by A E Housman
A. E. HOUSMAN’S ‘DE AMICITIA’ by Laurence Housman
Six years after his brother’s death in 1942, Laurence Housman, the poet’s literary executor, presented a small packet of papers to the Trustees of the British Museum with the stipulation that it was to remain unopened for twenty-five years. In the following essay Laurence discusses his brother’s homosexual feelings and his love for Moses Jackson.
When my brother’s papers came into my hands after his death, I was confronted with the fact that he had left me to discover in them certain matters of a very intimate character about himself, of which previously he had never spoken to me, although I had reason to think that he was aware both of my knowledge of what had so deeply affected his life, and of my sympathy for the unhappiness which it had caused him.
In the first place I had to deal with his unpublished poems, which, under the terms of his will, had been left for me to decide what should and what should not be published. I found that most of these were more autobiographical than any which had appeared previously. Several of them were, in my judgment, as good as the majority of those which he had himself published; and their place in the M.S. notebooks showed that they were of no later date. The only reason I could find for his not having allowed them to appear was that they were too autobiographical, and that they referred to certain persons (or to one person) still alive. But from the fact that he had not destroyed them I judged that their publication had been left to my discretion, and that he had no objection to their autobiographical nature being recognised after his death.
It is true that all but thirteen of the poems in A Shropshire Lad were written directly in the first person, in a form, therefore, that implied not narrative but personal feeling, or personal experience: and that some of these may have been autobiographical; but there was no poem which could for certain be so regarded. In my judgment those which are most closely autobiographical in feeling are the four which stand in sequence and may have been placed in sequence for that reason — xxx, xxxi, xxxii and xxxiii, but even in that series there is one word, “yeoman,” which is inapplicable to the writer himself. Of these four I believe that no xxx is the most direct expression of personal experience — and suffering.
In Last Poems there is far less material of an autobiographical character. In More Poems and Additional Poems — the two selections for which I was responsible — there is far more. That material my brother could have used to make Last Poems more nearly of a size with A Shropshire Lad. Yet though he held back from doing so, he left me free to decide otherwise; and ray interpretation of these two facts is that he was willing for those more personal poems to be published — but not in his own lifetime.
Of these poems, those which I reckon to be the most direct expression of personal feeling, or experience, are the following:
From More Poems’. “They say my verse is sad: no wonder”; “I to my perils of cheat and charmer”; “I promise nothing: friends will part”; “The mill-stream, now that noises cease”; “Like mine, the veins of these that slumber”; “Ho, everyone that thirsteth”; “To stand up straight and tread the turning mill”; “Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all’s over”; “Because I liked you better”; “Farewell to a name and a number”; “He looked at me with eyes I thought”; “When he’s returned I’ll tell him — oh”; “Far known to sea and shore”; “O thou that from thy mansion.” From Additional Poems: “It is no gift I tender”; “Ask me no more for fear I should reply”; “He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?”; “Now to her lap the incestuous earth”; “The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do”; “Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?”; “The laws of God, the laws of man” [actually Last Poems XII].
Here, then, are twenty-one poems (I might have added others) which have a more directly personal note than any of those previously published, except the four already mentioned, and one other to which I shall refer later; and all these poems have some degree of connection with the trouble which overshadowed the whole of my brother’s life. As I read them for the first time, they pointed quite clearly to the fact, which I already knew, that his deepest friendships were with men, that those friendships caused him trouble and grief, and that — in one instance at least — he gave a far greater devotion than he ever received in return. In that greatest of all his friendships (and probably in most of the others) there was no response in kind. Almost every friendship that he formed was destined to be a lonely one — the emotional element which went to the making of them being his alone. Only once, among the very small number of letters which he had selected and kept, from the correspondence of bygone years, did I find an instance of warmth of feeling as great as — perhaps, in this one case, greater than his own. It was a farewell letter, written by a colleague when he left the Patent Office to become Professor of Latin at University College London, in 1892. I do not think the writer of it was one of his special friends, but I found it lying alongside another letter — the last which he ever received from the greatest of all his friends, the Jackson who is here referred to. After congratulations on his professorial appointment, the writer goes on: “As a rule English people never allow themselves to say or write what they think about anyone, no matter how much of a pal he may be. Well, I am going to let myself loose. I like you better than any man I ever knew. There is, as far as I could ever discover, absolutely no flaw in your character as a man, and no one could ever hope for a better friend. I don’t say this only on my own account, but I have seen how you can stick to a friend like you have to Jackson. I mean not stick to him in the sentimental sense of not forgetting him although he is right out of your reach, (sic [LH]) I have always, besides liking you so much, had a great respect for your learning — Dear old pal, I’m as pleased as if I had done something good myself. Yours faithfully....”
At the time when that letter was written, Jackson, who had been the closest friend of his undergraduate days at Oxford, and also one of his colleagues at the Patent Office, had gone, three years before, to take up a permanent appointment in India, from which he only returned on leave at long intervals.
It is of that friendship, founded on deep mutual regard, but nevertheless a one-sided one in the direction already indicated, that I have to write the story — or that part of it which I was able to gather from brief references — fewer than a couple of hundred words in all — in diaries dating from January 1888 to November 1890; and from the poems which had remained unpublished.
My brother and Moses Jackson first met when in 1877 they both went up to St. John’s College Oxford with scholarships. Their association remained unbroken for a period of four years; for the last two of which (together with A. W. Pollard who was also a St. John’s scholar) they shared lodgings in St. Giles’. Their association was resumed when, after his failure in “Greats,” my brother became a Civil servant at H.M.’s Patent Office, where Jackson was already in a position of somewhat higher standing. From 1882 till somewhere about 1885 they shared lodgings, together with Jackson’s younger brother Adalbert, in Talbot Road Bayswater. In 1885 or 1886, they parted company and my brother went to live by himself at Byron Cottage Highgate. After that they met daily at the Patent Office, and as a rule lunched together, until Jackson in December 1887 — sailed for India, where he remained as Principal of a Training College at Karachi for the greater part of his life. On leaving India he took up another post of a similar kind in British Columbia, where he died in 1923.
The shared lodging in Bayswater ended in an incident of which I do not know the full explanation. Quite suddenly, and without a word of warning, my brother, after something which must have been of the nature of a quarrel, disappeared for a week; and an anxious letter from Jackson came to his father to say that he did not know what had become of him. Whether the worst was feared I do not know. After a week’s absence he returned, but only for a short time; probably the strain of such close association with a friend who could not respond with the same warmth of feeling
had proved too much for him; and he found it better to part.
It is only a surmise that the two poems, xxx and xxxi in More Poems may have had their origin in what then happened. But though there was disagreement there was no final parting such as the poems suggest; they remained firm friends through life, but always with a difference.
No letter from Jackson to my brother remains, except the last, which I found in an envelope, on which in Alfred’s handwriting were the words “Mo’s last letter.”
It was the letter of a sick man written faintly in pencil, from the hospital where shortly afterwards he died. Above the faint writing, the better to preserve it, Alfred had gone over the whole in ink. It began, “Dear old Hous”; it ended, “Yours very truly” — a formula of reserve to which I have reason to believe that Jackson must have adhered through the whole of their correspondence.
No doubt he intended the formula to have its full value; but demonstrative affection was something from which he may have found it prudent to refrain.
Before I come to the evidence of the diaries for proof of my brother’s devotion to this friend above all others, I must deal with a few points of special interest in the poems, indicative of his keen sympathy for those whose problem of life was similar to his own.
In his copy of A Shropshire Lad, alongside the poem which begins “Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?” I found a newspaper cutting, dated August 1895, in which was quoted a letter addressed to the coroner by a young Woolwich cadet, who had thus taken his own life. The letter made it quite plain that his trouble was what it is the fashion to call “pathological”; his own nature was the enemy he feared. “I will state,” he wrote, “the main reasons which have determined me. The first is utter cowardice and despair. There is only one thing in this world which would make me thoroughly happy: that one thing I have no earthly hope of obtaining. The second — which I wish were the only one — is that I have absolutely ruined my own life; but I thank God that as yet, so far as I know, I have not morally injured, or “offended,” as it is called in the Bible, anyone else. Now I am quite certain that I could not live another five years without doing so, and for that reason alone, even if the first did not exist, I should do what I am doing.... At all events it is final, and consequently better than a long series of sorrows and disgraces.”
Those last words formed the basis of the third verse of the poem:
‘Oh, soon, and better so than later After long disgrace and scorn, You shot dead the household traitor, The soul that should not have been born.’
I do not pretend to know how far my brother continued to accept throughout life, in all circumstances, the denial of what was natural to him, but I do know that he considered the inhibition imposed by society on his fellow- victims both cruel and unjust. That fact is made abundantly plain in the poem which, after considerable hesitation, I decided to publish, even though its literary merit was not high — the one beginning:
“Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?”
It refers quite evidently to those who inescapably, through no fault of their own, are homosexual — having no more power of choice in the matter than a man has about the colour of his hair, which, as the poem says, he may hide out of sight, or dye to a “more mentionable shade,” but cannot get away from.
Here, then, was a poem expressing contemptuous anger against society’s treatment of these unhappy victims of fate, and a sympathy which went so far as to imply no blame. That poem he had left me at liberty to publish: had he objected to publication he would either have so marked it — as he did one or two others for literary reasons — or would have destroyed it. My only reason for hesitation was that its meaning was so obvious, that intelligent readers would be unlikely to refrain (nor did they) from making the true deduction; and my brother had relatives still living to whom this might give pain. I felt, nevertheless, that the risk must be taken; it was something of a public duty that I — should make known so strong an expression of feeling against social injustice, and if I needed any further justification I had it in the second verse of the poem with which More Poems opens:
‘This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble
And I am not.’
His trouble was safely over; I printed the poem, as I believe he wished me to print it, for those in more present need.
Had the material which came into my hands been poems only, I might not have felt concerned to leave to a later day this fuller account of what one of his biographers has described as my brother’s “Buried Life.” But though all letters between the two friends have been destroyed — except the last one, my brother left four diaries in which is recorded with strange brevity, and almost without comment — not the breaking of their friendship (for that never happened) but the parting of their ways, when from daily intercourse they passed to the separation of years.
The diaries — the only diaries apparently which he ever kept, were those of 1888, 1889, 1890 and 1891. In those diaries nothing whatever was entered of a personal character except what had to do with Alfred’s association with his friend Jackson. Most of the pages are blank: the diary for 1888 contains nothing else except his cash account of daily and weekly spendings. In the following years there are entries, in addition to the cash account, of the variations of the seasons — mainly spring and autumn — the weather, and the dates at which flowers came into bloom; these are sometimes given in great detail. One of the fullest entries, that for March 16th 1890, reads as follows:
‘Catkins on hazel; calendine in bud; a green flower out, whose name I do not know; buds on hazel (green with red tip) and blackthorn (reddish); hawthorn, wild roses, and lilac buds unfolding; lords and ladies new (some just coming up); hayriff and wild parsley new; crocus fading in some cases.’
Sometimes, on a date filled with a list of flowers, all of which are written in pencil, comes an entry (written in ink so as to distinguish it) which has reference to his friend Jackson. But hardly once is his name given— “Jackson” never; once or twice the abbreviation “Mo” for Moses. It is nearly always “he” and nothing else.
In 1887 Jackson received his Indian appointment. In December of that year he sailed in the Bokhara — from which, at Suez, he trans-shipped to the Mongolia. In January 1888 the diary begins; and throughout that year there are no other entries than those which here follow — impressive, standing out from the otherwise blank pages, without names, and without comment.
Diary 1888
MONDAY. JAN: 4. Bokhara arrives at Gibraltar.
SUNDAY. „ 8. Bokhara leaves Naples 4 p m.
THURSDAY. „ 12. Bokhara arrives at Port Said.
FRIDAY „ 13. Mongolia leaves Suez 11.p m. Bokhara an hour later.
TUESDAY „ 17. Add [Jackson’s brother Adalbert] calls at Off: and out to lundi.
WEDNESDAY „ 18. Mongolia leaves Aden this evening.
WEDNESDAY „ 25 Mongolia arrives at Bombay this morning. (Midnight of the 24th I learn later)
FRIDAY „ 27. He gets to Karachi at “8 o’clock”.
WEDNESDAY MARCH 28. Add calls at Off: and out to lunch.
SUNDAY. JULY 8. He wrote this day to Nightingale, having seen his name in the paper as called to the bar. “My dear Nightingale.”
“Yours very truly.”
MONDAY. Nov: 19. This afternoon at Off: I receive letter, written on 28th and 31st October.
FRIDAY. DEC. 14. I posted letter to him.
WEDNESDAY „ 19 His grandmother died.
The most significant entry in the above is the note of July 8th. Jackson’s first letter comes not to Alfred but to a mutual friend: the terms used are noted without comment “My dear Nightingale” and “Yours very truly.” Not till four months later does Alfred get his first letter, — no doubt in the same terms— “Yours very truly.” Three weeks later, Alfred writes his first letter in reply. After that, in the diary of 1889, nothing is recorded fo
r six months; the friends do not correspond. In October of that year Jackson returned to England, for a reason which Alfred, it would seem, did not know until a month after the event. This I take to be almost certain — judging from other entries — and from the absence of the entry one would most surely expect: “I hear that he is engaged to be married.” Was it intended kindness which kept from him the news of that, and of the marriage which followed, until the date was well passed? It was a significant omission.
Diary 1889
FRIDAY. JUNE 28 Posted letter to him.
[Nightingale did so too, about the same time]
TUESDAY JULY 9. Nightingale has not heard from him for a long while, but wrote to him about a week ago.
TUESDAY. OCT. 22. He came to the Office: lunch he, I, MCK, Nghtgle. Afterwards he went with MCK into City. He dined at Nightingale’s: K also.
FRIDAY. OCT 25. Went to see him 6.30: he had just gone out to Camberwell.
SATURDAY Nov: 9. He started from Newport on a walking tour to Bletchley. I went to Cambridge.
THURSDAY Nov: 14. He returned to London.
MONDAY. „ 18 He came to me at the Office a little after 3.
WEDNESDAY „ 20 He meant to go home today.
MONDAY Dec: 9. He was married.
TUESDAY „ 10 He was to sail.
SUNDAY „ 22 He was near Perim and wrote to Add.
From these entries one gathers that Alfred and Jackson only met twice during the latter’s stay in England from October to December; once in the company of others, and only once (“at the Office”) alone. At the time of their meeting — only three weeks before the marriage — it is evident that Alfred had not been told of it. Three days later, when Alfred went, hoping to see him, he was out. The last three entries would seem to have been made at a later date, after “Add” has received the letter written on Dec: 22nd.
