A.E. Housman

Poetry seems a mostly forgotten presence in today's world.  It's a private pleasure now.  The planet, being fully wired, is too impatient for the kind of sacred space required.  Poetry demands reflection and an emotional response.  Just a little over one hundred years ago there was a book of poetry taken by young men in record numbers to the front, as a solace in the Great War.  It was taken partly as solace and partly as a reminder of the western ideal of the Pastoral.  It was also written in simple English in a simple metre, easily understood by men from the lowest literate labourer up to those in the privileged classes.  The book was A Shropshire Lad, the poet, A.E. Housman.

Housman was gay, and one could surmise, desperately gay.  One could also say he was essentially heartbroken by it.  He sublimated it, poor fellow.  He had the misfortune to fall in love with a handsome straight man, a situation with which more than a few of us can identify.  Doubly so, he believed he was an island, and this sense of himself carried on throughout his life and career.  The man was Moses Jackson, who he met while studying at Oxford.  Housman shared rooms with Jackson and A.W. Pollard.  Jackson was athletic and decidedly unliterary.

After college Jackson found work at a patent office and Housman followed him there.  They were roommates, and shared the space with Aldabert, Jackson's brother.  It was most likely in these rooms that Housman professed his love, but it was all for naught.  In 1885 Housman moved out, possibly as a result of making his feelings known.  A few years later Jackson moved to India, only to return briefly to marry in 1887.  He never invited Housman to the nuptials.

There is something of the character of Miss Havisham to Housman, that ghostly personality by Dickens, whose house is a dusty shrine to a bridegroom who never arrived.  Housman got the 'go by' and it set his heart to stone, or so it seems.  Nary a flexible fellow, he.  There were men after Moses Jackson, there always are, but Moses touched his heart, and was possibly the last to do so.  There is some evidence that Housman had in fact finally done the deed with none other than Moses' brother, Aldabert.

He would not stay for me, and who would wonder?

He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.

I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,

And went with half my life about my ways.

Housman went on to become one of the preeminent academics of his day, teaching Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge.  He considered his poetry second to his work in Latin and the Classics.  Moses Jackson returned from India and later settled in British Columbia.  He died in Vancouver in 1923.

So what should we make of this stuffy English academic?  E.M. Forster, upon delivering a series of lectures at Cambridge, found that he had made an impression and he and Housman duly went for dinner after one of his talks discussing his Aspects of the Novel.  During the meal Housman commented that he often enjoyed Paris so that he could be in unrespectable company, noting it with what must have been baldfaced cheek at the time.  Forster, certainly no prude, took his meaning.  And was set the foundations for an academic friendship, or so Forster thought.

Housman had rooms in Trinity college and Forster 'came a calling'.  He knocked on the door.  No answer.  He left a note.  No reply.  Housman wasn't making it easy, and it seems that this was his life-long approach to intimate relations, or the stone-cold lack thereof, truth be told.

He is something of a nightmare for biographers because not much of anything personal has come to light (or had ever happened?).  There is his five volume magnum opus of Manilius' Astronomicon that he eked out over a 27 year period, but it hardly sheds a light on the man himself.  He did leave a few clues, aside from the boys of Paris and his demimonde deeds in the City of Light.  And things did happen, very discreetly of course.

There was Andrea, a suitably romantic figure, a young gondolier, in Venice.  If you've ever been to Venice you know that gondoliers have a reputation for being rogues on occasion.  The fact that Andrea apparently had the use of only one of his eyes does not diminish him in the least.  I can expect that this relationship, which went on for some years, lent some spice to Housman's life.  But a lot of his private life is built on shifting sands, and it all disappears between the cracks.  There is an absolutely airless vacuity to Housman, which is amazing, considering the real heartbreak that is revealed in his poetry.

This may of course be the crux of the argument, getting back to that word I used at the beginning of this essay, sublimation.  The exquisitely shattering heartache that his later poems reveal shine a light onto something that he could never let go.  Fifty of the 70 poems in A Shropshire Lad were written in the span of 1895. Upon learning that Moses Jackson was dying in 1922, he finished Last Poems, his follow up volume, in a mere two months.  Housman thereupon sent a copy to Jackson.  Here was a now brittle and stiff old man, a man who Willa Cather called 'gaunt and grey and embittered' closing the door on a legacy that he was unable to escape.  But he still kept it hidden.  It wasn't until after his death, with his estate in the hands of his brother, that his romantically charged and much more personal work emerged in 1936 with the publication of More Poems.

And it shows, for here is the tender heart cut open and laid bare and bloodied on a stone of sacrifice.  All the hurt and unexpressed feelings, all the pent up years of crushing down his humanness come out in More Poems.  The homo-eroticism is evident.

XXX

Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over,

I only vex you the more I try;

All's wrong that ever I've done or said,

And not to help it in this dull head;

Shake hands, here's luck,  goodbye.

But if you come to a road where danger

Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share

Be good to the lad that loves you true

And the soul that was born to die for you,

And whistle and I'll be there.

Whistle and I'll be there.  An imperative sentence, but a request.  That one singular line betrays a lifetime of keeping most people at a distance, and finally we are seeing some of the true man.  Thin and reedy to be sure, but undeniably human.