Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  A death of someone who was certainly closely connected with Housman, and which undoubtedly affected him deeply, was that of Adalbert Jackson on 12 November 1892. The two poems Housman wrote about him were not included in A Shropshire Lad, though they were written at the same period. Adalbert nevertheless became a ghostly presence in the book, because his death was the very first among Housman’s close friends and seems likely to have contributed to the recurrent appearance in Housman’s poetry of lads who will never grow old. Six weeks before the blow fell, Housman had delivered his Introductory Lecture at UCL, in the course of which he alluded to man’s helplessness in the face of the inexorable workings of fate, a helplessness that affects the lives of his Shropshire lads: ‘As Sarpedon says to Glaucus in the Iliad, a hundred thousand fates stand close to us always, which none can flee and none avoid. The complexity of the universe is infinite, and the days of a man’s life are threescore years and ten. One lifetime is not long enough for the task of blocking every cranny through which calamity may enter.’

  Calamity befell another young man whom Housman had never met, but whose fate would contribute both directly and indirectly to the poems he was now writing. On 6 August 1895 a nineteen-year-old soldier called Henry Clarkson Maclean committed suicide in a London hotel. Harry Maclean came from an army family living on the Herefordshire–Worcestershire border and was training to be an officer at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in south-east London. His father was Major-General Henry John Maclean, late of the Rifle Brigade, who had served in the Crimean War and taken part in Lord Wolseley’s Ashanti Expedition to the Gold Coast in Africa, which effectively won for the British the third Anglo-Ashanti War. The general had four children with his first wife and another four with his second, who was some twenty-seven years his junior. Harry was the eldest of the second clutch, and had one sister and two brothers. In 1895 he had been staying with friends in Oxfordshire and had written to his parents on Saturday 3 August to say that he would be coming home the following Tuesday. His family were therefore puzzled to receive a telegram on that Tuesday sent from Vigo Street in London. The contents of the telegram were not reported, but it was, his father said, ‘the first intimation’ anyone had that Maclean was in London: ‘He had no business in town that the witness was aware of, nor had he any trouble on his mind. He was usually exceedingly cheerful, and there was not the slightest reason to suppose that he contemplated suicide.’ Nevertheless, at 5 p.m. that same day he had booked a single room at the Charing Cross Hotel beside the busy London railway station. At around 10 p.m., hotel employees told the inquest, ‘a sound was heard like the slamming of a door, but no notice was taken of it.’ The sound had in fact been made by ‘a service weapon of a large calibre’, which Maclean had held to his head and fired once.

  It was not until the following morning that a chambermaid found the body. Maclean had considerately left the door to his room unlocked, and he was ‘lying on the floor dressed, with the exception of his coat, and with a quantity of blood about his head’. The maid called for help, and Maclean was pronounced dead. ‘The body was cold and stiff, and there was a large wound on the forehead, and another on the top of the head, where the bullet had passed through. Near the feet was the revolver.’ Propped on the mantelpiece was a letter addressed to ‘The Coroner’. It was undated but written on two sheets of the hotel’s writing paper. According to the Malvern News, before killing himself Maclean ‘had carefully destroyed a number of letters and photographs, but several unburned fragments showed traces of a woman’s handwriting and it was assumed that the suicide was due to love troubles’. Quite how it was ascertained that the handwriting was that of a woman is unclear, and Maclean’s suicide note suggested that this was unlikely to have been the case, unless the letters were from his mother. It may be that the newspaper’s reporter was attempting to spare the feelings of a distinguished local family, and the coroner’s jury had been equally merciful, bringing in a verdict of suicide while temporarily insane.

  Maclean’s suicide note had specifically attempted to forestall this conclusion. ‘I wish it to be clearly understood,’ the cadet had written, ‘that I am not what is commonly called “temporarily insane”, and that I am putting an end to my life after several weeks of careful deliberation.’ The calm and measured tone of the note bears this out:

  I do not think that I need to justify my actions to anyone but my Maker, but for the sake of my mother and the few other people who love me I will state the main reasons that have determined me. The first is utter cowardice and despair. There is only one thing in this world that would make me thoroughly happy; that one thing I have no earthly hope of obtaining. The second – which I wish was the only one – is as follows:– I have absolutely ruined my own life; but I thank God that, as yet, so far as I know, I have not morally injured – or ‘offended,’ as it is called in the Bible – any one else. Now I am quite certain that I could not live another five years without doing so, and for that reason alone, even if the first one did not exist, I should do what I am doing. Of the dreadful blow I am dealing to my mother and the few other people who care for me I am quite aware. It is the one thing that has almost diverted me from my purpose, but, at all events, it is final, and consequently better than a long series of sorrows and disgraces. I hope that they will live to forgive and, perhaps, to forget me. May God, in His infinite mercy, forgive me for what I am doing. – HARRY C. MACLEAN

  It does not take a great deal of reading between these lines to ascertain what it was that had driven Maclean to this drastic action, and the timing of his suicide may be significant. Throughout April and May 1895 the newspapers had been very much preoccupied with a series of trials at the Old Bailey. The first, from 3 to 5 April, was that of the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess had left a card at Oscar Wilde’s club on which he scribbled a message accusing him of ‘posing as a somdomite’ [sic]. When Wilde rashly decided to sue Queensberry, the Marquess rounded up a succession of young men who would testify that Wilde was not simply a poseur but a practising homosexual. The trial collapsed and Wilde was arrested on 6 April, charged with homosexual offences. Wilde’s first trial opened on 26 April, but ended on 1 May without the jury having been able to agree on a verdict. His second trial opened on 22 May and three days later he was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Although stories of packet boats being filled with men fleeing to the comparative safety of the Continent in the wake of Wilde’s conviction may be exaggerated, the effect of the trial and verdict was both dramatic and long-lasting. Even homosexual men who had conducted their private lives discreetly now lived in fear of exposure, blackmail or arrest, and it was against the background of Wilde’s highly publicised case, in which the ‘corruption’ of youths by homosexual men was a constant theme, that Harry Maclean took his own life.

  There is in fact no hard evidence to explain why Maclean shot himself, but Housman clearly thought he knew the reason. It is certainly hard to imagine that ‘love troubles’ of a heterosexual nature would have resulted in the language of the carefully written suicide note Maclean left. Accustomed to seeding his poetry with biblical allusions and quotations, Housman would have recognised that, in expressing relief that he had not ‘morally injured – or “offended,” as it is called in the Bible – any one else’, Maclean was referring the coroner to the passages in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark in which Christ tells his disciples that to enter the kingdom of Heaven they should become like children, and warns that ‘whoso shall offend one of these little ones who believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’. The recruitment age in the army was sixteen and it is conceivable that Maclean was worried about ‘offending’ fellow soldiers younger than himself. Housman might also have recognised something of his own story with Jackson, or the dilemma facing many homosexual men, when Maclean wrote that one reason for killing himself was that there was �
�only one thing in the world which would make me thoroughly happy: that one thing, I have no earthly hope of obtaining’.

  That Maclean was the direct inspiration for one of the poems in A Shropshire Lad is certain, since Housman had tucked into his own copy of the book, beside his poem ‘Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?’ (XLIV), a report of the inquest published in the Standard on 10 August 1895. Written in immediate response to the cadet’s suicide, between August and September of that year, the poem also contains lines that more or less paraphrase Maclean’s suicide note: ‘After long disgrace and scorn’, ‘Souls undone, undoing others’, ‘You would not live to wrong your brothers’. Another poem almost certainly inspired by Maclean is ‘If it chance your eye offend you’, which not only follows XLIV in the published volume but was written immediately after it in Housman’s notebook, again in August or September 1895. Furthermore, in the Gospels of both St Matthew and St Mark, Christ’s address to the disciples about offending little ones continues with the image Housman uses in this second poem: ‘Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee’. The faint ghost of Maclean can also be discerned in a draft of ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ (XLVII) written in August 1895, which includes a cancelled couplet derived from the same passage in the Bible:

  Lock your heart and sink the key

  With the millstone in the sea

  ‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?’, written at the same time though not published in Housman’s lifetime, was directly inspired by Wilde’s prosecution. At the time of his trials, however, Wilde was a portly forty-year-old, and the youthfulness of the poem’s sinner suggests that Housman might also have had Maclean in mind.

  Many readers would have guessed what the ‘ill’ was that drove the lad in ‘Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?’ to kill himself, just as Housman guessed what prompted Harry Maclean’s suicide. The vocabulary is very much that of the period used to describe homosexuality, euphemistic but doom-laden: ‘disgrace’, ‘mire’, ‘undone’, ‘wrong’, ‘danger’, ‘guilt’. What is less clear is Housman’s tone. The poem seems straightforward: the sympathetic poet laments the death but also praises the young man for both putting an end to his troubles and avoiding possible transgressions in the future. ‘I thought chaps like that shot themselves,’ George V, one of England’s least imaginative monarchs, is reputed to have said when it was reported that someone he knew was homosexual, and this was an attitude that also prevailed in the 1890s. Housman was not, however, a king but a poet, and a poet who was himself homosexual. Did he really believe that, sad as it was, the cadet had done the right and honourable thing? Or did he believe that he had been unjustly driven to it by ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’ so vehemently rejected in the poem Housman drafted a few months before both Maclean’s suicide and the Wilde trials? In defence of having published some tactful details of the case that gave rise to the Maclean poem, Laurence Housman wrote that ‘there may yet be some living whom it will gratify to know that a young life wrecked forty-two years ago left inspiration for another that it was worth the having’. Is he suggesting that Housman was in some way inspired by Maclean’s story to put aside any thoughts of ending his own life for similar reasons? If this were the case, then the idea that the poet is straightforwardly praising Maclean for his action seems less likely.

  Try reading the poem out loud as though it were written as much in anger as in sorrow – anger not at the cadet’s action but at the social and moral forces that led to his death. The danger of doing this is that the tone may become merely sarcastic: what is required is an anger that is rigorously controlled, as Housman’s emotions tended to be. Otherwise, the poem appears to be adopting the accepted values of the day, values that Housman elsewhere rejects. Read straight, the voice of the speaker sounds like that of a conservative schoolmaster or clergyman, and this same voice seems to topple over into parody when it is employed in the poem that follows in the volume:

  If it chance your eye offend you,

  Pluck it out, lad, and be sound:

  ’Twill hurt, but here are salves to friend you,

  And many a balsam grows on ground.

  And if your hand or foot offend you,

  Cut it off, lad, and be whole;

  But play the man, stand up and end you,

  When your sickness is your soul.

  One can imagine this forming part of a sermon in the chapel of some particularly dismal public school, but it would be unlike Housman to endorse teachings of the Bible – particularly ones in which metaphor produces absurdity in the suggestion that self-mutilation will make a lad ‘sound’ and ‘whole’. Is the juxtaposition of the commands to cut off a foot and to ‘stand up’ merely unfortunate and unintended, or is it satirical? As with so much about Housman, the answer is that we simply don’t know.

  Another poem, ‘Her strong enchantments failing’, was drafted in 1894, then redrafted at exactly the same time Housman was writing his two poems about Maclean. Housman’s original intention was that it would be placed in A Shropshire Lad just before the two Maclean poems, as no. XLIII, but for reasons that remain unclear the poem was withdrawn at proof stage.

  Her strong enchantments failing,

  Her towers of fear in wreck,

  Her limbecks dried of poisons

  And the knife at her neck.

  The Queen of air and darkness

  Begins to shrill and cry,

  ‘O young man, O my slayer,

  To-morrow you shall die.’

  O Queen of air and darkness,

  I think ’tis truth you say,

  And I shall die to-morrow;

  But you will die to-day.

  A young man called Geoffrey Wethered had written to Housman after the poem was published in Last Poems apparently to ask its meaning. Housman replied: ‘The queen of air and darkness comes from a line of Coventry Patmore’s, “the powers of darkness and the air”, which in its turn is a reference to “the prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians II 2; and the meaning is Evil.’ It has been persuasively argued that the poem is linked to the Maclean poems by the grim theme that in order to kill the evil within, you have to kill yourself. The poem appears to have been open to other interpretations, however. Housman’s nephew Clement Symons, who copied it into an autograph book shortly before being killed at Loos, ‘believed the poem to depict the vanquishment of cowardice’. This would undoubtedly make sense, in addition to which Housman must have shown Clement the poem, which had not at that point been published, and he would hardly have done so if it were only about killing the evil within.

  It is, however, what the cases of Maclean and Wilde represented rather than what Housman wrote directly about them that is significant. They suggest the kind of public attitudes towards homosexuality that were prevalent when Housman was writing A Shropshire Lad. The poem Housman wrote about the Wilde case angrily and wittily satirises these attitudes, and begins:

  Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

  And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?

  And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

  Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

  ’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;

  In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;

  Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair

  For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

  It is clear from this where Housman stood on the nature-versus-nurture arguments about what ‘caused’ homosexuality. The poem also showed, in the last line of its second stanza, a scholarly knowledge of the historical criminalisation of homosexuality: ‘the Abominable Crime of Buggery’ officially entered English law in a 1533 Act of Parliament, and was subsequently deemed as a crime ‘inter christianos non nominandum’ (not to be named among Christians) by Edward Coke in the third volume
of his Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628). A.S.F. Gow, who was advising Laurence Housman what to publish in More Poems, vehemently objected to the suggested inclusion of both this poem and ‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth’ on the grounds that they revealed rather too much about the author. After a good deal of wrangling, Laurence eventually and very reluctantly agreed to omit the poem, although his own view was that ‘we are in a transitional period of public opinion over the H.S. [homosexual] problem, and that in the future it would add to rather than subtract from Alfred’s reputation if it were guessed that he had that burden laid upon him by the blind God of Nature.’

  It was, however, the Christian God that Housman was inclined to blame, and his belief that religion went hand-in-hand with the law and public attitudes is clear from ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’, which Housman himself excluded from A Shropshire Lad. The fact that he revised the poem for inclusion in Last Poems (XII) puts it in a different category from the Wilde poem, of which Laurence wrote in justification for eventually publishing it that, ‘though somewhat lacking in literary quality, [it] is so strong an expression of [Housman’s] feeling against social injustice that I am sure he would have wished it to be known’. Unlike Laurence, however, Housman was not by nature a social campaigner, and his attitude was altogether more fatalistic. The poem starts out magisterially, with its splendidly defiant and effectively placed rebuttal:

  The laws of God, the laws of man,