therefore have an absolute freedom and also a responsibility to define themselves and create their own purpose and meaning in life through conscious acts of will. Gunn’s primary reading in existentialism was a short book by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre: L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946), based on a lecture Sartre gave in Paris in October 1945. The first English translation, Existentialism Is a Humanism, appeared in 1948. In it, Sartre wrote that in a world in which god does not exist, man’s “existence comes before his essence.” This is the opposite of how human existence has traditionally been understood; a human being is not patterned after an essence, a plan, which exists before he is brought into existence. Sartre uses an analogy of the maker of a paper-knife to explain this. A knife is made by a craftsman who has a conception of what a knife is and what it should do, as well as “the pre-existent technique of production.”
Sartre continues:
Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paperknife that its essence— . . . the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible—precedes its existence.
He then applies this principle to human existence:
[M]an first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that leap towards existence.
This is the philosophy underlying “On the Move.” The motorcyclists are existentialists, exercising their freedom to shape their lives in a “valueless world” (Line 30) as they choose, without any preformed “essence” to guide, restrict, or mold them.
