Housman

By Charles McGrath

In person, A. E. Housman was so shy and furtive that Max Beerbohm once compared him to “an absconding cashier.” For such a crabbed and elusive figure, though, he continues to draw a surprising amount of attention: books, articles, musical tributes, even a Broadway play, Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love.” Academics know him the way he is mostly depicted in that play—as a formidable classicist, probably the greatest of his generation. But the real source of his fame is a single small volume of poetry, “A Shropshire Lad,” which has never been out of print since it was published, in 1896. Somehow, these sixty-three short lyrics, celebrating youth, loss, and early death, became for generations of readers the perfect evocation not merely of what it feels like to be adolescent and a little emotional but of what it means to be English. We don’t have anything remotely like it in American lit. Some of Emily Dickinson’s brief lyrics come closest—tonally, and in their mastery of the short, compressed line—but she has never quite attained Housman’s popularity, and the landscape she wrote about, the one inside her own head, could hardly be said to have created a sense of national identity. “He is a strange phenomenon,” Ted Hughes said of Housman, “but to my mind the most perfect expression of something deeply English and a whole mood of English history.”

Peter Parker’s new book, “Housman Country: Into the Heart of England” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—which helpfully includes the text of “A Shropshire Lad” in an appendix—is partly a brisk, sensible biography of Housman and partly a study in poetic reputation. It traces the way Housman’s singular vision seized hold of the English imagination, inspiring not just a literary following but a generation of composers, like George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sought to do musically what Housman had done with verse: to create a new and authentically English kind of song. Parker, the author of very good biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, casts a wide net here, and eventually it unravels in a skein of loose ends and Housmanian magpie-pickings. Parker lists just about all the many authors who ever snatched a title from Housman, for example. He also points out that not only is there an American rock band (formerly Army of Strippers) now called Housman’s Athletes but that the British rocker Morrissey used to quote Housman often and a grateful fan once wrote, “I thought his poems would be drivel about babies and flowers, but it’s really good stuff about suicide.” Parker doesn’t entirely succeed in explaining the great mystery of Housman—why it’s these rueful, corpse-strewn poems and not, say, the heartier ones of John Masefield which continue to resonate within the English soul. But he leaves no doubt about Housman’s lingering attraction. You could conclude from his book that when many people pulled the lever to vote for Brexit they were imagining a return to Shropshire.

To judge from Parker’s account, there were a number of different Housmans, and how you felt about him depended on which one you happened to meet. He was an adventurous eater and a lover of good wine. He liked dirty stories and flying in airplanes. At high table at his Cambridge college, he could be clubbable and amusing, and might even bend your ear about how much he liked the jazz-age novels of Anita Loos. But he could also be rude, aloof, brooding, and difficult. He suffered fools not at all, and was unable to tolerate a compliment. Willa Cather, who so admired his poetry that she made a pilgrimage to meet its author, found him “gaunt and gray, and embittered.” The whole encounter, she said, gave her “a fit of dark depression.” As Housman’s obituary in the London Times put it, “In his attitude to life, there seemed something baffled and even shrinking, as though he feared criticism and emotion alike more than he relished experience. . . . He valued confidence, but held back from intimate relations, and seemed to prefer isolation to giving himself away.”

There was Housman the poet, who actually wrote very little, and Housman the classical scholar, who spent most of his time poring over ancient texts and whose greatest pleasure seemed to come from writing caustic put-downs of other scholars. About an editor of Persius and Juvenal: “Mr. Owen’s innovations, so far as I can see, have only one merit, which certainly, in view of their character, is a merit of some magnitude: they are few.” He sometimes composed these insults in advance, leaving blanks for names he could later plug in. Housman was not a translator or a classical historian. He specialized in the dry-as-dust business of textual criticism, determining the correct version of a classical text by comparing different manuscripts and judging which variant was the most likely—whether in a certain line of Propertius it should be “et” or “aut,” and deciding where the commas belonged in Catullus. His life’s work was a five-volume edition of Manilius, an astrologer poet, who even Housman conceded was third-rate—“facile and frivolous,” he said, remarkable mostly for “doing sums in verse.”

How to square these two, the poet and the pedant, has preoccupied commentators for decades. Edmund Wilson once suggested that what made Housman so adept at textual criticism was his ability to think like a poet, not only like a scholar, and that his fetish for accuracy stemmed from a real passion for his texts. But Wilson also pointed out that in Housman’s choice of Manilius there seems an element of perversity and self-mortification, and that his scholarship sometimes radiated not so much love for literature as hatred for his rivals. The poems in “A Shropshire Lad” are not completely disconnected from Housman’s scholarly work—among other things, they owe something to Horace, Housman’s favorite Latin poet, in particular to Horace’s way of weighting apparently inconsequential words—but they seem to have welled up from another part of him, a spring of emotion that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, repress. Poetry, he once said, was for him a “morbid secretion,” as the pearl is for the oyster.

Housman never lived in Shropshire, or even spent much time there. He was born in Worcestershire in 1859, the eldest of seven children. His father was a Dickensian figure—a jolly, heavy-drinking lawyer, often broke and given to investing in harebrained schemes. His mother, to whom he was very close, died when Housman was twelve, an experience that turned him into a lifelong atheist. At school, he was an exceptionally gifted student of Latin and Greek, and easily won a classics scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he sailed through his first set of exams and then spectacularly botched the second. It’s possible that he was rattled by the news that his father had become seriously ill. It’s also possible that he took his success for granted and didn’t study hard enough. The young Housman was a know-it-all, who refused to have anything to do with his tutor after hearing the man mispronounce a Greek word, and even took a dim view of Benjamin Jowett, the famous master of Balliol and the greatest Greek scholar of the day.

But the more likely cause of Housman’s failure was that he had become emotionally undone over an unrequited yearning for his roommate, Moses Jackson. Jackson was athletic and good-looking, bright enough, but something of a philistine, according to one acquaintance, “quite unliterary and outspoken in his want of any such interest.” Apparently, he had no clue about Housman’s feelings for him. After Oxford, the two men roomed together in London, where they both had jobs at the Patent Office, and where Housman spent every evening at the British Museum, studying on his own, heroically and penitentially, and writing papers that eventually redeemed him as a classicist, landing him professorships first at University College, London, and then at Cambridge. But in 1885 there was a blowup between him and Jackson. Parker speculates that Housman made some sort of declaration and was rejected. Stoppard imagines that it’s Jackson who forces the issue, worried perhaps by the recent passage of a law against acts of “gross indecency” between men. In the play, Jackson is slow to figure things out but finally says, in effect, “You’re not sweet on me, are you?”

Whatever happened, Housman moved out, and Jackson soon married and settled in Karachi. Years later, Housman’s younger brother, Laurence, a novelist and playwright, also gay but much more open about it, suggested that on the rebound Housman found solace in the arms of Jackson’s younger brother, Adalbert. But Laurence was in his nineties then, and this may have been wishful thinking. Despite later rumors about Parisian rent boys and a Venetian gondolier, there’s no sure evidence that Housman ever slept with anyone, and there’s little reason to doubt that Moses Jackson was his only real love. The two men stayed distantly in touch, with Housman becoming a godfather to one of Jackson’s children and lending Jackson a large sum of money when he retired to British Columbia and tried, unsuccessfully, to make it as a farmer there. Housman, after finally overcoming his Oxford failure and achieving distinction as an academic, wrote to Jackson, “I would much rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots.”

More than half of “A Shropshire Lad” was written during a charged five-month period in 1895, when Housman seems to have been missing Jackson acutely. Readers with advanced gaydar, like Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster, early on detected a note of suppressed homosexual desire in the book, especially in poems like the one that begins:

Look not in my eyes, for fear

They mirror true the sight I see,

And there you find your face too clear

And love it and be lost like me.

The young Forster even wrote Housman a fan letter, and years later, after dining with him at his Cambridge college and hearing Housman say “with a twinkle” that he sometimes went to Paris to be with “unrespectable company,” ventured up the staircase to Housman’s rooms. He slipped his card under the door, but there was no reply.

Parker says that many early readers of Poem No. 44, addressed to a young man who has killed himself rather than face a life of “disgrace and scorn,” would have known that it referred to the well-publicized case of Henry Maclean, a young soldier who shot himself in a London hotel, apparently out of homosexual shame. And he makes the provocative suggestion—which could equally well be applied to other Housman poems, including the strange one that recommends plucking out your eye and cutting off your hand or foot if it offends you—that not every line need be taken at face value and the whole thing might be meant angrily or ironically:

Oh you had forethought, you could reason,

And saw your road and where it led,

And early wise and brave in season

Put the pistol to your head.

But one reason “A Shropshire Lad” has been so successful is that readers find there what they want to find. In 1929, a financial expert hired by Housman’s publisher declared that “A Shropshire Lad” was the “filthiest book I have ever read: all about rogering girls under hedges.” During the First World War, British soldiers carried copies in the breast pockets of their tunics, believing the author to be a kindred spirit and a war poet—though Housman knew little about war and soldiering. His main credential was his sense that life passes too quickly and death is always standing by, or, as one of his most famous poems has it:

Here dead we lie because we did not choose

To live and shame the land from which we sprung

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,

But young men think it is, and we were young.

After the war, “A Shropshire Lad” travelled in the breast pockets of the generation who had taken up rambling and rediscovering the English countryside, even though—aside from a few place names, like Bredon Hill and Wenlock Edge, evidently chosen more for euphony than for anything else—it’s not much of a geographic guide. The landscape of “A Shropshire Lad” is an all-purpose landscape, not a particular one, and, far from being the unspoiled countryside imagined by Brexiteers, it’s a place mostly of unhappy love and early death. Long past rogering each other, if they ever got that far, most of the Shropshire lads and lasses are already in their graves. Even the poems ostensibly celebrating seasonal rebirth, like the one beginning “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough,” contain within them, like a canker, a note of foreboding, and wind up sounding like laments.

Housman’s morbidness so bothered Ezra Pound that he wrote a famous parody:

O woe, woe.

People are born and die

We also shall be dead pretty soon.

Therefore let us act as if we were

dead already.

What Pound missed was Housman’s music, which so lent itself to composers—the intensity of his tone and the tautness and compactness of his expression. Parker sees Housman’s habit of plainness and terseness as manifestations of English traits that amount to a sort of polite national understatement: modesty, restraint, stiff-upper-lipness. Housman is tight-lipped, certainly, but that doesn’t account for the feeling you sometimes get that the poems are so repressed they ought to bear warning signs like those found on tanker trucks: “Caution: Contents Under Pressure.”

Housman insisted that the task of poetry was “to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought”; it was to make your throat clench and your hair stand on end. The emotion his own poetry most often elicits is that of overwhelming sadness. Parker sees him, quite rightly, as belonging to the long tradition of English melancholia, but despite the sometimes old-fashioned ways in which it is framed—the lads and lasses, the ploughed fields, the shimmering weirs—Housman’s melancholy is a more angsty, modern version, untethered from any religious or artistic consolation. He’s less like Keats, say, than like Hardy, his near-contemporary, whose bleakness, both personal and poetic, at times outdoes even Housman’s. (Hardy once wrote to Rider Haggard, after the death of Haggard’s ten-year-old son, “To be candid I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.”)

Some of Housman’s brand of sadness also carries over into the poetry of Philip Larkin, who was an admirer, especially in poems like “Cut Grass” and “The Trees,” which borrow the characteristic Housman form of short lines in just a few stanzas. In some ways, even Larkin’s life mirrors Housman’s: the small output of poems fastidiously worked over, the seemingly dull career as an academic librarian, the solitary bachelor flat (though we now know, of course, that he wasn’t nearly as lonely and sex-starved as he pretended). It’s not hard to imagine the two of them huddled over a couple of pints and taking great pleasure in reminding each other of all the ways in which the world is going to hell.

Loss, weariness, diminishment, the sense of a golden age long gone—you could make a case that for the past hundred and twenty years or so this has been the authentic, dominant note of Englishness in poetry, more than a wistful, Brexity yearning for a pastoral countryside. Part of Housman’s charm, even now, is the way he makes that sadness sound and feel so sweet:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content.

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

But that sweetness, verging on sentimentality, is also Housman’s limitation: the lads and lasses slumbering under the grass, never growing old or sick or worrying about how to find a job. Sadness in Housman is a one-size-fits-all emotion, not one rooted in particulars. It puddles up automatically. And reading “A Shropshire Lad” you can find yourself becoming narcotized against feelings that are deeper and more complicated. That may be the real secret of the book’s enduring popularity, the way it substitutes for a feeling of genuine loss the almost pleasant pain of nostalgia. ♦

This article appears in other versions of the June 26, 2017, issue, with the headline “The Land of Lost Content.”