Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Later that year Gurney completed his second Housman cycle, which he had been working at on and off since 1908. The Western Playland (and of Sorrow), to give its full if rather clumsy title, was scored once again for baritone, string quartet and piano and comprised ‘Reveille’, ‘Loveliest of Trees’, ‘With rue my heart is laden’, ‘Twice a week the winter thorough’, ‘Along the field as we came by’, ‘Is my team ploughing’, ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ and ‘March’. It received its premiere at the Royal College of Music in November 1920 and is generally agreed to be less successful than Ludlow and Teme, which is far more often recorded and performed. In particular, the setting of ‘Is my team ploughing’ seems not to differentiate either in the vocal line or the accompaniment between the two speakers, and the instrumental coda at the end of the cycle has been criticised as both unnecessary and directionless. Part of the problem was that Gurney had carried out major revisions when the cycle had already been accepted for publication. The differences between the manuscript and the published version have been described as mostly irreconcilable, but a new performing edition of the piece was produced in 2013 and appropriately received its premiere at the Ludlow English Song Weekend that year.

  Strenuous attempts had been made to find Gurney employment in order to introduce some stability into his rapidly unravelling life, but his mental state had deteriorated to such an extent that in September 1922 he was sent to a convalescent home for neurasthenics near Bristol. His problems turned out to be far worse than neurasthenia (a rather vague medical term that now included shell shock): he was in fact suffering from some form of paranoid schizophrenia and was shortly transferred to Barnwood House, a private asylum on the outskirts of Gloucester. Vaughan Williams generously guaranteed £100 towards the cost of his care and other friends and admirers raised funds, but his condition appeared to be worsening rather than improving and on 21 December he was taken to the London Mental Hospital at Dartford. Incarceration in an institution far from his beloved Gloucester was a particularly cruel fate for a man whose entire life and work were bound up with the English landscape across which he had spent so much time freely tramping. In this, as in much else, he felt a natural affinity with Edward Thomas, whom he never met but knew about through their mutual friend Jack Haines. Thomas had regularly walked the same part of the country as Gurney when he was living at Dymock and was, Gurney thought, ‘English at the core’, which counted for a great deal. Gurney’s great admiration for Thomas’s poems led him to set at least nineteen of them – six as Lights Out, for voice and piano, composed between 1918 and 1926, jointly dedicated ‘To Minsterworth’ and ‘to the 2/5th Gloucesters’, and his only completed song cycle apart from the two based on Housman. He also set a great many poems by Thomas’s Dymock neighbour W.W. Gibson and other Georgian Poets such as Rupert Brooke, W.H. Davies, Walter de la Mare and Robert Graves. In a memorial edition of Music & Letters Vaughan Williams wrote that Gurney was composing his songs at a time when the Georgian Poets ‘had just rediscovered England and the language that fitted the shy beauty of their own country. Gurney has found the exact musical equivalent both in sentiment and in cadence to this poetry.’

  The empathy Gurney felt for Thomas was increased when he learned that the poet had suffered from severe bouts of depression. He believed that Thomas ‘had the same sickness of mind I have – the impossibility of serenity for any but the shortest space’. One of those who visited Gurney in Dartford was Thomas’s widow, Helen, who on one occasion took along her husband’s ‘well-used ordnance maps of Gloucester’:

  This proved to have been a sort of inspiration, for Ivor Gurney at once spread them out on his bed and he and I spent the whole time I was there tracing with our fingers the lanes and byeways and villages of which he knew every step and over which Edward had walked. He spent the hour in re-visiting his beloved home, in spotting a village or a track, a hill or a wood and seeing it all in his mind’s eye, a mental vision sharper and more actual for his heightened intensity. He trod, in a way we who were sane could not emulate, the lanes and fields he knew and loved so well, his guide being his finger tracing the way on the map. It was most deeply moving, and I knew that I had hit on an idea that gave him more pleasure than anything else I could have thought of. For he had Edward as his companion in this strange perambulation and he was utterly happy.

  Gurney continued intermittently to write poetry and work at his music, and he published his two Housman cycles in 1923 and 1926 respectively. He would remain at Dartford until he died of tuberculosis in 1937.

  Between the Acts

  Gurney’s two cycles were part of a new upsurge in A Shropshire Lad’s musical afterlife during the 1920s and 1930s. Between the two world wars some 100 settings were made of poems from Housman’s volume, either as individual songs or as parts of song cycles – and this does not take into account the songs that began to appear after 1922 when composers turned their attention to Last Poems. Like those composed before and during the First World War, these songs vary in quality, and the majority of them have failed to keep a place in the repertoire. Of those that have, the most significant are settings by E.J. Moeran, John Ireland, Vaughan Williams and C.W. Orr, although mention should be made of two individual songs by Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1899–1960) and Muriel Herbert (1897–1984). Gibbs, whose family wealth derived from the manufacture of the well-known toothpaste and other toiletries, was a child prodigy who was supposedly able to improvise tunes on the piano before he learned to speak and whose first song was composed at the age of five. Although he wrote choral and stage music, he remains best known for his songs, in particular those setting the poems of his friend Walter de la Mare. His one setting of Housman, ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ for voice and piano, dates from 1921, when Gibbs himself was twenty-two, and its beautiful, wistful tune more than holds its own among the much better known settings from this period. Women composers of the early twentieth century were even more likely than their male counterparts to slip from history, but Muriel Herbert is among those who have been rediscovered in recent years. Born in Sheffield and brought up in Liverpool, she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1917 and studied composition there with Stanford. Her most active period as a composer was the 1920s, before her marriage in 1928 and the subsequent birth of her two children, the younger of whom became a well-known biographer and critic under her married name of Claire Tomalin. Herbert’s setting of ‘Loveliest of trees’ for voice and piano is very much of its period but, with its subtly descending accompaniment suggesting falling blossom, is nonetheless touching and effective and deserves a place in the repertoire.

  After demobilisation E.J. Moeran had returned to the Royal College of Music to take up his studies and began collecting folk songs once more, publishing them in the Journal of the English Folk-Song Society. His arrangements for voice and piano of some of the songs he had collected were published as Six Folksongs from Norfolk in 1924 and Six Suffolk Folksongs in 1931. Before heading for East Anglia, however, he had returned to Shropshire with his second Housman cycle, Ludlow Town for baritone and piano, written in 1920 and first performed at the Wigmore Hall in December 1924, the year they were published. The cycle consists of ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’, ‘Say, lad, have you things to do?’, ‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree’ and ‘The lads in their hundreds’, and deserves to be better known than it is. Moeran tended to choose the more rural and locally specific of Housman’s poems to set – though he wrote most of the songs before he went to live just over the Shropshire border at Kington, and composed ‘’Tis time I think, by Wenlock Town’ (1925) while travelling on a train between London and Westbury in Wiltshire. The English countryside always attracted him, however, and was the inspiration of much of his music, and it was no doubt Housman’s generic landscape that drew him to these poems as much as their mood. Perhaps because his own life was distinctly troubled, Moeran is finely attuned to the melancholy of the poems, which he often brings out in the questioning
piano part of his settings. He revised his earlier setting of ‘Far in a western brookland’ in 1925, and in 1931 set ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and the first two of three versions of ‘Oh fair enough are sky and plain’. This last song was one that seemed to preoccupy him. Although he professed to think the final version, completed in 1934, the best, he did not destroy earlier ones and when the song was published in 1957, seven years after his death, it was in the first and simplest version – though all three have now been recorded. Having spent so much time on this poem about a lad standing on ‘the cressy brink’ of a river and imagining himself drowning, it is a grim irony of the kind Housman would have appreciated that it was water that finally claimed Moeran. Having descended into alcoholism, and fearing that he would go mad and be sent to an asylum, he retired to Kenmare in County Kerry, where in December 1950 he suffered a stroke while standing on the pier and died when he fell into the water.

  Moeran’s tutor at the Royal College of Music, John Ireland, was born in Cheshire in what he called ‘a pleasant country place’. He too was inspired by landscape, particularly by two of the places in which he lived, Sussex and the Channel Islands. The former is evoked in both his piano piece Amberley Wild Brooks (1921) and A Downland Suite (1936), the latter in An Island Spell (part of his Decorations for solo piano, 1912–13) and Sarnia: An Island Sequence (also for piano, 1940–1). The writer Jocelyn Brooke, whose opinion Ireland said he rated higher than that of any music critic, tried to suggest the particular quality of the composer’s music, drawing a parallel with Housman. Recalling the anxious summer of 1939, in which war became inevitable, Brooke wrote: ‘In the verse of Yeats or Housman, in certain passages of Delius or John Ireland, I would detect the same quality: a kind of remote, nostalgic awareness of some legendary past.’ Like Housman, Ireland seemed to speak directly to Brooke:

  Ireland’s music has the quality of a personal communication which, if one happens to be, so to speak, on the right ‘wavelength’, seems to be addressed to oneself alone […] much of his music corresponds almost uncannily with certain moods and emotions which one recognizes as part of one’s own experience, associated in the main with the English countryside and with the tutelary genius of a particular place: the sense of

  old, forgotten far-off things

  And battles long ago.

  For Brooke, this music evoked ‘a country of the mind to which I find myself returning, with a recurrent nostalgia, over and over again’.

  There was, however, another aspect of Housman’s poetry that particularly drew Ireland to it. Whether or not Vaughan Williams or any of the other composers of the period recognised a homosexual subtext in Housman’s poetry is open to question, but Ireland was certainly ‘in the know’, and indeed ‘on the right wavelength’, as Brooke put it. When choosing titles for their songs, most composers used those supplied by Housman where they existed, or – as was more often the case – the first lines of the poems, either in full (‘Far in a western brookland’, ‘With rue my heart is laden’) or in a shortened form (‘Loveliest of trees’, ‘The lads in their hundreds’). In almost every instance, Ireland chose his own titles, and in doing so made the poems reflect his own emotional difficulties. His early setting of ‘March’, for example, dispensed with Housman’s two opening stanzas about astrology and animals, starting straight in with ‘The boys are up the woods with day / To fetch the daffodils away’, and took its title, ‘The Heart’s Desire’, from the poem’s final verse.

  Boys and the heart’s troubling desires were something of a preoccupation for Ireland, and both his Housman cycles were dedicated to a former chorister at St Luke’s Church in Sydney Street, Chelsea, where he was organist and choirmaster from 1904 to 1926. The diminutive son of a local picture-framer, Arthur George Miller joined the St Luke’s choir during the First World War, when he was about ten, and remained a close friend of Ireland for many years. During the 1920s he was the dedicatee of several of the composer’s most intensely felt works, including the two Housman cycles, The Land of Lost Content and We’ll to the Woods No More. He is also presumed to be the unacknowledged inspiration behind other compositions. Two Songs, for example, written in early 1920, set poems by Philip Sidney and Aldous Huxley, the first of which (‘My true-love hath my heart, and I have his, / By just exchange one for the other given’) suggests mutual love, while the latter (‘Thick-flowered is the trellis / That hides our joys’) suggests secrecy. Both are set simply for ‘voice and piano’, but one can safely assume that Ireland intended them to be sung by a male singer, which is the current practice. A few months later Ireland began work on The Land of Lost Content, also for voice and piano and written for Gervase Elwes, in which he set six of Housman’s poems. It starts conventionally enough with ‘The Lent Lily’, which is similar in subject matter to ‘The Heart’s Desire’. From boys and girls gathering flowers in springtime, we move on to ‘Ladslove’, a distinctly Uranian title which emphasises the homosexual nature of ‘Look not in my eyes’. ‘Goal and Wicket’ depicts a lad in ‘Twice a week the winter thorough’ playing sports in an attempt to keep sorrow at bay. The reason for his sorrow may be explained by the next song, which sets ‘If truth in hearts that perish’ as ‘The Vain Desire’. Further vain desires are apparent in ‘The Encounter’, a title which focuses our attention on the glance exchanged between the poet and the redcoat in ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’. The cycle ends with an ‘Epilogue’ in which there are further exchanges of looks between lads in a setting of ‘You smile upon your friend to-day’.

  The cycle seems related both to the Two Songs and to other compositions from this period. On a Birthday Morning for solo piano bore the dedication ‘Pro amicitia’ (for friendship), and the birthday it was celebrating was that of Miller, who became seventeen on 22 February 1922, a date which is added to the score. Miller’s subsequent birthdays would be similarly commemorated, as were outings the pair made in Ireland’s car to Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, visiting historical sites. The setting of Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, for example, is dedicated ‘To A.G.M.: Cerne Abbas, June 1925’, while the tardy completion of Three Songs (Emily Brontë’s ‘Love and Friendship’, the anonymous ‘Friendship in Misfortune’ and D.G. Rossetti’s ‘The One Hope’) in July 1926 meant that it had to be retrospectively dedicated ‘for February 22, 1926’, which was Miller’s twenty-first birthday. Ireland’s second Housman cycle, We’ll to the Woods No More (written 1926–7), was dedicated ‘To Arthur: in memory of the darkest days’. This darkness seems to have been connected with an unexpected change in Ireland’s emotional life. In October 1926 he left St Luke’s and two months later married a seventeen-year-old pianist thirty years his junior called Dorothy Phillips, with Miller acting as witness. Miller himself married the following year, though he and Ireland remained close. Ireland’s marriage, perhaps predictably, proved short-lived and was probably unconsummated; the couple divorced in September 1928.

  It was against this background that Ireland wrote his second Housman cycle, which sets the epigraph and ‘When I would muse in boyhood’ from Last Poems, while a third movement for piano only titled ‘Spring will not wait’ is prefaced with a quotation from ‘’Tis time I think by Wenlock town’, a poem Ireland had previously set as ‘Hawthorn Time’ (1919). This is a cycle of yearning regret, signalled by the first lines of the first song: ‘We’ll to the wood no more, / The laurels all are cut’. Ireland’s setting of this poem, which was derived from what Housman called ‘an old French nursery rhyme’, is particularly impassioned and despairing. The second song recalls similar ‘wild green woods’, where the speaker spent his boyhood dreaming of finding ‘friends to die for’. These friends are found and prove ‘hearts I lost my own to’, a line that recalls the Sidney poem Ireland had set in Two Songs, but without its sense of happy reciprocation: in Housman’s poem the friends go abroad and die, as Moses Jackson would do. The third movement also alludes to the recollection of happier times in the
English countryside, now irretrievably lost. It begins rather more optimistically than the two songs, but gradually becomes increasingly sombre and towards the end quotes from the music that accompanied the repeated ‘no more’ in the first song. The cycle is both true to the mood of Housman and appears to reflect Ireland’s own circumstances.

  Ireland’s personal life continued to be complicated. By the time his marriage was dissolved he had met Helen Perkin, another young pianist, the same age as his former wife. He appears to have been almost as infatuated with her as he had been with Arthur Miller, a troubled shift in devotion reflected in his Songs Sacred and Profane, written between 1929 and 1931. Whether or not Ireland had planned to propose to Perkin or whether he had been warned off marriage by his earlier venture into matrimony is unclear, but he was deeply upset when she married someone else in 1934, and from this time composed works in which his appreciation of boys became even less guarded. His original intention had been to call the central movement of the contemporaneous Sarnia ‘Boyslove’ (it was inspired by, and dedicated to, the ten-year-old son of the proprietor of a hotel in Guernsey where Ireland was a resident, and was eventually published as ‘In a May morning’), while his 1943 Fantasy Sonata for clarinet and piano is subtitled ‘Ode to Giton’, a reference to the sixteen-year-old lover of the narrator in Petronius’s Satyricon.