by Peter Parker
Wilde based the ballad on the case of a fellow prisoner, a soldier hanged in Reading Gaol in July 1896 for precisely the crime described. This is the kind of disaster familiar from such poems as ‘The Carpenter’s Son’, ‘The Isle of Portland’, ‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree’, ‘The True Lover’ and in particular ‘On moonlit heath and lonesome bank’, with which it shares a similar verse form, though its stanzas are of six rather than four lines. For the most part, the poem is, like A Shropshire Lad, written in a direct and modern voice, largely purged of the Decadent and grandiloquent flourishes that characterise much of Wilde’s earlier poetry, though whether Housman or two years’ hard labour was responsible for this new linguistic austerity is impossible to know. As Housman himself loftily observed, ‘Parts of The Ballad of Reading Gaol are above Wilde’s average’ – though he attributed this to his incorrect suspicion that these parts ‘were written by Lord Alfred Douglas’.
Like Wilde, E.M. Forster was among those who could ‘read’ A Shropshire Lad rather in the way Housman could ‘read’ Harry Maclean’s suicide note, and it might be thought that he was exactly the kind of young man to whom Housman hoped the book would give pleasure or solace. It seems appropriate that Forster had been introduced to A Shropshire Lad by a man with whom he had fallen unrequitedly in love while at university. H.O. Meredith had been educated at Shrewsbury School (which may be where he first encountered Housman’s ‘local’ poems) and had come up to King’s College, Cambridge to read Classics, which was also Forster’s subject. Aside from being very clever, Meredith was everything that Forster was not: handsome, extrovert, athletic, rebellious and a confirmed atheist. They met during their second year at the university, and Forster fell almost immediately under his spell. Thanks to Meredith’s influence, Forster soon abandoned Christianity, and thanks to his sponsorship was elected to the secret conversazione society, the Apostles, during his fourth year. The Apostles were distinctly homophile but not necessarily homosexual, and Forster had to be content to have Meredith merely as a loving friend. Only after they had both left Cambridge, towards the end of 1902, did the two men embark on some kind of affair. Quite what form this took is not known, though it proved unsatisfactory, largely perhaps because Meredith was essentially heterosexual – Forster would later base the character of Clive Durham in Maurice on him. Whatever the case, it confirmed in Forster something he already suspected. ‘I’ve made two great discoveries,’ he wrote in his diary when summing up his life on the last day of 1904: ‘the religious about 4 years ago, the other in the winter of 1902’. In both cases – rejecting Christianity and acknowledging his homosexuality – Meredith was the agent, and so it seems additionally appropriate that it was he who introduced Forster to A Shropshire Lad.
Although this introduction took place in April 1899, the copy of Housman’s book that Forster owned had been given to him in 1900 by another of his Cambridge contemporaries. ‘A copy with perfect associations would have overwhelmed me,’ Forster confessed, ‘perhaps it is well that I never had one. Such as it is, I read it for seven years in an awed, muddled sort of way.’ It was when Forster embarked on a solitary walking tour of Shropshire in 1907, ‘not yet looking out for its lads’, that ideas about Housman’s poems coalesced into something slightly less muddled. ‘I had a rush of gratitude and love towards the poet who had given me – I didn’t know exactly what,’ he recalled. This prompted him to write to Housman, but he used the headed paper of the hotel in which he was staying and was ‘too delicate’ to add his own address. He imagined that any response Housman cared to write would be forwarded to him by the hotel. Housman did not reply.
Forster later recalled that in his letter he had written: ‘My obscure admiration has grown with the years.’ This admiration was in fact no more obscure than what it was about Housman’s poetry that had prompted such gratitude and love, and both became absolutely clear to him when shortly after his walking tour he went to stay with a Classics don called J.M. Phillimore, whom he had met abroad. While discussing Housman’s poems, Forster
ventured to hazard that A Shropshire Lad concealed a personal experience. Phillimore agreed. Instantly my own conjecture became more vivid to me, and I realized that the poet must have fallen in love with a man. He happened to accompany my own development from subconscious to conscious [awareness of his own homosexuality], and that is why he is surrounded by an extra emotion […] The football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer, the simplicity controlled by a scholarship whose strength I took years to appreciate, the home-sickness and bed-sickness, the yearning for masculine death – all mingled with my own late adolescence and turned inward upon me. To meet the poet was not yet a possibility, but I could meet the poems, and as one grew stale another would come forward and companion me while its predecessor had a wash and brush-up. They seemed inexhaustible and the warmth of the writer’s heart unquestionable.
Forster would later change his opinion about the warmth generated by Housman’s heart, but his love of the poems never wavered. When Last Poems was published in 1922, he wrote once again to Housman to express his gratitude. By this time the two men had met at a dinner party in Cambridge, at which G.L. Dickinson had also been present. Forster had the sense not to mention Housman’s poetry on this occasion, but after he had read Last Poems, he followed Dickinson’s lead and sent another letter to the author: ‘When I read your other book, it promptly crossed the line that divides a book from a companion,’ he wrote, ‘and now, after twenty years, I have repeated my luck. I am very grateful indeed to you – glad also that your genius has been recognised, but that is not why I am writing. Indeed, I haven’t anything to say at all – only thankfulness from the bottom of my heart and the wish that you may be happy.’ It might be thought that (unlike Dickinson) Forster himself had crossed a line in this letter, but although he once again failed to provide a return address, he received a brief but friendly reply in which Housman thanked him for writing, said that he valued what Forster had told him, and that he recalled their meeting. He may also have remembered Forster’s earlier letter, for he added: ‘perhaps this letter may find you even though you withold [sic] your address’. This would certainly be a characteristic Housman tease, and Forster was pleased enough with this letter to tuck it into his own copy of Last Poems.
In 1927 Forster was offered the Clark Lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge, which involved giving a series of talks on English literature. Housman had been offered the previous year’s lectureship but had turned it down on the grounds that ‘literary criticism, referring opinions to principles and setting them forth so as to command assent, is a high and rare accomplishment, and quite beyond me’. For some reason, his letter of refusal had been shown to Forster, who copied it in full into his commonplace book. He added a sad little note to say that when he delivered his own lectures, subsequently published as Aspects of the Novel, ‘Housman came to two and I called on him on the strength of this, but he took no notice.’ It is not known when Forster added this note, but his recollection of the Clark Lectureship in the talk he gave to Bloomsbury’s long-running Memoir Club, probably in the 1950s, was rather more sanguine. He stated there that Housman ‘let it be known, through his circle, that he approved’ of those lectures that he had attended. Housman ought to have been flattered by the unattributed reference Forster had made to his poems, as a kind of grace note, in one of the lectures. Forster was talking about moments of intense feeling that stand outside the everyday operation and measurements of time: ‘Neither memory nor anticipation is much interested in Father Time, and all dreamers, artists, and lovers are partially delivered from his tyranny; he can kill them, but he cannot secure their attention, and at the very moment of doom, when the clock collected in the tower its strength and struck, they may be looking the other way.’ The words in italics are taken from ‘Eight O’Clock’, no. XV of Last Poems, as Forster evidently expected his audience to recognise.
Whether o
r not Housman acknowledged this little nod to him when, after the lecture, the two men dined together in Hall at Trinity is not known, but the conversation appears to have been unusually relaxed. At one point Housman told Forster, ‘with a twinkle’, that he went to Paris ‘to be in unrespectable company’. Encouraged by this apparent confidence, Forster ‘ventured to climb the forbidding staircase which led to [Housman’s] rooms. They were sported but I dropped a visiting card through the slit.’* Housman appears to have ignored this attempt at further familiarity, perhaps realising that Forster had indeed taken his little joke too seriously.
The following year, Forster published his second collection of short stories, The Eternal Moment. One of the stories, ‘The Point of It’, was partly inspired by ‘Hell Gate’, an uncharacteristically long and allegorical poem Housman had published in Last Poems. Forster sent Housman a copy of the book along with a letter which has not survived, but in which he had written ‘somewhat warmly and a little sentimentally’, suggesting that the one story ‘happens to be as near as I shall ever get to “Hell Gate”, and that is why they are coming to you.’ Had Forster left it at that, all might have been well, but he went on to write: ‘I don’t know whether there is such a thing as impersonal affection, but the words best express the feeling I have had towards you, through your poems, for the last thirty years, and I ask you to pardon this expression of it.’ This time, Forster recalled, ‘I did not conceal my address and I received, all too rapidly, his reply. It was absolutely hateful […] I was so disappointed and hurt that I destroyed it after one rapid perusal.’
Forster was later told that the reason Housman had been so offensive was that he had thought the Clark Lecturer ought to have dined at Trinity more often than he did, and that it had been particularly discourteous of Forster to dine instead with friends at King’s College. The civilities of English university life seem arcane to outsiders and it is possible that Housman really had been offended by Forster’s disregard for the generally understood rules of college conduct. If so, this seems disagreeably and uncharacteristically petty, particularly in one whose own attention to the usual courtesies of dining in Hall left on occasion something to be desired. There is nothing in Forster’s short story that might cause offence, apart from the fact that it isn’t very good, allegory being no more Forster’s strong suit than it was Housman’s. It is true that the protagonist is a civil servant who turns to literature and produces some books that ‘whetted the half-educated public, and made it think and feel’, but Housman could hardly have thought that Forster had meant anything by this. Forster’s own original diagnosis of what had gone wrong, before he was told about the dining solecism, was that ‘I had been forcing the pace, I had tried for intimacy too soon, I had presumed, a mere novelist, to parallel myself with a poet. I had made a fool of myself and been snubbed.’
While Forster was surely wrong to suspect that literary presumption played any part in this, he was probably right to think that it was his further attempt at intimacy that led to such a brutal rebuff. As his letters frequently show, Housman was not unaverse to praise of his work when it was made on paper rather than to his face; but there remained bounds which could not be overstepped. Housman assured Geoffrey Wethered that ‘I value the good opinion of those young men for whom, as you say, my poems were written’, while tending to dissuade them from meeting him in person. In reply to the letter Wethered had written to him in 1939, Laurence Housman wrote that his brother’s refusal to meet this admirer was wholly characteristic, ‘but he liked to be kind to young men, and he nearly always wrote to applicants, even when he refused’. The expression of ‘affection’, however, even if ‘impersonal’, presumed too far. ‘Mortified as only the cautious can be, I put the man out of my mind,’ Forster recalled. ‘The poems did not alter, they were still a light in the sky.’
This was generous, and for Forster that light never really went out. When he wrote a private memoir of Mohammed el Adl, the Egyptian tram conductor with whom he had enjoyed an affair in Alexandria during the First World War, Forster turned to Housman for an epigraph. El Adl had kept in touch with Forster by letter when the novelist returned to England, but had died of tuberculosis in 1922 aged only twenty-three. The memoir is prefaced with the second stanza, unattributed, of ‘The rain, it streams on stone and hillock’, a poem Housman had written in memory of his brother Herbert and included in Last Poems:
Good-night, my lad, for nought’s eternal
No league of ours for sure,
To-morrow I shall miss you less,
And ache of heart and heaviness
Are things that time should cure.
The alterations of punctuation (reproduced here) would have infuriated Housman, but the poignancy of these lines is wholly appropriate to the sad story of Forster’s first serious affair, an affair that though brief had a profound effect upon his thinking and outlook. ‘It seems to me that to be trusted, and to be trusted across the barriers of income race and class, is the greatest reward a man can ever receive,’ he told his friend and confidante Florence Barger. For Forster the affair represented ‘such a triumph over nonsense and artificial difficulties: it is a sample of the other triumphs that I am sure come off but of which we hear nothing through the brassy rattle of civilisation so called […] I see beyond my own happiness and intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and I know that there is a great unrecorded history.’
Housman would not form part of that history, but he was invoked at the memorial concert held for Forster at King’s College a few months after his death in 1970. This included readings of what Forster had written about A Shropshire Lad in his diaries and the performance of two songs from Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, ‘Bredon Hill’ and ‘Oh, when I was in love with you’.
4
Buried Lives
It was one thing for young men such as Forster to recognise the homosexual undercurrents running through Housman’s poetry, quite another to presume that this gave them special access to the author in person. Housman’s disinclination to discuss his personal life with anyone in any detail has inevitably led to a great deal of speculation and argument about what he did or didn’t do. There have, for example, been suggestions that his frequent trips abroad, like those of many homosexual Englishmen of the period, satisfied appetites additional to the gastronomic and architectural ones he wrote about in his letters. Much confusion arose over a list of names and prices Housman compiled relating to a stay in Paris, claimed by some as a tariff for young men enjoyed but believed by others to be merely aide memoire jottings about restaurants or music halls. There has also been conjecture about someone Housman referred to as ‘my gondolier’, who was retained to take him round Venice during his visits to the city but, it has been proposed, may also have provided more personal services in the manner of John Addington Symonds’s Angelo Fusato. The fact that Housman ‘rushed off’ in midwinter to attend the gondolier’s sickbed is seen by some as proof of a romantic devotion, by others as an act of charity. Suspicion has also been aroused by the mysterious and so far unidentified ‘French companion’ who sometimes joined Housman on his tours of France. ‘I cannot offer you anything of an invitation,’ he teasingly warned Grant Richards in anticipation of one such trip, ‘for I shall have a friend with me who would not mix with you nor you with him.’ Housman had, however, described this friend to Kate as ‘a nice young man, not much educated, who regards me as a benefactor’, and he would hardly have been so open with her if his benefaction had been in return for sexual favours.
Housman nevertheless seems to have extracted some entertainment from making off-hand remarks that the inquisitive might seize upon. His sly reference in conversation with Forster to the ‘unrespectable company’ he sought in Paris was matched by his admission to Richards, ‘I do know something of [the city’s] bains de vapeur’. As Forster commented when reporting Housman’s supposed confidence: ‘This was offered as a jest, and accepte
d as such, but so offered that I might make the mistake of accepting it seriously if I chose, which was intriguing.’ The same might be said of other ‘hints’ that Housman evidently enjoyed dropping. It is characteristic, for example, that his letter to Richards about steam baths should continue ‘I am flying to Paris (though not necessarily to those haunts of vice)’, just as, when he suggested that to include his poems in an anthology of the 1890s would be like including Lot in a book on Sodomites, he should add: ‘in saying which I am not saying a word against sodomy, nor implying that intoxication and incest are in any way preferable’. The deliberate ambiguity (‘not necessarily’, ‘not saying a word against’) in one who always chose his words carefully is of the same teasing nature as the irony he deployed elsewhere in his correspondence. It is precisely because his customary mode was one of teasing and deflection that Housman is so moving when he lets this mask slip.
The truth is that although we now know a good deal about Housman’s emotional life, we still know absolutely nothing about his sex life. W.H. Auden may have been ‘pretty sure’ that Housman was ‘an anal passive’, but he based this assertion on nothing more than a hunch and a wish to shock the readers of the New Yorker. The Parisian male prostitutes and the affair with the Venetian gondolier, referred to in some books as if established fact, not only have no verifiable substance but have been more or less conclusively proved to be biographical misreadings. One of the poems that Gow vainly attempted to prevent Laurence Housman from publishing is sometimes adduced as evidence that Housman had personal experience of ‘stolen waters’:
Ho, everyone that thirsteth
And hath the price to give,
Come to the stolen waters,
Drink and your soul shall live.
The concept of stolen waters is taken from the Book of Proverbs: ‘Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant’, and the relevant passage is marked in Housman’s own Bible. Recommending secret pleasures is not, however, an admission that one has partaken of them oneself. E.M. Forster quoted this poem when reviewing More Poems in 1936, and he concluded his notice: ‘Perhaps he had a better time than the outsider supposes. Did he ever drink the stolen waters which he recommends so ardently to others? I hope so.’ Forster had himself been a slow starter, not having his first sexual encounter until he was thirty-seven, but he had made up for this thereafter and it is perhaps unsurprising that he wanted Housman to have had similar luck. It is, however, one thing to hope that he did, quite another to state that the poem provides evidence that during a trip to Venice in the autumn of 1900 Housman ‘tasted some of the pleasures which he had longed for so intensely since childhood’. Had Housman longed for such pleasures since childhood? It would perhaps be ‘natural’ if he had, but there is no evidence to support this statement.