Diana Athill, the renowned British editor and writer, published “Letters to a Friend,” an epistolary chronicle of her 30-year friendship with Mr. Field, in 2011.
“The whole point of poetry for me is subject matter,” he told Ms. Athill. “Saying what I have to say, saying what has never been said before, what’s not polite to say.”
During the war, as an Army Air Corps navigator at the Grafton Underwood base in the English Midlands, Mr. Field met Coman Leavenworth, the first published poet he had encountered. Mr. Leavenworth introduced him to the work of contemporary poets who were writing about same-sex desire at a time when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and most gay writing was coded or underground. Mr. Field, who had concealed his own homosexuality from his family and in his own writing, was shocked and thrilled.
By the time he published his debut collection, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me” (1963), he was a writer openly embracing his own sexuality.
In the poem “Unwanted,” he wrote:
It is perfectly obvious that he was not popular at school
No good at baseball, and wet his bed.
His aliases tell his history: Dumbbell, Good-for-nothing,
Jewboy, Fieldinsky, Skinny, Fierce Face, Greaseball, Sissy.
Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name,
Responds to love, don’t call him or he will come.
Edward Field was born in Brooklyn on June 7, 1924, one of six children of Eastern European Jewish parents who were among a wave of immigrants in the early 20th century.
