Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  The Pettitt’s Annual Diary in which Housman made these notes remains in pristine condition, the gilt stamping on its front cover still burnished, its pages crisp. The few notes are all made in Housman’s beautiful, neat handwriting. Turning the pages, what strikes one most is that they have almost all been left unmarked, so much so that it seems hardly worth Housman having bought the diary if he had so little to write in it. It is in the later diaries that Housman makes his brief nature notes, but not here. Housman presumably filled his days, but they have gone unrecorded, and the cumulative effect of so many blank pages is desolating. This, one feels, is what his life had come to: a few lines charting Jackson’s ever-increasing distance from England; two lunches with Adalbert; the occasional tiny proof of a life continuing elsewhere, which mostly reaches him from other sources; a single letter. In its compressed, uninflected, almost unspoken way, this carefully preserved and more or less empty ledger of absence is as eloquent as the poems Housman would later write about his friend.

  Surviving out of context as individual pages, the other diaries have less impact, but the fragmented story they tell is much the same. The first surviving entry in the diary for 1889 is made on 27 June, when Housman records the temperature, as he does the following day, adding: ‘Posted letter to him’. He continues to note the temperature and the blooming and fading of flowers, then on 9 July writes: ‘Nightingale has not heard from him a long while, but wrote to him about a week ago’, which suggests a certain anxiety about communications, as well as a certain rivalry. Jackson returned to England on leave in October, principally in order to marry Rosa Chambers, the young, university-educated and recently widowed daughter of his Maida Vale landlord. Jackson had fallen in love with Rosa almost immediately, but had felt unable to support her on the salary he received from the Patent Office, and it was in order to improve his financial circumstances and so marry her that he had joined the ICS. This had meant leaving Rosa behind in London while he established himself in Karachi. Although Housman met his friend twice during this October leave, he was not – perhaps out of tact – informed of the impending nuptials. ‘He was married,’ Housman notes on 9 December, though this entry was in fact made retrospectively, for it was only on 7 January the following year, by which time Jackson had taken his bride back with him to Karachi, that Housman noted: ‘I heard he was married’. Housman wrote to Jackson two days later, presumably to congratulate him.

  Further cause for congratulation came on 2 October 1890: ‘His son born’ – once again written retrospectively, since news took time to travel all the way from India and it was not until 29 October that Housman noted ‘His son’s birth in the paper’. A week later Housman records: ‘I write to him by this day’s mail’. This is the final extant entry for the 1890 diary, and the only surviving entry about Jackson in the diary for 1891 was made eight years later. On the page for Friday 22 May 1891, he has written: ‘[Sunday 1898, 10.45 p.m., said goodbye.]’. This refers to another of Jackson’s home leaves, but it turned out not to be the last time the two men met.

  Rosa Jackson would give birth to three more sons. All four boys were sent to England to be educated at a preparatory school at Godalming in Surrey, where the family also acquired a house to which Rosa would return from India for extended periods, settling there on a permanent basis in around 1906. Jackson had asked Housman to be godfather to the youngest boy, Gerald, a duty Housman accepted and took seriously. After leaving Karachi to take up the post of Principal of the Baroda College of Science at the invitation of the princely state’s ruler, Maharaja Sayajirao III, Jackson returned to Britain to look at university laboratories with a view to improving similar facilities back in India. He and the maharaja had hoped to detach Baroda College from the University of Bombay, but this proved impossible, and in 1910, still in his early fifties, Jackson retired from the ICS. He returned to England in April and applied for a number of posts there. Housman, by now the highly prestigious Kennedy Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge, supplied a reference in support of Jackson’s application to become Director of Education for the Borough of Bradford, declaring that for thirty years he had ‘held his character and intellect in the highest admiration: indeed there is no one to whose example I owe so much’.

  Despite Housman’s efforts, Jackson was not appointed to this or any other post in Britain and so decided instead to emigrate to Canada and set up as a farmer in British Columbia. Housman clearly regarded this as an odd choice of career for a man in his fifties with no previous experience of agriculture, but with characteristic generosity he offered financial assistance. ‘I do not want to make investments on my own account in the wild-cat colony you now inhabit, where you have to put Angleterre on your letters to get them to England, but if you happen to want extra capital you might just as well have it from me and prevent it from earning its head off in a current account at a bank.’ Although presented as a loan, the money was in fact a gift, which was just as well because Jackson’s attempts to become a self-sufficient dairy farmer were more or less doomed from the start. The land he had bought may have seemed very appealing at first glance, heavily wooded and with a fish-filled creek running through it, but creating a farm out of such wildness demanded a great deal of labour. In addition, his family was obliged to live in ‘a cramped and primitive wooden house’ without electricity or running water. Less than eighteen months after Jackson bought the property, which he named ‘Applegarth’, a recession drastically reduced the price of milk. A severe drought followed, and a year later the First World War broke out. Jackson’s eldest son, Rupert, had been studying medicine at Cambridge, where he occasionally dropped in on Housman at Trinity College, and when war was declared he enlisted with the Royal Army Medical Corps. The other three boys were being home-schooled in Canada while helping out on the farm, but both Hector and Oscar volunteered for the Canadian Expeditionary Force as soon as they came of age, leaving only Housman’s seventeen-year-old godson still working the land. With many potential farm labourers now in the forces, keeping the land properly cultivated proved almost impossible and it began reverting to scrub.

  During the war Hector occasionally corresponded with Housman and visited him at Cambridge while on leave. The Jackson boys had inherited their father’s good looks and Housman approvingly reported that Hector had ‘grown up rather a distinguished-looking fellow’. Hector also had a distinguished war, and was awarded the Military Cross. All three serving brothers survived the war, and both Hector and Oscar returned to Canada. Instead of settling back on the family farm, however, they enrolled at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, where they both studied engineering. Rupert, meanwhile, had married a French woman and settled in County Durham as a general practitioner and consultant surgeon. Hector was killed in a senseless accident in January 1920 when a drunken taxi driver knocked him off his bicycle: he was just twenty-eight. His death and the vain attempts to keep the farm going, particularly after Gerald had gone to UBC to study for a BSc in geology, took its toll on both his parents. Rosa suffered a temporary breakdown, while the anaemia from which Moses had begun suffering turned out to be an early symptom of terminal stomach cancer.

  *   *   *

  It was Moses Jackson, Housman admitted, who was ‘largely responsible’ for his second career as a poet. ‘I wrote verse at eight or earlier, but very little until I was 35,’ he told Maurice Pollet, a professor of English at the Lycée d’Oran in Algeria, who sent him a list of questions about his life and work in 1933. Until around 1886, what Housman chiefly wrote was light verse. Inspired by reading the works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, he had during his boyhood developed both a taste and considerable skill for writing nonsense poetry, and he continued to write comic and occasional verse, parodies and squibs throughout his life, chiefly for the private amusement of friends and relations. A few of these were published, but usually without the author’s name attached. The earliest ‘serious’ poems to be included in the canon of Housman’s work w
ere both published in 1881 in an Oxford magazine called Waifs and Strays. Both were written while he was an undergraduate ‘in his twentieth year’ and appeared in the magazine above his initials.

  ‘New Year’s Eve’ is uncharacteristic both in subject matter and style, being set in church and written in the manner of Swinburne. It is also, by Housman’s later standards, very long, running to fourteen four-line stanzas. Although, according to Laurence, Housman had ‘ruled out’ the poem for republication on the grounds that ‘it smacked too much of the Swinburnian style which he had abandoned’, these verses became no. XXI of Additional Poems. The other poem, ‘Parta Quies’, is rather more recognisably in Housman’s mature style, consisting of two six-line stanzas on the subject of death: its title, taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, translates as ‘rest is won’. Housman chose not to republish the poem during his lifetime, and it first appeared, in a corrupt version and under a different title, as the last item in More Poems. In its correct form, it runs:

  Good-night; ensured release,

  Imperishable peace,

  Have these for yours,

  While sea abides, and land,

  And earth’s foundations stand,

  And heaven endures.

  When earth’s foundations flee,

  Nor sky nor land nor sea

  At all is found,

  Content you, let them burn:

  It is not your concern;

  Sleep on, sleep sound.

  The poem may have earned a place in Housman’s affections when it transpired that Moses Jackson was able to recite it with remarkable accuracy at the end of his life. Writing from his hospital bed to thank Housman for sending him a copy of Last Poems, Jackson wondered if anyone would publish his friend’s juvenilia. ‘That thing that you published in some aesthetic magazine seems to me, in its disregard of all politeness towards possibilities in the unknown future, seems to me to contain nearly half the philosophy of your two books. You will be surprised at my remembering them so nearly, if I am not quite word-perfect.’ He then wrote out the poem from memory, adding: ‘It wants the poet to punctuate it’. This was something with which in normal circumstances Housman would have vigorously agreed. Instead, he was deeply moved, writing back: ‘I never was more astounded at anything than at your reproducing my contribution to Waifs and Strays. I remember you reading it at Miss Patchett’s, and how nervous I felt. If I had known you would recollect it 42 years afterwards, my emotions would have been too much for me.’

  Even more moving was the fact that, in spite of writing in vague terms about his plans for the future, Jackson evidently suspected that his treatment was proving ineffective: ‘I am going on fairly well in this hospital, but will come out of it soon now, well or ill,’ he told Housman. Written over several days in a pencilled hand that showed signs of the correspondent’s physical weakness, the letter was signed off with ‘Goodbye’. The poem may therefore have come into Jackson’s mind because he was aware that he would soon be gaining his own ‘ensured release’, and it is perhaps significant that he had misremembered the title as ‘Ave atque vale’, or ‘Hail and farewell’. This was one of those Latin tags that had passed into the common currency of English; but Housman would have known, even if Jackson didn’t, that it originated in an elegy Catullus wrote bidding farewell to his dead brother. In order to perform funeral rites and pay his respects to his brother’s ashes, the poet has had to travel ‘through many nations and across many seas’ back to Rome from Bithynia, a province in Asia Minor where Catullus was on the staff of the province’s governor. Like Housman and Jackson, therefore, Catullus and his brother had been geographically separated when the latter died. Catullus’s lament that ‘fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum / heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi’ (‘Fortune has snatched you away, alas, poor brother, unfairly taken from me’) is a sentiment that Housman understood all too well, and lamenting the workings of fate was a frequent theme of his poetry.

  In his reply to the letter in which Jackson quoted ‘Parta Quies’, Housman offered Jackson the £500 he was due from Grant Richards for Last Poems. Fearful that Jackson would refuse the money, he wrote: ‘As I cannot be bothered with investments, this will go to swell my already swollen balance at the bank unless you will relieve me of it. Why not rise superior to the natural disagreeableness of your character and behave nicely for once in a way to a fellow who thinks more of you than anything in the world? You are largely responsible for my writing poetry and you ought to take the consequences.’

  Most of the poems Housman wrote directly about Jackson remained unpublished during his lifetime. There were, however, two exceptions: the verse dedication that prefaced the first volume of his edition of Manilius in 1903 and the ‘Epithalamium’ he wrote somewhat belatedly to celebrate – if that is the word – Jackson’s marriage, which he published in Last Poems. These were, in a sense, public poems, though more private aspects of the poet’s relationship with his subject were there for anyone who cared to look closely.

  The dedicatory poem, though both heartfelt and revealing, prefaced a volume that few people outside the world of classical studies were likely to see. Furthermore it was in Latin. The pre-eminent classical scholar Gilbert Murray thought it the best Latin poem written since antiquity, but this perhaps suggested that one needed to be a classicist of Murray’s standing to appreciate it. It would not be published in an English translation until October 1927, when a version by Edmund Wilson appeared in the New York magazine the Bookman. It is unclear why Wilson decided to translate the poem, particularly since eleven years later he published an article on Housman that attacked the poet for having failed to mature properly, by which Wilson meant grow out of what he himself regarded as the passing adolescent phase of homosexuality. He instanced Housman’s decision to abandon a study of ‘Propertius, who wrote about love, for Manilius, who did not even deal with human beings’ as a deliberate rejection of creativity for sterility.Whatever he may have thought of Housman’s character, Wilson evidently had considerable regard for Housman as a poet, and this may be the reason that he was able to bring himself to translate what amounts to a homosexual love poem. Indeed, he states that it is among the very few examples of Housman’s work as a classicist in which ‘the voice of the Shropshire Lad comes through’.

  The poem is prefaced with Housman’s personal dedication:

  SODALI MEO

  M.I. JACKSON

  HARVM LITERARVM CONTEMPTORI

  This is a characteristic Housman tease, which translates as ‘To my comrade M.J. Jackson, scorner of this scholarship’. The affection displayed in the poem, however, is heartfelt, and it is telling that the verse is written not in the dactylic hexameters employed by Manilius, but in the elegiac couplets favoured by Propertius. It opens with a recollection of the author and his subject walking through the deserted countryside at night, looking up at the stars. This may be intended to refer to walks that Housman enjoyed with Jackson at Oxford, but lovers wandering under the stars is also a poetic tradition of very long standing. In addition, it is an appropriate image to preface a book about astronomy, and Housman goes on to imagine Manilius looking up at the same sky many centuries before and, like any Shropshire lad, becoming mindful of his own mortality and therefore deciding to write his book about the heavens as a stay against time. (The sense that Housman and Manilius, separated by time, were nevertheless looking at the same sky is also reminiscent of the Lad and the Roman witnessing the same wind blowing through the trees in ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’.)

  Like many ancient texts, the Astronomica was lost for centuries, and Housman likens it to a shipwreck, much battered and fragmented, that eventually washes up on ‘our strand’, a reference to its discovery in 1417 by the Renaissance scholar and humanist Poggio Bracciolini. Housman then writes that he has not (as would be customary) invoked the help of the stars or the gods by dedicating his work as editor to them, but instead selected a human being, a comrade who is mortal, but who will live on as lon
g as the following pages will. He also refers to Jackson having left these shores to follow the stars east, in other words to India, and sends this salutation from the western shore where the poet remains. Housman asks Jackson to accept the poem because in time they will both be dust and the chain of comradeship will be broken. This final image of ‘uincla sodalicii’ recalls the last two lines of ‘Diffugere Nives’, Housman’s translation of Horace’s ode (first published in Quarto magazine in 1897), in which the chains of Lethe that bound Pirithoüs in the underworld could not be broken even by ‘the love of comrades’, which is to say Theseus’s love of his friend.

  Collected in Last Poems, the ‘Epithalamium’ would reach a far wider audience than the dedicatory poem. It was not until five years after the marriage that Housman began drafting it, by which time Jackson had already produced two of the sons the poet wishes upon his friend ‘to stay the rot of time’. Unlike the Manilius poem, this one begins conventionally enough with an invocation to Hymen, god of marriage, whom Housman calls ‘Urania’s son’ (Urania being the muse of astronomy and therefore the person to whom the dedicatory poem might have been addressed). Hymen is rather less conventionally summoned both ‘to join and part’ – to join the groom to his wife, but in doing so to part him from his friends: