Dual Nature

By J.D.Reed

A.E. HOUSMAN: THE SCHOLAR-POET

by Richard Perceval Graves

Scribners; 304 pages; $15.95

Like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), A. (for Alfred) E. (for Edward) Housman made scholarship his vocation and writing his pastime. Like those two, he is forgotten for his academic work and celebrated for his diversion. Since its publication in 1896, A Shropshire Lad has never gone out of print. Tens of thousands who never read verse can recall its athlete dying young, its rosy-lipped maids and doomed youths reveling in a haunting English countryside.

Simple, direct and suffused with melancholy, the poems were carried into the trenches of World War I by thousands of "lads," few of whom knew anything of the author--just as the poet wished. A Cambridge don who shunned any mention of his verse, Housman hid behind a late-Victorian mask of colorless propriety. The flamboyant London literary scene of the turn of the century left him cold. "He was like an absconding cashier," recalled Max Beerbohm. "We certainly wished he would abscond."

Biographer Graves (Lawrence of Arabia and His World) pierces that mask to show a man Max might have admired: a homosexual wrestling with his "curse," an atheist, gourmet, lover of nonsense verse and devoted companion to the few people he could tolerate.

As this shrewd and sensitive biography reveals, the scholar-poet had reasons for his dual nature. When his willful and vivacious mother, Sarah Jane, succumbed to cancer on Housman's twelfth birthday in 1871, an idyllic rural boyhood came to a traumatic end. His ineffectual solicitor father, Edward, remarried, took to drink, and in a fit of modernism had his five sons circumcised when Alfred, the eldest, was at least 14. It was a shock to the youth, and one of the causes of his later withdrawal into a formal persona from which he would rarely emerge. He reported the lascivious behavior of a governess to his stepmother, causing her dismissal. During a London visit to the British Museum he ignored a voluptuous Venus for a statue of Mercury. At Oxford, he welcomed the cloistered male world.

Already a prodigious classics scholar at 18, he spent his days emendating the Latin poet Propertius instead of reading the syllabus. When he failed his final exams, the undergraduate's pride was crushed. At home, his father had run through the modest family fortune, and for a drab and agonizing decade Housman clerked in the London Patent Office.

It was not until he won his way to the Latin chair at University College, London, that Housman wrote in 1895 most of the Shropshire poems. They exhibited an intense and sometimes alarming ardor. When he read of the suicide of a homosexual cadet, for example, Housman wrote:

Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?

Oh that was right, lad, that was brave:

Yours was not an ill for mending, 'Twos best to take it to the grave.

For 25 years at Cambridge, the great don thereafter took his daily "stroll" forced-march style, a spartan, slender man of sorrowful visage with pale eyes and drooping gray mustache.

Apparently, none of his students knew that their teacher reserved his pleasures for holidays on the Continent. In Venice, he conducted a passionate eight-year affair with a gondolier. A note in a book found after his death includes an astonishing list of male prostitutes whom he enjoyed on a fortnight's jaunt to France.

For years Housman refused the considerable royalties of his verse. "Vanity, not avarice," he announced, "is my ruling passion." When Bertrand Russell lobbied for draft resistance in World War I, Housman refused to protest Russell's removal from his lectureship at Cambridge. He contributed a substantial sum to the war effort, thereby wiping out most of his savings. In academia, Housman was feared by colleagues for ruining the reputations of classicists with his vitriolic criticism.

The truth-seeking scholar and the passionate homosexual lived parallel lives that never touched. The circumstance showed in the verse. It sprang fully formed from the depths of the subconscious, and Housman would not apply to it, the work of the mind. His poetry thus remains a chiseled miniaturization, a little too simple, a shade too accessible. Graves persuasively argues that if the scholar and the poet had joined forces, if the homosexual and the classicist had agreed to cooperate, Housman would surely be ranked with such brooding Victorian giants as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy.

Still, informed by this fresh appraisal, readers can be content with the precise passion, rigorously perfect meter and understated rhyme of Housman's work. There is little, after all, in English lyric poetry that surpasses one of his finest poems:

Stars, I have seen them fall,

But when they drop and die

No star is lost at all

From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be

Helps not the primal fault;

It rains into the sea,

And still the sea is salt.

--:By J. D. Reed

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