by Peter Parker
May stuck the land with wickets:
For all the eye could tell
The world went well.
Yet well, God knows, it went not,
God knows, it went awry;
For me, one flowery Maytime,
It went so ill that I
Designed to die.
It has been proposed that these lines refer directly to Housman’s failure in Greats, which took place that year at the end of May, or to the events that contributed to his failure. This is certainly plausible, although in another poem Housman implied that it was ‘at four-and-twenty’, which is to say two years after failing his exams, that he thought ‘To lay me down and die’. This perhaps merely goes to show that it is unwise to treat poems as if they were strictly autobiographical. That said, Kate’s recollections suggest that, if not actually suicidal, Housman became severely depressed in the aftermath of his failure at Oxford, and it is from this point that he becomes recognisable as the man who raised a self-protecting shield against the world. The poem continues:
And if so long I carry
The lot that season marred,
’Tis that the sons of Adam
Are not so evil-starred
As they are hard.
The striking phrase ‘The lot that season marred’ links this poem both to ‘Diffugere Nives’, Housman’s loose translation of the Horatian ode that reduced him to tears – ‘But oh whate’er the sky-led seasons mar, / Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams’ – and the crucial final poem of A Shropshire Lad, when he writes of the seeds he has sown that ‘some the season mars’. Here, perhaps, is the origin of Housman’s strong identification with the ‘luckless lads’ of that particular poem, and indeed of the entire volume. The world had gone awry for him when he was a young man and never settled back into its proper course – and this is the starting point of his poetry.
Here I lie down in London
1882–1887
Housman had at least learned from his bitter experience, and in July 1882 he passed the Civil Service exam. After he declined the offer of a job in Dublin, his stepmother ‘told him he must accept the next thing that offered’. Happily that turned out to be a job at the Patent Office, where Moses Jackson was already employed, and so Housman did indeed accept it. He went to London that December, finding lodgings at 15 Northumberland Place in Bayswater, to the north-west of Hyde Park. From there each day he travelled to the Patent Office in Chancery Lane, where he worked as a Higher Division Clerk in the Trade Marks Registry at a meagre annual salary of £100. It was Housman’s job to examine applications for new trademarks and compare them with those already received, a daily task that was both tedious and far beneath someone of his accomplishments. His salary was just about adequate to cover his daily expenses providing he was prepared to live frugally. A useful sum of £200 had come to him during the summer when his paternal grandmother’s death had released a family legacy over which she had no control, but Housman had made over this bequest to his penurious father. The only money he had, therefore, was what little he had earned as a schoolmaster and the balance of his Oxford scholarship, which after deductions amounted to a few pennies under four pounds, and life in the metropolis on a hundred pounds a year was not easy.
Jackson worked in the same building but in another office as Examiner of Electrical Specifications, a job far superior to that of Housman in both status and salary. Although, as his supervisor Ralph Griffin recalled, Housman ‘did not much love the Civil Servants into whose company he had been pitched’, he nevertheless managed to find some he liked in his own department. Griffin had been educated at Cambridge and was not a career civil servant, and he suggested that this might explain why Housman was drawn to him; for himself he described Housman as ‘beloved’, adding that ‘No one could not love him’. Another colleague recalled that Housman’s ‘most familiar friends were rowing men’, which is what Jackson himself had been at Oxford: one of Housman’s most valued possessions was a photograph of Jackson posing with his team-mates of the St John’s Eight. In particular he spent a good deal of time with Ernest Kingsford and with John Maycock, ‘a Thames oarsman and […] bon vivant’ who wrote light verse and was described as ‘his most intimate friend’ at the Patent Office. Ten years his senior, Maycock had already been at the Patent Office for fifteen years by the time Housman arrived there. Not a great deal is known about him, apart from the fact that he had a wife called Kate (affectionately addressed as Kitty) and a son named Henry. It was young Henry of whom Housman reported delightedly in 1885, when the boy was around eight or nine: ‘When he goes to heaven, which he regards as a dead certainty, he wants to be God, and is keenly mortified to learn that it is not probable he will. However, his aspirations are now turning into another channel: it has come to his knowledge, through the housemaid, that the devil has horns and a tail; and in comparison with these decorations the glories of heaven have lost their attractiveness.’ The family shared lodgings in Putney with a friend of Maycock called W.H. Eyre, who was also an active member of the Thames Rowing Club and got to know Housman well.
Housman’s friendship with these men was a good deal less complicated than the one with Jackson, though Maycock clearly had both a very high regard and a genuine fondness for Housman. The life of a bon vivant was well beyond Housman’s means, and a good day out for him, Maycock and Eyre would consist of an invigorating walk in rural Surrey followed by a modest dinner at a local inn. The barrier of reserve that Housman had raised back in Bromsgrove, and which he became notorious for raising in later life when people attempted to talk to him about his work, was evidently lowered during these walks. Eyre described Housman as ‘a most delightful companion, in conversation generally, & particularly in pointing out, what was most charming, & interesting’. Housman, he said, had ‘a deep appreciation of the beauties of nature, as regards landscape, & the wild flowers, birds & animals, which one comes across in the course of a long days walk, over fields, & commons & through woods […] He also told us many little anecdotes, which were very amusing, & indeed had a most delightful sense of humour.’ Eyre added that Housman was ‘very fond of his native country, Salop, & we had many talks about it, as my Mother lived at Shrewsbury, & I had done many walks (not with him) in the fine parts of the county about the Wrekin, Church Stretton & the Clee Hills.’ Shropshire was not, of course, Housman’s native county, but Eyre was writing, as he noted at the end of this letter, when he was ‘aetat 89’, recalling events after half a century. It is nevertheless clear that Housman’s interest in and affection for Shropshire were already well established, and that Eyre’s descriptions of the county were stored away for future literary use.
Despite these essentially hearty new friendships, Moses Jackson remained the principal focus of Housman’s etiolated emotional life. In early 1883 the two men decided once more to share accommodation. The third member of the household was Jackson’s equally handsome brother Adalbert, who was some seven years his junior and studying Classics at University College, London. When not at the Patent Office, Jackson himself also pursued his studies at UCL, doing further research towards a doctorate in science, which he would obtain later that year. The three young men took lodgings at 82 Talbot Road, a street running across the top of Northumberland Place. Pollard, now working in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum and living at his family home in Brompton Square, was a member of the same athletic club as Jackson and occasionally visited, but he felt that his friendship with Housman had waned, perhaps because he was an unwelcome reminder of the disastrous end of the Oxford years. The same, however, could be said of Jackson, with whom Housman now spent part of every day in the same household. It is nevertheless telling that although once addressed facetiously in the (grammatically correct vocative) Latin version of his forenames, Pollard subsequently became ‘My dear Pollard’, whereas the Jackson brothers were always ‘Mo’ and ‘Add’.
Housman saw little more of his siblings Clemence and Laurence, who were now in
London, sharing a home south of the river in Kennington, close to the Arts and Crafts School in which they had both enrolled in order to learn wood engraving and illustration respectively. ‘Though he would come dutifully to see us whenever invited,’ Laurence recalled, ‘he never asked us to his own rooms in return.’ They met Moses Jackson only once, at the house of a mutual friend and without Housman being present. Jackson was so surprised to discover that Housman had siblings living in London, neither of whom had ever been mentioned, that he wrote to their father to ask whether some family quarrel of which he was unaware had led to an estrangement. Alarmed, Edward wrote back to ask whether Alfred was leading ‘an irregular life’ which he wanted kept secret from his siblings. Jackson truthfully reassured Edward that Alfred’s life was perfectly blameless, perhaps still unaware that he was himself the object of some highly irregular feelings on Housman’s part.
The failure at Oxford may have meant that Housman had no future as a don, but he had been continuing his classical studies in his spare evenings. After a day spent at the Patent Office, he would walk to the British Museum in order to work in the reading room, where he began writing articles on Latin and Greek authors. He also worked here on his proposed edition of Propertius, whose principal theme of unrequited love must have come to seem increasingly painful. As at Oxford, however, the lure of Moses Jackson’s company meant that he did not make as much progress as he might have done had he been without distractions. One of the reasons for not inviting people to Talbot Road may have been that Housman did not want witnesses to his deepening attraction to Jackson, but in addition he may not have wanted to share him with anyone – apart, perhaps, from Adalbert. While Adalbert was bathed in the reflected glow of his older brother – and indeed had his own attractions – other people, whether family or old friends such as Pollard, were rigorously kept at a distance from Housman’s lodgings.
Adalbert graduated in 1884 and left the household to take up a job as a preparatory-school master outside London. In the autumn of the following year, Housman caused a great deal of alarm by leaving the house in Talbot Road and simply disappearing. Jackson was sufficiently worried to contact Housman’s father: ‘Whether the worst was feared I do not know,’ Laurence wrote. If Housman provided any explanation when he returned a week later, none was ever recorded. The supposition is that Housman had attempted to describe the nature of his feelings to Jackson and that some kind of quarrel had ensued. This, at any rate, is the explanation that Laurence provided and which has – with some caveats – been generally accepted. Housman shortly afterwards moved out of Talbot Road and found new lodgings back in Northumberland Place, at number 39. From there, a month or so later, he moved to Highgate; he would remain there until 1905, when his landlady, Mrs Hunter, moved to Pinner in Middlesex and he went with her. Moses Jackson also left Talbot Road, taking lodgings in Maida Vale; that – for him at any rate – the quarrel had not been fatal is clear from the fact that on weekdays the two men apparently ‘met daily at the Patent Office, and as a rule lunched together’. Having been through both public school and Oxford, Jackson cannot have been entirely surprised by the substance of any declaration that Housman may have made, but he may have felt it better to leave such things unsaid. Though he presumably made it clear that there was no question of reciprocation, he seems to have managed to negotiate a way through what must have been a very awkward and embarrassing scene.
Quite how this scene arose or what form it took is impossible now to know, although Housman would later write three poems which appear to have described its outcome. It may be that the presence of Adalbert had prevented Housman from declaring himself earlier, or even that the younger brother had provided some sort of substitute or distraction while living at Talbot Road. Housman was clearly very fond of Adalbert, as two poems he wrote about him make clear. In some letters he wrote to Maude Hawkins, whose A.E. Housman: Man Behind a Mask (1958) has been dismissed by the Housman Society as ‘The Mills and Boon of Housman biographies’, Laurence Housman suggested that his brother and Adalbert may have had some sort of affair. ‘I still think there was more mutual attraction between [Housman and Moses] than you give credit for,’ he wrote. ‘But Jackson shied away from the full implication, knowing that he could not share it “in kind”. But (and this is what I want you to release [sic: for ‘realise’?]): his attraction to the younger brother was reciprocated.’ As evidence of this, Laurence pointed to a poem printed in the posthumous More Poems:
He looked at me with eyes I thought
I was not like to find,
The voice he begged for pence with brought
Another man to mind.
This resemblance prompts the speaker to hand the beggar an extravagant half-crown and tell him that any thanks should be given not to him but to this lost friend. That the poem refers to Adalbert seems confirmed by a cancelled final quatrain in which the tramp is given direction for his quest:
Turn East and over Thames to Kent
And come to the sea’s brim,
And find his everlasting tent
And touch your cap to him.
It was to the Jacksons’ family home in Ramsgate on the east Kent coast that Housman later went to see Adalbert, only to find him away, and Ramsgate is where Adalbert’s ‘everlasting tent’ would be pitched after he died of typhus in his late twenties.
‘I doubt whether Moses ever kissed AEH,’ Laurence continued: ‘but I have no doubt that AJJ did.’Quite how Laurence came by this information is unknown: it is almost certain that he never met Adalbert, and Housman seems never to have discussed his private life with his brother. Laurence nevertheless repeated his assertion in a second letter to Hawkins – ‘I have no doubt whatever that A.E.H. was in a closer and warmer physical relationship with A.J.J. than with his brother Moses’ – once again citing the poem already quoted and also indicating the poem that followed it in More Poems. This poem, one of the most moving that Housman wrote, is unarguably about Adalbert – it is prefaced with his initials – but, while it laments ‘that straight look, that heart of gold, / That grace, that manhood gone’, it provides no particular support for Laurence’s allegation, which was made in old age, recalling events supposedly taking place over seventy years earlier.
Some have dismissed this story as mere ‘wishful thinking’ on the part of Laurence, who was himself homosexual, knew both Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter, and campaigned modestly for homosexual rights. That said, Laurence’s comments seem more than mere speculation: these are direct assertions, with numerous underlinings for emphasis. When Housman moved to his new lodgings in Northumberland Place, he took with him an invitation to Adalbert from the West London Debating Society and one to Moses from the Ealing Rugby Club, poignantly trivial items he kept with him for the rest of his life – though it has been suggested that these objects had merely been used as convenient bookmarks rather than kept as holy relics. Housman was, however, inclined to preserve with great care letters and other written material that meant a great deal to him. It is also the case that he kept two photographs of Adalbert hanging in his rooms alongside those of Moses.
Housman and Adalbert were young men at the time they lived together: the former in his mid-twenties, the latter in his late teens. Even so, the possibility that Housman, knowing he could never have a sexual relationship with Moses, enjoyed one vicariously by sleeping with Moses’s brother seems remote from what we know of his character. The truth of the matter will never be known, but Housman’s devotion to Moses almost from the moment they met means that any other romantic or erotic relationship would seem unlikely. As Propertius had put it in one of his poems:
My fate is neither to love another nor break with her:
Cynthia was first and Cynthia shall be last.
Joan Thomson, the daughter of J.J. Thomson, Master of Trinity during most of Housman’s time at Cambridge, recalled talking to him about love. ‘Housman would not tolerate the idea that it was possible for a man truly to love more than one woman in his
life; anyone who considered that he had done so had simply never really loved at all.’ It is clear from the vehemence with which he expressed this view that Housman was speaking from his own experience of love.
This long and sure-set liking
1888–1894
What is not in doubt is that Moses Jackson had a profound effect on Housman’s life and work, though the two men would not meet very often after Jackson joined the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and set off for Karachi in December 1887 to take up an appointment as Principal of the newly founded Dayaram Jethmal Sindh Science College. Jackson’s departure for India, and further events in his life over the next four years, were recorded by Housman in the only diaries he is known to have kept, the first of them dated 1888, while Jackson was still at sea. Most of the pages of these pocket appointments diaries appear to have been left blank.* Housman occasionally records the temperature or the date on which wild flowers come into bloom; the only other entries refer to Moses. Not that anyone coming casually across the diaries would know this. Laurence recorded that ‘once or twice’ Housman used his customary abbreviation of his friend’s name, ‘Mo’, but if so these entries have since vanished, and in every instance Jackson is referred to as ‘he’ or ‘him’. One might surmise that Housman used these pronouns to disguise the identity of the person he was writing about. A more likely and more poignant explanation is that no name was necessary: for Housman there simply was no other ‘he’ or ‘him’.
The first entries in the 1888 diary track Jackson’s voyage on the SS Bokhara, the ship taking him every day further away: ‘Bokhara arrives at Gibraltar’, ‘Bokhara leaves Naples 4 p.m.’, ‘Bokhara arrives at Port Said’, and so on. At some point Jackson transferred to another ship which, Housman notes on 25 January, ‘arrives at Bombay this morning’, subsequently adding: ‘(Midnight of the 24th I learn later)’. Two days later: ‘He gets to Karachi at “8 o’clock”’, the quotation marks suggesting that Housman got this news from a reliable source, perhaps Adalbert. In July Housman records that one of his colleagues at the Patent Office had received a letter from Jackson, congratulating him on being called to the bar, and he notes the form of address: ‘“My dear Nightingale”: “very truly”’. Housman himself did not receive a letter until 19 November, eleven months after Jackson sailed, and he posted a reply on 14 December. Then, on 19 December, ‘His grandmother died’, suggesting that any connection with Jackson, even one that had just broken, was gratefully seized upon.