Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  A Georgian England

  The English countryside would become central to a new poetic movement promoted by Edward Marsh in his five anthologies of Georgian Poetry, which appeared between 1912 and 1922. The Georgian Poets were not a group as such, and had no poetic manifesto, but they wrote a new kind of poetry, casting off the fustian and decadence of late-Victorian verse in order to write about the contemporary world in language that was robust and straightforward. Marsh had solicited a contribution from Housman for the first volume, but had been politely turned down, partly because Housman felt that he would have been as out of place in a Georgian anthology as in an 1890s one. ‘I do not really belong to the “new era”,’ he wrote, ‘and none even of my few unpublished poems have been written in the last two years.’ Many of the Georgian Poets celebrated the English countryside, a theme echoed by D.H. Lawrence, himself a contributor, when he declared: ‘we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning’. The first volume of Georgian Poetry (which was published in the last weeks of December 1912, going through thirteen editions and selling some 15,000 copies in its first year) was prefaced by a quotation from Lord Dunsany in which he stated that among the attributes of being a poet was ‘to know nature as botanists know a flower’, and it included Lawrence’s ‘Snap-dragon’ and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s ‘Geraniums’ amongst its botanical specimens. Gibson also spends summer days and nights out in the fields in ‘The Hare’, while W.H. Davies imagines passing ‘the livelong day / With Nature’ among grazing sheep in a ‘flowery, green, bird-singing land’, Edmund Beale Sargant gets lost in ‘The Cuckoo Wood’, and Walter de la Mare’s Traveller discovers a mysteriously empty house in a forest in ‘The Listeners’.

  De la Mare’s haunting poem (unlike most of those selected by Marsh) would become a hugely popular anthology piece, but it was Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ that George Orwell would later identify as ‘the star poem of 1913’, the year in which most people bought and read Georgian Poetry 1911–12. It is also the poem that shows most clearly the influence of Housman, whom Brooke had six years earlier declared ‘the only proper poet in England’. Brooke had admired Housman ever since his schooldays at Rugby, where at the end of his final term in 1905, in a paper on modern poetry delivered to the Eranos literary society, he introduced his audience to A Shropshire Lad. When he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, the following year he forged a close friendship with the future politician Hugh Dalton, largely based on their mutual admiration for Swinburne and A Shropshire Lad, which they often read aloud to each other. Housman himself was then still teaching at University College, London, and by the time he came to Cambridge, Brooke had left, although he was working on the dissertation that would see him elected a Fellow of King’s in 1913. In 1911 Brooke had entered a competition run by the Westminster Gazette for ‘the best new and original letters to a live poet’. He had been in Munich when he read in a newspaper of Housman’s election as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge, and he sent two poems, both in verse. The first, ‘A Letter to a Live Poet’, won the competition, and though sometimes claimed to be about Housman seems to have nothing to do with him; it was instead, according to Brooke’s biographer Christopher Hassall, written ‘with Lascelles Abercrombie in mind’. His second submission was titled ‘A Letter to a Shropshire Lad (Apropos, more or less, of a recent appointment)’. Housman was in Paris when this impertinent piece of work was published in the newspaper, and it is not known if he ever saw it. The poem shows Brooke’s thoroughgoing knowledge of Housman’s work, parodying or lifting and adapting lines from a large number of the poems, which was something Brooke occasionally did in his personal correspondence. It even opened with a version of the traditional lines with which Housman had prefaced ‘In valleys of springs of rivers’:

  Emmanuel, and Magdalene,

  And St Catharine’s, and St John’s,

  Are the dreariest places,

  And full of dons.

  The poem then sets out to lament that a poet should end up an academic, a fate, he suggests, almost as bad as that of the Woolwich cadet:

  Latin? so slow, so dull an end, lad?

  Oh, that was noble, that was strong!

  For you’d a better wit to friend, lad,

  Than many a man who’s sung his song.

  And so on, for another ten stanzas, few of which would have passed Housman’s stern editorial eye.

  A rather better salute to Housman is ‘The Chilterns’, a poem Brooke wrote in the same year as ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. Its stanza form was perhaps chosen in honour of the one used by Housman for his own doomed hilltop romance. Brooke’s poem is far cruder than Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’, both in its language and its sentiment, its cynicism of a far coarser order; but it occasionally seems to aspire towards the Housmanesque, as in these lines:

  But the years, that take the best away,

  Give something in the end;

  And better friend than love have they,

  For none to mar or mend,

  That have themselves to friend.

  In other stanzas Brooke associates clover with death and refers to ‘darkening shires’, and these, along with the use of the word ‘friend’ as a verb, and indeed the whole atmosphere of the poem, show his debt to A Shropshire Lad. A critic writing of Brooke in 1919 seemed to align him with Housman, although the older poet is not mentioned by name: ‘He was obsessed by the modern melancholy. Fired by that love of English life and English scenery which is the hall-mark of the public school and University man, bubbling over with delight in life and love and sweet companionship, he could nevertheless rarely escape, even for an hour, from the depressing conviction of the transient quality of all beauty and all human enjoyment, even indeed of love itself.’

  In his Rugby lecture, Brooke had caught the sharp tang of A Shropshire Lad well by recommending it should be read ‘on an autumn morning when there is a brave nip of frost in the air and the year is sliding quietly toward death’. A slightly sharper Housman-like tang might have prevented ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ becoming a soft target for Brooke’s detractors. It earns its place in Housman Country, however, as both a poem of exile (written, as its subtitle states, in the Café des Westens in Berlin, and opening with Brooke imagining the lilac blooming outside his room back in England) and as a poem of place. Brooke’s England, though located some 135 miles due east of Ludlow, is very much like Housman’s Shropshire. It is a place ‘Where men with Splendid Hearts may go’, men who are close cousins of those Lads of the Fifty-third, raised under ‘skies that knit their heartstrings right’, the lads in their hundreds who are ‘handsome of heart’, those ‘hearts of gold’ left behind in Shropshire after the poet has moved to London, the ‘kind … single-hearted’ lads now lying in the churchyard at Hughley. Like ‘The country for easy livers, / The quietest under the sun’ found around Ony and Teme and Clun, there is ‘peace and holy quiet’ at Grantchester as well as ‘a slumberous stream’ that appears to be a tributary of the one that lulls the lad lying ‘On the idle hill of summer’ in Shropshire. In short, Housman’s western brookland is spiritually not very far from this eastern Brookeland, a clearly identifiable land of lost content about which the exile asks:

  Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

  And Certainty? And Quiet kind?

  Deep meadows yet, for to forget

  The lies, the truths, and pain?

  The roll-call of towns and villages surrounding Cambridge is even more thorough than Housman’s Shropshire gazetteer, and the poem was dismissed by the dyspeptic Orwell as ‘nothing but an enormous gush of “country” sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names’. Orwell does, however, concede that, while the poem is ‘something worse than worthless’ as a piece of literature, ‘as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a valuable document’.

  In the same essay, published in 1940, Orwell made much the s
ame point about A Shropshire Lad, for which he retained a grudging admiration but now found of more sociological than literary interest. Brooke, on the other hand, never lost his enthusiasm for Housman’s work, and even seems to come well out of his encounters with the man. In February 1913 he went to Cambridge to stay with Edward Marsh’s father, who was Master of Downing College. Brooke was undergoing the latest in a series of emotional crises and, having attended a dinner in honour of Charles Lamb, had sat up most of the night writing to his erstwhile lover Ka Cox, who was in Germany. He was not therefore at his best when Housman came to dinner the following evening and afterwards watched him and the Master play billiards. Brooke was ‘exhausted with nagging trouble and lack of sleep, and at dinner could hardly focus his attention on Housman, the one man whom he had longed for so many years to meet’, writes Hassall. ‘Numb, stupid with heartache, he listened to Housman’s gentle encouragement of his verses, and for a moment, if for a moment only, he may have forgotten that he was helpless to give Ka the love she needed.’ One of the reasons for this helplessness was a young art student called Phyllis Gardner, who had more or less fallen in love with Brooke at first sight when they happened to be on the same train from London to Cambridge in November 1911. In September 1912 Brooke had paid his first visit to her family home at Tadworth in Surrey, where in her attic studio Gardner attempted to draw the young poet. Sitting on a cushion, Brooke ‘took out of his pocket a little book he had brought up with him from downstairs – A.E. Housman’s poems – and read a few things to me’, Gardner recalled. Distracted either by Housman or by her burgeoning feelings for her subject, Gardner seemed unable to get the drawings right,

  and at last I got rather cross over it, and then had an interval during which I did not try to draw, but listened to him reading poems. He read ‘The quietest places under the sun’, till the tears stood in my eyes: his voice was such an exquisite instrument, and his feeling for the poetry so exact: I have never heard anyone read as he read. He read ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, and ‘Are the horses ploughing’ [sic], and a lot of other things. And then I tried again at the drawing, but with not much better success.

  She had little more success in her relationship with Brooke, who was at the time entangled with several other women.

  It was Brooke who had proposed the idea for the Georgian Poetry anthologies to Marsh, and he was as keen as anyone to get out into the open air. He did this in pony caravans with a group of friends satirically dubbed by Virginia Woolf ‘the Neo-pagans’. Neo-paganism was an idealistic and in the end impracticable blend of politics, personal relationships and the simple life. Taking their ideas from the homosexual sandal-wearing sage of Sheffield, Edward Carpenter, the progressive tenets of Bedales, an independent co-educational boarding school founded in 1893, Cambridge Fabianism, and the university’s ‘secret society’, the Apostles, the Neo-pagans were idealistic and muddled in about equal measure. Liberated young men and women threw off the outmoded patriarchal values of the nineteenth century along with most of their clothes (nude bathing featured prominently among their outdoor activities) in the mistaken belief that a cheerful and chaste comradeship between the sexes would be the result. The tensions that naturally arose when young people went off on high-minded camping holidays together, unchaperoned but sworn to continence, could have been predicted, and several Neo-pagans, including Brooke himself, suffered breakdowns of varying degrees of seriousness. Brooke’s close friend Jacques Raverat, apparently driven to the brink of madness by sexual frustration, recuperated by going to France in the care of his father and a hypnotherapist, where he ‘lay nude in the sun, read Housman, Henley and Meredith, and let [the therapist] operate on his subconscious’.

  Brooke left England in May 1913, partly to escape from his increasingly tangled love affairs, and did not return until June the following year. ‘The South Seas are a Paradise,’ he wrote from Fiji. ‘But I prefer England.’ He announced that on his return he would embark on a walk he punningly dubbed ‘a Poet’s Round’: ‘One starts from Charing X, in a south-easterly direction, and calls on De La Mare at Anerley, on S.W. to find [W.H.] Davies at Sevenoaks, a day’s march to Belloc at Kingsland, then up to Wibson [i.e. Wilfrid Gibson] on the borders of Gloucestershire, back by (Stratford), RUGBY [where his mother lived], and the Chilterns, where Masefield and Chesterton dwell. Wouldn’t it give one a queer idea of England!’

  In the event, he only visited Gibson, one of a group of poets who had congregated around the village of Dymock on the Gloucestershire–Herefordshire border, which would give them not a queer but a compelling ‘idea of England’. Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, Edward Thomas and the American interloper Robert Frost became known as the Dymock Poets, and for them the local landscape, like Housman’s Shropshire, grew into an emblem of rural Englishness, celebrated in the poems they published in their journal, New Numbers. ‘Here in our quiet country village they lived,’ wrote the Rev. J.E. Gethyn-Jones, former vicar of the parish, in Dymock Down the Ages (1951). ‘They walked these lanes, these fields, these woods. They sought the first primrose on Hazards bank, the early daffodil in the coppice at Elmbridge by the Leadon stream, and, daintiest of all, the frail bluebell among the Ryton firs.’ They were in fact doing just what Housman did when he noted down the first appearance of wild flowers in his pocket diaries, and what he recommended to others in A Shropshire Lad: seeking out daffodils and ‘palms’ (pussy-willow or catkins) in ‘March’ (X); primroses, daffodils and windflowers in ‘The Lent Lily’ (XXIX); and ‘bluebells in the azured wood’ in ‘In my own shire, if I was sad’ (XLI). Brooke described Abercrombie’s cottage as ‘the most beautiful you can imagine: black-beamed & rose-covered. And a porch where one drinks great mugs of cider, & looks at fields of poppies in the corn. A life that makes London a very foolish affair.’

  Brooke wrote this in a letter on 6 July 1914. Within a month Britain would be at war with Germany, and the small scarlet field poppy, hitherto associated with the peaceful English countryside, would become a symbol of death and destruction on the battlefields of the Western Front.

  IV

  ENGLISH MUSIC

  Nowhere in the English thesaurus is there verse more apt for music.

  Ernest Newman, 1922

  During the Second World War, the composer E.J. Moeran spent much of his time in Kington, a small market town in the north-west corner of Herefordshire close to the Welsh border. Like Housman, several of whose poems he had set between 1916 and 1932, Moeran was a keen walker, often to be seen striding out in a pin-striped suit worn over an open-collared shirt, a pipe clenched between his teeth. The son of a clergyman, he had been brought up on the Norfolk coast at Bacton, but his parents had moved to Kington in 1937. They lived at Gravel Hill, an Italianate villa on the edge of the town found for them by their elder son, Graham, a vicar in nearby Leominster. Moeran’s mother immediately set about converting a small studio at the side of the house into a study in the hope of persuading Moeran, whose life had always been unsettled, to move in. Moeran was very much a composer of place who, again like Housman, found long walks an aid to composition. His music had been inspired not only by the Norfolk Fens, but also by Kerry in Ireland, where his family had its roots, and he had collected and arranged folk songs from both places as well as from Suffolk. Having settled into Gravel Hill, he praised Kington’s ‘wonderful air’, pronouncing the town ‘the healthiest place in Britain’, and enjoyed walks on Hergest Ridge on the western fringe of the town or longer excursions over the border into Radnorshire.

  Although Moeran is often thought of as an East Anglian or Irish composer, it was during his Kington period that he wrote some of his best-known works, notably the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1942–3) and the Sinfonietta (1944), which he described as ‘a symphony of the Welsh Marches’. The middle movement of the Sinfonietta came to him while standing on Rhos Fawr, the bare summit of Radnor Forest, and should, he said, be ‘played at a brisk walking pace’. He also began work on the C
ello Concerto (1945) and the Cello Sonata (1947), both written for Peers Coetmore, who shared his love of walking and whom he married at Kington church in the summer of 1945. His friend Lionel Hill recalled a trip to Rhos Fawr: ‘He took us out beyond Radnor by train, and thence by bus to a spot from which we climbed up and up, seemingly above the world, until the ground flattened out to give us superb views for miles around in all directions. I remember Jack pointing and saying, “Over there is Elgar country, and there, Housman country.”’

  Elgar Country and Housman Country are linked both geographically, by the River Severn, and spiritually, by a sense of place and a certain melancholy. Louis MacNeice’s pronouncement that Housman was the person ‘with whom any history of modern English poetry might very well start’ echoes the widespread idea that the first performance of Elgar’s Enigma Variations at St James’s Hall in London on 19 June 1899 is where any history of modern English music might start. Although Elgar never set Housman, many other composers did, and as a result the poet became – very unwillingly – a key figure in what came to be known as the English Musical Renaissance. ‘I am tempted to think that Housman did a tremendous service to English composers when he wrote those wayward, passionate, disturbing lyrics,’ wrote the music critic Stephen Williams in 1938, reviewing a concert of English songs which included settings of poems from A Shropshire Lad by Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, John Ireland and Ivor Gurney. This was not, to say the least of it, Housman’s intention in publishing the volume – ‘I wish they would not call me a singer,’ he complained of its first reviewers. ‘One fellow actually said minstrel!’ – and it is perhaps as well that he was safely dead when Williams’s article appeared. Similar things had, however, been written during his lifetime. When Last Poems appeared in 1922, England’s foremost music critic, Ernest Newman, somewhat tactlessly observed that while ‘all but about half a dozen’ of the sixty-three lyrics in A Shropshire Lad had ‘cried out for music: of the forty-one in Last Poems, hardly more than half a dozen are first-rate material for the composer’. If Housman ever read this, it must have been with mixed feelings: outrage that Newman appeared to regard providing material for composers as the principal job of a poet, but quiet satisfaction that the new volume seemed less likely to succeed in this task.