I was the sun, my brother Basil the earth, Alfred the moon. My part in the game was to stay where I was and rotate on my axis; Basil’s was to go round me in a wide circle rotating as he went; Alfred, performing the movements of the moon, skipped round him without rotation.

Housman is not the only poet in the nineteenth century to have been part of a living orrery; evidence uncovered by Nicholas Roe suggests that Keats enjoyed similar educative games at Enfield School, where each pupil was given a card listing key facts about specific planets (“I represent the grand Georgium Sidus . . . I move round the Sun in about 83 years, and at the distance of 1,800,000,000 miles”), and then put into orbit around a classmate representing “the great Sun”. But it seems significant that Housman, as well as taking part, was also the bossy god who created this mini-universe and set it in motion. For whereas most people grow out of the desire to have whole worlds at their command, just as they grow out of tending ant-farms or using train-sets to stage elaborate crashes, Housman might better be thought to have grown into it. His inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin in Cambridge pointed out that the boy who makes mud pies shares “in modest measure the activities of the demiurge”, as he sets out to “evoke a small world out of a small chaos; let him also behold the work of his hands and pronounce it, if he can, to be pretty good”, and he exercised similar talents in his twin lives as classical scholar and poet.

For many years, critics wrote about these lives as if they belonged to different people who just happened to inhabit the same skin: the grim, prim Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the beery, blossom-scented Shropshire lad. In fact, both kinds of literary endeavour reflected similar desires and fears. Both involved retrieving meaningful patterns from disorder and flux; both revealed Housman’s need to put contingency in its place. Despite claiming that the textual critic was “not at all like Newton, investigating the motions of the planets”, but “much more like a dog hunting for fleas”, the care he lavished on his edition of the astronomer-poet Manilius shows that, for all his sensitivity to local irritations, his editorial hand was guided by a larger purpose: to redeem the “chaos” (a common word in his notes) of earlier texts; to arrange words into the sort of permanent relations for which Manilius looked to the heavens. As a poet, too, Housman was keen to restore some kind of order to the undifferentiated white space of the page:

They say my verse is sad: no wonder.
Its narrow measure spans
Rue for eternity, and sorrow
Not mine, but man’s.

Only Housman could have written such uncertainly ambitious lines, which reach out enquiringly with those extra beats on “wonder” and “sorrow” before flinching back into a more predictable “narrow measure”: a stanza which works like a trap. And throughout both kinds of writing, the creative and the critical, Housman’s eyes were repeatedly drawn to the stars: the “star-defeated” lovers of Shropshire; the “superb constellation” of Arnold’s rivals; the claim that classical scholars should “thank their stars”. However serious these metaphors, their regular reappearance in Housman’s writing, added with all the measured approval of a teacher handing out gold stars, provided small moments of constancy in a world beset by chance and change.

The magnificent edition of The Letters of A. E. Housman, edited by Archie Burnett, shows how carefully Housman followed similar strategies of risk-management in his private life. “Nothing very remarkable has happened”, concludes one early undergraduate letter, and the audible mixture of regret and relief strikes a key that would reverberate throughout his later career – one in which the only surprises, like the coiled venom of his attacks on other critics, would be those he planned in advance. This could make social life difficult, particularly in situations that drew attention to the precious but precarious conventions of civilized behaviour. One of his longest surviving letters, written to the Steward of Trinity College, Cambridge, his home from 1911 until his death in 1936, begins with the complaint that at a recent feast “the sherry started on its rounds only from the Master’s left”. Hardly an error to knock the planet off its course, one might think, but the tone of mock-heroic banter in Housman’s explanation (“when the world is out of joint you are the only means to set it right”) does not altogether drown out the worry that setting oneself against falling standards is potentially a tragic business, as necessary moral ideals are fractured against the equally necessary compromises of everyday experience. There is nothing here of the tipsy Marcel Proust’s pleasure in the “dizzy but ordered circulation” of waiters in À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, as he becomes aware of the patterns made by their seemingly random scurrying between the tables, like satellites caught up in a galaxy’s gravitational field. For Housman, social propriety, like the accuracy of a classical text, was a matter of all or nothing, and his own behaviour in company – “this precise, formal, cautious little man”, as A. C. Benson described him – seems to have been motivated in part by the fear of what might happen to him if he stopped playing by the rules. A deep undercurrent of anxiety ripples through his friend Percy Withers’s claim that Housman was “nothing if not exact”.

According to his brother Laurence, Housman was also “shy, proud, reserved, reticent, taciturn, staid, sardonic, secretive, undemonstrative, and glum”. Those aren’t usually the ingredients for a successful social life, but those who knew Housman best were keen to point out that this was merely the protective shell of a sensitive man in the company of strangers; the same man, they claimed, could be affectionate, gentle and kind when he felt he wasn’t being watched. But although this private figure is fleetingly present in his letters, for Housman this form of writing too was unavoidably bound up with a sense of being watched. Even when addressing a family member or friend, the one observer Housman could never escape was his editorial self, casting a critical eye over his writing before adding the strangely formal tag “A. E. Housman”, as if this were less a signature than an ascription.

This habit of self-scrutiny takes different forms in his letters. Most obviously, it manifests itself in the surviving drafts printed by Archie Burnett, full of crossings-out and second thoughts, which show how much care Housman took to get the right word in the right place. But the finished letters, too, demonstrate an editorial vigilance in refusing to take anything for granted, least of all their own attitude towards a subject. Such wariness can be seen in Housman’s mastery of the comic non sequitur, as he uses the gap between paragraphs to make a sudden swerve of direction: “It looks to me as if the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort . . . . When are we going to the music-hall?” It can be seen in his fondness for cliché, which he often adopts as a stalking-horse for more thoughtful turns of thought and phrase, from describing how a young man of his acquaintance regards going to heaven as “a dead certainty”, to offering Laurence carefully barbed compliments on his poems: “I don’t know how you manage it”. Above all, it can be seen in his cultivation of an ear permanently cocked for fraudulence, so that whenever Housman the poet is tempted into flights of fancy, Housman the editor is quick to pull him back down to earth: “Why was I ever born? This question is addressed to the universe, not to you personally”.

Often these two voices cannot be separated. When Housman describes a trip from Paris on board one of the early commercial airliners, for example, his letter quickly settles into rhythms that bring together breathless excitement and more cautious exactitude: “I flew home by one of the new ‘Silver Wing’ aeroplanes, which is more roomy and steadier, and contains an attendant to supply you with cheese and biscuits and various liquors”. Over time he learned how to play these voices off each other as a double act of knowing comedian and impassive stooge, as when he responds to a query about which set of rooms Byron occupied in Trinity College: “I know a man who has occupied both sets, and I have asked him which would be the most convenient for keeping a bear in; and he says the former”. Occasionally a strong word penetrates Housman’s reserve, like a shark’s fin breaking the surface of the sea, as he grimaces at “filthy” misprints or “disgusting” errors. But even this could be turned into a game, as with his letters to Grant Richards about the sadomasochistic pornography Richards procured for him (Housman seems to have had a particular taste for flogging fantasies, such as The Whippingham Papers, sadomasochism being one way of preserving control within the potentially unruly world of sex), in which he repeatedly approaches a request for more material before veering away, tracing an elliptical orbit around the subject rather than confronting it head-on.

Like the subject of homosexuality in his poems, such tactics show Housman’s skill at circling an idea in a way that both highlights and evades it, but they can make it hard to assess his true feelings. As he wrote of his inaugural lecture, many of his letters are “rhetorical and not wholly sincere”. But neither are they wholly insincere, and it is troubling to read lines such as “You will be amused to hear that the careful Louis [his chauffeur] knocked down a small girl”, where the glint of private glee in “careful” starts to confuse real suffering with the sort of world depicted in the Cautionary Tales of Hilaire Belloc. Such lines are more common in the later letters, perhaps because by now he trusted his correspondents to know how his jokes should be taken, but also perhaps because his previously agile banter was starting to harden into a fixed expression. He was becoming the man in the ironic mask.

Only once does the mask slip, in the sole surviving letter to Moses Jackson, the Oxford contemporary to whom Housman devoted himself, but from whom, in Laurence Housman’s carefully chosen words, “there was no response in kind”. Forty years on, with Jackson dying of stomach cancer, A. E. Housman sent him a copy of Last Poems with what came as close as he ever dared to writing a love letter, just as his nickname for Moses, “Mo”, stopped tantalizingly short of being a confession of love, “Amo”.

It is now 11 o’clock in the morning, and I hear that the Cambridge shops are sold out. Please to realise therefore, with fear and respect, that I am an eminent bloke; though I would much rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots.

The desperate blokeishness of this suggests how raw Housman’s wounds still were, but the little dabs of alliteration (“bloke . . . blacked . . . boots”) also hint at an attempt to find a healing pattern in his grief, so it is entirely fitting that Housman was reworking an earlier attempt to make sense of their star-crossed relationship, in a draft of A Shropshire Lad IX, which dreams of “shoes I’d liefer black than most / That walk upon the land”.

The break with Moses seems to have happened in 1885, during the period in which both were working at the Patent Office in London and sharing lodgings. Whether or not Housman confessed that he wanted to share something more, as Laurence assumed, the friendship never recovered its old unselfconsciousness, and for Housman at least it became something to brood over alone, occasionally writing about Moses (one diary entry reads with heartbreaking flatness “I heard he was married”), but, it appears, never writing to him. The period in which Housman was busy mourning his loss – a loss of possibility that he would continue to mourn – was one in which he searched for a direction before settling on “those minute and pedantic studies in which I am fitted to excel and which give me pleasure”. They were simultaneously his wilderness years and the pivot around which the rest of his life revolved. It is, then, frustrating that this is also the period most sparsely covered by his extant letters: only eight survive between 1881 and 1889, a figure which looks even thinner when compared with the forty-three which survive from 1936, even though Housman died in April of that year. Given his usual reticence about his private life it is impossible to say whether this a matter of chance or design. Either way it is a hole at the heart of these two big volumes, a gap in which Housman disappears from view; like The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells (published the year after A Shropshire Lad), it is a period in which Housman is detectable only by the movements of his surroundings.

Archie Burnett is refreshingly candid about these gaps: “This edition aims to print all of A. E. Housman’s letters, and it fails to do so”. As he explains, any edition of a writer’s letters is doomed to incompletion; because a number will have been lost or destroyed or invisibly hoarded over the years, even a ‘definitive’ edition defines nothing more permanent than the state of knowledge available at the time it was assembled. Given how scattered and elusive Housman’s letters are, requiring the editor to chase after a target that is not only moving but forever changing its shape, Burnett’s achievement is all the more heroic. The only previous edition, compiled by Henry Maas in 1971, printed a selection of 883 letters, and was packed with Housman’s best comic set pieces, but bore about the same relationship to his letter-writing habits that the edited highlights of a football match do to the more unpredictable rhythms of excitement and boredom experienced by those watching it as a whole. Working through the 2,327 letters and additional fragments unearthed by Burnett, by contrast, is to become aware of the full complexity of a man who was quick to exercise his gift for invective, but whose frankest self-revelations always came when he was talking about something else, such as the lifetime of missed opportunity which speaks in his glancing reference to a soldier billeted in Trinity College, Cambridge in 1915, “doing a quick-step overhead”. Indeed, what Burnett’s decision to print all of Housman’s correspondence allows us to see is how often it is the routine letters – declining honours or refusing permission to reprint his poems in anthologies – which are moved by the most powerful subterranean energies, like Housman’s description of Vesuvius: “the surface had mostly turned grey, but the red hot part could be seen through cracks, and heat in some parts was like a furnace”. For the first time this edition allows us to see Housman live.

Whereas Housman always claimed to have no personal sympathy for Manilius (his interest was “purely technical”), Burnett is more upfront as an editor in expressing his admiration, and he deals with Housman in a way that is wholly true to the “amiable”, “generous” and “painstaking” qualities of his subject. Sometimes this sympathy extends to unusual lengths. It is odd, for example, to be provided with a precise little note explaining what a batting average is, but nothing on the “nice young man, not much educated” who spent time with Housman in France – a silence which may be a matter of tact, or a researcher drawing a blank, but in either case matches Housman’s own refusal to mix up speculations and facts. Even Burnett’s errors are curiously tangled up with Housman’s, as when Burnett refers to Edward FitzGerald as “Edward Fitzgerald” – a small slip, but no smaller than Housman’s own blind-spots when it came to other people’s names: “Jean Coctreau”, “Arnold Bennet”, and so on. It is a pattern that reaches a self-reflexive climax in a set of footnotes, intended to correct Housman’s wobbly French, which have somehow made their way back into the main body of the letter: “I hope Michael For ‘Prigueux’. For ‘Cvennes’ For ‘Angoulme’”. Given his own battles with slapdash printers, that sort of mistake might have raised a thin smile to Housman’s lips. However, he would certainly have appreciated Burnett’s generous determination to see his life steadily and as a whole.

Housman’s career has long been subject to caricature as that of a prickly and repressed curmudgeon unhappy with his own life and with life in general. It is a caricature neatly summed up by the last word he scribbled on a postcard in the Cambridge nursing home where he went to die: “ugh”. But there is an alternative story, just as there is an alternative Housman which this edition lovingly explores. His doctor recalled how, just before bidding him goodnight for the final time, he told Housman about an English actor who, when asked what he did in his spare time, replied:

“Well, I suppose you could say we spend half our time lying on the sands looking at the stars, and the other half lying on the Stars looking at the sands!” Slowly gasping out the words, Housman said: “Indeed – very good. I shall – have to repeat – that – on the Golden Floor”.

Not a very good joke, perhaps, but it is easy to see why it appealed to a man whose imagination was always at home among the stars.

________________________________________________________

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford. His book, Victorian Afterlives: The shaping of influence in literature was published in 2002. He gave the British Academy Chatterton Lecture on "A. E. Housman's Rejected Addresses" in 2006.

An excellent edition indeed, and the decision to attempt comprehensiveness is triumphantly vindicated.
But it needed more proof reading. As early as page 5 one sees two footnotes [3 and 5] interchanged, and there is a glaring error in the dates in note 2 to the first letter from 1932, for example.
Purchasers of the first printing should be provided with a list of errata.
Given the price, the lack of a family tree and facsimiles (as in Maas's edition) seems mean. It would have helped too to have the list of recipients in each volume, and to have footnotes below the letters to which they refer.
My list of cavils could continue, but the fact remains that I thoroughly enjoyed reading these letters and am grateful for the work that has gone into collecting and publishing them.

E J Thompson, London, England

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