by Peter Parker
The family nevertheless looked for other clues to the tragedy. The quotation Julian had left on his desk was taken from Antigone, in which the play’s protagonist, under threat of death, justifies her decision to defy Creon’s order that her brother’s body should lie unburied on the battlefield: ‘That I must die some time I knew, edict or no edict, and if I am to die before my time that I count a gain. When one lives as I do in the midst of a sorrow surely one were better dead.’ Julian’s own sorrows may have been related to an unspoken feeling that the army was training him to kill, and that he was at heart a conscientious objector, but there was no specific evidence for this theory. For his brother Douglas, the future Conservative politician and writer, there was ‘one other literary clue. During the short time he was at Aldershot Julian bought the Collected Poems of A.E. Housman, the green hardback edition published by Jonathan Cape. I have it in front of me; it is in excellent condition. Interleaved is a mauve eightpenny bus ticket issued at Aldershot on 28 May 1951. I suppose that Julian bought the book on that day and read it when he came home for the last time the following weekend. Housman’s repeated messages of despair addressed to young men in language of powerful, carefully contrived simplicity fitted exactly Julian’s mood.’
Douglas Hurd concluded that the immediate cause of his brother’s decision to end his life was the one his mother had identified. ‘The damage was done by the immediate contrast between the beauty and loving kindness of a weekend spent at home and the ugly misery of army life to which he had to return that Sunday night. This contrast played on the strong emotions of a romantic nineteen-year-old keyed up by a sentimental education. Deep down in Julian’s nature must have been a strain of sadness which suddenly overpowered him.’
Julian Hurd was one of those troubled young men whom Housman imagined reading his poems in some distant future. The melancholy of the poems that had so particularly appealed to young men in the early years of the twentieth century remained potent, but it also continued to have a much wider appeal. A century after that generation marched away to their battlefronts, Housman remains a pervasive presence in what we read, watch and listen to. The assertion by Edmund Wilson in 1938 that the poems of A Shropshire Lad ‘went on vibrating for decades’ is borne out by the book’s continuing longevity. It is not so much that it has remained in print and been read generation after generation, but that its vibrations have persisted in the collective mind. As Ted Hughes put it: ‘His poems have entered the national consciousness, or perhaps one should say national subconsciousness, with a deeper kind of familiarity and subjective intimacy, more unforgettably, than even, say, Hardy’s poems.’
In ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’, Housman used the word ‘aftermaths’ in its original, agricultural sense. Aftermaths were the new growth that appeared in fields after they had been mown or harvested, and it seems an appropriate word to use for the many different manifestations of Housman’s continuing presence in our culture some eighty years after his death.
And Fields Will Yearly Bear Them
Housman’s first volume of poems seemed fresh and forward-looking when it appeared in 1896, but his second was published the same year as The Waste Land. As the tides of Modernism washed around him, Housman remained firm upon his little rock, and as they receded he came to be valued as a representative of an older but still vital tradition. It was a tradition particularly appreciated by such poets as Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, who in both their life and their work felt a deep attachment to England and its landscape, and to a world that had been swept away by the war that made their literary reputations. When in 1940 F.R. Leavis declared Eliot ‘the greatest living English poet’, Blunden protested that ‘my feeling is that to this day T.S.E. is an American and his verse is not part of our natural production’. Sassoon agreed, replying that whatever the merits of Eliot’s poetry, it was ‘not the same thing that comes from essentially English feeling. A Herefordshire apple is itself, and so is a Burgundy vine. We write our lines out of our bones, and out of the soil our forefathers cultivated. Let Eliot write out of his New England ancestry.’ Over a decade later, the two poets placed Housman alongside Thomas Hardy, Robert Bridges and Walter de la Mare as the leading twentieth-century figures in what Sassoon called ‘the authentic procession of English poetry’.
Writers of a later generation agreed. ‘I consider A.E. Housman a great English poet, one of our greatest since Matthew Arnold,’ Kingsley Amis wrote in the TLS in 1991. ‘In my compilation The Amis Anthology (1988) I included thirteen of his poems, a total not surpassed by any other poet in the book.’ (Amis in fact slips a fourteenth poem into the anthology’s notes, where Housman’s ‘R.S.L.’ appears in the commentary on Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’.) For Amis, Housman had ‘nothing to do with the great modernist development in poetry’, a development more or less ignored in his anthology, but belonged instead to the ‘older, home-grown tradition of Matthew Arnold, Hardy, Edward Thomas and, in poems like “First Sight” and “Cut Grass”, Philip Larkin’. Larkin shared Amis’s respect for this tradition and his 1973 edition of The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse attracted considerable controversy for what was felt to be its anti-Modernist selection: Hardy was represented by twenty-seven poems, Kipling by thirteen, Betjeman by twelve, Graves by eleven, Edward Thomas by nine, and de la Mare and Housman by eight each (which was one more than Eliot).
Looking forwards rather than backwards, Louis MacNeice had written in 1938 that ‘Housman has left no followers.’ In the strictest sense of the term, he was probably right. ‘Housman is easy to parody and hard to imitate,’ noted John Carey in Pure Pleasure (2000), in which Housman’s Collected Poems was one of fifty books he selected to represent twentieth-century literature. Housman nevertheless left his mark on other writers – not least on MacNeice himself. Like many of his generation, MacNeice was introduced to A Shropshire Lad at school, and a short list of his principal characteristics drawn up by a close friend in the 1960s included ‘Housman by heart’. In the 1940s he was delighted to be living for a while in Byron Cottage, where Housman had written most of his first book, and his 1949 radio play The Queen of Air and Darkness was both inspired by and took its title from ‘Her strong enchantments failing’. His friend and collaborator W.H. Auden disagreed about followers and felt, rather, that Housman provided a good model for the young poet: ‘Art for him will be something infinitely precious, pessimistic and hostile to life. If it speaks of love, it must be love frustrated, for all success seems to him noisy and vulgar; if it moralizes, it must counsel a stoic resignation, for the world he knows is well content with itself and will not change.’ Auden had spent his own apprentice years reading and learning from older poets, and among his earliest poems, written at school and university, are several that are both modelled upon and echo Housman. A poem such as ‘Envoi’, for example, is almost entirely made up of lines and phrases more or less lifted from Housman. It begins ‘Take up your load and go, lad / And leave your friends behind’, and its verse form, prosody and vocabulary – sin, dust, bearing sorrows, dark roads, broken vows – are all Housman’s. As Auden later admitted, verses written early in a poet’s career are often ‘made up of magical phrases that seem to have risen involuntarily to the consciousness’.
Although Housman’s influence upon Auden’s poetry was comparatively short-lived – the discovery of T.S. Eliot in the summer of 1926 changed everything – Auden returned to this early literary godfather not only in several essays but also in the well-known but biographically contentious poem ‘A.E. Housman’, written in December 1938. As late as 1971 Auden would open his poem ‘A Shock’ with the declaration: ‘Housman was perfectly right. / Our world rapidly worsens’. This observation was prompted by Auden’s reading of Housman’s letters, in his review of which he quoted and glossed Housman’s claim to be a pejorist, and the poem goes on to recall a childhood in ‘leafy dells’, echoing the cuckoo in ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’, which ‘shouts all
day at nothing / In leafy dells alone’.
Of the same generation as Auden, John Betjeman was a poet whose work achieved a similar popularity to Housman’s among general readers. He ‘learned most of A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems by heart’ while at school with MacNeice, and, as a result, Housman had a great influence on his ‘ear and eye’. Betjeman’s own poetry came to represent a distinctive kind of Englishness; less complex than Housman’s, and more concerned with buildings and cities than with landscape, it was nevertheless replete with place-names and the occasional note of suppressed homoeroticism, and was written with an acute awareness of time passing, youth fading, and death lying in wait. Betjeman nods specifically to Housman by giving the title ‘A Shropshire Lad’ to a poem he wrote about Captain Matthew Webb, a Salopian (born in Dawley) who in 1875 became the first man to swim the English Channel. When asked to define the role of the poet, Betjeman’s answer was one Housman himself might have given: ‘I think primarily it’s to say things simply, shortly, rhythmically, memorably. And if it’s true that my poetry’s read by a lot of people who don’t ordinarily read poetry, that’s all I could want to happen.’
Place-names and a different, more primal sense of England are a feature of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. Hill seems an unlikely debtor to Housman, but the two poets share a childhood with deep roots in the soil of Worcestershire. Hill was born some two miles north of Housman’s birthplace, and he was educated in Bromsgrove. With a nod to ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’, he has acknowledged Housman as a ‘fellow townsman’ both in an interview and in the title poem of his 2006 collection Without Title, in which Housman is held up as a model for the expression of grief. Housman’s Collected Poems and Oliver Hill’s Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (1946) were the two books that introduced Hill to modern poetry at the age of fifteen, when they were bought for him by his father. Hill’s childhood may have taken place some seventy years after Housman’s, and in very different social circumstances, but the view west from Bromsgrove had not changed. ‘Before I knew anything at all about the psychology of Housman, I knew what his “Shropshire” meant to him at an intuitive level,’ he has said in an interview, ‘because the Shropshire Hills were the western horizon of the village landscape of my childhood. If you stood at the top of the field opposite our house you looked right across the Severn Valley to the Clee Hills and the Welsh hills very faint and far off behind them, and this was the landscape of Housman’s own childhood.’ As in Housman’s, place-names in Hill’s poetry evoke a lost past – Shrawley, Burcot, Romsley, Waseley, Walton, Lickey, Ipsley, Hurcott – and Hill made his own selection of his ‘local’ poems to publish alongside those of Housman and Molly Holden in Three Bromsgrove Poets (2003).
Housman surfaces most intriguingly in the poem ‘A Cloud in Aquila’, published in Hill’s 2007 collection A Treatise of Civil Power. The subject of the poem is Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician, computer scientist and wartime codebreaker, who fell foul of ‘the laws of God, the laws of man’ when he was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 and subsequently committed suicide. It would hardly be surprising if Turing’s fate did not bring Housman to mind, but there were further links between the two men. While at his public school Turing met Christopher Morcom, who became his best friend and first love – a love that was undeclared and unreciprocated. Morcom was another lad who would never be old, dying suddenly in his teens from bovine tuberculosis. The two schoolboys shared Housman’s interest in astronomy, and Morcom’s death caused Turing to think about the separation of mind and body, which in turn led the way to his most significant work, on computing and artificial intelligence, rather as Housman’s memories of his friendship with Moses Jackson had led to the writing of A Shropshire Lad. As Hill put it elsewhere: ‘Morcom was Turing’s muse.’ Not only that: Morcom lived at ‘The Clock House’, otherwise Fockbury House, where Housman had spent his teens. Hill’s poem ends with the reflection that Turing too is now dead and the Clock House demolished, but that the nearby road still leads to ‘Housman’s Pisgah’.
One of Philip Larkin’s poems that Amis singled out as belonging to the older, home-grown tradition, ‘Cut Grass’ was written in 1971 and consists of three four-line stanzas. In subject as well as form it is recognisably set in Housman Country, with its allusions to the death-haunted natural cycle of blooming and fading, while its image of June hedgerows seemingly strewn with snow appears to be borrowed from ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’. If this is a rare example of Larkin deliberately following Housman, the two poets nevertheless had a good deal in common both in their personalities and their writing. As Wendy Cope has noted, Clive James’s observation that Larkin ‘faces the worst on our behalf, and brings it to order’ might equally apply to Housman. Introducing himself to the novelist Barbara Pym, Larkin wrote: ‘I have a great shrinking from publicity – think of me as A.E. Housman without the talent, or the scholarship, or the soft job, or the curious private life.’ Both poets belong to the long tradition of English melancholia, which is often mistaken for mere gloom, and it was with a certain amount of fellow-feeling that Larkin’s review of Richard Perceval Graves’s 1979 biography of Housman was titled ‘All Right When You Knew Him’. More accurately, Larkin described Housman as ‘the poet of unhappiness’, adding: ‘no one else has reiterated his single message so plangently.’ The two poets hold a similar place in the English imagination and inspire the same kind of affection among readers.
The Names and Nature of Books
One of the more remarkable and unobtrusive ways in which Housman’s poems have entered the culture is that a large number of authors have borrowed lines and phrases from them for the titles of their books. In 1967 it was estimated that more titles had been taken from the collected poems of A.E. Housman than any other source apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, and if the gap between second and third place remains large, a vast number of additional Housman-derived titles have appeared in the almost fifty years since then. Edmund Wilson suggested that one reason authors light upon Housman when searching for book titles is that they ‘assume that his poems are so well known that it is almost like quoting Shakespeare’. Among renowned writers working in a wide range of genres who, in search of a striking title, have reached for their copies of Housman’s poems are James T. Farrell (A World I Never Made, 1936, and No Star Is Lost, 1938), Nevil Shute (The Far Country, 1952), Patrick White (The Tree of Man, 1955), Ursula K. Le Guin (The Wind’s Twelve Corners, 1976) and James Ellroy (Blood’s a Rover, 2009). While it seems natural that an account of Ludlow in the First World War should go to ‘The Recruit’ for the title Till Ludlow Tower Shall Fall, other books that have nothing to do with Housman’s poems nevertheless bear titles derived from them. Some of these, such as Brooks Too Broad for Leaping, With One Coin for Fee and The Sky Suspended, could only have come from Housman. Others, such as Drums of Morning, The Careless People and End of Roaming, might have been chosen without particular reference to his poems, but in almost every case the borrowing is acknowledged and the poem from which it is taken is reproduced in part or in full, either in the text or as an epigraph.
‘Into my heart an air that kills’ appears to have provided more titles than any other Housman poem, not only because it contains striking phrases that have become very well known, but also because its references to an irrecoverable past have provided writers with a kind of emotional shorthand. When Dennis Potter called his 1979 television play about childhood Blue Remembered Hills, he expected viewers both to recognise the reference and appreciate its irony. Far from depicting childhood as a land of lost content, the play echoes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in emphasising the innate barbarity and cruelty of children (all of whom are played by adult actors), and it ends with the most vulnerable and unhappy of them being burned to death in a barn while the author himself intones Housman’s poem in voice-over. The same poem is similarly read in the coda to Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout, in which a woman recalls a scene of primal innocence when, some yea
rs earlier, she and her little brother, lost at the time in the Australian outback, swam naked in a waterhole with the Aboriginal boy who had saved them before killing himself. That Housman’s poem has travelled a long way from Shropshire or Highgate is also suggested when it is quoted (but not identified) in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). An English writer in Nigeria during the civil war in the 1960s thinks about his parents’ house in Wentnor, a Shropshire village just to the west of The Long Mynd, and recalls his father reading this poem, which has further resonance in the novel because the secessionist Republic of Biafra lasted only two and a half years before being reintegrated into Nigeria. For the Igbo people who had fought for independence, Biafra became a lost homeland that ‘will not come again’.
Like Housman’s Shropshire, the magical kingdom of Gramarye in T.H. White’s great Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King (1939–58), is a far (and partly imaginary) country that stands for all England. The revised second volume of this quartet was titled The Queen of Air and Darkness and took as its epigraph the final stanza of ‘The Welsh Marches’ (XXVIII), a poem of unusual violence that seems to have haunted White, probably because he felt some of his own troubles related back to his being the child of ill-matched and viciously warring parents. During his revisions, White wrote to a friend that the character of Morgause in the novel ‘is now pure melodramatic WITCH (rather fun) who goes about boiling black cats alive and so forth. Housman wrote a poem about her. (Her strong enchantments failing, Her towers of fear in wreck, Her limbecks dried of poison, etc.)’. The character of Lancelot, first introduced as a fifteen-year-old smitten with Arthur, also owes something to Housman: ‘The boy thought there was something wrong with him. All through his life – even when he was a great man with the world at his feet – he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.’