by Peter Parker
When news of Richards’s difficulties became public, Housman had been approached by at least one other publisher, but he later said that moving elsewhere would have been a bother. This may have been true, but in spite of considerable provocation Housman remained steadfastly loyal to Richards. As Laurence Housman wrote, although his brother could be very severe about defects of scholarship, he was more forgiving of moral failings: ‘Even deflections from rectitude which he would not have tolerated in himself, caused no withdrawal of aid when once it had been proffered; and in a case known to me, conduct which he described as “nefarious” did not alter relations of real personal friendship between him and the offender, though the offence was to himself.’
What have you in your heart?
Richards was clearly one of those few people with whom Housman felt he could relax, even to the point of making sly allusions to such topics as sodomy and bains de vapeur. That said, Richards was at pains in his vivid memoir of Housman to refute all hints of possible homosexuality, or anything that ‘puts a stigma on Housman’s reputation that is entirely unwarranted’. In spite of the language he uses, Richards was a man of the world who had books on his list (by Alec Waugh and Ronald Firbank, for example) in which overt homosexuality, both male and female, provided a principal theme. It is unclear why he should be so vehement, unless he thought that what he called ‘a distorted nature discovered through the medium of his poems’ would alienate potential readers from Housman’s popular and (to his publisher) highly lucrative publications. When he asserted that ‘There is no single thing that I observed in my forty years of association with [Housman] that cannot be told openly,’ he was either being uncharacteristically naïve or unwittingly providing evidence that even those who believed they knew Housman well were not given access to his most private feelings and beliefs. As Laurence Housman wrote, his brother was ‘a shy, proud and reticent character; even to his intimates he was provokingly reserved, finding, I think, a certain pleasure in baffling injudicious curiosity’. This captures Housman well: a genuine reserve that sometimes resulted in rudeness but often manifested itself as a mischievous refusal to be drawn.
Laurence also drew attention to one of the jottings it was Housman’s habit to make in books he was reading. In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence had written 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.
There was a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known. Contempt for my passion for distinction made me refuse every offered honour …
In his own copy of the book Housman had written in the margin: ‘This is me.’ It is symptomatic of Housman’s oblique methods of self-revelation that he should state what made him the man that he was in such a lapidary form, and not directly but by referring to someone else’s self-analysis.
Given the strain such conflicting feelings must have placed on Housman, it is scarcely surprising that Laurence should write of his brother: ‘He was not a man of happy disposition.’ This is not, however, to say that Housman had rejected happiness as a human ideal or considered it not worth pursuing. In the Introductory Lecture he delivered at University College, London, in October 1892, he had gone so far as to assert: ‘Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.’ The context for this was Housman’s rejection of the social theorist Herbert Spencer’s utilitarian concept of education. ‘We may seem to be occupied, as Mr Spencer says, in the production, preparation and distribution of commodities,’ he continued, ‘but our true occupation is to manufacture from the raw material of life the fabric of happiness; and if we are ever to set about our work we must make up our minds to risk something.’ Laurence went on to write that in spite of not having a happy disposition, his brother ‘extracted from life a good deal of melancholy satisfaction suited to his temperament; and though he smiled at life somewhat wryly, he did manage to smile’.
That wry smile and that melancholy satisfaction were characteristic of both the man and his poetry. It was, however, the apparent differences between the man and the poet that struck many people. His friend Percy Withers referred to aspects of Housman’s character that were ‘implicit in his poetry’ but absolutely ‘hidden in his person’, while the playwright George Calderon, introduced to Housman by William Rothenstein in around 1901, commented: ‘Well, William, so far from believing that man wrote The Shropshire Lad [sic] I shouldn’t even have thought him capable of reading it!’ Rothenstein agreed that Housman ‘neither looked nor talked like a poet’, and Max Beerbohm memorably likened his appearance to that of ‘an absconding cashier’. Rothenstein felt that Housman ‘prided himself’ on his unpoetic appearance: ‘he was grim and dry and seemed to disdain the artist in himself, to be contemptuous of temperament.’ Housman clearly did not disdain the artist in himself, but he kept that part of his personality private. In some cases – Oscar Wilde being an obvious example – the man and the writer are all of a piece, but this isn’t always the case. W.H. Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson makes a point that is perhaps applicable to many writers, but to Housman in particular: the author of the poetry was someone his friends ‘had never met – not the man they joked with over dinner, but the poet who worked alone in a study “more private than a bedroom even”, behind a closed door that no one but he was allowed to open’. Housman’s door was more firmly closed than most, and for good reason.
That door opened a crack in the poetry in a way it rarely did in the man. The true test of poetry for Housman was not how it stood up to scholarly analysis, but the immediate response it produced in the reader. This response, he notoriously claimed in a lecture given late in his life, was ‘more physical than intellectual’. He told his audience that when once asked by an American reader to define poetry, he had ‘replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms it provokes in us’. Poetry, he said, should make one’s hair stand on end; it should cause shivers down the spine, a tightening of the throat, tears. This, clearly, is a populist definition, and – to Housman’s great satisfaction – it did not please everyone in his audience, which was largely academic. It was particularly striking that this advocacy of an emotional and visible reaction to poetry should be made by someone who appeared, even by the standards of his well-tailored era, rigorously buttoned-up.
Housman did occasionally, and very effectively, let his carefully maintained self-restraint slip. Shortly after his death, one of his students recalled one such occasion in May 1914, ‘when the trees in Cambridge were covered in blossom’. Having dissected Horace’s ode Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis ‘with the usual display of brilliance, wit and sarcasm’, Housman ended his class on a wholly unexpected note:
… for the first time in two years he looked up at us, and in a quite different voice said: ‘I should like to spend the last few minutes considering this ode simply as poetry.’ Our previous experience of Professor Housman would have made us sure that he would regard such a proceeding as beneath contempt. He read the ode aloud with deep emotion, first in Latin and then in an English translation of his own. ‘That,’ he said hurriedly, almost like a man betraying a secret, ‘I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature,’ and walked quickly out of the room. A scholar of Trinity (since killed in the War), who walked with me to our next lecture, expressed in undergraduate style our feeling that we had seen something not really meant for us. ‘I felt quite uncomfortable,’ he said. ‘I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry.’
The poem, in other words, had done just what Housman felt poetry ought to do.
On another occasion, two years before his death, Housman was visited in his rooms at
Trinity by his brother Laurence. Seeing a photograph of a man hanging over the fireplace, Laurence asked the identity of the sitter. ‘In a strangely moved voice he answered, “That was my friend Jackson, the man who had more influence on my life than anyone else.”’ As with the brief comment on Horace’s ode, Housman’s voice and manner betrayed a struggle between saying too little and saying too much, something that provides a creative tension in his poems. Laurence went on to remark: ‘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?’ But what precisely was Housman telling his brother? What was it that he wished him to know? Even more telling, perhaps, was the fact that the face in the photograph, that of someone who was so important in his brother’s life, was one that Laurence had never seen before, or at any rate failed now to recognise. As with his emotions, so with people: Housman liked to keep things compartmentalised.
Housman evidently believed that a writer’s work should stand and be judged on its own merits without any reference to the life of the person who wrote it. In his own case, that person was, first and foremost, the leading classical scholar of his generation, and Housman frequently referred to this work as his ‘trade’, with the suggestion that poetry was a sideline. The notion of the gentleman amateur is distinctly English, with a long tradition of people proving highly skilled at, and often leading the field in, occupations for which they have received no specific training. One thinks of John Vanbrugh, arguably the greatest English architect of his age, who drew up plans for Castle Howard with no previous experience of technical draughtsmanship; John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, who rose to similar eminence as painters without attending an art school or serving an apprenticeship; the great naturalist, Gilbert White, one in a long line of English clergymen who contributed to the arts and sciences when not writing sermons or taking church services; Gertrude Jekyll, who trained as a painter and turned to horticulture only after her eyesight began to fail, becoming nevertheless the doyenne of Edwardian gardening. A similar strand in English literature was noted by James Sutherland, writing in 1947 in Ernest Barker’s The Character of England: ‘The English poet is rarely a bard or a seer, rarely even a professional poet; his poetry, as often as not, is the product of such leisure hours as fall to the lot of a civil servant, or a parish priest, or a country doctor. This noble English tradition of business in the daytime and poetry at night goes back to Chaucer’ – who became the father of English literature while earning his living as a civil administrator and diplomat. Housman saw himself as an amateur poet in both its original meaning of someone who does something out of love for it, and its more usual one of someone who does it for no financial reward, as exemplified by his paying for the first edition of A Shropshire Lad and refusing for many years to take a royalty on commercially published editions of the book.
None of this is to suggest that Housman did not take his poetry seriously or indeed have a proper appreciation of its worth. At some private level his poetry was clearly as important to Housman as his scholarly editions of classical writers, but this was not something he wanted to acknowledge publicly: his unexpected display of emotion when reading aloud to his students Diffugere nives and his own translation of it, marks a point at which the poet and scholar, the private and public man, met – and almost undid him. While working on the fifth and final volume of his edition of Manilius, he told Percy Withers: ‘It ought to be out in a year’s time, and then I shall have done what I came on earth to do, and can devote the rest of my days to religious meditation.’ As so often, Housman deflects attention from what he is saying, as well as any accusations of sententiousness, with a joke; but the serious point remains. It could be taken to mean that what Housman was put on earth to do was to be a classical scholar, but he had also by this time published his second and, as he hoped, ‘Last’ volume of poems. When he added ‘THE END’ to the final page of that book, he meant it, and he wrote almost no poems thereafter.
* * *
The many disappointed accounts of what it was like to meet Housman, and attempts by those who did so to reconcile the man and the poet, overlook one essential thing. At the time he was writing A Shropshire Lad, Housman was not the prickly old don people encountered at Cambridge during his years of fame, but a comparatively young man in his mid-thirties. The best-known likeness we have of him is a drawing by Francis Dodd dated July 1926, commissioned by St John’s College, Oxford, to mark Housman’s election as an Honorary Fellow of his alma mater. Laurence Housman, who used it as the frontispiece for the posthumously published More Poems, described it as ‘the best portrait of my brother that has ever been done’, but it was drawn more than three decades after the publication of A Shropshire Lad. Dressed in a lightweight three-piece suit worn over a wing-collared shirt and tie, and looking more or less at ease, Housman sits on a wooden-framed chair with a rush seat, his hands resting on his thighs. The sketched-in background reveals some ghostly bookcases behind his left shoulder and a sofa piled with more books to his right. His head is turned towards the portraitist, but he is not looking directly at the viewer, and his eyes have a faraway gaze. The bristling eyebrows are still dark, but the hair is grey and parted in the centre into two neat wings, while the moustache is white and luxuriant, curving down around the mouth. This portrait shows Housman as he was at the time: a distinguished Classics don in his late sixties – though Housman himself considered it ‘very unlike’. Familiar and often reproduced though the image is (it currently adorns the wrappers of the Housman Society Journal), it is no more the face of the man who wrote A Shropshire Lad than is the photograph taken by E.O. Hoppé in 1911, which has also been widely reproduced – on the cover of the 1988 Penguin edition of Housman’s Collected Poems and Selected Prose, for example. In this photograph, of which the subject did not possess a copy and which he claimed was taken merely ‘to oblige the artist, as he called himself and perhaps was’, Housman looks considerably older than his fifty-two years. He rests his face upon his left hand, as if in deep and melancholy contemplation, and these features stand out against the sombre background and the dark suit he is wearing. Similarly, the famous descriptions of Housman looking like ‘an undertaker’s mute’ (Richard Middleton) or as if he were ‘descended from a long line of maiden aunts’ (A.C. Benson: look who’s talking) were made when Housman had settled into donnish middle age and are more notable for their wit than their accuracy.
We need to banish these well-known images from our mind when we think of A Shropshire Lad, replacing them with the carte de visite photograph taken by Henry Van der Weyde in around 1894. The exact date of this photograph has been variously guessed and does not much matter, but Laurence in his memoir A.E.H. states that it depicts Housman ‘aged 35’. The subject is recognisably the same man as in the later representations, but when we look at it we are usefully reminded that the unhappiness Housman confronts in the poems is that of someone who had not long left his youth behind him. The face, caught almost in profile, is an unexpectedly attractive one, with deep-set eyes and a beautifully straight nose – markedly different from the rather commonplace half-profile he presents to the world in a photograph taken when he was eighteen, before the advent of what he called ‘the great and real troubles of my early manhood’. In that portrait he appears unformed, not yet grown into himself – or indeed into the roomy blazer he is wearing. By 1894, however, his face appears notably sensitive, something the full moustache seems designed, but fails entirely, to mask. The ears lie at an unusual backwards angle against the head, away from elegantly narrow sideburns. The hair is immaculate: cut short at the back and sides, parted in the centre, and glossy with pomade. Is it what we now know about Housman’s life that makes this carte seem like the sort of photograph someone might give to his mother as he set off to fight in a war he did not expect to survive? Or perhaps it is merely the face of a man to
whom the worst has already happened, and who has accommodated that worst without it solidifying his features into grim resignation, as in the Hoppé photograph. Whatever the case, there is something deeply moving about this image, something that relates to the poems of A Shropshire Lad in a way no other image does. It is also worth noting that when Housman was asked by friends and admirers to send them a copy of his likeness, this was the photograph he always chose, and precisely for the reason that – as far as he could remember – it was taken ‘the year when I was beginning to write A Shropshire Lad’.
None of the surviving letters from this period mention that Housman was writing poems and assembling them for publication, and those who knew him must have been as surprised as the reading public was when A Shropshire Lad appeared as if from nowhere. ‘So, Alfred has a heart after all,’ one member of the family commented after reading the book. He had indeed, and had secretly lost it to someone who could not respond in kind. It was this, as he privately suggested after the publication of his second volume of poems, that had made him a poet. Whether or not it also contributed to his failing his finals at Oxford and thus derailing the career for which he seemed destined is unproven, but the two events certainly contributed to the ‘troubles’ of his early manhood. Those troubles also turned him from a skilled writer of occasional and comic verse into one of England’s best-loved lyric poets. And it is to them, and to Housman’s early years more generally, that we need to look in order to understand how he became the kind of poet – and indeed the kind of man – that he did. It was also his childhood and youth, later recalled as ‘the land of lost content’, that provided much of the emotional and physical background of A Shropshire Lad.