Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Housman would have been pleased that ordinary readers such as Nichols’s businessman had read his poems and learned them by heart. He was less pleased by an encounter in 1927 with a rather more illustrious American admirer of his work. ‘I had a visit not long ago from Clarence Darrow, the great American barrister for defending murderers,’ he told his brother Basil. ‘He had only a few days in England, but he could not return home without seeing me, because he had so often used my poems to rescue his clients from the electric chair.’ Of all Darrow’s cases the most notorious was that of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy young men from prominent Chicago families who in 1924 stood trial for the apparently motiveless abduction and murder of a fourteen-year-old schoolboy called Bobby Franks. The case against the pair was overwhelming and the only thing a defending lawyer could do was to argue that the death penalty should not be imposed. To this end, Loeb’s family contacted the most famous lawyer in the country.

  Darrow was both a passionate opponent of the death penalty and a keen reader of poetry, and when it came to defending these two apparently indefensible young men, he turned to Housman, many of whose poems he reportedly knew by heart. His closing argument at the hearing in Cook County on 22 August 1924 was long, impassioned and somewhat rambling, lasting in all some twelve hours. Part of Darrow’s ploy was to keep emphasising the youth of the defendants, whom he frequently referred to as ‘boys’ and on nine occasions as ‘lads’. In two instances Shropshire Lads were also invoked. He suggested that Leopold and Loeb might be any parents’ sons, and to this end quoted the whole of ‘The Culprit’ from Last Poems to suggest that the defendants were ‘victims’. ‘I remember a little poem that gives the soliloquy of a boy about to be hanged,’ Darrow said, ‘a soliloquy such as these boys might make.’ In the poem the condemned lad imagines the moment of his conception, at which his father was not considering how his son might turn out, and the moment of his birth, at which his mother is simply glad to have borne a son. At the point of execution, however, the lad is alone:

  Oh let no man remember

  The soul that God forgot,

  But fetch the county kerchief

  And noose me in the knot,

  And I will rot.

  For effect, Darrow had altered the words ‘county kerchief’ to ‘County Sheriff’, this being the title of the region’s highest law-enforcement officer.

  Towards the end of his closing statement, Darrow turned once again to Housman, using ‘When hollow fires burn out to black’ from A Shropshire Lad to suggest the bleak future that faced Leopold and Loeb whatever sentence was passed: ‘I care not, Your Honor, whether the march begins at the gallows or when the gates of Joliet [Penitentiary] close upon them, there is nothing but the night, and that is little for any human being to expect. But there are others to be considered. Here are these two families, who have led honest lives, who will bear the name that they bear, and future generations must carry it on.’

  Darrow’s heartfelt rhetoric won the day and the judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment for the murder plus ninety-nine years for the kidnapping. Housman’s only recorded reaction to the trial itself was that ‘Leopold and Loeb owe their life sentence partly to me’. Darrow had given him a copy of his speech, ‘in which, sure enough, two of my poems are misquoted’. The second violation of the text was presumably unintentional: Darrow had rendered the second line of ‘When hollow fires burn out to black’ as ‘And lights are fluttering low’, rather than ‘guttering low’.

  *   *   *

  True to his word, Housman published no more poems after the appearance of his second volume. He did, however, publish an edition of Lucan’s Bellum Civile in 1926 and the fifth and final volume of Manilius’s Astronomica in 1930 – both at his own expense. He also continued to contribute the occasional pungent review to the Classical Review and the Classical Quarterly, in which his savagery and wit showed no signs of diminution. Of the French scholar W. Morel’s Fragmenta Poetarum Latinorum, for example, he wrote in 1928: ‘I should have written less harshly if Mr Morel had not taken measures to secure favourable reviews from his own countrymen. By duly disparaging Baehrens (in bad Latin) on his first page, and by ritual homage to Leo and Cichorius and other acceptable names, he has done his best to create a friendly atmosphere and obtain commendation irrespective of desert; and he must not be surprised if smoke ascending from domestic altars draws in a current of cold air from abroad’ – an air that kills, perhaps. Housman found compositors of classical texts no more competent than those employed by Richards to set up his poetry, asserting of H.J. Izaac’s edition of Martial in 1931 that: ‘The printers have indulged immoderately in their favourite sport of dropping letters on the floor and then leaving them to lie there or else putting them back in wrong places’.

  His most substantial piece of writing from his last years, however much he may have disparaged it, was the Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. The lecture had cost him a great deal to write, partly because by 1933 his health was in serious decline. Housman was rightly proud of his strong constitution, and the worst thing about increasing age was the limit it put on his daily walk. ‘In the course of this year I have grown older, which shows itself in my walking powers,’ he complained to Kate at the end of 1932, when he was just three months short of his seventy-third birthday. ‘After five or six miles, though I do not get tired, my legs tend to act sluggishly. My heart, according to the doctor, is going on all right.’ This optimism proved unfounded, however, and the following June, a month after delivering the Leslie Stephen Lecture, he wrote to Laurence: ‘I suppose I ought to warn you that I am not in rude health. On the pretext that my heart was all over the place, after walking too much, I suppose, in the hot weather, the doctor sent me to bed for a week in a nursing home, where the heart must have disappointed him bitterly, for it behaved with the utmost decorum.’ From what he wrote to a friend about his heart ‘now behaving with monotonous correctness’, it seems the problem was some kind of arrhythmia.

  What worried Housman more was his psychological state: ‘My real trouble, which I have often had before, is nervous depression and causeless apprehensions, aggravated by the fact that I am going to move into new rooms [in Trinity] next term.’ These depressions, he said, tended to last three months, and could no longer be alleviated by physical activity: ‘In previous visitations of this nervous trouble I have been physically strong and able to take good long walks,’ he complained during an unusually hot spell in July; ‘but at present, though my heart appears to be all right again, I am feeble, partly no doubt because of this weather.’ While on his customary summer holiday in France he was struck down with a ‘violently painful inflammation of the throat’ which resulted not in an outpouring of poetry but in a bout of influenza that left him further enfeebled. Although he recovered to some extent, partly thanks to a tonic ‘known among doctors as “honeymoon mixture”’, he was still complaining the following spring that he had not returned to his former good health. It was the further diminution of his ability to walk long distances that most preyed on him, because it robbed him of something that ‘all his life had given that quiet companionship of nature which suited him best’. ‘The doctor does not want me to take walks of much more than a mile,’ he told Laurence, ‘and I myself am not inclined to do much more than twice that amount. I still go up my 44 steps [to his rooms on his Trinity staircase] two at a time, but that is in hopes of dropping dead at the top.’

  By the summer of 1935 he was telling Richards: ‘The continuation of my life beyond May 1933 was a regrettable mistake’ – though continue it did for another ten months. A three-week holiday in France and Switzerland in August and September got off to a bad start when he banged his head while entering a taxi, the resulting wound requiring stitches. ‘Do not expect bulletins,’ he wrote home to Kate; ‘death or grave illness will be duly notified to you by the Head Porter at Trinity.’ He returned to England in an aeroplane fighting he
adwinds (‘The machine was not particularly unsteady, except in taking off and in landing’), and wearing a skullcap to cover the part of his head that had been shaved in order to stitch his scalp. ‘I do not expect to go abroad again,’ he told Kate, and although he was pronounced ‘very well’ by the doctor he consulted on his return, a few weeks later he endured another spell in the Evelyn Nursing Home in Trumpington Road with ‘breathlessness, weakness, and the dropsical swelling of the ankles and knees’. He would remain there for over three weeks, though he insisted upon summoning a taxi to take him back to college to deliver his twice-weekly lectures.

  In order to thwart his hope of dropping dead while ascending to his rooms in Whewell’s Court, arrangements had been made for him to move into a set of ground-floor rooms in Trinity’s Great Court, ‘with a bathroom which dazzles the beholder and is equipped with every imaginable luxury, including a thermostat’. He was still troubled by sleeplessness, largely caused by the difficulties he was experiencing with his breathing but partially relieved by bromide washed down with champagne – ‘but I wake up early and worry’. Quite what was worrying Housman is not known: his breathing problems were in fact Cheyne-Stokes respiration, often a symptom of heart failure, but from everything he wrote it seems that approaching death was not something that greatly concerned him.

  He was unwell enough to check himself back into the Evelyn for Christmas, and reported: ‘The other night they gave me heroin instead of my usual soporific, and I learnt what it is to be totally deprived of intellect.’ Smacked out or not, he was sufficiently alert to refuse permission for the National Federation of Women’s Institutes to reprint his poem ‘Fancy’s Knell’ in their magazine. He returned to Trinity in mid-January, ‘but with no strength for anything beyond my actual work’, and continued to lecture and to correspond, but by 22 March was back in the Evelyn once more. He rallied in order to rebuke a persistent and tiresome American admirer, Houston Martin, who wanted him to read a study he had written of him. ‘I hope that if you can restrain your indecent ardour for a little I shall be properly dead and your proposed work will not be by its nature unbecoming,’ Housman wrote. ‘But the hope is not more than a hope, for my family are tough and long-lived, unless they take to drink.’ He told Martin that he did not forbid him from quoting from his letters, but added: ‘I think you should ask yourself whether you are literary enough for your job. You say that I may think it “indignant and presumptious” for an American to write such a book before an English one has appeared. By presumptious you mean presumptuous, and what you mean by indignant I have no idea.’

  Housman returned to Trinity on 21 April, and two days later delivered his first lecture of the new term. It would also be his last lecture, and J.J. Thomson, who attended it, recalled, ‘He was terribly ill and must have had an invincible determination to lecture in such a state.’ He returned to the nursing home on 25 April, writing a brief note to Kate to inform her. It would be the last letter he wrote, and it ended with the one-word postscript: ‘Ugh!’

  Kate’s son Jerry Symons went to view the body in the nursing home’s chapel, where it was laid out beneath a purple and gold silk pall. As he reported: ‘There was a great composure and firmness of expression, and the look on the face was that of a man who had met the storms of life and faced and fought them. I cannot call it serene, it still held what I can only call a proud challenge – “I am captain of my soul and master of my fate; do your worst; I scorn you.” Indeed, his features in death were a mirror to all he had suffered from life, and of his attitude to it – it was the face of an autocrat and an aristocrat facing a silly mob and defying it.’

  III

  ENGLISH LANDSCAPE

  The graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.

  E.M. Forster, Howards End

  Little Brampton in Shropshire is not much more than a few farm buildings spread out around a crossroads in the Clun Valley. It barely even counts as a hamlet, but standing to one side of the junction itself is an unexpectedly grand fingerpost, erected in 1800 by the 2nd Lord Clive. Set into a low stone wall on a stepped square plinth, it consists of a banded and domed limestone pillar with four cast-iron arms into which the following place-names are cut so that the sky can be seen beyond them: B.S CASTLE, LUDLOW, C.N GUNFORD and CLUNN.

  This part of Shropshire is true Housman Country: the ancient market town of Ludlow stands at its very heart, while Clungunford and Clun are saluted in a prefatory quatrain to the fiftieth poem of A Shropshire Lad as being among ‘the quietest places / Under the sun’. The direction pillar, as it is more properly called, was moved slightly to its present position during a road improvement scheme in 1929, around the time such popular books as H.V. Morton’s In Search of England were encouraging people to explore the countryside in motor cars. Even so, the junction at Little Brampton is of two small B roads rather than major highways, and some 120 years on from when Housman wrote his poem the countryside around Clungunford and Clun is still remarkably quiet. It is possible to take a day-long walk in the Clun Valley on a fine October day, passing through Sowdley Wood (which contains large numbers of Housman’s favourite beech trees) and along the many footpaths and bridleways that cross the fields, without encountering more than a couple of other people. The view is of gentle hills divided by old hedges into small fields in which large and ancient trees act as way-guides. There are substantial woods, but also numerous small coppices, spinneys and thickets, while sunken and green lanes and narrow little bridges over the River Clun and its tributaries suggest generations of people travelling the country on foot. Although forestry work is carried out in the larger areas of woodland, the landscape still conforms to Housman’s ideal of ‘a land of boughs in leaf / A land of trees that stand’.

  There is no record of Housman ever having visited this particular area, but it is impossible to walk in it without his poetry beating in one’s mind. While he undoubtedly put Shropshire on the map for many readers, he often acknowledged that he did not in fact know the county at all well. ‘I know Ludlow and Wenlock, but some of my topographical details – Hughley, Abdon under Clee, – are sometimes quite wrong,’ he wrote in 1933. Laurence Housman visited Shropshire a few months after his brother’s book had been published, and reported back that Hughley Church, of which Housman had written ‘The vane on Hughley steeple / Veers bright, a far-known sign’, not only had no steeple but could hardly be ‘a far-known sign’ since it was buried in a valley. Furthermore, Housman had written that on the north side of the church ‘slayers of themselves’ lay in ‘steeple-shadowed slumber’; in fact, Laurence reported, this part of the churchyard was the final resting place of ‘respectable churchwardens and wives of Vicars, all in neatly tended graves’. Housman admitted that he had caught a glimpse of the church during a visit he paid to Shropshire ‘to gain local colour’, as he mischievously put it, after the bulk of the poems had been written. ‘I ascertained by looking down from Wenlock Edge that Hughley Church could not have much of a steeple,’ he told Laurence. ‘But as I had already composed the poem and could not invent another name that sounded so nice, I could only deplore that the church at Hughley should follow the bad example of the Church at Brou, which persists in standing on a plain after Matthew Arnold had said [in his poem of that name] that it stands among mountains.’ Other place-names, Housman admitted, were chosen for euphony rather than for any particular associations.

  These names are nevertheless scattered throughout A Shropshire Lad like fingerposts, apparently placing poems in precise locations: Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Knighton, Hughley, Buildwas, Clunton, Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun; Clee, the Wrekin, Wenlock Edge, Wyre and the Welsh Marches; the rivers Severn, Teme, Corve and Ony.* No wonder William Archer, reviewing the book, was able to declare, ‘Shropshire no longer lacks its poet’; while Michael Peele, who reproduced a great deal of earlier poetry about the county in his 1923 volume Shropshire in Poem and Legend, acknowledg
ed that ‘In [Housman] the county at last has a poet worthy of its loveliness.’ Housman’s notion that his book would be set in the county he had looked at from afar during his childhood was not there from the beginning, however, and in early drafts of the poems some of the place-names were taken from elsewhere: not only was Wenlock in ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’ (XXXIX) originally ‘Stourbridge’, at the time a small town in Worcestershire but now part of Birmingham’s metropolitan sprawl, but the broom in the same poem was originally urged to ‘tarnish slow on Kinver Edge’, which is on the Worcestershire–Staffordshire border. Similarly, in ‘The Welsh Marches’ (XXVIII) the Severn originally ran down to Bewdley, again in Worcestershire, rather than to Shropshire’s Buildwas.

  Western Horizons

  Housman’s reasons for choosing Shropshire as the ostensible setting for his book may have been personal, but the county had long been renowned for its landscape and history. It is geologically rich and geographically diverse, with its dramatic hills rearing up from wide plains, its ancient (though now patchwork) forests of Wyre and Clun, the River Severn more or less bisecting the county, and the River Teme running along its south-west border. The past here, as in much of England, is both palpable and curiously layered, so that the ghosts of other, earlier lives tread beside you as you walk in it. Shropshire is criss-crossed with ancient paths, fortifications and tracks, dotted with ancient buildings or their remains, and boasts parish churches still in use which date back to the Norman Conquest, when William I more or less handed over the county to his cousin Roger de Montgomery, whom he made Earl of Shrewsbury. Making your way on foot up onto Panpunton Hill above Knighton, you tread a steep path that runs alongside Offa’s Dyke, the defensive barrier against the Welsh constructed by a king of Mercia in the eighth century and still visible. At Clun the towering remains of an eleventh-century border fortress rise on a mound at the edge of the town. The nave and chancel of St Swithun’s Church at Clunbury date from the Norman period, and the misericords beneath the seats of the choir stalls in St Laurence’s Church in Ludlow were carved in 1447. The Lancashire-born topographical writer Joseph Nightingale, who wrote the article on Shropshire for John Britton’s monumental twenty-seven-volume survey of Beauties of England and Wales (1801–16), declared: ‘Of the beauties of England, perhaps no other county contains a more interesting share than the one now under consideration. It possesses every variety of natural charm: the bold and lofty mountain; the woody and secluded valley; the fertile and widely cultured plain; the majestic river, and the sequestered lake. It is no less rich in the remains of ancient times, which awaken a thousand enthusiastic reflections, by engaging us in the contemplation of the memorable events of our history.’