Housman Country Read online

  Housman photographed by Henry Van der Weyde, c. 1894

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  For

  Sue

  in memory

  of

  Pat & Teddy

  PREFACE

  In her introduction to Grant Richards’s memoir of her brother, Katharine Symons described the book as ‘not a complete biography of A.E. Housman but a nearly complete biography of his poems’. Housman Country is neither of these things, though it might be described as an account of the life and times of A Shropshire Lad. It is for this reason that the text of Housman’s first volume has been included in this book, and those poems discussed in the text are additionally identified by the Roman numeral each of them bears in order to make them easy to locate. Since many of the poems published in later volumes were drafted or written at the same time as those in A Shropshire Lad or otherwise bear on the narrative, I have often referred to or discussed them. There are innumerable editions of Housman’s collected poems, but all quotations from them in this book are taken from A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems (2010), authoritatively edited by Archie Burnett and readily available as a Penguin paperback or as an e-book. These poems are identified in the notes, once again by the Roman numerals used by Housman, which will make them easy to locate in any edition.

  There remain whole areas of Housman’s life and work – notably his career as a classicist – that do not come into this book. Several biographies of Housman, referred to in the text and listed in the bibliography, supply a more comprehensive account for anyone seeking one. Equally, at a time when questions of national identity are being much discussed, ‘Englishness’ here describes something that seemed rather more clearly identifiable during Housman’s lifetime, although it is still recognisable today. My principal intention has been to investigate what I have called ‘Housman Country’, an English sensibility in which literature, landscape, music and emotion all play their part, and which finds one of its most perfect expressions in Housman’s poetry.

  Peter Parker, London E3, March 2016

  I

  ENGLAND IN YOUR POCKET

  He is a strange phenomenon, but to my mind the most perfect expression of something deeply English and a whole mood of English history – a true master.

  Ted Hughes on A.E. Housman

  Towards the end of February 1896 a small volume of sixty-three poems was published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd in an edition of 500 copies at half a crown each. The author was a thirty-seven-year-old professor of Latin at University College, London, named Alfred Edward Housman, and he had been obliged to pay £30 towards the cost of publication. A small, slow trickle of reviews was led by The Times, which in its brief round-up of ‘Books of the Week’ on 27 March noted: ‘Mr Housman has a true sense of the sweetness of country life and of its tragedies too, and his gift of melodious expression is genuine.’ Other reviewers were less faint in their praise, but there is little in their verdicts to suggest that A Shropshire Lad would become, and remain, one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the language. By the end of the year its combined sales in Britain and America amounted to only 381 copies, and the first edition did not sell out until two years later – and only then because Housman’s brother Laurence bought up the remaining copies.

  It took the enthusiasm and persistence of a young publisher called Grant Richards to rescue the book from this faltering start. Richards had reviewed A Shropshire Lad in W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, rightly describing Housman as ‘a very real poet, and a very English one at that’. On 1 January 1897 he set up his own publishing company, Grant Richards Ltd, with premises on Henrietta Street in Covent Garden, declaring that ‘A Shropshire Lad was perhaps of all books the one I most wanted on my list.’ Housman took some persuading, but a new edition of 500 copies was published by Richards on 14 September 1898. Although sales were not exactly brisk, the little book’s reputation gradually grew and it soon went into further editions. In America, meanwhile, the poems had found more immediate popularity after 161 copies of the first edition were imported and published under the John Lane (New York) imprint in 1897. The book was widely pirated and, although Lane reprinted his edition several times, innumerable unauthorised editions were issued from 1902 onwards, continuing to appear even after Henry Holt & Co. published the first authorised US edition in 1922. Housman took a lenient view of piracy, complaining only when books were badly produced or poems misprinted. ‘Vanity, not avarice, is my ruling passion,’ he told Richards; ‘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.’

  Apart from eliminating misprints, Housman’s principal concern was that his book should remain affordable, and in order to ensure this he declined royalties. ‘I only stipulate for simplicity of design and moderateness of price,’ he told Richards. Having for his first edition raised the original cover price by one shilling to 3s 6d – ‘perhaps the largest sum which can be called moderate, but I suppose it deserves the name’, Housman grumbled – Richards lowered it to 3s for his second. In December 1899 the publisher suggested a new size for the third edition. ‘I rather like the notion of a pocket edition,’ Housman commented. ‘Large paper and illustrations are things I have not much affection for.’ An octavo edition was therefore published in January 1903, priced at 1s.

  In 1904 Richards ‘gave full weight to the author’s strong preference for a really cheap book’ and published what he called a ‘waistcoat pocket edition (at sixpence with a cloth cover; at a shilling bound in leather)’. This edition was unfortunately full of misprints, though Housman felt ‘bound to say however that the leather binding makes a very pretty book’, and it sold well, serving as ‘a pleasant and inexpensive Christmas card’ for the literary minded. The poet Edward Shanks recalled buying a copy of this edition in a Falmouth bookshop in 1907 when he was fifteen: ‘It was not for its reputation that I bought it, for I had never heard of either A.E. Housman or A Shropshire Lad. I like to think now that I must have turned over the pages as I stood in the shop and recognized the quality of the verses. The more probable supposition, however, is that I was seduced by the price. It was only sixpence, and I hadn’t much more, and it was a very low price indeed to pay for such an attractive-looking little book.’

  The growth in the book’s popularity was most marked during the early years of the twentieth century: in 1905 it sold 886 copies, but by 1911 the average yearly sale was an astonishing 13,500 copies. Sales were undoubtedly boosted by the large number of composers who made settings of Housman’s poems during this period, which had seen a renaissance in English music and a rediscovery of traditional English folk song. In Housman, English composers felt they had found their own Heine or Müller, and A Shropshire Lad provided ideal texts for the forging of a truly English equivalent of the lieder tradition. According to the poet Robert Nichols, by the outbreak of the First World War
, Housman’s little book was ‘in every pocket’. Poems describing the quiet places of an idealised rural England, a ‘land of lost content’ to which one could never return, struck a chord with those huddled in trenches amid the shattered landscapes of France and Belgium. Housman’s themes of love and loss and of ‘lads that will die in their glory and never be old’ seemed additionally poignant and of the moment to those left at home when their men marched away.

  The book’s popularity was maintained after the war, with Grant Richards producing numerous further editions during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 alone he issued 5000 copies of the small edition and 2000 of the larger one, with another reprint of 5000 copies of the smaller edition the following year. Housman felt sure that his insistence upon the book’s availability in inexpensive editions was largely responsible for its continuing sales, proudly telling an admirer who wrote to him in 1934 that ‘for the last thirty years or more it has been procurable for eighteenpence’.

  By the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication, A Shropshire Lad had gone through forty-eight editions in Britain and had become securely embedded in the national culture. In 1935 Eugene Goossens, who was at that time conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and described himself as ‘a terrific lover of the Shropshire Lad poems’, had insisted that ‘The particular psychology they express is something which belongs only to Englishmen and it is idle to expect an American (as I know from experience) to try and understand the underlying idiom of these poems. Nobody who hasn’t lived somewhere near the Wrekin or Bredon Hill or, to go a little farther afield, the Cotswold country, as I have, could ever hope to relish these works and their peculiar “aura”.’ That this was not the case may be judged by the fact that forty-seven American editions (not including mere reprints or imported volumes) were listed in a 1946 bibliography, and that a note in the US edition of Housman’s Selected Poems, published three years earlier, stated: ‘No contemporary poet has been so widely read or appreciated as this quiet scholar, whose verse has the accent of immortality and who always prized quality above quantity.’

  Similarly, Morton D. Zabel, the literary critic and academic who became Professor of English at the University of Chicago, could confidently assert on the fiftieth anniversary of A Shropshire Lad’s original publication that ‘no book of poetry published in the past half-century has attained a greater popularity.’ One unusual mark of that popularity was that Yardley could use two lines from one of the poems to advertise its Orchis perfume in the New Yorker in 1931. A Shropshire Lad has been reprinted continually ever since its half-centenary and individual lines of the poems remain familiar even to those who have never read the book. In the 120 years since its original publication it has never once been out of print.

  *   *   *

  The unlikely author of this enduringly popular volume of poetry was not himself a Shropshire Lad. ‘I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time,’ he confessed in 1933. ‘I had a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were our Western horizon.’ That horizon was visible from Fockbury, the small Worcestershire hamlet where A.E. Housman was born on 26 March 1859. He was the eldest of the seven children of a genial but financially improvident solicitor, and he spent his childhood at Perry Hall, a large family house in nearby Bromsgrove. It was here that his siblings were born: Robert (1860), Clemence (1861), Katharine (always known as Kate, 1862), Basil (1864), Laurence (1865) and Herbert (1868). Already weakened by this swift succession of childbirths, Housman’s beloved mother, Sarah Jane, developed breast cancer shortly after the birth of Herbert and by 1870 had become an invalid, unable any longer to manage the household. A cousin, Mary Housman, came to take on the role, while the older children took it in turns to read aloud to and write letters for their stricken mother. When it became clear that Sarah Jane was dying, Housman was sent to stay with his godmother at Woodchester in rural Gloucestershire. It was here that news of his mother’s death reached him on his twelfth birthday. Housman had been brought up as a devout Christian, but the loss of his mother began a process which led him to reject Christianity altogether and become a convinced atheist at the age of twenty-one.

  Housman had gone as a scholar to his local public school, King Edward’s in Bromsgrove, where he excelled at Classics and won several prizes for Greek, Latin and English verse. In 1877 he was awarded an open classical scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he was generally regarded as exceptional, and where he met a fellow student called Moses Jackson, with whom he fell unrequitedly in love. To everyone’s astonishment, having gained a first in Moderations, the exam taken at the end of his second year, he entirely failed his finals. Instead of embarking on the academic career everyone had predicted, he was obliged to sit the Civil Service Examination, and as a result accepted in 1882 a comparatively lowly job as a clerk in the Patent Office in London. He did not abandon his studies, however; he spent his evenings and weekends working on classical texts in the reading room of the British Museum, and the articles he began contributing to scholarly magazines gradually acquired him a considerable reputation in his field. When in 1892 the Chair of Latin fell vacant at University College, London, he was able to provide seventeen testimonials in support of his application for the post, to which he was duly appointed. He had written poetry since childhood, mostly light verse, but in the late 1880s, while living in Highgate, north London, he began writing the poems that would eventually be published in A Shropshire Lad, the majority of them in a sudden burst of creativity in 1895.

  The success of A Shropshire Lad led many people to enquire when a second volume of poems might be ready for the press. Housman was disinclined to oblige, concentrating instead on scholarly publications, notably his edition of Manilius’s Astronomica, which appeared (at his own expense) in five volumes between 1903 and 1930. He had been appointed Kennedy Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge in 1911, and would remain there as a Fellow of Trinity College until his death. He continued, somewhat costively, to write new poems and revise those he had excluded from A Shropshire Lad. Another burst of creativity led him to announce to his delighted publisher in April 1922 that he hoped to have a second volume ready for the autumn. The decisively but as it turned out inaccurately titled Last Poems appeared on 19 October 1922 and attracted widespread notice and very good sales.

  Housman had left it to his brother Laurence, himself a renowned poet and playwright, to decide what should be published after his death. Most of the poems were contained in four notebooks and the only instruction Housman left was that Laurence should publish ‘nothing which [he] considered inferior to anything that had already appeared’. After Housman died on 30 April 1936, Laurence selected forty-eight items to publish as More Poems in October of that year. The following year an additional eighteen poems appeared in his memoir A.E.H., alongside some ‘light verse and parodies’ and a selection of letters. In a note explaining his reasons for publishing what became known as the ‘Additional Poems’, Laurence argued that although the three previous volumes now constituted ‘the canon’ of his brother’s poetry, nothing he was now publishing was ‘of a lower standard’ than the one Housman had set. Five more poems, three of them ‘rescued from periodicals’, were appended to these Additional Poems when they were subsumed into the canon as part of the first Collected Poems, published in 1939. This volume excluded the light verse and parodies, but contained three previously published translations from the Greek.

  Setting aside these translations, the light verse, and the assorted fragments that have subsequently been published, the collected edition of Housman’s poetry remains small: 170 numbered poems with the addition of the two used as epigraphs for Last Poems and More Poems. Few of these take up more than a page and many of them consist of as few as two or three four-line stanzas. It seems very little on which to rest a considerable reputation, but if Housman had published nothing after A Shropshire Lad, he would still have earned his place in literary history. Thi
s is the volume that people always associate with him and it has retained the affection of readers from all backgrounds over many years. At the time of writing it is available in thirty-one editions.

  There will continue to be arguments over the literary merits of A Shropshire Lad, but although Housman was not entirely indifferent to the views of critics and academics, and had a robust sense of his own literary standing, he wrote for ordinary people rather than his scholarly peers. ‘My chief object in publishing my verses was to give pleasure to a few young men here and there,’ he once said (women, young or old, tending not to enter his calculations very often). It is to the young that the poems’ prevailing mood of romantic melancholy, their depiction of thwarted or unrequited love, and their railing against the injustices of life have always had a special appeal. ‘I don’t know how it is with the young today,’ wrote W.H. Auden in 1972, ‘but to my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent.’ George Orwell concurred, describing Housman as ‘the writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young’ in the years between 1910 and 1925. He described the poems’ themes as ‘adolescent’: ‘murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death’ – though by that reckoning the plays of Shakespeare might equally be deemed adolescent in their preoccupations. One sees, however, his point, and it is in adolescence that poetry tends to strike home most forcefully, even among those who may never read it thereafter. Orwell claimed to have had the whole of A Shropshire Lad by heart while at Eton: ‘these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy’. Orwell further felt that young people were attracted by the ‘blasphemous, antinomian, “cynical” strain’ of Housman’s poetry, particularly in the wake of the First World War, as the result of which a huge gulf had opened up between the generations. Housman, he wrote, ‘stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young’. Orwell would become disenchanted with Housman, but others did not, and Cyril Connolly’s brutal reassessment of the poems in the New Statesman shortly after Housman’s death caused howls of outrage – an indication of how far Housman retained his hold upon readers well beyond their impressionable youth.