Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Modern biography has recognised that a subject’s sexual life is a legitimate area of enquiry, and if no trail has been left to follow then it is confidently assumed that there is a ‘secret life’ to be discovered. We know from the reminiscences of A.C. Benson that Housman enjoyed what were then considered ‘off-colour’ stories, and that all but one of the letters he wrote to his friend Arthur Platt, Professor of Greek at UCL, were destroyed by the recipient’s widow on the grounds that they were ‘too Rabelaisian’. A certain number of risqué books were procured for Housman by Grant Richards, and his own library included a collection of volumes on sexual topics, not all of them strictly scholarly. Housman also devoted considerable time to an article he titled ‘Praefanda’, which addressed the difficulties that occasionally arose in Latin poems on sexual subjects. He wrote it in Latin and submitted it in 1931 to the Classical Quarterly, which accepted it and sent him proofs before suddenly getting cold feet. It was subsequently published in Hermes, a German magazine of classical studies. ‘Praefanda’ was one of Housman’s serious jokes, in which he applied his exacting scholarship to poems about masturbation, sodomy, fellatio and foreskins (or lack of them). Whether the knowledge of anatomy and sexual mechanics he displayed in the article came from personal experience or merely from reading is impossible to say. We can draw our own inferences from these facts about Housman, but they remain no more than that.

  If Housman had a less busy sex life than Forster eventually did, this would not have been as unusual in his own period as it would be today, particularly in the context of university life. Even after dons were allowed to marry, many chose not to, a bachelor’s life then being regarded as neither exceptional nor something to arouse suspicion among the prurient. While not necessarily homosexual, universities tended to be homosocial: even after women were admitted as undergraduates, they were corralled within their own colleges, leaving the masculine world of other colleges largely undisturbed. Living within institutions where domestic necessities were provided by servants and companionship by fellow scholars, many men who were not celibate as a result of religious conviction nevertheless found no need for the comforts and consolations traditionally supplied by women and marriage. Bachelorhood had a long tradition within universities and in many cases suited the scholastic temperament, avoiding the kind of obligations and distractions from hard intellectual work that a wife and family might involve. This was the world within which Housman lived in Cambridge for the last twenty-five years of his life.

  With regard to Housman’s poetry, whether he was sexually repressed or found sexual adventures of which we know nothing is not particularly important. Far more relevant to his work is emotional repression, and of that we have plenty of evidence in his life. Laurence Housman was far from the only person who recorded instances of his brother being caught between the warring urges of concealment and revelation. One of Housman’s more unlikely friendships was the one he struck up with Joan Thomson, the young and sympathetic daughter of the Master of Trinity, and during their many conversations he appears to have revealed himself in a way he rarely did to his male friends. The recollections Thomson wrote three years after Housman’s death are amongst the most touching and enlightening accounts we have of his character. ‘His powers of restraint and self-control were very great,’ she recalled, instancing his ability to give up the wine he so much enjoyed for several months because ‘some doctor told him that it would be good for his nerves to abstain from alcohol’. This cure was ineffective, ‘but the strength of will he must have exerted during a long period was very characteristic of him’.

  The exertion of will also controlled Housman’s most personal feelings. ‘He was capable of emotion terrifying in its strength,’ Thomson recalled. ‘There were very few outlets for his affection and it was only very rarely possible to catch a glimpse of the man he might have been.’ She records Housman enjoying a family Christmas, pulling crackers and reading out the hackneyed rhymes that were included as mottoes, and sitting with a toy animal on his knee while he indulgently watched the hosts’ baby grandson at play: ‘he looked as if he were then his natural self.’ More usual, however, was the solitary figure apparently nursing a private grief. ‘His amazing power of self-control must have been necessary indeed to him when the experience came that was the tragedy of his life,’ Thomson writes, without saying what that tragedy had been. ‘How intensely he had suffered might be guessed by anyone who saw his face as it sometimes appeared at the end of one of his long walks. Perhaps he had recalled some of his own wretchedness as he walked alone and the sadness of his face was as poignant as on the face of a man experiencing the bitterness of sorrow for the first time.’ She concluded that Housman was ‘ashamed of the strength of his own feeling’, which is why he took care to hide and suppress it in the English manner of someone of his background and upbringing.

  Housman left a similar impression on his long-standing friend Percy Withers, who wrote in an article published in the New Statesman when Housman died: ‘The emotions may have run deep in many men, but few can have repressed them so effectually that only intimacy provided a rare and fleeting glimpse.’ When in 1940 Withers published his ‘Personal Recollections’ of Housman in book form, he did so under the title A Buried Life. Although he nowhere says so, it seems likely that he borrowed this title from Matthew Arnold. Published in 1852, Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’ asks whether love can reveal someone’s real nature, the ‘genuine self’ that is otherwise hidden or simply gets lost as we negotiate ‘the rush and glare’ of daily existence. In its evocation of emotional reticence and repression, this is a very English poem. According to E.M. Forster, writing in 1926, the defects of the English character, so far as the educated classes were concerned, derived from the public schools, whose alumni ‘go forth into [the world] with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts’. Forster argued that it is these undeveloped hearts, rather than cold ones, that cause Englishmen difficulties: ‘For it is not that the Englishman can’t feel – it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks – his pipe might fall out if he did. He must bottle up his emotions, or let them out only on a very special occasion.’

  As the joke about the pipe suggests, Forster is painting something of a caricature, but the underlying observation is both serious and compelling. He goes on to tell an anecdote about the difference between his own reaction and that of an Indian friend when a holiday they had been enjoying together came to an end: the Indian ‘could not express his sorrow too much’, whereas Forster, knowing that they would meet again soon, remained sanguine and began to scold his friend for both feeling and showing ‘so much emotion upon so slight an occasion’. The Indian remonstrated that emotions could not be measured out ‘as if they were potatoes’, and when Forster countered that this was ‘better than slopping them about like water from a pail’, he was told: ‘your whole attitude toward emotion is wrong. Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness. It matters only that it shall be sincere. I happened to feel deeply. I showed it. It doesn’t matter whether I ought to have felt deeply or not.’ Feeling deeply among late-Victorian and Edwardian Englishmen – and indeed subsequent generations – was not the problem; it was the display of such feelings that was considered more or less taboo. This had become a commonplace when, for example, a local newspaper such as the Chelmsford Chronicle reported of the first Armistice Day in 1919: ‘It is a strong national trait that we do not carry our hearts on our sleeves, and anything like a display of emotion is, and was, particularly in pre-war days, quite foreign to the British character.’ Like the heart not worn on the sleeve, the stiff upper lip that supposedly characterised Englishmen may have become a cliché, but a trembling lip is a real physical symptom that unwillingly betrays deep emotion, whether fear or grief. The popularity of moustaches during this period meant that, behind their bristling defences
, lips could, if absolutely necessary, covertly quiver, the failure of nerve this represented remaining largely undetectable.

  Percy Withers recorded that on the few occasions he witnessed Housman expressing deep emotion the effect was alarmingly physical. ‘The intensity of feeling was shown not by the use of emphatic words or declamatory expressions, but by the physical manifestations of a faltering voice, a flushed face, and an agitation of the frame that gave the impression of a seething force restrained only by the exercise of stern self-discipline, and not always successfully, for a visible tremor would momentarily escape.’ It is no coincidence that these physical symptoms are not unlike those that Housman claimed were caused by an encounter with true poetry.

  The terror of self-exposure was not restricted to men like Housman who needed to conceal romantic or sexual feelings that were wholly inadmissible. As Arnold wrote in ‘The Buried Life’:

  I knew the mass of men conceal’d

  Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d

  They would by other men be met

  With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;

  I knew they lived and moved

  Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest

  Of men, and alien to themselves …

  Forster wondered how it was that a nation reputed to be emotionally chilly could nevertheless be pre-eminent in producing poets. ‘We can’t get fire out of ice. Since literature always rests on national character, there must be in the English nature hidden springs of fire to produce the fire we see.’ It was precisely because these springs were hidden that the English were famed for their poetry, according to James Sutherland, writing twenty-one years after Forster in the essay on ‘Literature’ in Ernest Barker’s The Character of England. He imagines a foreigner visiting England and asking: ‘How is it that this people, apparently so practical, so prosaic, so reticent in expression of their feelings, have produced so much of the world’s greatest poetry?’

  The answer must surely be that Englishmen, by reason of their defects no less than their virtues, are closer than most peoples to those reservoirs from which poetry springs […] If the Englishman’s home is his castle, so to an almost unsociable extent is his mind. Accustomed to respect the intellectual and emotional privacy of his neighbours, he expects a similar forbearance towards himself. More sociable nations put their ideas into a common pool, but the Englishman keeps drawing his up painfully from his own private well for his own private use.

  … It may be deep –

  I trust it is – and never dry:

  What matter? if the waters sleep

  In silence and obscurity.

  Yet this slow accumulation of experience and thought and feeling, so parsimoniously expended in social intercourse, so rarely tapped and run off in conversation, seems to be peculiarly favourable to the production of poetry. By some strange paradox, what the Englishman cannot bring himself to say even to a friend he tells without inhibition to all the world.

  This is what Withers meant when he wrote of those aspects of Housman’s character that were ‘implicit in his poetry, so hidden in his person’. The critic Brian Reade compared A Shropshire Lad to ‘a beautiful ruin built over an invisible framework’, a framework that Housman was on the whole careful to conceal, and Kate Symons admitted that one of the reasons for her pleasure when Additional Poems was published was that ‘they tell more of himself and his queer muffled heart than he chose to show’. Sutherland concludes that the paradox of revealing in published poetry what cannot be admitted to friends in private conversation explains why some English poets have been reluctant to discuss their work, instancing (appropriately enough) Thomas Gray in an anecdote related by Matthew Arnold. According to Victor de Bonstetten, a young Swiss whom Gray befriended towards the end of his life, Gray ‘would never talk of himself, never would allow me to speak to him of his poetry. If I quoted lines to him, he kept silence like an obstinate child’. As Sutherland notes, this sounds very much like stories told about Housman. It is also possible that one of the reasons Gray ‘never spoke out’ (as Arnold put it) was that, like Housman, he needed to conceal an emotional life that was focused on young men such as Bonstetten.

  The widespread difficulty that late-Victorian middle-class men had expressing their feelings is perfectly illustrated by a letter Housman received on his appointment to the Chair of Latin at University College, London. It was written to him by John Maycock, the man described as ‘his most intimate friend’ at the Patent Office, and demonstrates the bounds within which such intimacy could be expressed. The letter, dated 15 June 1892, was addressed to Housman at Perry Hall, and has often been quoted, but its significance has been overlooked. Housman carefully kept it, in its envelope, until he died, as he did the last letter he received from Moses Jackson. It is by any standards a touching tribute to Housman’s character as a young man, but it is the wording Maycock uses in expressing his congratulations and the observation he makes about Housman’s friendship with Jackson that provides the more likely explanation for its preservation. ‘I am as delighted with your success as though I had got something for myself,’ Maycock wrote. ‘It is funny to think how I used to chaff you about your work producing no money, and all the time you were working silently on with that strength of purpose which I can admire but can’t imitate.’ Thus far the letter is of the sort any man might like to receive from a colleague he knew well. It is what Maycock goes on to write, however, that is crucial: ‘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 have ever known.’ This declaration evidently stayed with Housman, who three years later, during his period of greatest creativity, wrote a poem that is generally agreed to describe his quarrel with Jackson in 1885, and in which he echoes Maycock’s words:

  Because I liked you better

  Than suits a man to say,

  It irked you, and I promised

  I’d throw the thought away.

  *   *   *

  In an earlier draft the second line read ‘Than friends in liking may’, which also points to Maycock’s letter as a source. The letter continues: ‘There is as far as I could ever discover absolutely no flaw in your character as a man, and no one would 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 stick to him in the sentimental sense of not forgetting him although he is right out of your reach.’ In spite of his ability to let himself loose, as he phrases it, Maycock was very much a product of his period and nationality: the letter is addressed ‘Dear Housman’ and signed ‘Yours faithfully, Maycock’. Had Maycock shared Housman’s sexual orientation, one would suspect that the letter was suggesting more than it actually says outright, that Maycock was acknowledging that he knew that Jackson was out of Housman’s reach not just geographically but also sexually and emotionally, but this was not the case.

  The inability to forget is a theme of ‘Because I liked you better’, one given a characteristically ironic twist in its final stanza. Housman perhaps thought the poem too revealing, and he did not include it in A Shropshire Lad. Jackson would undoubtedly have recognised the poem’s scenario, particularly since it continues:

  To put the world between us

  We parted stiff and dry:

  ‘Farewell,’ you said, ‘forget me.’

  ‘Fare well, I will,’ said I.

  Jackson had indeed put the world between himself and Housman when he went to live in India. It seems that it was precisely because Housman had apparently cast aside English reticence and told Jackson what he felt for him that the friends had quarrelled and parted. The disparity of feeling between them is subtly indicated in this poem by Housman’s precision in the choice of words: the friend’s purely conventional ‘Farewell’ is returned to its constituent parts and its original and more potent benediction in the speaker’
s almost imperceptibly altered echo, ‘Fare well’.

  The tension in ‘Because I liked you better’ between what is felt and what is said is wholly characteristic of Housman’s best poems. By choosing to write poetry that is both conventional in its form (requiring scansion and rhyme) and very brief in its extent, Housman contains the emotions with which his speakers are struggling within a tight framework, and by doing so makes them all the more powerfully felt. In many cases the very form of his poetry enacts their subject: the repression and containment of difficult or troubling feelings. Unsurprisingly, this is most apparent in the poems Housman wrote that appear to recall his quarrel with Jackson. ‘Because I liked you better’ continues:

  If e’er, where clover whitens

  The dead man’s knoll, you pass,

  And no tall flower to meet you