Complete Poetical Works of a E Housman

by A E Housman

  Diary 1890

  TUESDAY JAN: 7. I heard he was married.

  THURSDAY. „ 9. I wrote to him (mail tomorrow)

  FRIDAY. JUNE 20 Wrote to him by to-day’s mail THURSDAY OCT. 2 His son born.

  WEDNESDAY „ 29 His son’s birth in the paper.

  FRIDAY NOV. 7 I write to him by this day’s mail.

  The only entry in the diary of 1891, is of a subsequent year, 1898. This seems to indicate that Alfred did not continue to keep a diary: and this is borne out by other entries relating to flowers and seasons in several years following: in each case the date of the year is added.

  The one significant entry is thus given, under Friday May 22, 1891: [Sunday 1898, 10.45. p in said goodbye.] This meeting must have taken place when Jackson was once more home on leave from India. But though it was the last of which my brother has left any record, there was at least one of a later date. When Jackson had resigned his Indian appointment, and was on his way to take up another at Vancouver in British Columbia, he stayed in England for the last time; and it was at the house of their mutual friend Dr. A. W. Pollard, that the two had their final meeting.

  There was no estrangement; all three were, in Pollard’s account of that meeting, “very youthful and light-hearted.” For my brother the remedy of age had come to ease the old trouble which had left on his life so deep a mark.

  Nobody reading these entries from his diaries, can have any doubt about the emotional nature of my brother’s love for Jackson; it was deep and lasting, and it caused him great unhappiness. Even in memory the emotion of it remained. Only two years before his death, I had proof of it. In Alfred’s rooms at Trinity College Cambridge, two portraits hung near together over the fire-place — the one a portrait taken in youth, the other in late middle-age. The youthful one, I learned later, was of Adalbert (the A.J.J. of poems xlii in More Poems). I asked Alfred, when I was staying with him two years before his death, whose was the other. In a strangely moved voice he answered, “That was my friend Jackson, the man who had more influence on my life than anyone else.”

  Only those who knew how impenetrable was my brother’s reticence over personal matters, will understand how astonished I was that he should have told me that. Why did he tell me anything more than the name, unless he wished me to know?

  When I found the poems which he had left to my discretion, when I found the diaries which had so obviously been preserved for one purpose only, when I found other things among his papers, which did him no discredit, but which told me clearly the direction of his interest in beauty of human form, I became convinced that he had a purpose, and that purpose was to let me know the secret of his life, and to give me liberty to make it known. —

  I do so for two reasons, one personal, the other social. I am quite sure that, however much my brother resented the ill-fate which his “unlucky love” had imposed on him, he had no false shame in the matter: “the laws of God, the laws of man” were none of his making — the responsibility for them was not his. One may agree with it, or not; but that was how he himself stated the case: and he was of too proud a nature to wish that he should be mis-understood.

  Yet this proud nature had a deep human need, which all through his life remained unsatisfied. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence gives the following introspective account of himself:

  There was my craving to be liked — so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another. The terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink from trying; besides, there was the standard; for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply, in the same language, after the same method, for the same reasons....

  Against this passage, Alfred wrote in the margin “This is me.”

  I find a special significance in that last sentence: “intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply” etc.

  The poems and the diary tell us plainly that the perfect reply was never given. The Shropshire Lad poems were all written between the years 1891, and 1895. In answer to the inquiries of a literary correspondent about his life and writings, Alfred made the following statement: “I did not begin to write poetry in earnest till the really emotional part of my life was over... very little of A Shropshire Lad is autobiographical.” The last of the diaries, containing entries actually to date, was the one of 1890. In the one of 1891 is the single entry, dated May 22nd, eight years later: “Sunday 1898. 10.45. p in said goodbye.” That was the concluding word to the emotional part of his life: after that there is no mention.

  Alfred’s craving to be liked was also a craving to be understood; and in order that understanding might be possible, he left these records to be found by one of whose sympathy he could be sure. And though the foolish and the obdurate, and those of hard understanding may reprobate what is here disclosed, many — the more intelligent, the more charitable, the more kindly of understanding — will, I believe, think differently; and having fuller knowledge will be able to have more liking also for the man who, in his own life-time, could not let himself be better known.

  This is the personal reason for what I have here recorded.

  My social reason is that though, in their treatment of the homosexual problem, “the precious balms of the righteous” have broken many heads, and many hearts, and ruined many lives, I have a hope that, twenty-five years hence, their day of evil power will be gone; and that society may, at long last, have acquired sufficient common sense to treat the problem less unintelligently, less cruelly, more scientifically. And if not, it may help to that end for the world to be given knowledge that one to whom it is deeply in debt for the beauty of his poetry and the eminence of his scholarship, was one of the sufferers whom it has in the past found it so foolishly easy to despise and to condemn.

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