Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Answering Laurence’s complaints about the inaccuracy of ‘Hughley Steeple’, Housman had said that he ‘did not apprehend that the faithful would be making pilgrimages to these holy places’. As the volume grew in popularity, however, those who had come to love the poems naturally wanted to visit the places that had ‘inspired’ them, and many carried with them pocket editions of the book. Norman Nicholson, a genuinely local English poet of a later generation, much of whose work was inspired by the village of Millom in Cumbria, where he spent most of his life, once remarked: ‘You might as well use A Shropshire Lad as a guide to [Shropshire] as use Rossetti’s “Blessed Damozel” as a guide to heaven.’ Others disagreed. Edmund Gosse wrote that Housman ‘never describes’ the countryside in which his poems are set, ‘but he indicates its character in a way which exceeds the impression made by any topographical survey, however accurate. I have wandered on “the high-hilled plains”, needing no guide but one little olive-coloured book of verses.’ Stephen Tallents, who as public relations officer for the General Post Office in the 1930s would be responsible for commissioning many well-known documentary films about England and the English, had visited Housman Country while awaiting the results of the Civil Service exams in 1908. He had recently been studying at the University of Grenoble, where he had become a particular friend of a French girl, and on his return to England he sent her a silk scarf and a copy of A Shropshire Lad, ‘with a plea that she should make “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” a part of her English studies’. He then set out on a solitary walking tour beginning at the English Bridge in Shrewsbury. ‘The Shropshire Lad had brought me to Shrewsbury,’ he recalled. ‘It was delightful to walk through the woods of Wenlock Edge, with the forest fleece of the Wrekin to the north behind me, and Clee and Cleobury away to the east; delightful, too, to be woken up in Ludlow on a Monday morning by the church bells truly playing The Conquering Hero comes.’

  Two of the most distinguished literary pilgrims to Housman Country during this early period, both of them clutching their copies of A Shropshire Lad, were Willa Cather in July 1902 and E.M. Forster in April 1907. Cather, who was thirty-two when A Shropshire Lad was published, had been born in Virginia, but moved at the age of ten to Nebraska, which would provide the setting for her best-known novels. It would be difficult to imagine a landscape more different from the treeless American prairies than the dramatic limestone escarpment of Wenlock Edge or ‘the wild green hills of Wyre’ that were the settings for Housman’s poems, but Cather was immediately captivated by this wholly other world. ‘Do I know a Shropshire Lad?’ she wrote in 1903, the year in which she published her first and only volume of poetry. ‘Do I? Isn’t the internal evidence of my own poetry all against me? Why I’ve been Housman’s bond slave, mentally, since his volume first appeared some six years ago.’ Armed with this volume, Cather not only made a pilgrimage to Shropshire during a European trip in the summer of 1902 but even tracked down the author in Pinner. She was accompanied by a young friend called Isabelle McClung, in whose house she lived while working on magazines in Pittsburgh. ‘As soon as I got to England, I went straight to Shropshire,’ she reported (not quite accurately: the two women had in fact spent five days in Chester, before they ‘coached fifty miles to Shrewsbury’). ‘When we got into Shropshire we threw away our guide books and have blindly followed the trail of the Shropshire Lad and he has led us beside still waters and in green pastures.’ They went ‘to all the places – Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Knighton, and the rivers “Ony and Teme and Clun”.’ In Shrewsbury they

  saw how

  ‘High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam

  Islanded in Severn stream,

  The bridges, from the steepled crest,

  Cross the water east and west.’

  We sat for two sunsets on the very spot where he must have done it and watched the red steeples in the clear green water which flows almost imperceptibly. And what do you think was going on in the wide meadows on the other shore? Why boys were playing foot-ball!

  ‘Is football playing

  Along the river shore?’

  Well I guess yes. And we went to Shrewsbury jail. You remember

  ‘They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail;

  The whistles blow forlorn

  And trains all night groan on the rail

  To lads that die at morn.’

  Of course they do, for the jail, which is the most grewsome [sic] building the hand of man ever made, is on a naked hill right over the switch yard and station, so you see ‘forlorn’ was not put there [just] to rhyme with morn.

  Travelling on to Ludlow, they ‘heard the bells of Ludlow play “The Conquering Hero Comes” of a Monday’, just as Housman recorded in ‘The Recruit’ – ‘and even now they are calling to farm and lane and mill,’ she reported, referring to another line of that poem. They particularly admired Ludlow Castle, ‘one of the most perfect Norman-Elizabethan compounds in England and the least visited […] Isn’t it nice that Sir Philip Sidney grew up and first wrote in Ludlow castle when his father held the Welsh borders here for Elizabeth? We have read those two singing Shropshire lads until our eyes are blinded and our reason distraught.’ Cather was inspired to write a poem about the red field poppies that grew on the castle’s turrets; the influence of Housman is clear, not least in the archaic use of ‘mind’ for ‘remember’:

  I’ll mind the flowers of pleasure,

  Of short-lived youth and sleep

  That drank the sunny weather

  A-top of Ludlow keep.

  ‘We are going to bicycle to Wenlock Edge this afternoon,’ she reported, ‘“Oh tarnish late on Wenlock edge” etc. I’ll not quit Shropshire till I know every name he uses. They are just making hay now, too, and I think I might almost find Maurice behind the mow somewhere’ – Maurice being the murdered brother in ‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree’ (VIII). They may not have come across any corpses, but they did find a bookseller who delighted them when he said: ‘You must not carry these books; I will send them up to your hotel by my lad.’ Cather felt that ‘Somehow it makes it all the greater to have it all true’ – and she would have been disappointed to discover that far from sitting on the banks of the Severn at Shrewsbury ‘on the very spot’ that she had found, Housman had cribbed such details from Murray’s Handbook – possibly the very guidebook she had cast aside in favour of A Shropshire Lad.

  The one thing the two women had not been able to find in Shropshire was any trace of the man himself: ‘Of him not a legend, not a button or feather or mark. Nobody had ever heard of him or seen his book. There was a copy in the Shrewsbury public library, but the leaves were uncut.’ Undaunted, Cather ‘battered on the doors of his publishers until they gave me his address’, and she and her companion, now accompanied by another friend, Dorothy Canfield (who had come over from Paris, where she had been studying), decided to pay Housman a visit. They trundled out along the Metropolitan Railway line to Pinner, where they found their hero in ‘an awful suburb in quite the most horrible boarding-house ever explored’. This was 1 Yarborough Villas, which was indeed an unlovely semi-detached house built in the 1850s.

  Housman turned out to be as dingy as his surroundings, and he had clearly made no effort to make himself presentable for his lady visitors. ‘He is the most gaunt and gray and embittered individual I know,’ Cather reported. ‘He is an instructor in Latin in the University of London, but I believe the position pays next to nothing. The poor man’s shoes and cuffs and the state of the carpet in his little hole of a study gave me a fit of dark depression.’ Cather had been looking forward to spending the afternoon with the man who in her opinion was ‘making about the only English verse that will last, the only verse of this decade I mean’, but any attempts to discuss that verse were, as was customary, deftly brushed aside. It was fortunate for Housman that Miss Canfield had studied Classics, which allowed him to steer the conversation ‘in safe and impersonal channels’. The fact that this opportunity had been wasted, the afternoon spe
nt discussing ‘other things than Mr Housman’s verses’, so upset Cather that she apparently burst into tears as soon as she left the house.

  To her great annoyance, a fanciful version of her unlikely encounter with her favourite poet was concocted by Ford Madox Ford and published in his 1932 autobiography Return to Yesterday. According to Ford, Cather was president of the Pittsburgh Shropshire Lad Club and had led a delegation of ladies to visit Housman in Cambridge, where she presented him with a golden wreath. The publication of this fantasy led to Cather being ‘besieged by demands to “tell what I know about Housman” […] a heavy price to pay for a very brief acquaintance’, and in April 1947 she decided to write a detailed article refuting Ford’s fantasy and describing what had really happened. Just over a fortnight after she wrote to Dorothy Canfield asking for her recollections, however, she died suddenly and the article was never written.

  Cather, though she became a writer of place in her novels, was not the most obvious of Housman fans. The principal relationships in her life were all with other women, but she was well aware of the appeal of A Shropshire Lad for a certain category of young men. ‘Several rather mushy boys (young men they were, apparently) have sent rather horrid manuscripts on Houseman [sic] to me,’ she complained to Canfield shortly before her death. ‘Why do all these Willie boys sigh for him so, and claim him for their own? The word “lad” seems to hypnotize them.’* One young man who, if not mushy, was by his own admission certainly something of a muff, was E.M. Forster, whose own pilgrimage to Housman Country was made five years after Cather’s. By the time the twenty-eight-year-old Forster set off for Shropshire, he had already made similar explorations of other parts of rural England, most notably in September 1904 when he had gone walking in Wiltshire. It was here that he came across Figsbury Rings, the Iron Age hill fort, and talked to a lame shepherd lad, a landscape and an encounter that would inspire his personal favourite amongst his novels, The Longest Journey (1907). For Forster the ancient Wiltshire landscape was ‘charged with emotion’, and the same might be said of his experience of Shropshire. It is significant that he embarked on his tour of the county immediately after taking a walking holiday with a small group of friends that included H.O. Meredith, the former lover who had introduced him to A Shropshire Lad. In addition, he had recently become smitten by a seventeen-year-old Indian called Syed Ross Masood, who had been sent to him to be coached in Latin while waiting to go up to Oxford. Masood was an immensely glamorous, boisterous and self-dramatising young man, very free with oriental endearments but entirely heterosexual. (He is clearly the ‘Indian friend’ mentioned by Forster in his ‘Notes on the English Character’.)

  Forster was still very much under Masood’s spell when he made his tour of Shropshire. Like Cather, he began his pilgrimage in Shrewsbury, which he found ‘Unspoilt and alive: a city with vigour still adjusted to its beautiful frame. Poetry – or luck – in every inch of it. Gloriously piled on a curve of the Severn, wh. two fine bridges traverse – the English and the Welsh, and against which laps the Quarry, with a magnificent avenue of limes.’ These were the two bridges referred to in the first stanza of ‘The Welsh Marches’ (XXVIII), which Cather had quoted.

  Forster was writing up his journey during his stay at the sixteenth-century timber-framed Angel Hotel in Ludlow, ‘sitting in the great bow window which commanded the sloping street’. The weather had been far from perfect:

  Wet walk from Wellington over Wrekin, which was foul with orange peel & bottles. No view: but plumes of trains pushing through the mist […] Ate sandwiches walking. Buildwas Abbey is transitional: nave & crossing arches perfect. In a field of intense green by the Severn. Much Wenlock I hadn’t time to see, since I lingered over cider at the ‘Rock House’ […] Train after a tunnel got out on Wenlock Edge. ‘Hughley Steeple’ below, & to right the Wrekin as an inflation. So did I see it yesterday from Uricon. Ludlow seems something special: a tower at crossing of the Chester colour and many old houses. Feel very happy.

  His diary entry ends: ‘Want to write to A.E. Housman.’ – and the resulting letter was the one the poet failed to answer.

  Like Cather, Forster enjoyed identifying places mentioned in A Shropshire Lad (he had also walked to Clun), and he too was inspired to write a poem – ‘Ludlow’, dated April 1907 – in which Housman’s influence is clear. Indeed, the few poems Forster wrote in his twenties all show the influence of Housman in their rhythms, rhyme schemes, vocabulary and subject matter. ‘Ludlow’ naturally includes echoes of Housman, having been written during the Shropshire tour, but two years later Forster wrote ‘Incurious at a window’, which reads like a more boldly homoerotic recension of ‘The street sounds to the soldier’s tread’ (XXII). Housman Country would also be incorporated in Forster’s novels, notably Howards End, published three years after his visit. Part of the novel is set in Oniton, a border town in what Mr Wilcox calls ‘the wrong part of Shropshire’, where he owns a house he has bought for no apparent reason and does not much like. In the 1960s Forster’s friend William Plomer asked about the origins of Oniton, which (like the real Onibury) takes its name from the River Onny. ‘How lovely to be asked whether Oniton is any where,’ Forster replied.

  No one but you has asked, and those chapters in the book have always given me a particular feeling.

  It is Clun. I can’t be sure of the date from my diary, but my map shows that I walked there, over Clun Forest, from Newto[w]n (Montgomery), and walked the next day to Ludlow. I was alone, except for the dubious company of A.E. Houseman [sic]. There are breaths from him in those chapters, the best I think being at the end of ch. 29.

  The walk from Clun would have taken him through Onibury, and the final paragraph of Chapter 9 of Howards End is indeed replete with borrowings from A Shropshire Lad:

  Day and night the river flows down into England, day after day the sun retreats into the Welsh mountains, and the tower chimes, ‘See the Conquering Hero’. But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening. They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust and a little money.

  Margaret Schlegel, who loves Oniton and the Wilcoxes’ house there, eventually settles at Howards End, the house that Mrs Wilcox intended to leave to her. Howards End is in Hertfordshire, at the edge of London’s northward suburban sprawl, rather than in the rural fastness of Shropshire, but it is removed enough from the urbanised village of Hilton still to embody the English countryside. Sitting within ‘the peculiar sadness of a rural interior’, Margaret is prompted to some thoughts about the countryside clearly influenced by Forster’s reading of A Shropshire Lad:

  … the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields. All was not sadness. The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder-rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw. It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness. In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect – connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.

  Forster also claimed that he made his ‘favourite characters’ quote Housman’s poetry. Both the Emersons do so in A Room with a View, which he was writing at the time he toured Shropshire and which would be published the following year, dedicated to Meredith. George Emerson is just the sort of troubled young man whom Housman hoped would appreciate his poems. His doting father, who is clearly Forster’s favourite character in the novel, is puzzled by George’s unhappiness, which seems to have no discernible cause. ‘How can he be unhappy when he is strong and alive?’ Mr Emerson asks during their holiday in Florence. ‘What more is one to give him? And think how he has been brought up – free from all the superstition and ignorance that lead
men to hate one another in the name of God. With such an education as that, I thought he was bound to grow up happy.’ The absence of any belief in God, as Housman knew, did not necessarily make a man any happier: ‘I only know what is wrong with him,’ Mr Emerson tells Lucy Honeychurch, ‘not why it is.’ When Lucy, ‘expecting some harrowing tale’, asks about the nature of George’s difficulty, Mr Emerson replies: ‘The old trouble; things won’t fit […] The things of the universe. It is quite true. They don’t,’ and then goes on ‘in an ordinary voice, so that [Lucy] scarcely realized he was quoting poetry’, to recite the first stanza of ‘From far, from eve and morning’ (XXXII). ‘We know that we come from the winds and that we shall return to them,’ continues Mr Emerson. ‘But why should this make us unhappy?’ Forster does not identify the poem or its author, but he evidently expected his readers to know it and to be aware of its plea (not quoted) to ‘Take my hand quick and tell me, / What have you in your heart’, a snatched moment of intimacy in the face of life’s transience. In essence, this is what Mr Emerson wants Lucy to do for his son.

  For George himself, life is ruled by fate, as in Housman’s poems: ‘Everything is fate. We are flung together by Fate, drawn apart by Fate – flung together, drawn apart. The twelve winds blow us – we settle nothing –’. The winds of Housman’s poem that blew the Emersons into Lucy’s company in Italy later blow them to Summer Street, the village in Surrey where she lives at a house called Windy Corner. They also blow in Mr Beebe, the clergyman whom Lucy originally met in Tunbridge Wells then re-encountered in Florence, and who now takes charge of the parish. A hint that Mr Beebe is not quite the sympathetic character he at first seems occurs when he drops in on the Emersons in their new house to find books lying around waiting to be shelved. ‘“A Shropshire Lad”. Never heard of it,’ he declares complacently. Neither has he heard of the famously iconoclastic The Way of All Flesh, whose author, Samuel Butler, provided Forster with a partial model for Mr Emerson. Both Butler and Housman feature in a list of names Forster noted in his diary on the last day of 1907, the year he made his Shropshire pilgrimage and completed A Room with a View. What these unannotated names have in common is that they were those of artists and writers Forster knew, or suspected, to be homosexual, all of whom are acknowledged or unacknowledged presences in a novel which, although it has a heterosexual romance at its core, contains a distinct subtext aimed at the kind of readers who recognised something of their own troubles in A Shropshire Lad.