‘But when the hundred-and-thirty-eighth night had come SHE SAID
Time reaps all and does not remember; therefore let him who would know the fate which will befall his name in time to come, guard the fame of those who have passed before him into the room of death.’
The Thousand Nights and One Night, Mardrus and Mathers
My chief aim has been to write a balanced and sympathetic account of a remarkable but troubled life. A secondary aim has been to introduce a new generation to the neglected beauties of A. E. Housman’s poetry.
A. E. Housman was a great classical scholar, a distinguished poet and a vintage academic character. There has so far been no general biography. A. S. F. Gow’s Sketch (1936) was only intended as an outline of Housman’s life, for the benefit of those who were primarily concerned with Housman as a classical scholar. Other volumes of recollections by Laurence Housman, Percy Withers, Grant Richards and others illuminated different aspects of A. E. Housman’s life, without attempting a general view. George L. Watson in A. E. Housman: A Divided Life (1957) did not have access to a great number of important letters and papers; and so, there were many gaps which he could only fill with speculation. Maude M. Hawkins’s A. E. Housman: Man Behind a Mask (1958), the most recent biography, is not thought to be dependable.
The publication in Encounter (October 1967) of an article by Laurence Housman gave an important insight into his brother Alfred’s personal life; and then in 1971 the appearance of The Letters of A. E. Housman provided – as their editor, Henry Maas, had hoped – some solid material for the study of Housman’s life and character. By the mid-1970s, in addition to these and other printed sources, a great number of unpublished papers had also become accessible to any would-be biographer. These included documents in public institutions, such as the Housman collection in the Lilly Library, Indiana; and documents in private hands, such as those generously shown to the present author by M. Higham. It was now possible, for the first time, to try to see the full pattern of Housman’s life.
Any account of Housman’s life must of course describe Housman’s achievements as a classical scholar. Here I thank two of Housman’s successors to the Latin Chair at University College London: O. Skutsch; and also – and in particular – Professor G. P. Goold, the modern translator of Manilius.
Others who have given me the benefit of their expert knowledge, or who have contributed to the readability of my book, include H. M. Colvin of St John’s College, Oxford; Dr R. Robson of Trinity College, Cambridge; Mrs J. Percival, Archivist of University College London; N. V. H. Symons; John Pugh; H. E. M. Icely; J. T. R. Graves; Timothy O’Sullivan; Frank Sutterby; Alan Harding; and my wife Anne Graves.
I also thank the following for supplying me with original material or for corresponding with me on some aspect of my book: the Hon. Sir Steven Runciman, Dr R. Salisbury Woods, H. Montgomery Hyde, the Rev. Geoffrey T. Carlisle, R. M. Simkins, G. Robertson, A. G. McL. Pearce Higgins, E. G. Bothroyd, J. Hunt, and E. Dalby. I have also had useful conversations with, among others, the late A. S. F. Gow, the late Professor A. V. Hill, Mrs Phyllis Symons, Professor Sandbach, A. Prior, Dr E. P. Cadbury, Mrs David Oilier, and the Rev. A. Butler.
I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to librarians and other owners or custodians of manuscript documents who have allowed me to study material from their collections; to the owners of copyright, and the rights and permissions managers of publishers who have given me the permissions which I asked for; and to others who have smoothed my path. In particular I thank Miss Anne Munro-Ker and Miss Doris Beer of the Society of Authors for their help. Finally, I should make it clear how much I owe to the cooperation of the Housman Society, and of Housman’s literary executor Robert E. Symons.
In the course of preparing for this biography, I read and noted some articles, many books and a great number of manuscript documents relating to A. E. Housman. But I cannot pretend that – in three years – I have read every article about Housman which has ever been written, or that I have had time to read every book to ensure that none of the manuscript sources which I quote have already been referred to in print. Inevitably, there will be some occasions – I hope not too many – when I have unwittingly given an unpublished source precedence over a published one; and there will also be occasions where I have arrived independently at a conclusion which has at some stage been put forward by someone else. I would like to assure any scholar whom I have offended that errors of this sort have been made honestly, and if pointed out to me, will be put right in any future edition of this work.
I must add that, in using material from the Grant Richards papers in the Library of Congress, I have sometimes felt that it was more effective to quote from an original letter than from Mr Richards’s interpretation of it or reference to it in his Housman 1897–1936 – (see for example Chapter 6 notes 6 and 7); and I make no apology for quoting from any of the letters in the Laurence Housman papers from the Library of Congress which may have formed the basis of statements by Maude M. Hawkins in her A. E. Housman: Man behind a Mask; original letters, I suspect, will carry more weight with some scholars than many extracts from Mrs Hawkins’s book.