"Thick on Severn snow the leaves": Housman's Letters

"Thick on Severn snow the leaves": Housman's Letters

THE LETTERS OF A. E. HOUSMAN RUNS TO over a thousand pages, flanked in these two volumes by a detailed and indispensable list of recipients-with biographical information about each one-at the beginning, and an index of recipients (as well as a general index) at the end.1 To read through them requires some patience, because many of them are concerned with the forgettable details of everyday life: acceptances or refusals of invitations to dine, acknowledgements of receipt of proofs or payments, reports of good or ill health. The two volumes also include all his scholarly correspondence, mostly about emendation of Greek and Latin texts. However, I concur with the editor Archie Burnett when in his Introduction he claims that the earlier, standard edition of the letters (edited by Henry Maas and published by Harvard University Press in 1971) presented a flawed and incomplete view of the great poet. The earlier compilation includes only 883 letters; this two-volume work includes 2,327. The cumulative effect of all these letters does more to suggest that Housman was a convivial person, attached to those in his inner circle, especially his brother Laurence, sister Kate, and sister-in-law Jeannie, as well as friends like Percy Withers, Elizabeth Wise, and his publisher Grant Richards. It also shows him to be studiedly uninterested in fame or fortune. In general he refuses to allow the poems in A Shropshire Lad to be anthologized, on many occasions he foregoes royalties, and he gives away quite a bit of money to those in need.

During his student days, Housman wrote lively letters to his siblings and his stepmother Lucy, with funny verses interpolated; later, around the turn of the century, he wrote his most evocative letters about travel in France, Italy, Switzerland and Turkey to Lucy. (She died in 1907. Though it is clear that Housman was traumatized by the early death of his mother, especially since he was kept away from her as she was dying, and was not allowed to attend her funeral, he seems to have been quite fond of his stepmother.) These earlier letters stand in contrast to the laconic travel letters written later in life, to his sister or his publisher Grant Richards, which mostly discuss restaurants and wine lists. Here, for example, is a letter to Lucy from September 1904:

Constantinople is famous for its sunsets, and I used to watch them from the western edge of the hill that Pera now stands on, looking over the cypresses of what was once a graveyard but now contains only dust and dogs and is beginning to be built over. From here you look down across the Golden Horn and see the western half of Stambul, and the downs still further west, where the sun goes under. The sky would be orange and the hillside of the city would be dark with a few lights coming out, and the Golden Horn would reflect the blue or grey of the upper sky; and as there was a new moon, the crescent used to come and hang itself appropriately over the mosque of Muhammad the Conqueror.

This is the kind of letter one expects from Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the great letter and travel writers of the late nineteenth century, though it doesn't quite achieve the gorgeous cadences and harmonies one finds in Stevenson. But such letters in Housman's Nachlass are few, as few as the poems in Stevenson's Collected Poems that achieve the perfection characteristic of so many of Housman's.

The great frustration of reading through Volume I is that the years of the early 1880s, when Housman was "inventing love," have left almost no extant letters, as likewise the mid-1890s, when on his own account he wrote or began most of the poems that would be published during or after his lifetime. Especially since the recent success of Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love, the amorous details of Housman's life are generally known: he fell in love with a fellow student at Oxford, Moses Jackson, who later became his roommate while they were both employed at the Patent Office in London. Jackson was, however, not homosexual, and must have rebuffed Housman quite conclusively in 1885, at which point they ceased to live together. In 1887, Jackson was posted to India; in 1889 he returned to England only to marry; and after his early retirement he moved to a farm in Canada. Many poems in A Shropshire Lad (1896) as well as in Last Poems (1922) and the two collections Laurence Housman published, More Poems (1936) and the "Additional Poems" in Collected Poems (1939), were spurred by this unrequited love. He referred to the period ending with the departure of Jackson as "the emotional part of my life," and thereafter seemed to relegate eros to summer trips on the Continent, where according to his biographers he frequented baths and brothels, though in his letters home he refers only to traveling with "companions."

At the turn of the last century, neither British law nor British society was tolerant of homosexuality. Housman admired Oscar Wilde but had no wish to share either his public flaunting of the law or the imprisonment and ruin that followed upon it. Housman was politically very conservative. Still, he wrote many poems (especially among those published after his death) that more or less explicitly address love between men, or complain about the treatment of those who can no more change their sexual orientation than the color of their hair. He seemed never to recover from the suffering inflicted on him by Jackson. The one letter from Housman to Jackson that has not been destroyed or blocked from publication was written just before the latter's death in early 1923; until very recently, it belonged to a collector of Housman memorabilia who lived in Blois, France, and so did not appear in the earlier collection of letters. Housman assembled his second book of poems, Last Poems, very quickly when in the spring of 1922 he heard that his friend was fatally ill; the letter dated October 19, 1922 was sent to Jackson along with a copy of the just-published book. He received it, read it and responded by letter shortly before he died. Housman's letter begins,