Paul Johnson
From Bromsgrove to Trinity
The Letters of A E Housman
Edited by Archie Burnett (Oxford University Press 2 vols 960pp £180)

Housman, one of the egregious eccentrics of English poetry, was the son of a busy solicitor who practised in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. He had two sisters and four brothers, one of whom, Laurence, wrote a West End smash, Victoria Regina. He had a passion for Latin and Greek but not much interest in classical history and philosophy. Hence, at St John's, Oxford, he took a first in Mods but flopped in Greats and had to seek employment in the Patent Office (like Einstein). However, his powerful pieces on classical philology in learned journals eventually led to recognition as a scholar and in 1892, when he was thirty-three, he was appointed professor of Latin at University College, London. Nearly twenty years later, his career was crowned by his election, against a strong field, to the chair of Latin at Cambridge. Thus he exchanged a dim house in Pinner for a splendid set of rooms in Trinity, where he lived till his death in 1936.

In the vain attempt to solve the mystery of Housman, who, despite many efforts - including a superb play by Tom Stoppard - remains elusive, it must be grasped that virtually all his working life was spent on teaching, lecturing on and publishing the work of obscure Latin authors, devoting to them bone-grinding industry which to us is inexplicable and was pretty odd even a century ago. There is an eye-witness description of him, on a hot Saturday afternoon in August, sitting at his table with a huge Latin dictionary before him, writing furiously, dipping his pen into a jam-jar full of ink. His chief object of study was the gruesome Manilius, a writer from the time of Tiberius about whom nothing is known but who left behind him five books of verse about astrology and the signs of the zodiac. Housman admitted that Manilius was 'a very poor poet' and that his subject matter is repellent. Yet he attracted the attention of Bentley, greatest of all classical scholars and, in our own time, of the weird Shackleton Bailey (whose chief claim to fame, however, is his brief marriage to the fascinating Hilly, first wife of Kingsley Amis). To Manilius Housman effectively devoted his professional life, and the five volumes he published on him between 1903 and 1930 are his abiding monument.

However, in 1896 Housman astonished even those who knew him best by publishing a volume of sixty-three poems, A Shropshire Lad, which achieved success even at the time and assured him immortality. He was not a professional poet, could not write to order or at will, and needed a powerful personal stimulus to versify at all. He said he composed most of the poems in 1895 under 'continuous excitement'. Thereafter he wrote little, though a further volume was reluctantly published in 1922 and a few more poems after his death.

What are we to make of this strange man? His letters provide a few clues. This is by far the best and fullest edition, printing every letter that has been found, some 2327 complete and four fragments. In my view Housman was one of the great letter-writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But he is an acquired taste. The word which applies best to him is laconic, the pithy brevity of Sparta. A high proportion of the letters are to his publisher Grant Richards, and most are a single sentence, acknowledging proofs or giving a direction. Very occasionally he lets himself go, as when describing the political relationship between A J Balfour and his own bête noire, Joe Chamberlain. There is a tiny masterpiece on the subject of understanding poetry which characteristically has been cut to the bare bone and is worth quoting in full:

When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to one of three causes. Either the author through lack of skill has failed to express his meaning; or he has concealed it intentionally; or he has no meaning either to conceal or express. In none of these cases does he like to be asked about it. In the first case it makes him feel humiliated; in the second it makes him feel embarrassed; in the third it makes him feel found out. The real meaning of a poem is what it means to the reader.

Many letters deal with classical problems. This, for instance, is typical:

In Mart. XI 99 5-6 I quite agree with you about nimias, and I think Minyas absurd as well as ungrammatical, but I have never been able to stomach magni, because culus is proktos, not puge, and there seems to be no point in accusing the lady of euruproktia.

Always laconic, Housman was also diffident, though far from humble. He loved saying No: to universities offering him honorary degrees, to government honours (he turned down the OM), above all to publishers who wanted to include his poems in anthologies. He referred to Latin as his 'trade', called himself a 'pedant' rather than a scholar and wrote: 'I am only a connoisseur and not a critic.' Declining to join the Cambridge governing body, he explained he was 'an egotistical hedonist. It would find me quite useless, and it can very well dispense with any lustre which might be shed upon it by my exiguous (though eximious) output.'

He could be sharp. He refused to be included in an anthology with Meredith 'as I am a respectable character and do not care to be seen in the company of galvanised corpses. By this time [1903] he stinketh for he has been dead twenty years.' He wrote: 'I do not want to write letters to a woman whose name is Birdie.' He wrote: 'Mr Thomas thanks me for "a poem", and prints two: which is the one he doesn't thank me for?' Here is a letter received by another anthologist called Moore of Burton-upon-Trent:

Permission to quote is one thing, permission to misquote is another. First you take certain verses of mine and disfigure them with illiterate alterations, then you ask me to let you attribute them publicly to me, and now, because I do not abet you in injuring my reputation, you think it rather hard. Why was Burton built on Trent?

But though he often refused permission to quote, he also declined fees and royalties. He wrote:

Vanity, not avarice, is my ruling passion; and so long as young men write to me from America saying that they would rather part with their hair than with their copy of my book, I do not feel the need of food and drink.

This brings us to his other ruling passion. Housman was in love for most of his life with a man called Jackson. But this was never consummated. Jackson married, had children, went out of reach in Canada. When he died in 1923, Housman marked the event with a laconic cry: 'Now I can die myself: I could not have borne to leave him behind me in a world where anything might happen to him.' Whether Housman ever had affairs is unknowable. On one of his constant trips to France, he reports that he was accompanied by 'a young Frenchman'. In another letter he says he always keeps enough in his current account to enable him to 'flee the country'. He lived through the Wilde scandal and another involving Norman Douglas, who jumped his bail and fled into exile in Capri after an incident with a young man in the V&A. Of course Housman may have been joking. He found a few things in life funny. But for the most part existence appalled him. His last written word was 'Ugh!'