by Peter Parker
So the groomsman quits your side
And the bridegroom seeks his bride:
Friend and comrade yield you o’er
To her that hardly loves you more.
It is not known who acted as Jackson’s groomsman, or best man, but Housman, in his idealisation of the scene, steps up to hand over his friend to Mrs Chambers, who might have been less than flattered at being described as someone who loved her new husband hardly more than the reluctantly yielding Housman did.
The distinctly homophile underpinning of this poem is reinforced by Housman’s appropriation of Sappho, a poet who – though little is known about her life – had become associated with female homosexuality, her own name adapted for the adjective ‘sapphic’ and her birthplace, the island of Lesbos, leading to the coinage of the synonym ‘lesbian’. Housman takes some lines of Sappho about the evening star bringing home the sheep to the fold and the child to its mother, and translates and expands them for incorporation in the poem. In the final stanza the poet imagines the marriage bed, which he sees encircled by ‘the thoughts of friends’ posted to keep the bridal pair from ‘nightly harms’.
These poems, along with those Housman wrote which more directly recorded the difficulties of this unequal friendship, are perhaps less important than Jackson’s hidden and unwitting status as ‘the onlie begetter’ of all Housman’s poetry. It is generally accepted that it was news of Jackson’s illness in 1922 that prompted a hitherto reluctant Housman to begin assembling a second collection of his poetry, revising poems already written and producing new ones. He had additionally proved uncharacteristically anxious to see the book in print in a comparatively short space of time. That Jackson was also ‘largely responsible’ for the writing of A Shropshire Lad was confirmed in a conversation Housman had in March 1925 with A.C. Benson, whose own homosexual life apparently took an even more exiguous form than that of his Cambridge colleague. ‘He said that his first poems were caused by a deep personal attachment which had lasted fifteen years and left a deep mark on him,’ Benson recorded. ‘He said that he had twice felt a loss of vitality in life – at 36 when even his devotion failed – and again lately when he found himself less interested in life.’ The reference is clearly to Jackson, whom Housman met in 1880, fifteen years before the literary annus mirabilis of 1895, during which Housman wrote the majority of the poems in A Shropshire Lad. Housman’s comment could be misconstrued to mean that his personal attachment had ended after fifteen years, but it seems more likely that he meant that by the time he was writing the poems the attachment had already lasted fifteen years. That the attachment continued thereafter is evident from other things Housman wrote, though since he turned just thirty-six in March 1895 one has to ask what caused a loss of vitality that same year so debilitating that ‘even his devotion [to Jackson] failed’. In the absence of extant letters from this period, we have no way of knowing whether any behaviour on Jackson’s part contributed to that failure, but it seems unlikely. It may simply have been that Housman’s lassitude was a result of producing so many poems in such a short time – and (so he would claim) against a background of ill health.
It may also be that in writing a corpus of poems inspired by a thwarted passion (including poems not eventually selected for publication in A Shropshire Lad) he had to some extent – but only temporarily – exorcised what had been haunting him for fifteen years. He told Maurice Pollet, ‘I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over,’ but a poem Housman drafted in April 1922 suggests otherwise. It opens ‘I promise nothing: friends will part’ and includes the lines: ‘But this unlucky love should last / When answered passions thin to air’. It is always dangerous to read poems biographically, but those which are generally accepted to be about Jackson tend to be about parting, recalling the two friends’ mysterious quarrel in the autumn of 1885. That Housman’s devotion endured even after passion faded is evident from those of his letters to Jackson that have come to light. ‘Literature as Compensation,’ wrote E.M. Forster in the commonplace book he started keeping in 1921. ‘“I shall make something out of this some day” must have occurred to many an unhappy man of letters, and to have made something is possible – Heine, A.E. Housman, Shakespeare avow it.’
A morbid secretion
1886–1896
The poems of A Shropshire Lad were written intermittently over a period of some nine years, though the bulk of them were produced in what Housman described as a period of ‘continuous excitement’ during the first few months of 1895. Dating individual poems is a hazardous undertaking, largely because in the process of editing his brother’s poems and safeguarding his reputation, Laurence Housman mutilated the notebooks in which the poems had been drafted and frequently revised. The principal reason for wanting to date the poems is to establish whether or not there was some kind of scheme to the volume, or to establish relationships between individual poems. It is clear, however, that in the first instance Housman wrote the poems with no particular aim in mind. He told Sir Sydney Cockerell, the long-serving director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, that the poems ‘came to him willy-nilly’. When Cockerell asked him ‘whether he at once realized their merit’, Housman’s answer was ‘that he had, because they were so unlike anything else that had come to him’. The poems may have bubbled up in his mind as if from nowhere, but Housman was a craftsman and most of them went through several drafts. ‘I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right,’ he said of the poem that stands last in A Shropshire Lad, and what remains of the notebooks shows that other poems were similarly worked over repeatedly until they satisfied him. As the Athenaeum magazine noted of the book: ‘It is the sort of easy reading which is hard writing.’
The first of the poems was written in 1886, by which time Housman was living in Highgate. He would later say that all but one of the poems of A Shropshire Lad were written at Byron Cottage, and he began drafting these in a notebook in which he had previously jotted down classical references. In an unsigned review of Laurence Housman’s memoir of his brother, Desmond Shawe-Taylor observed that ‘Housman is perhaps a unique case of a true poet who produced no poetry in his twenties.’ We now know that this is not strictly true, but of the 172 poems eventually included in the canon, fewer than a dozen can be dated to Housman’s third decade. One reason for this was that, as Housman wrote in 1892 when applying for the chair of Latin at University College, London, ‘During the last ten years the study of the Classics has been the chief occupation of my leisure.’ The papers he wrote on Greek and Latin authors had begun appearing in such leading scholarly publications as the Classical Review and the Journal of Philology, and by 1892 he had published twenty-five of them. It was these that prompted such an impressive array of scholars to provide him with testimonials when he applied for the post at UCL. Housman would later say that UCL had ‘picked him out of the gutter, – if I may so describe His Majesty’s Patent Office’, and it must have been a relief to find a job more suited to his considerable talents. When he opened the new academic year at UCL by delivering his Introductory Lecture to the combined faculties of arts, law and science, he took as his subject the notion that learning and knowledge are valuable for their own sake, but he must also have been aware that after a decade of clerical drudgery, he had at last found a fulfilling means of earning his living.
Terms at UCL consisted of twelve weeks, during which Housman taught for ten hours a week. This left him with weekends and the holidays to walk and think and write poetry, though some of this time was taken up by marking papers and writing the eight or nine lectures he was contracted to deliver each spring. Late in his life, Housman explained how his poetry came to him during his long afternoon walks in Hampstead and Highgate:
Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon – beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life – I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thin
king of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so, then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss which I have already had occasion to mention, the pit of the stomach. When I got home I wrote them down, leaving gaps, and hoping that further inspiration might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my walks in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand, and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure. I happen to remember distinctly the genesis of the piece which stands last in my first volume. Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business.
In spite of his forbidding reputation, Housman could also be a terrible old tease, and one of his biggest, most successful and most enjoyable teases was the Leslie Stephen Lecture he delivered at Cambridge on 9 May 1933, from which this extract is taken. At some level the lecture is entirely serious, but it was also intended as a playful provocation. Although Housman claimed to have written it unwillingly, allowed it to be published (as was the custom) only grudgingly, and repeatedly asserted that the praise it received was undeserved, the covert pleasure he derived from delivering so contentious a talk in such a distinguished and ordinarily sober lecture series is apparent on almost every page of it. This in itself is wholly characteristic of Housman, much of whose writing is a kind of flirtation with ‘truth’, a decorous pavane of concealment and revelation. His delight in causing trouble with the lecture became more explicit when he informed Laurence that ‘The leader of our doctrinaire teachers of youth is reported to say that it will take more than twelve years to undo the harm I have done in an hour.’ That leader, Professor I.A. Richards, was not alone in deploring Housman’s deliberately anti-intellectual account of ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, as the lecture was titled.
Housman’s principal contention was that ‘Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.’ He suggested that those who had admired Wordsworth in the nineteenth century did so for the wrong reasons: ‘they were most attracted to what may be called his philosophy’, while remaining largely deaf to what was far more important, ‘that thrilling utterance which pierces the heart and brings tears to the eyes of thousands who care nothing for his opinions and beliefs’. The process by which poetry moves us is mysterious, he thought, appealing to something atavistic in the human psyche. He used an image of the English landscape to illustrate his point. Quoting Milton’s line ‘Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more’, he asked:
what is it that can draw tears, as I know it can, to the eyes of more readers than one? What in the world is there to cry about? Why have the mere words the physical effect of pathos when the sense of the passage is blithe and gay? I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way to something in man which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organization of his nature, like the patches of fen which still linger here and there in the drained lands of Cambridge.
Much of the lecture was devoted to the work of other writers, Housman airily dismissing both the Metaphysical and Augustan poets for the likes of the usually despised Isaac Watts. While this infuriated academics in the English faculty, it was what he said about his own work – a subject on which he usually remained silent – that stirred the interest of his admirers. They may not have noticed immediately that, while revealing something of the processes of writing poetry, Housman said nothing about its origins – except that they apparently lay in the pit of his stomach. As so often with Housman, he proffered information while neatly sidestepping the more interesting and complicated truth about his work. To borrow an image from one of his poems, of all Housman’s lads none was more fleet of foot than the author himself. The substance of what he said, with its carefully adduced supporting detail (‘while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune’), may indeed have been true, but it is presented so drolly as to deflect any more probing questions about his poetry that may have arisen in his audience’s mind.
The experience of writing poetry, Housman told his audience, ‘though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting’. It was ‘only that you may know what to avoid’ that he went on to describe the process. Once again, humour of a particularly dry English kind is used to distract the attention, in this case to steer the audience away from any consideration of what may have been the most revealing thing Housman said about poetry in the whole lecture. It was in this lecture that Housman suggested that the true test of poetry was the physical reaction it provoked in the reader, notably what is technically known as horripilation. ‘Experience has taught me,’ he said, ‘when I am shaving in the morning, to keep a watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.’ While the ripples from this joke were presumably spreading through the audience he enumerated other physical sensations, the third of which he could ‘only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, “everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear”.’ This seems, perhaps, an extreme response to a line of poetry, but was Housman in fact talking less about poetry than about what prompted it? Whatever her shortcomings, and these have been argued over since the nineteenth century, there is general agreement that Fanny Brawne was not only the ‘one passion’ of Keats’s life, as his early biographer Lord Houghton phrased it, but was also the inspiration behind many of his best-known poems. Housman too had had one passion in his life, a person who had been ‘largely responsible’ for the poetry he wrote, and this glancing reference to Brawne seems to be another example of his letting something slip without appearing to, revealing and concealing at the same time.
If members of the audience missed this reference, they may well have nodded to each other knowingly when Professor Housman defined his poetry as an involuntary secretion; not, he suspected, ‘a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir’, but ‘a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster’. ‘Morbid’ was certainly a word people associated with the two volumes of poetry Housman had published, in which a kind of overarching existential gloom was luridly augmented with tales of dead soldiers, hanged murderers, youthful suicides and variously doomed lovers. Housman went on to explain that the reason he described his own secretions as morbid was that he had ‘seldom written poetry unless [he] was rather out of health’. (He had originally written ‘rather out of health or mentally agitated’, but deleted the latter perhaps too revealing detail before delivering the lecture.) He had been more explicit about what this ill health was when, three months before delivering the lecture, he told Maurice Pollet that ‘a relaxed sore throat’ was chiefly responsible for his productivity during what he acknowledged as his ‘most prolific period, the first five months of 1895’. Even this malady is vague, however – and possibly strategically vague. Out of health or not, Housman was at the same time apparently downing pints at lunchtime and going for not physically undemanding walks of two or three hours’ duration.
Long walks had been a feature of Housman’s life since childhood. When the family had moved from Perry Hall to Fockbury, his journey to King Edward’s School was one and a half miles, which meant he needed to leave home at seven every morning. This
was no great hardship: ‘Punctuality, industry, fixed routine, daily walking, love of flowers and trees, woods and hills, all were part of his Fockbury life’, his sister Kate wrote, ‘and these habits never left him.’ Pollard recalled that at Oxford he and Housman ‘had from the first taken many long walks together and continued to do so in our third year’ (when they sought further exercise by taking up ‘elementary lawn tennis’). As we have seen, walks were also a fondly remembered feature of his time at Oxford with Moses Jackson and at the Patent Office with Maycock and Eyre. Although such outings were clearly companionable, Housman’s preference was to walk on his own, even while still a schoolboy. ‘His sense of some pleasures was acute, and seemed exercised best alone,’ Kate remembered. ‘It was alone that he liked to tramp to enjoy the sight and smell of the woodlands, or to gaze on a setting sun or a starry sky.’ It was just the same when he was a distinguished academic: ‘That his daily constitutional should have been solitary is not surprising,’ his Trinity friend and colleague A.S.F. Gow observed. ‘And when, as often, one met him taking his daily exercise in the country some miles from Cambridge, he walked with a visibly abstracted air and often failed to notice one as he passed.’
The poems he composed while out walking in Hampstead continued slowly to accumulate in his notebooks, but a number of events, both private and public, led to an extraordinary increase in activity during 1895. Up until that point, Housman had drafted nineteen of the sixty-three poems he published in A Shropshire Lad (along with a substantial number of poems that would be published in other volumes); but in the course of 1895 he wrote over two-thirds of his first and most famous book, and by the end of the year he had enough poems to make a collection that he felt he might submit to a publisher. When he showed them to Pollard, his friend declared that not only were they worth publishing but that they would still be read in 200 years’ time. Macmillan disagreed, and turned the book down, as they had Housman’s proposal for an edition of Propertius ten years earlier; but then Pollard introduced Housman to the firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., who were very happy to take Housman’s money.