This yearning for new and distant scenes, this craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness – they were, he admitted to himself, an impulse towards flight, flight from the spot which was the daily theatre of a rigid, cold, and passionate service. That service he loved, had even almost come to love the enervating daily struggle between a proud, tenacious well-tried will and this growing fatigue …

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1911)1

He enjoyed a glass of port. That is something. One wishes he could have enjoyed the happy highways which he resigned in the body and possessed so painfully in the imagination. Perhaps he had a better time than the outsider supposes. Did he ever drink the stolen waters which he recommends so ardently to others? I hope so.

E. M. Forster on A. E. Housman2

As a classical scholar at St John’s, Alfred Housman must sometimes have wished that he could go abroad to visit the classical sites of Italy or Greece. But he had no money to do so and, in any case, this was after the age of the Grand Tour, and in the 1870s and 1880s Continental travel was not as fashionable as it had been in the previous century.3

After his failure in Greats, Housman remained comparatively poor for another eleven years, and it was during this period that his confinement in England became really galling. As he fell in love with Moses Jackson, and came to realise the homosexual nature of that attachment, Housman also came to realise that he was effectively trapped in a land whose moral codes and attitudes were extremely hostile to men of his kind. Preserving his reputation depended upon Housman disguising his real nature even from his friends. He wrote bitterly about this in 1894:

The Continent meant a large measure of toleration for homosexuals, and a real escape for all sorts of people from the bonds of Victorian respectability. But the Continent was as far away for a poor man as the Saturn or Mercury which Housman mentioned in the last lines of his complaint:

It was not until Housman had been a Professor at University College London for five years that he felt financially secure enough to spend money on foreign travel. Then, in August 1897, at the age of thirty-eight, he crossed the Channel for the first time, and travelled by train to the Paris of the Impressionists, with its little music halls and cafés chantants and yellow fiacres.

No doubt Housman enjoyed the good living, the low prices, and the entertainment. The Bible had taught him: ‘There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour’ (Eccl. 2:24); and by getting some pleasure out of life, Housman felt that he was doing something positive to set against the indifference of the Universe. Later he expanded this feeling into a principle of his philosophy: ‘I am a Cyrenaic or egoistic hedonist, and regard the pleasure of the moment as the only possible motive of action.’ To his stepmother Alfred wrote admiringly about the architectural excellence of Paris; about the beauty of the Seine as it flowed beside handsome quays and beneath handsome bridges; and about the wild and picturesque Bois de Boulogne, which he preferred to the more formal London parks. He also visited Versailles; and then, after a week in Paris, he decided to venture further afield, and boarded a train for Rome and Naples.

Italy was hotter than usual for late September, and the damp and enervating Sirocco was blowing for part of the time; but this did not mar Housman’s enjoyment. In Rome, the classical scholar stood among the ruins of the Forum, and the romantic poet searched for the graves of Keats and Shelley. From Naples, he travelled up and down the coast, visiting the islands of Ischia and Capri, seeing ‘cyclamens blooming as thick as wood anemones in April’, and going out to the Roman town of Pompeii. Alfred also travelled to Vesuvius, from where, much impressed, he wrote to Lucy a detailed letter describing his ascent, the sight of molten lava and of the crater’s edge.

On this first trip abroad Housman had behaved very much like any other tourist, and there is no hint of anything which might have caused unfavourable comment at home. On his next journey three years later, things turned out very differently; and he then began to make foreign travels a regular part of his annual routine.

It was in fact in September 1900, shortly after the second edition of A Shropshire Lad had been launched, that Housman went abroad for the second time. After a windy and rainy crossing to Calais, he travelled by train across the flatlands of northern France. He went on through Switzerland, past Lucerne, and along the shores of Lake Zug, admiring the Alpine scenery. Then through the St Gotthard tunnel, and finally down to the plains of Lombardy and the city of Milan.

Milan did not impress Housman. Apart from its old stained glass windows, he found little to appreciate in the cathedral, and was glad to find that ‘The inside is very dark, a fault on the right side, and so the defects in details do not trouble one much’. As for the city in general, Housman commented disparagingly: ‘It considers itself the intellectual capital of the country, and probably hopes to go to France when it dies.’ After a short stay Alfred took the train for Venice. He reached that city on a romantic evening, describing his arrival to Lucy:

Thomas Mann wrote evocatively:4

Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time – or returning thither after long absence – and stepping into a Venetian gondola? That singular conveyance, come down unchanged from ballad times, black as nothing else on earth except a coffin – what pictures it calls up of lawless, silent adventures in the plashing night; or even more, what visions of death itself, the bier and solemn rites and last soundless voyage!

Venice was the home of several English families; and Walter Ashburner, Housman’s colleague at University College London, would have given him an introduction to his friend Horatio Brown, one of the leaders of the English colony.5 Brown, an expert in Italian art and history, had been for twenty-five years a friend of the homosexual writer John Addington Symonds – ‘Mr Soddington Symonds’ as he was apparently described by the poet Swinburne. Symonds had been in the habit of visiting Venice, where he had befriended a young gondolier – an attachment which did not, in that tolerant city, with its notorious homosexual underworld, prevent him from being invited to official functions.6

Housman, following in Symonds’s footsteps, had soon befriended a gondolier of his own. Andrea was a young man of twenty-three who had been blinded in one eye in an accident. This injury, though it made him less obviously handsome, was a sure way to Alfred’s sympathy – as were Andrea’s tales of the wife, two sisters, mother, mother-in-law and paralysed uncle whom he was expected to support. Soon Alfred was enjoying a double love-affair; with Venice and with his gondolier. Perhaps, like another visitor to Venice, he felt7

as if I were dreaming, or as if this was some exquisite holiday of my childhood. One could talk for years of these passages in which, amidst the shadow and sunlight of cool, gray walls, a gleam of colour has shown itself. You look down narrow courts to lovely windows or doors or bridges or niches with a virgin or a saint in them…. Unexpected doorways, dark and deep with pleasant industries going on inside, bakerooms with a wealth of new, warm bread; butcheries with red meat and brass scales; small restaurants where appetising roasts and meat-pies are displayed.

At the heart of Venice lies the Piazza San Marco, overlooked by the Basilica of St Mark, which Housman, who was drawn to visit it almost daily during his stay, described, with some justice, as the most beautiful building in the world. Alfred also toured the palaces, the churches, and the art galleries. ‘The painter best represented in Venice’, he wrote, ‘is that lurid and theatrical Tintoret, whom I avoid, and Paul Veronese, whom one soon sees enough of.’ He preferred the paintings of Giovanni Bellini.

Often at sunset Housman would go up the Campanile in the Piazza. From here, with Venice looking ‘like one large island’, he watched the sun go down and the stars come out. Now, rather to his surprise, he tasted some of the pleasures which he had longed for so intensely since childhood:

The following September, after revisiting Paris, Housman went to Italy again. He travelled down to the ‘rather handsome and very sleepy town’ of Pisa, and also spent a few days in Florence before making his way for a second time to Venice and the intimacy of Andrea. On his first visit to Venice, Housman had admired the work of Giovanni Bellini; now he travelled out to Castelfranco to admire the ‘Enthroned Madonna’ of Giorgione. While in Venice he stayed at the Hotel Europa which, he wrote later, had ‘absolutely the best possible situation…. In dignity, according to my gondolier, it ranks next to Danieli’s, where the food and drink are better, but which is noisy, and not central enough, and dearer.’

Horatio Brown had just returned from staying with their mutual friend Walter Ashburner in the Engadine,8 and soon invited Housman to have Sunday lunch with him and his mother. Housman was pleased to accept.

Housman was now forty-two years old; and during the next seven years, until the autumn of 1908, he continued to make fairly regular visits to Italy, visits which usually ended with a few days in Venice with Andrea. In 1903, he stayed on the shores of Lake Garda before travelling on to Venice;9 two years later he was staying in Milan at the Cavour, where Ashburner introduced him to the wine ‘Camastra, an acquaintance which has materially alleviated the sorrows of the Italian table d’hôte’;10  in 1906 he went first to Rome and Capri, a trip which led him to comment rather condescendingly on ‘the South-Italian character, which is interesting but rather vile’;11 and then in 1908 he was planning to stay on the shores of Lake Garda again. Ashburner had been hoping to see him in Venice, but Housman wrote to him at the end of August:12

They were not extraordinarily fascinating, nor did Garda detain him long: in fact the holiday was for various reasons a great disappointment. For one thing, the scenery did not live up to Alfred’s expectations. He stayed at Garda itself, which, as he wrote to his sister Kate, ‘on the former occasion struck me as the prettiest part of the lake, when viewed from the steam-boat in which I was coming away’. But he complained petulantly:13

On land it is not so satisfactory, as the cypresses and olives which ornament the hills are mostly in private grounds, and there is the usual Italian lack of real open country. Also the food and cooking did not suit me, and when I got to Venice, as sitting all day in a gondola is not the best thing in the world for restoring one’s digestion, I was more uncomfortable, for about five days, than I have been for a long time.

It was not only Housman’s digestion that was upset; he was falling out of love with Andrea.

Housman subsequently wrote a letter to Grant Richards in which he advised him about where to stay and to eat in Venice – (‘The best restaurant to my thinking is the Vapore, and my gondolier tells me that all foreigners say the same. From the Piazza you go under the clock and along the Merceria …’); but, although he made one more fleeting visit to Venice in the autumn of 1912, his own regular visits to that city had now come to an end. Housman’s passion for his gondolier had evaporated; and at a later date, after writing a bitter verse about Moses Jackson, in which he complained:

But this unlucky love should last

    When answered passions thin to air;

Eternal fate so deep has cast

    Its sure foundation of despair.

(MP 12)

he drafted a poem in which he made his farewell to Andrea. In his letter to Kate of November 1908, he mentioned that the Campanile ‘has now risen to half its old height and the work is going on more briskly, so that they expect to finish it …’.14 Now he used the phallic image of the ‘tower that stood and fell’ in a poem about his gondolier:

Even before the rift with Andrea, Housman had not confined his foreign travels to Italy. Rather surprisingly, for a classical scholar, he never visited Greece; but in the summer of 1904 he took the Orient Express from Paris all the way to Constantinople. As other travellers have been, Alfred was impressed by the immense extent of the old Roman walls; a romantic impression of the fallen might of the Empire was heightened by ‘the loneliness around. Inside, the skirts of the city are thinly peopled, more market gardens than houses; outside, the country is rolling downs and graveyards, with cultivation only here and there.’ He sketched details of city life for his stepmother: the carts drawn by white oxen or black buffaloes, ‘pretty frequent in the streets; and once my carriage was stopped by a train of camels’; the fighting rams kept by the Turks as pets, which ‘may sometimes be met in the streets, invading the greengrocers’ shops and butting at the boys, who catch them by the horns’; the plague of sick dogs; the fire service, which would happily ‘gaze at the conflagration: if the owner of the property likes to hire them, they will put out the fire for him, but not otherwise’. Housman was also struck by

Alfred delighted in the city’s famous sunsets, and later told his brother Laurence that Constantinople was the world’s finest site.15

As well as visiting Constantinople, Alfred made several journeys to Paris, where he found that he very much preferred French cooking to Italian. In the late spring of 1907 Housman invited Grant Richards, who happened to be in Paris at the same time, for dinner at the Tour d’Argent. This restaurant was managed by Frederic, described in the contemporary Gourmet’s Guide to Europe as16

the one great ‘character’ in the dining world of Paris. In appearance he is the double of Ibsen, the same sweeping whiskers, the same wave of hair brushed straight off from the forehead. He is an inventor of dishes, and it is as well to ask for a list of his ‘creations’ which are of fish, eggs, meat and fruit, and generally named after some patron of the establishment.

At the Café Royal in London Grant Richards had been impressed by the skill and understanding with which Housman ordered food and wine; and now he found that, at the Tour d’Argent in Paris, ‘the name of Housman commanded immediate respect’. After a ‘characteristic but simple’ soup, the two Englishmen enjoyed Barbue Housman,17 the dish of fish and small new potatoes which Frederic had named after his discriminating customer. This was followed by canard à la presse, a dish for which Frederic was so famous that he presented each guest who ordered it with a card stating the number of the duck so prepared since Frederic had taken over the restaurant. Richards wrote fondly

that duck was the richest, and the most succulent, that I have ever eaten; and with it went the richest sauce. With the food a fine white Burgundy, followed by a great old red Burgundy! And Coffee … and a fine dating back to the beginning of the last century … that 1907 meal was the finest that he ever gave me …

When Grant Richards subsequently wrote his entertaining and light-hearted novel Caviare (1912), he gave his central character, Charles, something of the approach to good living which he admired in Housman

Charles not only ordered good dinners himself, but he was the cause of good dinners in others. With him as guest, somehow or other, even the most careless host didn’t push the carte across the table, as if to say, ‘Order what you like: I shall have steak and kidney pudding.’ There was something about his attitude as he sat at table that suggested that he expected to lunch or dine as the case might be, and not simply to feed (p. 103).

After the break with Andrea, Housman went more frequently to Paris. Not only was it the gastronomic capital of the world, but it offered a rich diet of sexual adventures. When in August 1909, at the age of fifty, Housman wrote to Mrs Rothenstein saying that he would prefer not to holiday with her family at a French seaside resort, he explained:

This joke about the vices of Paris concealed a truth which would have astonished the Rothensteins and his other friends in London: Housman had begun to make use of the less well-advertised services of the French demi-monde. The details of this may surprise even those who have accepted Alfred’s devotion to Moses Jackson, his attachment to Adalbert Jackson, and his friendship with Andrea.

Among a private collection of Housman’s papers, there exists a small document in Housman’s handwriting, found in a book when part of his library was sold at Blackwell’s after his death. On this document are what would seem to be references to a number of male prostitutes, including sailors and ballet-dancers, together with a note of the price paid on various occasions for their services, and a marginal note in which Alfred refers with some satisfaction to the large number of these homosexual encounters which he had enjoyed in the space of a little over a fortnight.18

Paris offered other erotic possibilities. Housman took a keen interest in books which were banned in Britain as pornographic, and here he was able to buy some French and German works described by his brother Laurence as classics of their kind;19 he also read a number of English novels, including the then notorious Fanny Hill.

Pursuing his own pleasures, Housman spent a week or a fortnight in Paris each autumn for the next four years. In the spring of 1912 he also took a spring holiday in Sicily, where ‘the weather and the wild flowers were all that could be desired’, and in 1913 he went to France earlier in the year than usual, spent only a few days in Paris, and then hired a chauffeur-driven car and motored around the west of Normandy. That autumn he wrote to Grant Richards: ‘No, I shall not be in Paris. I am staying at home and being good’; and in the spring of 1914 he once again hired a car, and went off for another motor-tour, this time in the south of France, in the area of Marseilles and Avignon.

Less than two months after Housman’s return to England from this pleasant sight-seeing and gastronomic interlude, the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria set in motion the train of events which led to the First World War.

On one level, Housman was appalled by the suffering and the waste of lives; but his philosophy had prepared him for a world in which the most terrible things were likely to happen, and had taught him that it was his duty as a human being to defy ill fortune as courageously as possible. So he decided, when considering what to do with his spring holiday in 1915, to go abroad quite normally and ignore the dangers of travelling to the Continent in war-time. By the beginning of March, Alfred had persuaded or shamed Grant Richards into accompanying him to France; and he wrote to a friend, with some bravado: ‘On the 16th I shall be beyond the Channel or beneath it: more probably the former, for steamers seem to ram submarines better than submarines torpedo steamers.’ And he added, softening an arrogant thought with a characteristic stroke of very dry wit: ‘Hitherto I have always refused to go the Riviera, but now is my chance, when the worst classes who infest it are away.’

Not surprisingly, the boat on which Richards and Housman embarked at Folkestone carried few passengers. These two civilians, one in early and one in late middle age, had a deck cabin to themseles. ‘There was, we supposed, some danger of the ship being mined or torpedoed, but I recall’, wrote Richards,

They arrived safely at Dieppe, and travelled down to Nice, where they found everything unusually sober and deserted. There were few of the regular visitors to the town, so they were given an especially warm welcome by one of Richards’s acquaintances, the author Ernest Belfort Bax, who lived on the Riviera with his wife. Housman enjoyed talking to Bax, a man of ‘persistent curiosity … old-fashioned scholarship and ponderous humour’; and both the travellers were amused by his wife’s ‘Germanic domesticities and her fussy preoccupations with her lord’s comforts and dignities’.

The place of the usual tourists in Nice had been taken by a few Allied troops, most of whom were Blacks from the Colonies; and their presence gave a sinister edge to the holiday: each morning, Housman and Richards would be woken in their hotel rooms ‘by funeral music on the Promenade des Anglais, for influenza was rife in the town’, reported Richards, ‘and the blacks went down like flies. There would be marching soldiers on the way to the burial ground.’

From Nice the two men made excursions along the coast: eastwards to Monte Carlo, and westwards to Antibes or Cannes. Even at Monte Carlo, there were few people about, but a number of good restaurants were still open, and they tracked down some good Burgundies including a particularly fine La Tâche. One evening they went in to see the gambling tables. Alfred, after so many years of being careful with his money, was amazed and rather shocked at the risks which gamblers took. He watched with distaste while Grant Richards lost a couple of louis at roulette; and they did not visit the tables again.

Once they travelled beyond Monte Carlo to Ventimiglia, just the other side of the Italian frontier, where Housman was disappointed by a lunch consisting mainly of ‘small envelopes of paste enclosing mincemeat’, which they followed by a walk ‘through the town and under some trees by the shore to a rough breakwater’. Closer to Nice, they visited Beaulieu, where they ate at the Réserve – ‘one of the half-dozen best restaurants in the whole of the world we knew’. Not far from Beaulieu, at Cap Ferrat, they strayed into an area out of bounds to civilians. They were challenged by a soldier but, to Grant Richards’s great relief, Housman’s ‘presence of mind, his good humour, his readiness and his lack of embarrassment impressed the officer before whom we were brought, and we were immediately released’.

In the following year, 1916, Housman and Richards planned another journey abroad; but at the end of March the SS Sussex was torpedoed by a German submarine off the French coast, and Richards’s wife, on hearing of this, refused to let her husband cross the Channel again during wartime. Housman commiserated with his friend, writing:

Housman himself still intended to go ‘at least as far as Paris’; and applied for leave to go through Folkestone and Dieppe, commenting to Richards (who had advised taking the less direct route by Southampton–Le Havre): ‘After all, a quick death is better than a slow journey; and as I am only an author and not a publisher I am comparatively well prepared to meet my God.’ But the Folkestone route was closed, and so Alfred abandoned his holiday – ‘Not on account of mines or torpedoes, which I despise as much as ever’, he wrote to Grant, ‘but because … the voyage by Southampton–Havre, without the solace and protection of your company, is a long and weary subtraction from the short holiday I meant to take.’

In the summer, another attempt to reach France came to nothing; and then in 1917 the War Office refused to grant him a passport, so that he was confined to England for the rest of the war. Housman felt this restriction keenly, describing it as ‘much to the detriment of my health and spirits’. On another occasion, when he was trying to find the right words for an obituary, he told Grant Richards: ‘It is one of several proofs that I am suffering from confinement in these islands mentally as well as physically, that … I have not got hold of any sentence that will hit off your uncle.’20

The Great War ended in November 1918; and the following September, despite worries about visas and permits, Housman was back in France, motoring through ‘beautiful country in the Limousin, where I had not been before. Things were cheap, and they were yearning for the return of the English tourist.’ Before and after his tour, he spent a few days in Paris, where he was unexpectedly visited by Grant Richards, who had kindly arranged his visa and given him other help and advice in preparing for the journey. Alfred sent him a note saying:

It will be no good looking for me here this evening, and I am also engaged tomorrow evening and Monday evening: otherwise I have no tie. Usually I leave the hotel not long after 9 a.m., and tomorrow I will look you up at the Normandy soon after that time.

From now on, Housman visited France at least once every year for as long as his health permitted. He had experienced a certain perverse enjoyment tempting fate when he crossed the Channel in war-time; and perhaps it was to recapture something of that excitement that in 1920 he decided to ‘attempt Paris by the aeroplane route in September’. There was now a regular service between Croydon and Le Touquet, with several small companies taking passengers for around £20 a seat. It was only eleven years since Blériot had first crossed the Channel in an aeroplane, since when there had, of course, been many developments, but the pilots still sat in open cockpits, there were no proper brakes, so that an aeroplane had to be slowed down by flapping the wings, the ailerons even the back doors; and there were many forced landings and a number of serious crashes. One pilot’s total of forced landings climbed to seventeen during the first few years of passenger flights; while an aeroplane was still in the air, an experienced pilot would keep a close eye on the landscape below him, so that he always had in mind the position of at least one field which he could reach quickly if a forced landing became necessary. Flying under such circumstances certainly required just that sense of adventure with which Housman approached it.

Cook & Son, the travel agents, booked a seat for Housman with ‘Air Express’, one of whose aeroplanes crash-landed in the middle of August. Predictably enough Housman was not alarmed, writing philosophically: ‘My inclination to go by the Air Express is confirmed by the crash they had yesterday, which will make them more careful in the immediate future.’ However, on the eve of his first flight he made sure of at least one more first-class dinner at the Café Royal, inviting Grant Richards and Grant’s son Charles to join him for ‘two admirable grouse’, and ‘lashings of caviare’. As for the flight itself, Alfred sent this account to Kate:

For the next four years, Housman flew across the Channel at the start of his holidays in France; and it came to be said of him at Cambridge ‘that he was more proud of having travelled so many times by aeroplane than he was of being Kennedy Professor or of having written A Shropshire Lad’. As each year passed, the flights grew more comfortable. Housman particularly enjoyed his 1923 experience in a Handley-Page which ‘crossed the Channel 7000 feet high, higher than the piles of clouds which lay over both shores, and both coasts were visible at once, which I have not found before’.

He stayed in Paris for part or all of each holiday; though to what age he continued to seek out homosexual prostitutes is uncertain. In 1922 he wrote to Grant Richards that he knew something of the ‘Paris Bains de vapeur’; but his comment that he was flying to Paris, ‘though not necessarily to those haunts of vice’, is enigmatic to say the least. If he had more than a week to spare, he liked to engage a chauffeur-driven car and tour in the provinces; and so in 1923 he visited Brittany, where he was impressed not only by the coastal scenery – especially the impressive headland of Finisterre – but also by the churches and cathedrals, ‘better than I had any idea of’; and in 1925 he travelled as far as the Pyrenees.

Then in 1926, at the beginning of June, Housman had an unexpected message from Venice. Andrea, his gondolier, sent word that he was dying, and that he wished to see his old friend again. Alfred hurried out to Venice, where he found that revisiting that city was a strangely emotional experience, as he later described in a letter to Kate:

Andrea was ill, but not so ill as Housman had expected. The summer weather had revived him somewhat, but Alfred reported to Kate, that though Andrea seemed better, he personally, expected him to ‘go steadily downhill’.

In fact, Andrea lingered on for another four years until 1930; and it would be interesting to know whether he had really been at death’s door, or whether the desperate call for Housman had been engineered by his improvident relatives. If so, their plan was a success – at least for the time being. Alfred, with his usual generosity, regularly sent money to Andrea to help make his last illness as comfortable as possible. But when at last Andrea died, Housman was infuriated to receive begging letters from Andrea’s family, and they had nothing more from him.21

The summer following Housman’s last visit to Venice, he spent a month in France, half of it on a motor-tour through Burgundy, Franche-Comté, the Jura, Lyons and Clermont Ferrand, in the company of Grant Richards. It was twelve years since their war-time holiday together on the Riviera; but although Housman was now an elderly man of sixty-eight, he had lost none of his relish for good food and drink. Richards later wrote of this:

His passion in life was, I should say, accuracy in Latin and in Greek, and he had also pleasure in architecture, but he liked his meals. Do not mistake me. He did not eat a great deal. When at table he was of the Edwardian school rather than that of Victoria or the Georges. Nor did he, save on the rarest occasions, drink too much. He enjoyed. That is the truth: he enjoyed, appreciated, was happy with good food and with fine wine…. His spare, wiry frame was good evidence that he did not indulge to excess.

Housman had also learned to enjoy travelling in style. When they arrived at the first hotel of their tour, the Épée in Auxerre, he astonished Richards ‘by ordering two rooms and two bathrooms with that note of assurance which suggested that he was certain that such accommodation would be available. Don’t you wish you may get it! I said to myself.’ They did. ‘It was’, wrote Richards, ‘… but a foretaste of the milord manner in which A. E. H. journeyed.’

From Auxerre they motored on to Chablis, where they explored the vineyards before enjoying, at the Hotel de L’Étoile, a luncheon of écrevisses à la crème and ballottine de pigeonneau, washed down by a Vaudésir 1915 and a Clos des Hospices 1921. So excellent was the food and wine that, after travelling some distance in the afternoon, Housman suggested returning to Chablis for dinner; at which Richards smiled, and said that he had been thinking the same thing ever since they finished coffee. ‘Monsieur Bergerand showed himself flattered by our return’, wrote Richards later; and he provided them with ‘… potage santé, soles au beurre d’écrevisses, andouillette du pays grillée, and fondue de poulet à la crème, to which, in our special honour, truffles had been added.’ With this feast they drank ‘Chablis Grenouilles 1921 … Nuits Vieilles Vignes 1919, and an exceptional Marc.’

The Englishmen travelled on to Dijon, where they drank a Romanée 1904 – rather disappointingly for them, ‘the oldest wine we encountered in a fortnight’. Then to Beaune, and a story of expertise at first unrecognised and then discovered which will warm the heart of any romantic, gourmet or not. After seeing the sights, Housman and Richards arrived at the Hotel de la Poste informally, and on foot, with Housman wearing his very undistinguished-looking cloth cricket cap. The two men entered the dining-room unwelcomed, and had to find their own seats. A waitress casually brought them the menu for the lunch of the day, asking whether they would like red or white wine to go with it. Housman, admirably controlled in the face of what was, for a gourmet, a terrible insult, asked to see the wine list, and quietly ordered two wines towards the foot of the list. No sooner had the astonished girl disappeared through one door with her order for a Meursault Perrières and a Montrachet 1919 ‘than through yet another there entered almost at a run but with considerable circumstance, a veritable maître d’hôtel and an impressive sommelier. The demand for rarer, more expensive wines, had set the machine going.’ They were asked to pardon the girl’s mistake; a more imposing menu was at once placed in Housman’s hands; and the proprietor arrived to compliment him on his choice of wines. Soon they were settling down to a happy meal of écrevisses à la crème, pâté de foie gras maison, and truffes-en-serviette.

For several days they remained in the general area of Dijon. Then, on the road back from Arbois to Dijon, they stopped in Dôle; and Housman rather reluctantly accompanied Richards to the jeweller’s shop of a M. Alfred Perrier, on whom Richards had promised to call. Inside the shop they were welcomed by a smiling, comely Madame, who said that Monsieur should be fetched at once. Perrier himself, the soul of hospitality, was soon inviting them to dinner, mentioning that he had an old bottle or two, at which his wife added: ‘Ah, Alfred – he loves his wine!’ Grant looked at his friend rather doubtfully, knowing as he wrote later, that Housman ‘was not a man whom you could carry off to the house of a stranger at a moment’s notice’. But all was well. ‘Visibly, he was pleased at the invitation. He did not wait for me to speak, but accepted for us both. These, he afterwards told me, were people very much after his own heart.’ Together, they enjoyed an evening of conversation and laughter, of admirable cooking and of rare and excellent wines. Housman, usually so reserved with strangers, became ‘interested and quite voluble’; and the two men walked back to their hotel, in the light of a crescent moon, jolly and a little unsteady.

After Dôle, they drove eastwards to Poligny, and then on towards the Swiss border; but their plans to drive into Switzerland were thwarted by their chauffeur, Louis, who explained at the frontier that he had forgotten to have his passport endorsed with a visa for Switzerland; so they turned back, and drove south-west to Lyon and Clermont Ferrand before heading for Paris. Grant Richards was depressed, when the day came on which he was due to board a train at the Gare de Lyon; for him, the north meant ‘grey skies and the pavements of London and work’. Housman stayed on in Paris for a day or two (where he caught food poisoning), and then flew home

The two men had enjoyed each other’s company for most of the tour; though Housman was sometimes upset by his friend’s tendency to embroider stories – at Dijon, he had fixed Richards with his eye, and asked him directly ‘Why do you tell these bloody lies to these unsuspecting French people?’; and after dinner a few days later he had commented: ‘Your talent for conversation, on which I have already remarked, is always making me drink more than I ought.’ But in general he thought highly of Grant Richards as a travelling companion, writing to him in January 1928: ‘… if I were a capitalist I should not set you up as a publisher, but engage you as a courier, salary unlimited’. And later in 1928 Housman invited Richards to join him for a few days at St Germainen-laye, where he was holidaying in a hotel with a magnificent view, the luxurious Pavilion Henri Quatre.

Housman enjoyed travelling abroad as though he were a wealthy man: which of us would not? But his foreign visits meant, above all, freedom – a temporary escape from the conventional sexual morality by which, even in the Cambridge of Forster, Brooke and Keynes, he felt imprisoned.

Notes

For much of the information in this chapter except where separately indicated the major sources are: Letters; Housman: 1897–1936.

1 Thomas Mann, Stories and Episodes, London, Dent, 1940 (reprinted 1960), p. 73.

2 E. M. Forster in a Review of More Poems, and AEH by Gow; see the Listener 11 November 1936.

3 Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, p. 246.

4 Stories and Episodes, p. 89.

5 See the letter of 7 November 1901 from A. E. Housman to Walter Ashburner, quoted in Alan Bell (ed.), Fifteen letters to Walter Ashburner, Edinburgh, Tragara Press, 1976.

6 H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal, London, W. H. Allen, 1976, p. 241.

7 Theodore Dreiser, A Traveller at Forty, published by Grant Richards, 1914, p. 407.

8 Fifteen Letters to Walter Ashburner; letter of 7 November 1901.

9 Congress, RHP Box 2: Alfred Housman to Mrs K. E. Symons, 26 November 1908.

10 Fifteen Letters to Walter Ashburner; see letter of 2 May 1907.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., letter dated 27 August 1908.

13 Congress, RHP Box 2: Alfred Housman to Mrs K. E. Symons, 26 November 1908.

14 Ibid.

15 Columbia: Laurence Housman to Cyril Clemens, 22 December 1938.

16 Quoted in Housman: 1897–1936, p. 115.

17 J. Hunt, General Secretary of the Housman Society, has kindly supplied me with this recipe for Barbue Housman:

Use brill or turbot. Make a stock of white wine, mushrooms, fines herbes, a little butter and the bones from the fish. Strain the stock and poach the fish in this. Remove the fish and keep warm while the stock is reduced. Make a sauce Mornay.

To serve: Lightly butter the serving dish. Pour on a layer of Sauce Mornay. Place the fish on this. Arrange small boiled potatoes around the fish. Pour the reduced stock over the fish.

Cover the whole with the rest of the Sauce Mornay. Lightly brown in the oven or under the grill.

18 This is the present author’s interpretation of a document in the possession of M. Higham Esq. I should add that my interpretation has been confirmed by others, in particular by H. Montgomery Hyde, who adds that the notes are very similar to those made by Roger Casement in his homosexual diaries.

19 JPP, Laurence Housman to Katharine Symons, 9 March 1939.

20 Congress, RHP Box 3: A. E. Housman to Grant Richards, 25 February 1917.

21 Withers, pp. 78–9.