… resuming his search for his tutor. He found him without trouble in the tower room which he had chosen when he arrived. All philosophers prefer to live in towers, as may be seen by visiting the room which Erasmus chose in his college at Cambridge …

T. H. White, The Once and Future King

We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation – no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.

R. W. Emerson, Friendship

Arrival and the pre-war years, 1911–14

The journey across London to Liverpool Street Station, and then by train to Cambridge, was one which Housman had often made before – first as a clerk at the Patent Office, attending meetings of the Philological Society, and then as a Professor of Latin at University College London. But when he made this journey for the first time after being elected Kennedy Professor of Latin, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, it was with a keen awareness that his status in the academic world had been dramatically improved. ‘He gives himself airs now as a Fellow of Trinity’, wrote his old friend and colleague, Arthur Platt, only half in jest, ‘and tells me not to look down on him any longer …’.1

The train ran on, through Essex and into the flat fen-lands of Cambridgeshire, past Stapleford and Cherry Hinton, and finally into the station on the outskirts of Cambridge itself. Here, from the station yard, Housman and his fellow-travellers could take a horse-drawn tram or a hansom to the town centre. The market-place was the heart of the town; and Cambridge would have been no more than a small market-town without the University. Colleges lay north and east and south of the market; and to the west, from Bridge Street in the north to Silver Street in the south, St John’s, Trinity, Clare, King’s, Queens’ and other Colleges were ranged impressively together, with their backs to the River Cam.

At the time of Housman’s arrival, Trinity contained more than sixty Fellows, and provided for some six hundred undergraduate and seventy post-graduate students. As a residential College, it was most unlike University College London; but the way of life was not new to Housman. Apart from the difference in scale, it was similar in many respects to the life in which he had himself taken part, as an undergraduate at St John’s College, Oxford. As at St John’s, the social and intellectual lives of the undergraduates centred largely on the College;2 and there was a similar round of tutorials and lectures. As at St John’s, the Fellows dined together each evening at High Table.

But Housman had grown used to solitude at Highgate and Woodridings, and he was apprehensive about College life, replying to Lady Ramsay’s congratulations on his election: ‘Joy does predominate over sorrow, as I am fond of money and fond of leisure; but, as I am also fond of solitude, and shall not have it at Cambridge, there is some sorrow mingled with the joy …’, and he had even complained to his landlady at the prospect of being forced into the society of others. In fact, for the summer of 1911 he was nominally Professor in two Universities; so he delayed moving into Trinity, taking temporary lodgings at 32 Panton Street in the south of Cambridge.3 As for the problem of doing two jobs at once: he remembered that it had been Oliffe Richmond, a young classical Fellow of King’s, who had first urged him to stand for the Kennedy Professorship; and he repaid that favour by putting Richmond into his own post in London for the summer term.4

At Cambridge, Housman’s first major public duty as the new Professor of Latin, was to introduce himself to the University in an Inaugural Lecture, which he did on 9 May, to a large and enthusiastic audience. ‘Brilliant is the only epithet’, wrote one scholar, ‘– flashing and scintillating with dry humour’; and Henry Jackson, the elder statesman of Trinity, wrote to Arthur Platt: ‘Housman’s discourse was excellent. He smote with all his might two tendencies of modern scholarship – on the one hand, aesthetic criticism; on the other hand, the slavish mechanical methods of the Germans.’ Interwoven with his important arguments on these subjects was ‘another theme on which’, said Housman, ‘it is natural and proper that I should speak today’.

Mentioning that the Chair of Latin, founded to honour B. H. Kennedy, had been held already by two of his pupils, Housman added

Housman then praised his two predecessors, Hugh Munro, who had written to him kindly when he was an undergraduate, and whose edition of Lucretius was ‘a work more compact of excellence than any edition of any classic which has ever been produced in England …’; and John Mayor, who had produced ‘no work having even the air of completeness’, but who had sensibly recognised his own bent as an antiquarian and lexicographer, and followed it.5

The kind and genuine sentiments about Cambridge scholarship sounded well coming, as they did, from an Oxford man, and helped to confirm Housman’s reputation in his new home. His old College at Oxford had recently elected him as an Honorary Fellow,6 finally wiping out the disgrace of his failure in Greats; and his old friend from Oxford days, Alfred Pollard, had travelled to Cambridge to hear the Inaugural Lecture, and was ‘richly rewarded by the cry of pleasure with which I was greeted when he caught sight of me after it. I think that somehow my presence seemed to him a recognition that he had reached his haven at last.’7 A sense of having arrived came to Housman not long after this in another, and a more curious fashion. Walking near Cambridge with a colleague, he came to a long narrow field, where the trees made a broad, grassy avenue: ‘Suddenly Housman paused and, looking about him said: “Now this is strange. I have dreamt often of this very place – and now I am here. This is the exact place of my dreams.”’

Immediately after the Inaugural Lecture, Housman travelled to Paris for a few days’ holiday, and when he returned to his lodgings, he found that he had no very definite work to do for the rest of the summer term.8  Instead, he spent his time getting to know Cambridge: he was shown over the Fitzwilliam Museum by its Director, Sydney Cockerell, and he found that he was ‘much occupied with social duties … and either from the climate or the heat was generally tired when I was not occupied.’ In August he went to Woodchester, where his godmother Mrs Wise had died earlier in the year; and then he went back to his old lodgings at Pinner, to work on his lectures for the autumn term, and to arrange for the removal of the bulk of his belongings to the rooms which he was to occupy in Trinity.

Eastwards of the older parts of Trinity College, on the other side of Trinity Street, an archway led into Whewell’s. Court, built in the romantic neo-Gothic style which Housman had favoured since he was a child. It was in the Gothic tower at the eastward end of the second courtyard that Housman had chosen to live. This was one of the most secluded parts of the College; to reach his rooms he had only to come in through the Sidney Street entrance, turn in to the doorway in the north side of the tower, and climb the stone steps. He had several rooms: a study, which looked out over Sidney Street; and on the other side a small bedroom, and also a larger and more comfortable room which he used as a sitting-room, and where he also kept a dining table so that he could entertain guests.

As Kennedy Professor of Latin, one of Housman’s chief duties was ‘to give lectures in every year’; and when the autumn term began, he conscientiously lectured twice a week on the Satires of Persius.9 Afterwards, he wrote with some pride to his sister, Kate:

The attendance at my lectures was from 20 to 30 (which, though not large, is from 20 to 30 times greater than the attendance at my predecessor’s) several of whom were lecturers themselves. I believe the lectures are considered good (as indeed they are.)

The lectures were, in fact, extremely scholarly expositions of the classical text. More suitable for other lecturers than for any but the most brilliant undergraduate, they nevertheless set a standard by which all other classical work in the University could be measured. Andrew Gow, then a young colleague of Housman’s at Trinity, describes what it was like to listen to

the level, impassive voice setting out, without enthusiasm but with an athletic spareness and precision of phrase, just so much commentary as was necessary for the interpretation of the passage under discussion. To call his lectures inspiring would perhaps be to convey the wrong impression, for they were austere both in matter and in manner, and they made a severe demand upon their audience, but certainly nobody with tastes at all akin to his own could witness that easy command of the relevant learning, that lucid exposition and dispassionate judgment, without setting before himself a new standard of scholarship … one was in contact with a mind of extraordinary distinction.

Apart from lecturing, Housman’s other principal duty was ‘to devote himself to research and the advancement of knowledge in his department’. This was what chiefly interested him, and he made full use of the time available. His reputation when he arrived in Cambridge was already considerable, based not only upon the great number of his published papers, but also upon his editions of Juvenal, and of the first book of Manilius. Now Housman gradually increased his reputation with more scholarly papers, and he also found time for some hard work on the second book of Manilius.

Safeguarding his public image seemed more important than ever to Professor Housman now that he had reached such an eminent position, and there is no indication that he ever became involved with any of the Cambridge homosexual groups of his day. During his first months at Trinity he was particularly cautious, and was very annoyed when Grant Richards sent a pornographic book to him through the post. It was one which Housman had read in Paris, and then passed on to Richards; and he now wrote: ‘I am horrified at your bringing back a Tauchnitz and sending it to a respectable person like me. I gave it to you because otherwise I should have left it in France.’ Something of the distance which Housman deliberately put between himself and most other people when he first arrived at Cambridge may be measured in the reaction of G. U. Yule, who had been Housman’s assistant at University College London until 1899, and who came to take up a post at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1912. ‘When I came here’, he wrote, ‘… I was shocked: he seemed a different man, walking solitary and alone with unseeing eyes that recognised none and repelled advance. When we did speak he was cordial but tongue-tied.’

There were other reasons why Housman sometimes appeared distant and aloof during those early days at Trinity. For one thing, he was rather out of sorts during the hot summer, and did not feel quite well again for some months, writing to his sister as late as December: ‘I don’t know that the climate exactly suits me.’ For another, there was some news which depressed him. He had not been the only one to make a move in 1911: the friend closest to his heart, Moses Jackson, had also moved, and decided on where to settle permanently; instead of returning from India to England, as Housman must have hoped, Jackson had travelled on with his family to the province of British Columbia, in the far west of Canada. Here, at Aldegrove near New Westminster, he bought some land and took up farming.10 He and Alfred continued with their friendly correspondence; but Alfred now recognised that, in all probability, he would never again see the man whom he still deeply loved.

However, during the autumn and winter of 1911 Housman found that, as a newcomer, he was ‘much asked out to dinner. People’, he wrote to Kate, ‘are very hospitable and friendly.’ No doubt he was entertained by James Frazer who he had known for several years; though Housman did not like Frazer’s wife, and had written to Mrs Platt: ‘the prospect of exchanging you for Mrs. Frazer is one of the clouds on my horizon.’ Oliffe Richmond of King’s College – back from London again – attended all Housman’s lectures and saw much of him;11 and it was perhaps through his hospitality that Housman first met the Provost of King’s, M. R. James, who shared Housman’s love of ghost stories, and himself wrote some of the most chilling ever printed.

Housman had also remained on good terms with Henry Jackson, the Professor of Greek and editor of the Journal of Philology; and he would sometimes join a group of men in Jackson’s rooms after Hall. Here he was not so much at ease as he had been at University College in the company of Ker and Platt; and he sometimes overcompensated for his feelings of awkwardness by employing a wit so biting that he must have hurt the feelings of those with whom he was trying to be good humoured. On one occasion, the Irish composer, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, was telling a story about Robert Louis Stevenson when he lost the thread of what he was saying, and paused. Housman at once stepped in: ‘With the characteristic inaccuracy of your race, Sir Charles’, he announced, ‘you have mixed up two entirely different stories and have missed the point of each of them.’

Among those in the College whom he did not already know, Housman wished above all to be a respected figure; so that ‘he was sometimes apt, from shyness, to suspect a liberty where none was intended, and to be sharp-tongued in answer’.12 But he gradually made some new friends among his colleagues in Trinity, even if they were not very close. He took an interest in Andrew Gow, a young Fellow in his twenties who greatly admired his scholarship; Alfred took him out to the Cambridge theatre from time to time, and was genuinely sorry when in 1914 he left to become a master at Eton. Housman also became attached to Reginald Laurence, a Fellow in his mid-thirties who shared his taste for good wine; and he enjoyed seeing something of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, then a College lecturer with rooms in Nevile’s Court. Russell, like Housman, was a friend of the Rothensteins, and Housman could also remember when Russell’s mother and father had lived on the hill just opposite Woodchester. But the most exciting moment in College during these years probably came in the winter of 1912–13, when, as Housman wrote in mock horror, Trinity College became like

a besieged city. A week ago there came a telegram to say that one of the junior Fellows, Pearse, … had left his home, mad and armed, and would probably make his way here. All entrances to the College have therefore been closed, except the Great Gate, which is guarded by a double force of Porters. Cambridge was perplexed at first, but has now invented the explanation that it is the Master who has gone mad, and has made these arrangements in order that he may shoot at the Fellows from the Lodge as they come through the Great Gate. The Provost of King’s gives imitations of the Master thus engaged: ‘Ah, there is dear Dr. Jackson!’ bang!!

What makes matters worse is that the College evidently sets no value on my life and even on that of the Archdeacon of Ely; for Whewell’s Court is left quite unprotected and I have to look under my bed every night.

The Master of Trinity College, H. M. Butler, was of course far from mad: and Housman appreciated his virtues. In 1913 Housman was asked by the other Fellows of the College to write an address congratulating Butler on his 80th birthday, a request with which he was glad to comply.

Outside the College, Housman made more friends. In particular he enjoyed the sparkling company of Arthur Benson, a Fellow of Magdalene College, only three years his junior, a prolific and popular author who talked brilliantly, despite suffering from periods of depression.13  Housman, as a fellow-sufferer, sympathised with him and admired him for his achievements; though he would not be flattered by him into joining a Committee, as he made clear in a reply of May 1913:14

You write me a very kind letter, but your suasions fall upon the deaf ear of an egotistic hedonist – I suffer a good deal from life, and do not want to suffer more; and to join the Academic Committee, or any similar body, would be an addition to my discomforts, not overwhelming, but still appreciable.

Despite this refusal – or perhaps because the suggestion of suffering intrigued Benson – a friendship grew between them, and in February the following year Benson was to be found lunching with Housman and Grant Richards in Housman’s rooms and drinking ‘some rather particular hock’.

Not long after his move to Cambridge, Housman met W. S. Blunt. He was introduced to him by Sydney Cockerell, with whom he had talked about the writing of A Shropshire Lad; and he accepted Blunt’s invitation to spend the last weekend of November 1911 in company at his house in Sussex. On the first evening, Wilfred Meynell read them George Meredith’s long series of poems, ‘Modern Love’, the tragic story of the breakdown of a marriage. Blunt recorded in his diary that, with Meynell’s ‘running commentary’, this made ‘excellent entertainment’. Then, on the Sunday, wrote Blunt:

I took Housman for a walk and asked him how he had come to write his early verses and whether there was any episode in his life which suggested their gruesome character, but he assured me it was not so. … He shows no trace now of anything romantic, being a typical Cambridge Don, prim in his manner, silent and rather shy, conventional in dress and manner, learned, accurate, and well-informed … with Meynell’s help we got him to discuss his own poems, though he refused absolutely to read them out…. We had much pleasant talk all day, and sat up again till twelve at night telling ghost stories. He takes an interest in these. Housman’s personal appearance is one of depression and indifferent health. He does not smoke, drinks little, and would, I think, be quite silent if he were allowed to be.

In describing his personal appearance as one of depression, Blunt had penetrated as far as Housman’s underlying melancholy; but Alfred had not of course been entirely honest when he said that there was no episode (or episodes) in his life which had suggested the character of his poems. Indeed, fearing where investigations of this sort might lead, Housman discouraged his new colleagues at Trinity from discussing anything to do with his poetry.

Among his older friends, Housman continued to see something of the Rothensteins; but now he saw them more often in Gloucestershire than he did in London. They had bought a country house not far from Wood chester, and when he visited the Wises, which he did every summer, he would walk over to see them.

Back in Cambridge after holidaying with the Wises, or with one of his own family, Housman continued with his scholarly and unemotional lectures. One of his students, a woman, later recalled how:

Only once was there a change from this routine:

Afterwards another undergraduate, a scholar of Trinity, commented: ‘I felt quite uncomfortable. I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry.’

The war years

With the start of the Great War in August 1914, Cambridge rapidly assumed its military responsibilities. By the end of November, Housman was writing to an old London friend that

Although Housman himself, at the age of fifty-five, was too old for military service, he still made a real sacrifice, sending the bulk of his savings to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as a contribution to the war effort;15 and then he settled down to live as normal a life as possible. He continued with his scholarly papers; and with his lectures on Persius and on some of the longer poems of Catullus; though Cambridge soon had ‘1000 undergraduates and 20,000 soldiers’, with, as he told a friend, ‘500 of them billeted in the building in which I write these lines, and one of them doing a quick-step overhead’. To Grant Richards, whom he asked to visit him in the spring of 1915, Alfred explained that feasting and guest-nights were suppressed, but that on Tuesdays and Thursdays the dinner was better than on other days; and he later warned him not to be surprised if a sentry tried to keep him out with a bayonet, as Whewell’s Court was ‘now a barracks, sparsely inhabited by four Fellows of Trinity. We do not dress for dinner.’

But despite all the military activity in Cambridge, the city came to be seen by some people as a centre of unpatriotic pacifism. In Trinity there were four conscientious objectors, and thirteen members of the Union for Democratic Control. The UDC was in fact primarily concerned with the post-war settlements; but many of its members quite rightly felt by the end of 1915 that the best result would be a drawn war and a compromise peace, and so were labelled pacifists. There were also a number of the academic staff, including Bertrand Russell, who were strongly opposed to conscription; and, at the time, Housman agreed with them, believing that people should only fight for their country if, like his three young nephews, they had volunteered to do so. But the majority of the senior Fellows favoured conscription, and loathed any ideas which they felt smacked of pacifism, so that during 1915, although no one descended to outright rudeness, differing factions conspicuously avoided one another.

Bertrand Russell was more seriously affected by the bad feeling than most. The Council were about to make him a Fellow of the College, but because of his political views they changed their mind, and instead renewed his lectureship for a further five years. Those Council members who opposed Russell must have felt that their decision had been right when in April the following year, 1916, Russell published a controversial pamphlet about Ernest Everett, sentenced to two years hard labour for being a conscientious objector: ‘He is only fighting the old fight for liberty, and against religious persecution….’.

The Government decided against making a stand for those who were defending conscience, and prosecuted Russell, who was found guilty of making a statement likely to prejudice recruiting; and although he was not imprisoned, he was fined £100 with costs. At this stage, Housman felt neutral: he believed that Russell had acted as a bad citizen, but he also agreed that people should not be persecuted for holding minority views.16

Now the Council of Trinity College renewed its attack on Russell, and when they met in July they agreed that he ought to be removed from his post of lecturer. When this decision was announced, there was a storm of protest. Gilbert Murray, now the Professor of Greek at Oxford, stated publicly that the action which the Council had taken was incredible; and before long twenty-two Fellows of Trinity, Housman’s friend Andrew Gow among them, sent a formal letter to the Council to record their dissatisfaction. Housman did not sign it, though he felt that the Council’s action was unwise. But when Russell petulantly asked for his name to be removed from the books of the College, Housman turned against him, feeling that this was an unnecessary insult to an institution of which he himself was proud to be a member.

Housman had little to say to the soldiers who were billeted in College. One of them, Evan Pughe, an old Trinity man, approached Housman and said how much he had enjoyed his poems, only to be told, before Housman turned his back on this admirer, that ‘the kindest action the Dons have ever done me has been never to mention my poems’. Housman felt that any discussion of his poetry posed a threat to his privacy, and since Pughe lived directly opposite him on the same staircase in Whewell’s Court, the threat was greater than usual; no doubt it was this which led to an otherwise unnecessarily sharp reply.

That Housman took a real interest in the welfare of soldiers in general is shown by a letter which he wrote attacking the Dean of Lincoln for suggesting that soldiers should be deprived of their natural appetites during the war;17 and at the end of September 1915, he allowed Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English at Oxford, to print some of the poems from A Shropshire Lad in one of The Times’ Broadsheets which were issued to keep up the morale of troops in the trenches.

In February 1916, Housman once again invited Grant Richards to visit him at Trinity College; but put him off only a few days later because of an outbreak of cerebro-spinal meningitis among the soldiers quartered in the College. Later in the month, Housman wrote to Grant Richards again, this time to commiserate with him on the death of his uncle Herbert Richards, one of the examiners, who, long ago, had ploughed Housman in Greats. Housman had never nursed a grudge against Herbert Richards for this; and now he wrote, appreciatively: ‘There are far too few severe and thorough scholars of his sort.’

In the meantime, news about the war came in, some of it serious, some less so. In June Housman wrote a teasing letter to Mrs Platt, having heard that ‘Ladies in Cambridge are getting into closer touch with war: they are to be allowed to paint shells. I greatly fear that patriotism together with feminine unscrupulousness will lead them to poison the paint.’

The printing of some of Housman’s poems in the Broadsheets for the trenches had given the sales of A Shropshire Lad a new lease of life; they climbed to over 14,500 in 1916, and although they dropped a little in 1917, in 1918 they reached nearly 16,000 copies – the best figure for nine years.18  Alfred was pleased to think of the young men in the trenches reading his book; and when in the summer of 1916 he heard that Grant Richards had doubled the price of A Shropshire Lad from 6d to 1s. 0d., he wrote, with characteristic irony:

I do not make any particular complaint about your doubling the price of my book, but of course it diminishes the sale and therefore diminishes the chance of the advertisement to which I am always looking forward: a soldier is to receive a bullet in the breast, and it is to be turned aside from his heart by a copy of A Shropshire Lad which he is carrying there. Hitherto it is only the Bible which has performed this trick.

Housman never heard of a man being saved from a bullet by a copy of his poems; but later he preserved among his papers the letter of an American who had looked after a wounded British soldier in France after the war. The American wrote that he had brought his copy of A Shropshire Lad for the man to read; at which the wounded soldier had smiled, and taking from under his pillow his own copy, tattered, torn, and bloodstained, had told him how he had carried the little volume in his pocket all through the war.

Since he was unable to get abroad during the last years of the war, in the summer of 1916 Housman was very pleased to join Grant Richards and his family for a holiday in Cornwall. Grant had married again in the previous year, to a Hungarian widow with a daughter, so the party consisted altogether of Housman, Richards, his Hungarian wife, five children (including the four from Grant’s first marriage), a nurse, and maids, all crowded into an ancient cottage called Caerleon, which looked over the Channel, about half-way between Cadgwith and Ruan Minor, and about two miles from the Lizard. It was in many ways a children’s holiday, but Alfred thoroughly enjoyed it, only showing signs of impatience when the children became a little too boisterous. He particularly liked Grant Richards’s young wife Gioia, who was only twenty-seven, and talked to her for hours about Grant’s work, about the children’s future, and about the war; and once he even came to her rescue, dashing barefoot to help her down from a cliff on which she had climbed too high. Grant Richards later recalled that they often picnicked on the beaches, and that when they did, Housman – whose principal task was to look after the wine – was ‘unusually cheerful, scrambling down to the remoter coves as if he were again an undergraduate, watching the rest of us bathe with amused eyes or going off on a stroll of his own’.

Once, Housman and Richards were out with the children when they stumbled on an adder which turned and hissed as if about to spring; Richards recalled that

That autumn, Grant sent his friend a walking-stick to replace the one which had been broken, and Alfred replied: ‘I only hope the new one may make as good an end.’ The Cornish holiday had been a great success, and in the following year, 1917, Housman spent two week-ends at the Richards’s home.

Earlier in the war, Housman had been much amused when he heard that a letter from Edmund Gosse to the author Compton Mackenzie, then living in Capri, had been delayed by the censor for a week, and then sent on with a note advising Mackenzie that in future, his correspondent should write ‘shortly and dearly’. Housman had written

Now, in the spring of 1917, Gosse had provided him with entertainment of another sort: a biography of Swinburne, whose early poetry had strongly influenced Housman’s own writing as a schoolboy and undergraduate.

Housman had always despised most of Swinburne’s later work, and so he was particularly pleased to find that the only two poems he admired in Swinburne’s later volumes, ‘Ave atque Vale’ and the prologue to ‘Tristram of Lyonesse’, had both been written early; but he was still more interested in the clandestine side of the poet’s life. Knowing that Swinburne had been a drunkard, and obsessed with flagellation, Housman wrote to Gosse: ‘Perhaps we should both blush if you unfolded the awful inner meaning of “a way which those who knew him will easily imagine for themselves”.’ And he asked whether Swinburne was the author of some poems in a collection of flagellant writings, The Whippingham Papers, which he had bought on one of his trips to Paris. Later, Housman sent these to Gosse, adding that the author of the poems – who was not in fact Swinburne – was said to have written another work, The Romance of Chastisement, which he had not come across and as a result ‘my library is sadly incomplete, and not at all worth leaving to the British Museum when I die’. Gosse had been depressed when Housman had pointed out a number of small mistakes in his biography, but Housman made up for this now by writing to him

Trinity College was still full of soldiers in 1917; the terrible slaughter continued on the Western Front, and the end of the war seemed as far away as ever. The year was enlivened for Housman by the visit of a young soldier whom he had met the previous year, but who had been lost to his sight in the ranks of the RAMC;19 and in March 1917 he allowed The Blunderbuss, a local war-time magazine edited by one of the soldiers stationed in Trinity, to publish his poem about courage which ends:

In October, Grant Richards asked Housman to look up the ailing Percy Withers, a middle-aged doctor who very much admired Housman’s poetry, and who had been wanting to meet him for some time. Withers had been transferred in the early summer of 1917 to war service in Cambridge where – like Alfred’s favourite brother Basil in another part of the country – his job was to examine recruits to see whether they were fit for army life. But his own health was very poor, and when, one late autumn afternoon, Housman called on him in his rooms overlooking the Fitzwilliam Museum, he was still recovering from months of illness. Withers describes the scene as his landlady opened the door of the room in which he sat reading, huddled over a fire, and announced: ‘Professor Housman.’

This meeting was the start of a curious friendship, often close but never really intimate, which lasted until Housman’s death nineteen years later. Ever since the months when he had watched his mother dying, any illness had been a sure way of arousing Alfred’s sympathetic interest, and the fact that Withers was often a sick man – he was later diagnosed as a diabetic – prepared the ground for their friendship. But its solid foundation was the enormous admiration which Withers felt for literary men, and particularly for Housman, to whom he was attracted on this first meeting by a feeling that there was something unexplained about him. Withers was intrigued by ‘the sadness of his expression in all moments of repose’; Mrs Withers had joined the two men, and at the end of the visit, after showing Housman out, she remarked: ‘That man has had a tragic love-affair!’

Before he left, Housman had invited Withers to dine with him in Hall one evening and he had also carried off a volume of Georgian Poetry. This had been pressed upon him by Withers, partly because it contained some verses by John Drinkwater, a young poet whom Withers had befriended; partly because he wanted an excuse for calling on Housman at his rooms in Trinity. This he did some days later. Housman, who had recently written to Grant Richards that Withers ‘seems an agreeable man’, gave him a cordial welcome. He had been sitting reading in his study at a table strewn with books, and Withers was interested to notice that a pair of dumb-bells lay on the floor beside the chair. Housman explained that he used them for ten minutes every morning after his cold bath, and again at night, whenever he felt drowsiness coming on as he sat by the fire reading.

They talked about Withers’s work on the National Service Board, putting through sixty recruits a day, many of them in apparently poor condition. Then Withers asked whether he would one day publish a successor to A Shropshire Lad. At this, Housman waved a hand at his desk, and said that there were a few poems in one of the drawers, and that he might think of writing more – ‘for posthumous publication, he added with a laugh determined and full of meaning, but its meaning escaped me, so mocking it was, so sardonic and so evasive’. The meaning is clear enough when one knows the full story of the poems which Housman had written about Moses Jackson, and on other subjects which he did not feel he could safely publish during his life-time; but he would never do more than hint at this side of his life, and Withers was not perceptive enough to guess at it.

When Withers was leaving, Housman returned the volume of Georgian Poetry which he had borrowed; and, asked whether he had anything to say about it, he replied: ‘No … Yes, one opinion I have formed: that your friend John Drinkwater is not a poet.’ When Withers ingenuously asked how he could be so sure, Housman flushed, and was unable to speak for a moment; but then, growing calmer, he told Withers: ‘You feel poetry in the throat, in the solar plexus, or down the spine. Drinkwater’s verse touches neither spine, belly nor throat.’

For the next twelve months, while the war dragged on into 1918, and Withers remained at Cambridge, he saw a great deal of Housman, visiting him every few weeks in his rooms, dining with him in Hall, or meeting him there or in the Combination Room when he was dining in College as the guest of another Fellow. Housman was pleased that Withers praised his poems, and once told him self-deprecatingly: ‘People don’t want any more of my poetry. It is only a few like you who care anything about it; the rest neither anticipate nor desire more.’ When Withers told him that he was wrong, and asked how he could justify letting his rare gift fall into disuse, Housman, in a most unusual moment of revelation

But, in spite of this, Withers continued to badger him for more poems, and from time to time Housman would announce that he had written one.

The two men had an interest in common besides literature: they both liked studying the architecture of old churches and cathedrals. Not long before their first meeting, Housman had spent a holiday touring Rochester, Canterbury, Winchester and Salisbury. But the great difficulty for Withers in his friendship with Housman was that, although Housman loved listening to gossip, especially anything slightly malicious, he never initiated any small-talk himself. Despite this, he hated silences, so Withers found that he had to do a great deal of talking himself, and that the only certain way of having a conversation with Housman was to ask him a series of questions.

This taciturnity – which Housman may have learned in part from his old friend, Ker, who was famous for his silences – was also evident in the meetings after Hall in Henry Jackson’s rooms, some of which Withers attended. He found that Housman would, on occasion, say nothing the entire evening, and yet appear to have enjoyed himself. On the other hand, when he did speak:

In the right company, and on the right subject, Housman could talk brilliantly; and if some men found him difficult, others such as John Drinkwater – despite Housman’s dislike of his verse – found ‘nothing but charm, amiability, friendliness and responsiveness; and the last quality he should suspect in Housman was taciturnity’.

A much more distinguished writer whom Housman met during 1918 was André Gide, who was visiting Cambridge during the summer and autumn of 1918, and who had been given a letter of introduction to Housman by their mutual friend William Rothenstein. Gide had then written several of his best-known works, including Les Nourritures Terrestres and L’Immoraliste, an exploration of man’s growing awareness of his suppressed homosexuality. After Housman’s first meeting with Gide, he wrote to the Rothensteins that he hoped to see him again but there is no record of any further communication between them, and this is not really surprising. A real friendship between the French prophet of rebellion, and the English poet and Professor who had decided that it was impossible for him to rebel, would have been difficult, to say the least!

At last the fighting in Europe stopped, and those who had survived returned home to resume their normal lives, if such a thing was possible. Some of them returned with honour: two of Moses Jackson’s sons had been decorated,20 and Housman’s nephew Jerry Symons had been awarded a Military Cross. But Jerry’s brother Clement lay dead in a foreign grave; as did both of Alfred Pollard’s sons,21 and too many other ‘fellows that were good and brave/And died because they were’ (LP 38).

An established figure

Professor Housman had tried to lead as normal a life as possible during the war, despite the fact that the University was drained of undergraduates and the younger dons. Now, life in Trinity College and in Cambridge as a whole resumed much of its pre-war pattern – though for a while there was a strange contrast among the undergraduates, between men straight from school and those who were veterans of the trenches.

Soon after the end of the war, Housman was delighted to be asked to join an exclusive Cambridge dining-club, limited to twelve members, who met once a fortnight in term-time and took turns to entertain each other.22 Housman was by this time a great connoisseur of food and wine, so the Club had an obvious appeal for him; and the romantic side of his nature may have enjoyed knowing about the origins of the Club: it had been started two centuries ago by men who favoured the cause of the exiled King James II, and in Housman’s day members still passed wineglasses over their finger-bowls as a silent toast to ‘The King over the water’.23 The Club was known as ‘The Family’, a pleasant description, and one especially apt for those who, like Alfred, were unmarried, and for whom the regular meetings made up to some extent for the lack of a real family.

When Housman joined ‘The Family’, its most distinguished member was Sir J. J. Thomson, who had been elected Master of Trinity on the death of H. M. Butler in the previous year. Thomson was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had discovered the electron, and he looked and sometimes behaved like everyone’s idea of an absent-minded Professor. Where Housman took great pains to be neat and presentable, Thomson – with his long iron-grey hair – was eccentric and unkempt in appearance, ‘far too importantly occupied to bother about tailors and hairdressers’. But he liked Housman, sharing his love of walking and his relish for detective stories,24 and he later wrote:25

I always found him excellent company, and was very glad when I could sit next to him…. It is true that from time to time he had fits of silence and depression; but these were rare…. He usually, in my experience, talked freely, and, as might be expected, incisively. He held strong opinions on many subjects, and expressed them strongly, and he was not fond of strangers.

Andrew Gow could not have been a member of ‘The Family’ at this time, as he was away teaching at Eton; but he was at least once a guest of Housman’s at a Family dinner in 1924, and later became a member himself; and he wrote about Alfred at these dinners:

He liked good cheer and good wine… and, responding to their tonic, would draw upon surprising stores of knowledge in unexpected fields and show himself as vivacious as any member of the party. He would illuminate the conversation with flashes of wit, heralded by a slight arching of the wrist as it lay idle on knee or table, and by a characteristic downward glance …; [he] would pour out from his accurate and retentive memory anecdote and reminiscence with a felicity and economy of language which made him an admirable raconteur; and would greet the contributions of others with bursts of silvery laughter … something boyish and infectious.

When it was Housman’s turn to entertain the other members of ‘The Family’, his dinners, as Sir J. J. Thomson records26

had, like everything else he did, the air of distinction. There was always some dish which few, if any, of his guests had met with before, and over which he had taken a good deal of trouble to instruct the College cook in all the details of its preparation. All the wine was good, and there was pretty sure to be some of special interest or rarity.

And, as a final and personal touch, just before the guests arrived, Alfred would usually make the salad himself.

Stephen Gaselee, Fellow and Librarian of Magdalene College, was not a member of ‘The Family’, but a friend of Housman’s who shared his enthusiasm for good food and wine. The two men had a particular preference for Hock and Burgundy – Housman had built up a small but excellent cellar of both – and before wine sales of departed old dons they would sometimes arrange that one or the other of them would stand down for certain lots, so that they should not bid against each other. Gaselee invited Housman to dine occasionally, and was delighted in return to be invited to Trinity, where, in the Combination Room, there was ‘a fair selection of the best port vintages from 1875 onwards’. Sometimes they shared their meal with Housman’s friend Arthur Benson, and Gaselee remembered that ‘The port, which was taken in strict moderation, seemed to loosen their tongues, and nowhere and never in my life have I listened to better talk …’. Alfred also made a custom of enjoying oysters and stout on New Year’s Eve, as he wrote to Mrs Platt one December: ‘I and other choice spirits here always see the New Year in on oysters and stout, to do what we can for the cause of human progress and the improvement of the world’; and another year, to his brother Basil: ‘I have had a terrible shock from a telegram today from a London fishmonger. All the native oysters have been torn from their beds by tempest, and I shall have to eat the New Year in on Dutch.’

So Housman had gradually extended the circle of his acquaintances at Cambridge to include a number of agreeable companions. He talked enthusiastically to Percy Withers about Benson, though ‘less of the man than the good companion and raconteur’; and probably his closest friend was R. V. Laurence, the Junior Bursar at Trinity. When he spoke of Laurence, his ‘voice and manner disclosed more of affection than I ever heard from Housman’s lips but once’. But despite his membership of ‘The Family’, and his friendship with men like Gaselee, Benson, and Laurence, Alfred was still extremely reticent about himself, even to his intimates. So reticent, in fact, that Laurence Housman found, when preparing his biography of Alfred, that ‘some of them (Gow for instance) consider that he had no intimates’.27 Gow himself wrote: ‘we knew him as one of those who deliberately choose to restrict their friendships to the surface, neither giving nor asking for confidences.’ Another man who knew Housman explains:28

He was often solitary because any substitute for perfect intimacy seemed to him too poor a thing … he had a passion for perfection…. Anything imperfect was torture to him. Conversation that fell short of what he felt to be worthwhile he instinctively avoided.

This last comment is not altogether true: Housman liked being talked to, as Percy Withers had noticed when they first met; and Laurence Housman once heard his brother ‘quite amiably enduring a chatter-box of a man (“distinguished”, a recipient of the O.M.) whom I found insufferably boring’.29 But there is no doubt that Alfred’s manner was often forbidding – not because he wished to restrict his friendships to the surface, but because he was afraid that he would be rebuffed. He once read a passage from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and wrote ‘This is me’ alongside a passage which began:30

I was very conscious of the bundled powers and entities within me; it was their character which hid. There was my craving to be liked – so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another. The terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink from trying; besides, there was the standard; for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply, in the same language, after the same method, for the same reasons.

When someone whom he liked made some advance towards him, Housman’s reserve could soon fade, as one of his acquaintances, Edward Marsh, observed in a touching little story:31

Arthur Benson told me of a little incident which threw a faint but perhaps appreciable light on Housman’s shy reserve. Arthur was spending the copious gains of his pen on a new Hall at Magdalene [where he had become Master in 1915], which was the pride of his life. He delighted to stand in the street and watch the masons at their work, and one day, catching sight of Housman, he did on impulse what as a rule he would never have dreamt of – seized him by the arm and dragged him into the building ‘for to admire and for to see’. Something seemed to melt under his touch, a barrier fell, and for the first time Housman became entirely human. It was borne in upon Arthur that if people could only take to slapping him, so to speak, he would become a different person; but I never heard of anyone carrying the experiment further.

Housman would certainly not have welcomed a general invasion of his privacy; but, as he was now a very well-established figure in the academic world, he could have been less reserved without worrying that this would lead to people treating him with less respect. Quite apart from the excellent papers which he continued to produce, he had by September 1920 published the fourth volume of his Manilius, and it was becoming generally recognised that this attempt to edit the whole of Manilius was one of the great scholarly enterprises of the day.

Because of this, Housman’s life in Cambridge was often solitary. In the afternoons he set out alone on his walks, ‘clutching a walking-stick and attired in a nondescript grey suit, elastic-sided boots’, which, incidentally, hardly anyone else had worn in England since Queen Victoria had died, ‘high stiff single collar and close fitting cap, with a button top like a schoolboy’s’.32 His favourite route led past the Botanic Garden; but whether one met him here, or, just as likely, out in the countryside miles from Cambridge, ‘he walked with a visibly abstracted air and often failed to notice one as he passed’. He entertained less often than most of his colleagues; and in the evenings would often retire to his Tower rooms to work alone, or to amuse himself with reading poetry or detective stories.

But although few of Housman’s Cambridge friendships were really intimate, they still gave him pleasure, and a sense of belonging; and although he remained reticent about his own life, he was less reserved than at first. Indeed, he was well known by his friends as a man who would tell entertaining and often very bawdy tales which he had come across when reading the Latin and Greek authors;33 and occasionally he wrote ribald limericks which he passed around for their amusement,34  much as his mother had once passed around satirical verses for the amusement of her close friends at Woodchester.

Professor Housman felt warmly towards his colleagues – so warmly that according to Gow, he was ‘deeply affected by the deaths of men on the very fringe of his acquaintanceship’ – and he was very loyal to the community of which he and they were members. His reaction to the Bertrand Russell affair shows clearly that he would not tolerate any behaviour which he felt was a slight to the College, while he strongly desired the good opinion of the other Fellows. In November and December 1919 there was a forceful campaign to have Russell reappointed to a lectureship. In a letter to Hollond, one of the young organisers of the campaign, Housman said that he would not support it:35

Russell is a great loss to the College, not merely for his eminence and celebrity, but as an agreeable and even charming person to meet;… what prevents me from signing your letter is Russell’s taking his name off the books of the College. After that piece of petulance he ought not even to want to come back. I cannot imagine myself doing so; and my standard of conduct is so very low that I have a right to condemn those who do not come up to it.

I am writing this, not to argufy, but only in acknowledgement of your civility in writing to me. I hope I shall not be able to discover ‘conscious effort’ in the amiability of yourself or Hardy when I happen to sit next to you in the future. I am afraid however that if Russell did return he would meet with rudeness from some Fellows of the College, as I know he did before he left. This ought not to be, but the world is as God made it.

Your party has a clear majority, and you ought, quite apart from this question, to vote yourself on to the Council as opportunities arise. There is not nearly enough young blood in it.

Housman’s letter was so warm that his failure to support the campaign did not lead to any bad feeling against him; and, in any case, the campaign succeeded, and Russell was offered a lectureship. He accepted it, but then resigned without taking up the appointment, perhaps secretly agreeing with Housman’s estimate of his behaviour. It is interesting that Housman should have referred to his own standard of conduct as being ‘so very low’. Presumably he was simply intending to make his opposition to Russell seem less intolerant than it might otherwise have done; but the words strike a surprisingly personal note. At the most, they hint at something of Housman’s feelings about his own behaviour abroad; at the least, they reinforce the view of Housman as a man for whom loyalty to institutions was a very important element in life.

Housman was now sixty; and, wishing to devote as much of his time and energy as possible to his classical studies, he would not normally accept duties within the University; in 1920 he wrote: ‘Not if the stipend were £150,000 instead of £150 would I be Public Orator. I could not discharge the duties of the office without abandoning all other duties and bidding farewell to such peace of mind as I possess’; and in 1925 he refused the offer of the Clark lectureship, saying that he regarded himself as a connoisseur of literature, but not as a critic; and that the time spent on preparing the required six lectures would give him anxiety and depression, and would be ‘the more vexatious because it would be subtracted from those minute and pedantic studies in which I am fitted to excel and which give me pleasure’. Nor would he even appear at a meeting of a Queens’ College society at which a paper by his old friend Sir James Frazer was to be read, in case on the strength of this appearance he might subsequently be worried into reading the society a paper himself.

But his affection for Trinity meant that Housman was prepared to take on a number of extra tasks on its behalf. In July 1919 it was Henry Jackson’s eightieth birthday, and the Master and Fellows of the College gave him a replica of the tobacco-jar which had been owned by Jackson’s most famous predecessor as Professor of Greek, Richard Porson. Although Housman disliked prose composition, and later said that the task had ‘laid waste three whole mornings’, the first of them occupied in wishing for death, he agreed to write the accompanying letter to Jackson, in which he emphasised that: ‘Our tribute carries with it the personal affection of friends, and the gratitude of a community.’ The letter was written to Housman’s usual high standards; an exacting task, and perhaps he disliked  doing it the more because it reminded him of the days when he was ‘used too much as a scribe’ at the Patent Office.

Housman was also a member of the College Wine Committee for many years. This involved pleasant duties for a connoisseur, such as occasional trips to London for wine-tasting sessions. As the years passed, Housman became rather discontented by the quality of the Burgundy which was offered for sale, and was glad that his private cellar contained a reasonable supply of pre-war vintages, as he was told that standards of wine making had deteriorated. But he carried out his duties with a keen palate for excellence; and on one occasion so much enjoyed a Madeira which cost rather more than the College had allowed for, that he ordered it and made up the difference out of his own pocket.36 At the same time, he kept an eye on the quality of the food which was served at High Table, and the Suggestions Book contains many of his entries, such as this one, which dates from war-time:37

As venison is now about half the price of mutton it is our duty to have it sometimes in the interests of economy

or this, written in January 1928, not long after the College had engaged a new chef, a man who had worked at the great Café Royal in London:

The sauce aux huîtres which we had last night with the cod was not oyster sauce but sauce Hollandaise into which an oyster or two had been dropped, combining no better than the Duke of Clarence with the Malmsey.

Housman had maintained his interest in botany, on his daily walks, and he also joined the Trinity College Garden Committee, and served on it for many years. For a part of that time he took on the considerable responsibility of being Secretary, which meant that he had to supervise the gardens and the gardeners, and to see that the recommendations of the Committee were properly carried out.38 The Master, Sir J. J. Thomson, later wrote that Housman was ‘very active and useful’ in this post. He certainly had very decided views, liking flowers to have bright and definite colours, and ‘very contemptuous of what are called in florists’ catalogues “art shades”, and which he called muddles’. It was Percy Withers who noted that he also loved their scent, as he had done since he was a child, and was very outraged if a new variety had sacrificed the fragrance of the parent stock. He took his interest in botany seriously, so that it sometimes seemed to a friend that he was more interested in the rarity than the beauty of a particular tree or wild flower; but there were moments when he could not disguise his love for natural beauty, as when he was crossing a field entirely ringed with the gleaming whiteness of the hawthorn, ‘and then he stopped, and gazed, and exclaimed’. And at Trinity Housman particularly admired the breath-taking flock of purple crocuses on the lawns at the back of the College, by the river; and a beautiful avenue of flowering cherry trees (for which Housman was not, in fact, personally responsible). The depth of his feeling for nature is most poignantly recorded in a poem written in 1922, which begins:

Although he was prepared to serve on a number of committees, there was one major College institution with which Housman would have nothing to do – at least, nothing open. This was the chapel. Housman was still interested in religious questions, but would never attend chapel, not wishing to show any trace of allegiance to the God whom he had long ago rejected. Even if there was a preacher whom he particularly wanted to hear, Alfred would not sit in the main body of the chapel, but would steal up to the organ loft, out of sight of the congregation, so that he could hear the sermon without taking part in the service.39 Outside the chapel, it was another matter, and once, when a leading Anglo-Catholic scholar, Bishop Charles Gore, was dining at Trinity, Housman particularly asked to be introduced to him.40 Indeed, Housman was aware of his own ambivalent approach towards Christianity. In 1920 Geoffrey Grant Morris, the classical tutor of Corpus Christi, invited him to be his guest at a college feast, and in the course of the evening dared to ask Housman about his religious opinions. Alfred replied: ‘I think I should describe myself as a High-Church atheist’, and explained that the qualification ‘High-Church’ was a tribute to his mother’s memory and his own early upbringing.41

In general, Housman had very little direct contact with the undergraduate members of the College, though when he was invited to a meeting of the Trinity Classical Society he would sometimes spend an evening reading a classical work with them. His main efforts were concentrated at this time upon pure scholarship: in 1925 he was working not only on the fifth volume of Manilius, but on a full-scale edition of Lucan; while by that year he had already published more than one hundred and forty reviews, articles, or critical comments on Latin and Greek subjects.

Only once, in 1926, did Housman supervise a research student, W. H. Semple, who later became Professor of Latin at Manchester University. And he did not do any individual teaching, or hold any seminars. But he continued to lecture, term by term, in the Examination Schools near Cambridge Market Place, even if the number of those who attended was never very large. One student who attended some of Housman’s lectures between 1919 and 1920 was R. M. Simkins, who recalls42

that he was dealing with the Epodes of Horace among other subjects. These were not immediately connected with the classical Tripos syllabus and in any case what he said was far above our heads … our College tutors left it to us whether we went or not….

My memories are of a middle-sized grey-moustached man who at once gave two impressions – that he was completely master of the situation (misbehaviour or inattention would have been out of the question) and that his words were infallibly correct. The Housman we saw was the Housman who wrote the Introductions to Juvenal and Manilius. But in spite of the concentrated erudition we were constantly expecting some dry witticisms. These served to break any possible monotony and were by no means spoilt by the imperturbable serenity with which he uttered them, I only ONCE saw any semblance of a smile. I do not think he ever addressed any individuals and I am sure I should never have dared to approach him. In fact one felt that it would be impossible for anyone to express disagreement–unless it was in writing. Even now, after half a century, it gives me a shock if I find a modern scholar querying any of his ‘readings’ or explanations.

Geoffrey Carlisle was another student who found that the level of scholarship was far above his head; but when he also complained to his classical tutor that Housman did not seem to appreciate the Latin poetry, he was directed to A Shropshire Lad, and later wrote: ‘I was immediately captivated, and the person of AEH took on a glamour it has never lost.’43

Any undergraduate who dared to call on Professor Housman uninvited was kindly received; but most of them, like Simkins and Carlisle, were too much in awe of him to do so – though Carlisle did arrange to sit next to Housman at Trinity High Table on two occasions after he had graduated, even if he was too shy to talk to the great scholar, and the increasingly famous poet. For the sales of A Shropshire Lad, which had revived during the war, climbed to record heights in the early twenties, when the nostalgic mood of many of the poems perfectly matched a widespread longing among people for a return to the days before the Great War – days which seemed in retrospect to have been an Indian summer of prosperity and tranquillity.

Mainly friendships

Above the fireplace in Housman’s rooms in Whewell’s Court hung the photographs of Adalbert and Moses Jackson. While the picture of Adalbert showed a young man – and of course Adalbert had never grown old – the picture of Moses, which hung as a pendant to the other, was that of a man in late middle age.44 Moses and Alfred were now elderly men, and with Moses and his family living in Canada, they were far apart; but their friendship, based on a lively correspondence, continued; and Alfred was as much in love with his old friend as he had been thirty-five years earlier. Alfred realised what a toll this friendship had taken on his happiness and peace of mind: in one poem, unpublished during his life-time, he described it as an ‘unlucky love’ (MP 12); and in another, also unpublished, he looked forward to death, when he would be freed from the painful burden of his love:

Crossing alone the nighted ferry

    With the one coin for fee,   

Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,

    Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,

    The true sick-hearted slave,

Expect him not in the just city

    And free land of the grave.

(MP 23)

His efforts to ease his continuous sorrow, by writing to ‘My dear Mo’,45  only prolonged the years of hopeless suffering. He had managed to disguise it enough to become quite a family friend, sending nonsense verse to his godson Gerald Jackson,46 and even writing to Moses’s wife, on one occasion sending her an illustrated edition of A Shropshire Lad together with a letter in which he commented: ‘I do not admire the illustrations as much as I admire the poems!’ Even when in 1922 Alfred sent Moses his newly-published Last Poems, the four-page letter which accompanied it was written in an amusing way. But among the poems in this volume was ‘Epithalamium’, the wedding poem written in Moses Jackson’s honour which Housman had only recently completed, and which contained the lines:

Friend and comrade yield you o’er

To her that hardly loves you more;

(LP 24)

and the dedication to Moses was serious enough, written as it was from ‘a fellow who thinks more of you than anything in the world’, and who told his friend: ‘you are largely responsible for my writing poetry and you ought to take the consequences’.47

Moses Jackson had himself known some sadness. In 1919, shortly after returning from the war, his second son had been killed in a bicycling accident in Vancouver; but, generally speaking, he had thoroughly enjoyed life on his farm near Aldegrove, where he had now been settled for eleven years. But by 1922 he was beginning to show symptoms of some serious illness; and less than a year later, suffering from cancer of the stomach, Moses was very close to death. Lying in a hospital bed in Vancouver, he pencilled a last, faint letter to his old friend, whom he addressed as ‘Dear old Hous’. Alfred received the letter; and, soon afterwards hearing of Jackson’s death, he endorsed the envelope ‘Mo’s last letter’, carefully went over the writing in ink, and treasured it for the rest of his life.48 Later, the Jacksons sent Housman a photograph of Mo’s tombstone;49 the picture of Moses remained on the wall above the fireplace. One day Alfred’s brother Laurence noticed it; although he had met Jackson as a young man, he did not recognise the middle-aged man of the photograph, and he asked Alfred who it was. His brother answered, ‘in a strangely moved voice … “That was my friend Jackson, the man who had more influence on my life than anybody else.”’50

Moses Jackson was the only one of Housman’s Oxford friends with whom he had kept in regular communication. True, he had been pleased to see Alfred Pollard at the Inaugural Lecture in 1911, but by then they seemed to have little in common, and if he did meet Pollard again, it was at very infrequent intervals; though, remembering that Pollard had helped him with the publication of A Shropshire Lad, Housman may have asked his advice about Last Poems. However, Housman was now an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, who in 1925 commissioned Francis Dodd to make a portrait drawing of their prodigal son. Housman had always taken a friendly interest in his old University, feeling pleased, for example, when Oxford won the Boat Race; and in the post-war years he enjoyed meeting groups of Oxford men from time to time, whether informally, as when he lunched with Professor Adcock of King’s College and several Oxford graduates,51 or formally, at dinners of the inter-University club ‘The Arcades’. In November 1921 he even agreed to propose the toast ‘Oxford’ at the annual dinner of Oxford men in Cambridge. The dinner was held in the Combination Room of St John’s College, where, after addressing the company as ‘Fellow-exiles’, Housman entertained them with ‘an elaborate comparison between the Ivy at Magdalene, which was said to be clinging to and destroying the fabric, and the women members of the University’.52

Housman’s links with the Patent Office were even fewer than his links with Oxford. Having registered so many of them as Trade Marks, he still had an eye for advertisements; and when he wrote to Percy Withers about his New Year’s Eve stout and oysters, joking that he took them ‘medicinally to neutralise the excesses of Christmas’, he finished: ‘When you give Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup to a baby, “the little darling wakes up as bright as a button”; and so do I on New Year’s Day.’ On his writing desk lay the Wedgwood medallion which his superior had given him when he left the Patent Office in 1892, and among his papers was John Maycock’s letter of congratulation on his appointment as Latin Professor; but the only fellow-clerk with whom he had any contact at all in later years was Hodges, the married staff clerk at whose home Housman had long ago spent an occasional happy evening.53

Housman always felt a special gratitude towards University College London. When he left, he had asked to continue his membership of the Professors’ Dining Club,54 though he did not actually dine with them again until 1925, at the special invitation of H. E. Butler, his successor there as Professor of Latin. But, during that evening in October, he went over to Professor A. V. Hill, a Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine, who had been a Fellow of Trinity until 1916, and was now teaching at University College. ‘Housman looked through me at Trinity’, A. V. Hill remembered, ‘but welcomed me warmly at University College, coming over to me in the most friendly way; as it was University College which had first recognised his academic brilliance after his years in the Patent Office.’55

Housman had kept several good friends from his days at University College, chief among them Walter Ashburner, W. P. Ker, and Arthur Platt. Occasionally Housman dined in London with Ashburner, and when in 1926 Ashburner went to Oxford as Professor of Jurisprudence, they still kept in touch – perhaps because they shared so many of the same fairly harmless prejudices: in January 1929 Alfred wrote to his friend: ‘I met yesterday a man who had been entertained, as I never have, at Pembroke in your University, and who spoke well of its wine and its anti-feminism.’56

W. P. Ker retired as Professor of English at University College in the summer of 1922; and, although he soon afterwards left for a holiday in the Alps, Housman was glad to think that he would be able to show Ker the proofs of Last Poems on his return. Ker had been elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1920, and still had several years of those light duties to occupy him; but in July 1923 he returned to the Alps again, where he fell dead from heart failure while enjoying one of his favourite mountain walks.

Two years later, Arthur Platt was also dead. Housman had continued to visit the Platts regularly, and he and Arthur had enjoyed a lively and uninhibited correspondence. Unfortunately, only one of these letters survives – in which Alfred wonders whether St Paul’s experiences in the third heaven could be explained in the same way as those of Don Quixote in the moon. The rest were destroyed by Mrs Platt on her husband’s death, as ‘too Rabelaisian’. The friendship between Housman and Platt had always had an element of friendly banter in it: ‘I congratulate you on having managed to live with Platt so long’, wrote Housman to Mrs Platt in December 1920, adding ‘This is a compliment of the season’; and a favourite theme was the fact that Housman preferred drinking, and Platt smoking. When Housman first went to Cambridge as Professor in 1911, Platt had written to their mutual friend Henry Jackson, mentioning Housman’s boast that he would drink double to make up for Mayor’s abstinence, and adding: ‘so I hope you’ll keep your eye on him; he’ll drink only too much without any sense of duty to spur him on – comes of not smoking, I believe’.57 Now Housman, after working hard to collect and edit the best of Platt’s Essays for publication, added a Preface in which, after paying full tribute to Platt’s good nature, his versatility, and his scholarship, he added: ‘In conclusion it is proper to mention his vices. He was addicted to tobacco and indifferent to wine, and he would squander long summer days on watching the game of cricket.’58 In the main body of the book, Housman added notes to explain simple references to cricket, such as ‘that arts had had an unconscionably long innings’, later explaining that his object was ‘to win a smile from Platt’s beatified spirit and mitigate the tedium of Paradise’.

William Rothenstein and his family had returned to London, and Alfred saw them from time to time. But he had always disliked Rothenstein’s drawings of him, and was pleased to be able to write to Mrs Rothenstein in January 1927:

You might tell William that he has lost his monopoly in my features, as I have been drawn this last year for my two Colleges by two artists named Dodd and Gleadowe. The two drawings are very unlike, but neither of them makes me look as nasty as the portrait which this College bought from William, and so prevented him, to my great relief, from exhibiting it any more in public and from adding malignant touches from time to time, as he used to do when he was out of temper. But I have a beautiful and forgiving nature, and I wish him as well as you a happy new year….

The drawings were certainly very unlike; the Dodd portrait, commissioned by St John’s College, shows Housman sitting beside a desk piled high with books; he is neatly dressed, with a tie and wing-collar; and his face is that of a man who has suffered, but who gazes proudly, almost defiantly, out of the picture, with a look of aristocratic challenge. Gleadowe’s portrait, commissioned by Trinity, shows a different aspect: the face rather soft and sensitive; and the droopy moustache, which seems only incidental in Dodd’s portrait, here becomes an important feature, reinforcing a general impression of sensuality. Gleadowe, who was Slade Professor at Oxford when he drew the portrait, later recalled that Housman59

chatted easily most of the time, and was so lively that I felt I had a good chance of getting something of his true character into the drawing. As I started drawing I said to him ‘What about your time?’ He thought I said ‘tie’, and replied ‘Ready-made, half-a-crown, fastens with a clip behind. I’ll take it off, if you like.’ When I was drawing his ear, I remarked on its interesting shape. ‘Ordinary criminal type, surely’, said he.

Rothenstein made one more attempt to draw Housman. In January 1928, Alfred was one of a group of distinguished pall-bearers at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey.60 Rothenstein wanted to paint them as a group, but Housman would only agree to sit on the condition that all the other pall-bearers agreed first, telling William bluntly: ‘You are much too great an artist to catch a likeness’; though he softened this remark by adding that ‘a journalist present in the Abbey says that my person proved as polished as my verse, after which I desire to be for ever invisible.’ When J. M. Barrie also held out against the project, it came to nothing, much to Housman’s relief. Indeed, he disliked the portrait which Trinity had bought from Rothenstein so much, that in the end he gave the College another of himself by Rothenstein, one which he found less offensive, and then he removed the first one, and destroyed it.

One of the pall-bearers, Sir Edmund Gosse, died himself only four months later. Alfred had been very pleased to see him again, and find him looking ‘as young as ever’, for although they had seen each other fairly often before the war, their friendship had been continued only by occasional correspondence since then. But Gosse had written a very favourable review of Last Poems for the Sunday Times: and he had also pleased Housman – who had earlier complained that his biography of Swinburne did not reveal enough – by sending him a typewritten account of Swinburne’s addiction to drink and flagellation. Gosse wrote about Swinburne’s excesses in a way which may have struck an answering note in Housman’s mind, when he thought of his own homosexual encounters;61

They existed, as it were, outside his morality, which was in all essentials (strange as it may seem) unaffected by them. He was totally without the vicious desire to cause other persons to accept his conduct in these matters as admirable. He never excused, or boasted, or expressed any remorse or regret for these excesses. I never heard him, and I never heard of anyone else who heard him, recommend them to others. He was a perfectly safe companion for youth, and to those who were temperate and innocent he seemed to have himself preserved both temperance and innocence.

Housman was certainly interested to note that, while his writings were influenced by de Sade, Swinburne’s private inclinations were those of Sacher-Masoch. On his own shelves in Whewell’s Court there were a number of serious books about sexual matters; and he also read with interest German and French classics, such as Balzac’s bawdy Contes Drolatiques,62 and books which were banned in England, including James Joyce’s Ulysses – which he had received from Grant Richards, to whom he wrote that he had ‘scrambled and waded through [it] and found one or two half-pages amusing’. In 1928, through Grant Richards – who wrote ‘I suppose I ought not to post it to you, but if by some mischance I am prosecuted, I shall maintain that its literary interest to citizens connected with literature places me in a privileged position’ – he laid hands on Frederick Rolfe’s unpublished set of pornographic letters about the homosexual underworld of Venice. He had thought that these might inflame his passions, but in the event they were something of a disappointment: ‘That sort of thing is not really improved by literary elegances’, wrote Housman to Grant Richards, ‘and I have been more amused with things written in urinals.’

Over the years, Housman had remained more closely in touch with James Frazer, who had been knighted in 1914 for his anthropological work. Housman still did not much care for Lady Frazer, a woman with an uncertain temper.63 ‘Many thanks for your kind effort on behalf of my proper feeding’, Alfred wrote to her once, ‘You look very benign in the picture, and I hope that the interior corresponds …’.64 But in 1921 Housman was one of the sponsors of the Frazer lectureship in social anthropology, and was chosen to write a formal address to Sir James. Just as he was inspired by Frazer’s unveiling of ancient mysteries in The Golden Bough, so on his various holidays in England, Housman was always interested in discussing local traditions, and kept a letter from the vicar of Bloxham, who wrote to say ‘When we were talking about folk lore … I meant to tell you that we still have surviving in this district the use of a doll on May day encircled in the green.’ The doll was carried round lying flat on her back, by children who sang ‘not very clearly, a carol of which I have not yet been able to get the words, as they are shy about them’.65

The Frazers remained in Cambridge; but two of Housman’s friends had left for Eton: Andrew Gow to become a classics master there in 1914, and M. R. James to become Provost in 1918. Housman, who felt that Gow was wasting his talents by taking a job as a schoolmaster, kept a friendly eye on his career, encouraging him to try for Latin professorships, and to keep in touch with Trinity; and when James also moved to Eton, he began to make occasional journeys there to see his friends. Gow was flattered by Housman’s attention, though he did not know him at all well at this time; and in January 1924, after dining as Housman’s guest at a meeting of ‘The Family’, Gow sent him a copy of the Creech translation of Manilius, hoping that Housman would accept it as ‘a very trifling return for a great deal of pleasure and instruction that I owe you’.66 At last, in 1925, Gow was offered a teaching post at Trinity, and accepted it, after Housman had written to him pointing out that he had made a success of his time at Eton, and might even be opulent if he become a Housemaster; but that Eton would not allow him leisure for the full development of his talents. On his visits Housman had met a number of the staff at Eton, including the librarian, Broadbent, ‘rather a figure of fun, with the largest and most bloodshot eyes I ever saw, and produces Greek and Latin verses which should be pointed but are not’, and the headmaster Dr Alington, who was very impressed by the paper on Erasmus Darwin which Housman read to an Eton society. But Housman particularly delighted in the company of James, and once sent him this ‘Proposal for an edition of the Septuagint by M. R. James’:67

A.E.H. fecit
This pictures offers to your sight Chaos before the birth of hight; The state of things you will remark Is consequently very dark.

A.E.H. fecit
The figures you do not perceive Are those of Adam and of Eve; To draw them would not do at all – How providential was the Fall!

Dr Withers, that other friend from Cambridge, had now moved close to the edge of the Cotswolds. He made every effort to keep in touch with Housman, writing to him each Christmas with news of his family and his new house. Quite by chance, his village of Souldern lay very close to the route along which Housman had himself chauffeur-driven to visit the Wises in Gloucestershire every year; and in June 1921 he wrote to Withers, asking if he might look in for lunch on the way. The meeting was a great success; conversation flowed easily for once, and the house looked at its best on what had turned out to be a perfect summer’s day. The following year Alfred stayed with his friends at Souldern for three nights, and the year after that for five. From then on, he visited them for at least a few days almost every year until he died.

Percy Withers and his wife worked hard and unobtrusively to make things pleasant for their distinguished guest, and Alfred had soon found that he could settle into a thoroughly relaxing routine in their household. At 7.15 a.m. they brought him morning tea, and then, after breakfast an hour later, he would wander in the garden, burying his face in trusses of bloom for the scent. Much of the rest of the day he spent reading peacefully in the garden or the library; but each morning and afternoon he and Withers would set off together for a five-or six-mile tramp through the surrounding countryside. Withers felt these walks, and indeed much of each visit, a considerable strain, finding it difficult to keep up a conversation with Housman. This lack of understanding is shown clearly in his description of an incident on one of their walks. Withers had recognised a local farm labourer in the lane ahead of them, and, telling Housman how good and wise the man was, he stopped to talk to him, expecting that Housman would stop also. But Alfred, as might have been expected, ‘walked steadily on, as though the lane were vacant’, clearly feeling that he had nothing to learn from an Oxfordshire peasant.

It was frustrating for Withers ‘never to feel the smallest assurance that I had got an inch nearer to Housman himself … I had to be content as the mystic is, who adores his saint without requital, and is satisfied’, and this frustration spills over into his book about Housman, in which he seems to delight in recording the mornings on which Alfred was sometimes

But there is no doubt that Percy Withers admired Housman enormously, and that the warmth of his admiration and friendship moved Housman strongly, so that on the last day of each visit he would be visibly sad and gloomy at the thought of leaving. At the end of one visit, this was particularly noticeable. On the evening before, Withers’s daughter Audrey had come up from work in London for a visit. She was natural and spontaneous, and Housman, who had never met her before, took to her immediately: ‘within three minutes’, wrote Dr Withers rather enviously, ‘words were rattling to and fro, swift and keen and challenging, like the ball on a racquet court, and the game never for a moment halted … a joint display of wit, mirth and benevolence, in which I occasionally chipped in.’ But the following day, after lunch, Housman was glum and tongue-tied; Audrey’s efforts to talk to him were in vain; and when, after saying goodbye to Audrey and Mrs Withers, Alfred walked down to his car, he could bring himself to say nothing of his visit: ‘but, as he grasped my hand, wordlessly,’ remembered Withers, ‘he turned on me the saddest and most haunting countenance I had ever seen on any face but his …’.

Housman continued to be sympathetic about Withers’s poor health; though, as soon as insulin became available for treating diabetes, Withers’s general health improved a great deal. Housman himself had remained in excellent health until his sixties. Then, in May 1923, he reported to Withers that: ‘For nearly three months I have been ill, not on a scale which would inspire your respect, but enough to make me very angry and disgusted, and in fact worse than I ever was in my life.’ He had suffered from boils, and then a succession of carbuncles, and his Easter holiday had been ruined. But, after this unpleasant bout of ill health, he was physically very well again for some years; though no doubt from time to time he suffered from the ‘nervous depression and causeless apprehensions’ which he later said had often afflicted him.

As he advanced towards his old age, Housman had to bear the unhappiness of outliving many of his closest friends, and his most highly-valued acquaintances. Edmund Gosse, Arthur Benson, W. P. Ker, Arthur Platt, and his beloved Moses Jackson had all died before Alfred’s seventieth birthday in March 1929. But many still remained, including two of his oldest and dearest friends, Sophie Becker and Edith Wise. His reputation as a poet had been confirmed and strengthened by the publication of Last Poems; and Housman was becoming recognised through out the world as one of the great classical scholars of his day.

Notes

Unless separately indicated the major sources of background information for this chapter are from: Letters; Gow; Housman 1897–1936; Withers.

1 Lilly, Arthur Platt to Henry Jackson.

2 G. M. Trevelyan, Trinity College: An Historical Sketch, 1972; Epilogue by Dr. R. Robson, p. 114.

3 Congress, LHMS: Sir Sydney Cockerell to Laurence Housman, 28 March 1937.

4 Lilly: Carter correspondence, Oliffe Richmond to Mrs K. E. Symons, 27 September 1937.

5 Extracts from A. E. Housman, The Confines of Criticism, Cambridge Inaugural Lecture 1911, Cambridge University Press, 1969. See the Preface, pp. 7,8, 17, 21, 23.

6 See the College Register of St John’s, Oxford for 26 April 1911.

7 AEH: Recollections, A. W. Pollard, p. 44.

8 Sotheby’s Catalogue, 15 December 1970, p. 147; from a letter to Edith Wise, 11 July 1911.

9 The lectures are set out by years in Trinity, Add MS 71–252.

10 Watson, p. 199.

11 Lilly: Carter correspondence, Oliffe Richmond to Mrs K. E. Symons, 27 September 1937.

12 AEH: Recollections, A. S. F. Gow, p. 72.

13 See the interesting description of Benson in A. L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977, p. 230.

14 Trinity, Add MS 71–144; letter of 16 May 1913.

15 AEH: Recollections, Mrs K. E. Symons, p. 34.

16 Information taken from G. H. Hardy, Bertrand Russell and Trinity, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

17 Trinity, Add MS 71–32. This letter to the Dean is mentioned in a letter from Laurence Housman, 18 October 1936. Apparently, thoughts about the sexual needs of soldiers also came to Housman in his sleep. Trinity have a letter (at present uncatalogued) from Leonard Whibley to A. S. F. Gow recalling an amusing couplet which Housman dreamed during the war, in which Housman imagines that the smoke from a popular cheap cigarette, and the image of a certain sort of woman, coil round each other above the place where a soldier lies buried.

18 Congress, RHP Box 6.

19 Congress, RHP Box 3: see the letters from A. E. Housman to Grant Richards of 4 February 1916 and 14 October 1917.

20 JPP.

21 Dictionary of National Biography.

22 J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Reflections, London, George Bell, p. 314.

23 See Maude Hawkins A. E. Housman: Man behind a Mask, Chicago, 1958, p. 181.

24 Rex Salisbury Woods Cambridge Doctor, London, Robert Hale, 1962, p. 91.

25 Recollections and Reflections, p. 314.

26 Ibid.

27 Congress, RHP Box 2: Laurence Housman to Grant Richards, 10 March 1939.

28 Lilly: G. B. A. Fletcher to Grant Richards, 26 September 1940 (see also Housman 1897–1936, p. 385).

29 Columbia: Laurence Housman to Cyril Clemens, 28 January 1943.

30 T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, London, Cape, 1935, p. 563; it was the knowledge of this which first awakened the interest of the present author in Housman.

31 Edward Marsh, A Number of People.

32 Cambridge Doctor, p. 93.

33 Laurence Housman in the Listener, 27 November 1941, p. 727.

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

35 Bertrand Russell and Trinity, pp. 54–5.

36 Grant Richards, Alfred Housman: Gourmet, copy in Congress, RHP Box 2.

37 Housman Society Journal, vol. 1, Turner and Devereux, 1974; A. E. Housman at Trinity, A. S. F. Gow, p. 18. Housman’s malicious remark about the inferior ‘sauce aux huitres’ is from the same source.

38 Recollections and Reflections, pp. 315–16.

39 Information from A. S. F. Gow in a conversation with the present author, 20 September 1975.

40 Letter to the present author from the Rev. Geoffrey T. Carlisle, 15 May 1976 (told to him by Rev. W. F. P. Ellis, c. 1921).

41 Ibid, (told to Carlisle by Geoffrey Grant Morris on the morning after the feast).

42 Letter to the present author from R. M. Simkins, 15 May 1976 (St John’s College, Cambridge, 1917–21).

43 Letter to the present author from the Rev. Geoffrey T. Carlisle, 15 May 1976.

44 Trinity, Add MS 71–31; letter from Laurence Housman, 22 September 1937.

45 Sotheby’s Catalogue, 9 July 1968, p. 160.

46 Details in this paragraph about Housman’s contact with Moses Jackson’s family are taken from Lilly: Carter correspondence 1936–1970; letter from Gerald Jackson, 18 May 1955.

47 Watson, p. 211.

48 From an article by Laurence Housman in Encounter, October 1967.

49 Sotheby’s Catalogue, 9 July 1968, p. 160.

50 From the article by Laurence Housman in Encounter, October 1967.

51 Congress, LHMS: letter from Alan Ker, 15 December 1937.

52 Trinity, Add MS 71–268; letter from R. Laffan, 14 July 1936. The letter refers to the ‘Long Gallery’, but I am told by Dr Robson that this is more commonly called the Combination Room – though it had formerly been the Long Gallery of the Master’s Lodge.

53 Trinity, Add MS 71–190; letter from F. W. Hodges. See also Trinity, Add MS 71–187; letter from Philip G. Webb.

54 Trinity, Add MS 71–203; letter from R. W. Chambers, 2 February 1937.

55 A. V. Hill in conversation with the present author, September 1975.

56 Alan Bell (ed.), Fifteen Letters to Walter Ashburner, Edinburgh, Tragara Press, 1976; letter of 29 January 1929.

57 Lilly: Carter correspondence; copy of the letter from Arthur Platt to Henry Jackson, 22 April 1911.

58 A. E. Housman: Selected Prose; Arthur Platt, p. 159.

59 Columbia: letter from R. M. Y. Gleadowe to Cyril Clemens, 21 December 1936.

60 Amongst the other pall-bearers were Stanley Baldwin, Bernard Shaw, Kipling, Gosse and J. M. Barrie.

61 This essay has been published in Cecil Y. Lang (ed.), The Yale Edition of the Swinburne Letters, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1962, p. 235.

62 JPP, Laurence Housman to Katharine Symons, 9 March.

63 From a conversation between the present author and A. S. F. Gow, 20 September 1975.

64 Trinity; 12 October 1926.

65 A letter from W. Fothergill Robinson to A. E. Housman, 30 June 1921: among the papers of M. Higham Esq.

66 St John’s College, Oxford; letter of 15 February 1924.

67 Among the papers in the possession of M. Higham Esq.