Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Although A Shropshire Lad was published in the final decade of the Victorian era, Housman agreed that the book was a chronological anomaly. When asked by A.J.A. Symons for permission to include some of the poems in A Book of Nineties Verse, Housman issued through his publisher the customary refusal he gave to anthologists, but mischievously added that Symons ‘may be consoled, and also amused, if you tell him that to include me in an anthology of the Nineties would be just as technically correct, and just as essentially inappropriate, as to include Lot in a book on Sodomites’. Janus-like, Housman looked back to the traditional prosody and verse forms of Victorian poetry and forward to a modern world in which irony and stoicism had replaced the long-standing consolations of the Christian faith. In this, as in much else, he resembled Thomas Hardy, another writer who straddled the Victorian and modern ages.

  When A Shropshire Lad first appeared in 1896 its author was completely unknown outside academic circles. Over a century later, the book and the man are so much of a piece that we find it difficult to separate them one from the other, much as Housman would have liked us to. In addition, we now know a great deal about the author and about what led him to write his poems, so we have to imagine ourselves back to a time when it was the poems alone that caught the reading public’s imagination. Housman’s original intention had been to publish the volume anonymously under the title Poems by Terence Hearsay. It has been suggested that Housman borrowed ‘Terence’ from the Latin playwright who, brought from North Africa to Rome as a slave, had spent his life in exile from his homeland, a major theme of A Shropshire Lad. ‘Hearsay’ sounds like the surname of a Shakespearean rustic, while also suggesting something unsubstantiated, or even proverbial, perhaps evoking folk memories. Fortunately, the one friend to whom Housman showed the poems before submitting them for publication, his Oxford contemporary A.W. Pollard, suggested changing the title to what now seems the only possible one. The sole traces of Housman’s original intention are that ‘Terence’ is the author to whom a friend complains in the book’s penultimate poem, ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’, and the person who is told to ‘look your last on me’ by one of the collection’s rural criminals in ‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree’ (VII). This imaginary author of the poems has otherwise disappeared from the book – if indeed he was ever a real presence there.

  Even Housman’s name on the paper label pasted on the book’s spine would have meant nothing to readers who did not already know the author in his academic guise. No biographical information was provided, as it would be today, and this is exactly as Housman would have wished. In the days before mass communication, professional publicists and the eternal round of literary festivals, the only way most readers met a writer was on the page. Some months after A Shropshire Lad was published a bare outline of Housman’s life was printed in the Bookman magazine’s ‘New Writers’ section, but this focused principally upon his work as a classical scholar. Even when the book began to achieve widespread popularity, Housman deflected any attempts to elicit information about its author.

  1

  The Man

  ‘Housman is one of my heroes and always has been,’ the American poet John Berryman once said. ‘He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.’ Berryman had never in fact met Housman, but he was not alone in loving the work at the same time as deploring the character of the man who wrote it. Housman’s natural reticence and solitary habits, his apparent failure to form any satisfactory emotional attachment, his devotion to the drier aspects of classical scholarship, and his habit of brusquely rebuffing those who complimented him or asked him about his poetry, have led to descriptions of him as (amongst other things) austere, unapproachable, aloof, taciturn, arrogant, rude, bitter, morbid, self-pitying, even ‘self-loathing’. Those who knew Housman well, however, insisted he could also be clubbable, amusing, and a good conversationalist. The merciless critic who noted down caustic comments as they came to him, with blanks left where names could be filled in when the public occasion arose, was also capable of great kindness and generosity. The scholar whose rooms in Whewell’s Court at Trinity struck visitors as self-punishingly uncomfortable and cheerless also relished good food and fine wines and would never miss his college’s New Year’s Eve feast of oysters and stout. The man who knew that he was not only judged the finest classical scholar of his generation but also a poet whose verses were appreciated by thousands of ordinary readers appeared to have a horror of being praised to his face and fastidiously turned down every academic and other honour offered to him, including in 1929 the Order of Merit, and the post of Poet Laureate the following year.

  For all the reports of Housman’s moroseness, the wife of his brother Basil remembered a much more light-hearted figure. ‘He always seemed to enjoy things and be happy,’ she recalled. ‘I have known him and Basil laugh until they cried.’ This is the Housman who wrote genuinely funny nonsense poetry and boasted that he was responsible for introducing the comic jazz-age fiction of Anita Loos to England. The notion of the supposedly dour and misogynistic Housman enjoying the gold-digging hi-jinks of Lorelei Lee seems unlikely, but he nevertheless insisted: ‘I read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and told my Cambridge friends about it, and before I knew it everyone in the University was reading it, and thereafter the delightful work became popular throughout England.’

  Even those who saw Housman regularly could find themselves in two minds about him. A.C. Benson, a fellow member of a small private dining club in Cambridge called The Family, wrote several entries about Housman in his voluminous diaries. In his biography of Housman, Norman Page traces Benson’s fluctuating opinions of his colleague, at one moment judged ‘very pleasant … very friendly and companionable’, at another someone who ‘sits prim and grim, and casts a chill over the table’. It would seem that Housman’s mood was as changeable as the company in which he found himself, and Benson conceded that, although ‘shy and formal in manner’, he relaxed as he ‘warmed up’. Not that Benson much cared for this warmed-up version: ‘as he got easier he got vulgar’. This appears to be a coded reference to Housman’s taste for risqué stories, which the overly fastidious Benson found ‘not funny, only abominable’.

  Attempts to explain the apparent contradictions in Housman’s character began as soon as he was dead. The obituary in The Times (to which it is thought Benson at the very least contributed) was more or less constructed around antitheses:

  He was a good raconteur, of the pithy and caustic order, and was by no means averse to gossip, nor incurious of the vagaries of human nature. He would sometimes surprise a party by a long quotation, made with rhetorical emphasis and gesture. But on occasions he would be so unapproachable as to diffuse a frost, and shroud himself in impenetrable reserve. He spoke freely of his views and prejudices, which were of an aristocratic and even contemptuous order, but he was most reticent about his experiences.

  Housman very seldom betrayed in public any of the passionate emotion which often slips through the fence of his verse, and appeared of all men least tolerant of sentiment. In fact, 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. But he could not be called fastidious so much as impatient of conventions and stupidities. He valued confidence, but held back from intimate relations, and seemed to prefer isolation to giving himself away.

  The artist William Rothenstein recognised that ‘underneath the dry asperity lay an odd affectionateness’. Rothenstein had long experience of this since Housman never tired of telling him gleefully how much he disliked his portraits of him. Housman’s habit of sharp teasing is evidence of this combination of asperity and affection. Teasing is a very English way of showing affection without being too obvious about it, mockery deflecting attention from anything as embarrassing or incriminating as a declaration of fondness, and this was Housman’s custo
mary tactic in his correspondence, particularly in letters to those such as Rothenstein and his wife, whom he genuinely liked and counted as friends. Cordiality rather than true intimacy characterised Housman’s relationships with such people. Congenial company rather than exchanged confidences was what he apparently sought in a friendship, and, although he could express heartfelt sympathy when people were ill, bereaved, or otherwise in trouble, most of his letters to friends and family tend to be funny at their or his expense.

  The author and his publisher

  Irony, deployed with varying degrees of gentleness, is also a way of expressing dissatisfaction without (supposedly) causing hurt or offence, and so proved particularly useful to Housman in his dealings with his publisher, of whom he appears to have been genuinely fond but frequently found exasperating – a not uncommon sentiment among authors. However much publishing has traditionally been touted (mostly by publishers themselves) as a gentlemanly trade in which the signing of contracts and payment of royalties are regrettable commercial incursions into the otherwise convivial relationship between editor and author, most writers maintain a sensible distance between themselves and the people responsible for bringing them into print and keeping them there. In Housman’s case, these protective boundaries soon dissolved, and on several occasions the customary financial arrangements between author and publisher became reversed.

  Of Housman’s enduring friendships, the one with Grant Richards is the most fully documented. Richards appears to have kept almost every letter he received from Housman and made these the basis of his 1941 memoir, Housman 1897–1936. Although Richards could be obtuse, and was careful to skate around potentially difficult episodes to do with finance and sexuality, his portrait of Housman nevertheless remains one of the best we have, based as it was on a personal and professional relationship lasting almost forty years. It was a relationship that showed Housman to his best advantage: meticulous, funny, patient, generous and loyal.

  Housman’s very first letter to Richards, who had expressed an interest in taking over the unsold copies of the first edition of A Shropshire Lad and issuing a second one, set the tone for all future correspondence. ‘I suppose no author is averse to see his works in a second edition, or slow to take advantage of an infatuated publisher,’ he wrote, ‘and it is impossible not to be touched by the engaging form which your infatuation takes.’ He then went on to warn Richards that even if he paid no royalty he would most likely end up out of pocket. Housman would also ‘have to ask Kegan Paul if their feelings would be lacerated by the transfer. I do not think very much of them as men of business, but their manager has been nice to me and takes a sentimental interest in the book, like you.’ He ended the letter: ‘At the present moment I can think of nothing else to damp your ardour.’ Housman was clearly pleased that publishers liked his poems, but was careful to employ irony – ‘infatuated’, ‘lacerated’, ‘sentimental’, ‘ardour’ – in order not to appear too pleased or to lay himself open to accusations of taking commercial flattery too seriously.

  Having come to terms, Housman wrote that ‘after the book is set up I should like to have the sheets to correct, as I don’t trust printers or proof-readers in the matter of punctuation’. He was right not to do so, and many of his letters contain wholly justified complaints about misprints, which regularly occurred in new editions of A Shropshire Lad. Richards’s second edition (1898) was particularly corrupt, and when the publisher proposed a subsequent pocket edition of the book, Housman wrote: ‘I should like to correct the proofs and to have them printed as I correct them. Last time some one played games with the punctuation’ – games that resulted in forty alterations of punctuation (‘30 additions, 8 substitutions, and 2 deletions’), three changes of spelling, some missing letters and the alternate lines of one poem losing their indentation. In spite of Housman’s corrections, misprints continued to appear. ‘I enclose a copy of our joint work,’ he wrote in 1904, sending Richards a marked-up copy of the fifth edition of the poems. ‘The results of your collaboration are noted on pages 4, 22, 45, 55, 71, 77, 78, 92, 116.’

  Housman was also displeased that, without consulting him, Richards had included this edition in a series titled ‘The Smaller Classics’; it was, he said, ‘unbecoming that the work of a living writer should appear under such a title’, and he took the opportunity to remove it from the imprint two years later. He went on to tell Richards ‘how atrociously you behaved in ever including the book in the series, and how glad I am to have the chance of stopping the scandal’, but characteristically followed this scolding by expressing the hope that he and Richards might be able to meet up in Paris the following week. What Housman would call ‘the atrocious production of 1904’ would thereafter be held up as the low point in Richards’s publications, although the publisher’s editions of Housman’s classical works gave further opportunity for ‘the usual blunders – numerals wrong, letters upside-down, stops missing, and so on’. Things had not much improved by the time Last Poems appeared. In a prefatory note, Housman explained that he was publishing the book ‘while I am here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation’; against this in his own copy he wrote ‘Vain hope!’

  Richards was a man of wide literary sympathies and considerable charm, who shared Housman’s enthusiasm for travel, good food and fine wines. The two men often met to lunch or dine in London and made regular gastronomic tours of France together, Housman courageously becoming one of the first people to take frequent advantage of newly introduced and occasionally hazardous commercial aeroplane flights to the Continent. Housman also much enjoyed visiting churches and cathedrals, for architectural rather than religious reasons, but this was an enthusiasm Richards did not share, confessing that he was more likely to remember a good lunch than a noble building. Nevertheless, as far as he was fond of anyone outside his family, Housman was fond of Richards; he even took an interest in the publisher’s wife and children, occasionally joining them on holidays and becoming a regular visitor to their succession of homes in the country.

  In his trade Richards was a maverick, skilled at both publishing books and publicising them, notably in a column he wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. He also hit upon the novel idea of printing in advertisements extracts from unfavourable reviews of books he knew to be controversial, such as Alec Waugh’s outspoken public-school novel, The Loom of Youth (1917). He published both highbrow and popular books, from George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce to Warwick Deeping and Thomas Burke, the author of Limehouse Nights (1916). Alongside commercially successful anthologies and travel guides, his list included books that would become twentieth-century classics, such as Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1902) and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), as well as such representatives of the avant-garde as Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and (at the author’s expense) Ronald Firbank.

  Unfortunately, while Richards took commendable literary risks, he sometimes did so without the wherewithal to support his boldness, and he was first declared bankrupt in 1905. Housman sent a letter of sympathy in which he said he would presumably have to find another publisher for his edition of Juvenal’s satires – by which he meant someone whom he would pay to produce the book. He added that he was content to leave A Shropshire Lad where it was, which turned out to be with E. Grant Richards, since Richards relaunched the firm under his wife’s name. He was officially ‘manager’ of the new company, but neither his role nor his financial mismanagement appreciably altered.

  By 1908, although still paying off creditors, he took the publishing house back into his own name, and it appeared to prosper, the steadily increasing sales of Housman’s royalty-free volume no doubt helping to keep the company stable. By December 1920, however, Richards was once again in difficulties, and Housman wrote him a cheque for £500. (To put this amount in perspective, it represented half the annual salary he was at that time receiving as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge.) ‘I hope this will be some go
od,’ he wrote after explaining that claims upon him from ‘other friends’ prevented him from lending more: ‘I am not losing interest, as I always keep in my current account enough money to flee the country with’ – the joke clearly intended to dispel any embarrassment Richards might be feeling and to forestall too fulsome an expression of gratitude. As Housman no doubt realised, the chances of reclaiming this money were slight, and ten months later Richards (clearly unembarrassed) applied for a further loan. Housman gently rejected the appeal, explaining that in addition to the £500 he had already given Richards he had other outstanding loans amounting to £600, half of which he did not expect to get back. ‘Naturally, your troubles make me unhappy,’ he wrote, ‘and I hope you will not increase them by vexing yourself about repaying the £500. I shall never think of it.’

  A week later, Housman sent Richards another £300, explaining that one of his loans had just been repaid. This at least helped keep the firm afloat and able to publish Last Poems, but Housman had begun to suspect that Richards was not passing on American royalties, and so in January 1924 he arranged for them to be sent to him directly. He was sufficiently put out to cease corresponding with Richards personally, only writing letters to the firm. This froideur persisted throughout much of the year, and when Housman did again write to Richards directly, on 1 October, about Lovat Fraser’s proposed illustrations for A Shropshire Lad, he added: ‘As matters stand it would cause me embarrassment to stay or dine with you.’ A month later relations had thawed sufficiently for Housman to mention the excellence of some sherry Richards had sent him two years before.

  The friendship was restored, but in 1926 Richards filed for bankruptcy a second time. The receiver informed Housman that he was due £5 12s 3d for recent sales of his editions of Manilius and Juvenal and for royalties on Last Poems. In fact, Housman had received no money for a very long time: in addition to this small sum, he was also owed £1014 11s 8d for sales and royalties going back to 1921. At this point, Housman finally took steps to protect his interests by consulting a solicitor; he also decided that in future he would ‘exact’ (as he put it) royalties on A Shropshire Lad. Even so, he seemed to bear no grudge and the following year he and Richards met up in Paris and spent a happy fortnight ‘eating and drinking our way to Dijon’.