In the New Yorker...

[Jeff Wrangler]

At lunch today I read Charles McGrath's article on A. E. Housman (June 26), which I find notable for its use of both gaydar and angsty.

One of my favorite lines in all of poetry comes from Housman: "Malt does more than Milton can / to justify God's ways to man." 

[serious crayons]

At lunch today I read Charles McGrath's article on A. E. Housman (June 26), which I find notable for its use of both gaydar and angsty.

I'm not surprised that Charles McGrath used those words, though I would be if A. E. Housman used them.

Angsty maybe takes some liberties, but I think gaydar is a regular accepted word at this point (though my spellcheck doesn't, but then it doesn't even recognize homophobe).

[Jeff Wrangler]

I'm not surprised that Charles McGrath used those words, though I would be if A. E. Housman used them.

Angsty maybe takes some liberties, but I think gaydar is a regular accepted word at this point (though my spellcheck doesn't, but then it doesn't even recognize homophobe).

But what would Mr. Shawn say? 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

At lunch today I read Charles McGrath's article on A. E. Housman (June 26), which I find notable for its use of both gaydar and angsty.

One of my favorite lines in all of poetry comes from Housman: "Malt does more than Milton can / to justify God's ways to man."  

This one too, Jeff:


"Loss, weariness, diminishment, the sense of a golden age long gone—you could make a case that for the past hundred and twenty years or so this has been the authentic, dominant note of Englishness in poetry, more than a wistful, Brexity  yearning for a pastoral countryside."


I had been thinking about Hausman after reading Forster so recently, now this. Good article--





But the more likely cause of Housman’s failure was that he had become emotionally undone over an unrequited yearning for his roommate, Moses Jackson. Jackson was athletic and good-looking, bright enough, but something of a philistine, according to one acquaintance, “quite unliterary and outspoken in his want of any such interest.” Apparently, he had no clue about Housman’s feelings for him. After Oxford, the two men roomed together in London, where they both had jobs at the Patent Office, and where Housman spent every evening at the British Museum, studying on his own, heroically and penitentially, and writing papers that eventually redeemed him as a classicist, landing him professorships first at University College, London, and then at Cambridge. But in 1885 there was a blowup between him and Jackson. Parker speculates that Housman made some sort of declaration and was rejected. Stoppard imagines that it’s Jackson who forces the issue, worried perhaps by the recent passage of a law against acts of “gross indecency” between men. In the play, Jackson is slow to figure things out but finally says, in effect, “You’re not sweet on me, are you?”





http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/how-ae-housman-invented-englishness




Books
June 26, 2017 Issue
How A. E. Housman
Invented Englishness
The poet’s longing for a lost golden
age is now a national identity.

By Charles McGrath



Readers have long found in “A Shropshire Lad” what they wanted to find. Illustration by Guido Scarabottolo



In person, A. E. Housman was so shy and furtive that Max Beerbohm once compared him to “an absconding cashier.” For such a crabbed and elusive figure, though, he continues to draw a surprising amount of attention: books, articles, musical tributes, even a Broadway play, Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love.” Academics know him the way he is mostly depicted in that play—as a formidable classicist, probably the greatest of his generation. But the real source of his fame is a single small volume of poetry, “A Shropshire Lad,” which has never been out of print since it was published, in 1896. Somehow, these sixty-three short lyrics, celebrating youth, loss, and early death, became for generations of readers the perfect evocation not merely of what it feels like to be adolescent and a little emotional but of what it means to be English. We don’t have anything remotely like it in American lit. Some of Emily Dickinson’s brief lyrics come closest—tonally, and in their mastery of the short, compressed line—but she has never quite attained Housman’s popularity, and the landscape she wrote about, the one inside her own head, could hardly be said to have created a sense of national identity. “He is a strange phenomenon,” Ted Hughes said of Housman, “but to my mind the most perfect expression of something deeply English and a whole mood of English history.”

Peter Parker’s new book, “Housman Country: Into the Heart of England” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—which helpfully includes the text of “A Shropshire Lad” in an appendix—is partly a brisk, sensible biography of Housman and partly a study in poetic reputation. It traces the way Housman’s singular vision seized hold of the English imagination, inspiring not just a literary following but a generation of composers, like George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sought to do musically what Housman had done with verse: to create a new and authentically English kind of song. Parker, the author of very good biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, casts a wide net here, and eventually it unravels in a skein of loose ends and Housmanian magpie-pickings. Parker lists just about all the many authors who ever snatched a title from Housman, for example. He also points out that not only is there an American rock band (formerly Army of Strippers) now called Housman’s Athletes but that the British rocker Morrissey used to quote Housman often and a grateful fan once wrote, “I thought his poems would be drivel about babies and flowers, but it’s really good stuff about suicide.” Parker doesn’t entirely succeed in explaining the great mystery of Housman—why it’s these rueful, corpse-strewn poems and not, say, the heartier ones of John Masefield which continue to resonate within the English soul. But he leaves no doubt about Housman’s lingering attraction. You could conclude from his book that when many people pulled the lever to vote for Brexit they were imagining a return to Shropshire.

To judge from Parker’s account, there were a number of different Housmans, and how you felt about him depended on which one you happened to meet. He was an adventurous eater and a lover of good wine. He liked dirty stories and flying in airplanes. At high table at his Cambridge college, he could be clubbable and amusing, and might even bend your ear about how much he liked the jazz-age novels of Anita Loos. But he could also be rude, aloof, brooding, and difficult. He suffered fools not at all, and was unable to tolerate a compliment. Willa Cather, who so admired his poetry that she made a pilgrimage to meet its author, found him “gaunt and gray, and embittered.” The whole encounter, she said, gave her “a fit of dark depression.” As Housman’s obituary in the London Times  put it, “In his attitude to life, there seemed something baffled and even shrinking, as though he feared criticism and emotion alike more than he relished experience. . . . He valued confidence, but held back from intimate relations, and seemed to prefer isolation to giving himself away.”

There was Housman the poet, who actually wrote very little, and Housman the classical scholar, who spent most of his time poring over ancient texts and whose greatest pleasure seemed to come from writing caustic put-downs of other scholars. About an editor of Persius and Juvenal: “Mr. Owen’s innovations, so far as I can see, have only one merit, which certainly, in view of their character, is a merit of some magnitude: they are few.” He sometimes composed these insults in advance, leaving blanks for names he could later plug in. Housman was not a translator or a classical historian. He specialized in the dry-as-dust business of textual criticism, determining the correct version of a classical text by comparing different manuscripts and judging which variant was the most likely—whether in a certain line of Propertius it should be “et” or “aut,” and deciding where the commas belonged in Catullus. His life’s work was a five-volume edition of Manilius, an astrologer poet, who even Housman conceded was third-rate—“facile and frivolous,” he said, remarkable mostly for “doing sums in verse.”

How to square these two, the poet and the pedant, has preoccupied commentators for decades. Edmund Wilson once suggested that what made Housman so adept at textual criticism was his ability to think like a poet, not only like a scholar, and that his fetish for accuracy stemmed from a real passion for his texts. But Wilson also pointed out that in Housman’s choice of Manilius there seems an element of perversity and self-mortification, and that his scholarship sometimes radiated not so much love for literature as hatred for his rivals. The poems in “A Shropshire Lad” are not completely disconnected from Housman’s scholarly work—among other things, they owe something to Horace, Housman’s favorite Latin poet, in particular to Horace’s way of weighting apparently inconsequential words—but they seem to have welled up from another part of him, a spring of emotion that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, repress. Poetry, he once said, was for him a “morbid secretion,” as the pearl is for the oyster.


Housman never lived in Shropshire, or even spent much time there. He was born in Worcestershire in 1859, the eldest of seven children. His father was a Dickensian figure—a jolly, heavy-drinking lawyer, often broke and given to investing in harebrained schemes. His mother, to whom he was very close, died when Housman was twelve, an experience that turned him into a lifelong atheist. At school, he was an exceptionally gifted student of Latin and Greek, and easily won a classics scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he sailed through his first set of exams and then spectacularly botched the second. It’s possible that he was rattled by the news that his father had become seriously ill. It’s also possible that he took his success for granted and didn’t study hard enough. The young Housman was a know-it-all, who refused to have anything to do with his tutor after hearing the man mispronounce a Greek word, and even took a dim view of Benjamin Jowett, the famous master of Balliol and the greatest Greek scholar of the day.

But the more likely cause of Housman’s failure was that he had become emotionally undone over an unrequited yearning for his roommate, Moses Jackson. Jackson was athletic and good-looking, bright enough, but something of a philistine, according to one acquaintance, “quite unliterary and outspoken in his want of any such interest.” Apparently, he had no clue about Housman’s feelings for him. After Oxford, the two men roomed together in London, where they both had jobs at the Patent Office, and where Housman spent every evening at the British Museum, studying on his own, heroically and penitentially, and writing papers that eventually redeemed him as a classicist, landing him professorships first at University College, London, and then at Cambridge. But in 1885 there was a blowup between him and Jackson. Parker speculates that Housman made some sort of declaration and was rejected. Stoppard imagines that it’s Jackson who forces the issue, worried perhaps by the recent passage of a law against acts of “gross indecency” between men. In the play, Jackson is slow to figure things out but finally says, in effect, “You’re not sweet on me, are you?”

Whatever happened, Housman moved out, and Jackson soon married and settled in Karachi. Years later, Housman’s younger brother, Laurence, a novelist and playwright, also gay but much more open about it, suggested that on the rebound Housman found solace in the arms of Jackson’s younger brother, Adalbert. But Laurence was in his nineties then, and this may have been wishful thinking. Despite later rumors about Parisian rent boys and a Venetian gondolier, there’s no sure evidence that Housman ever slept with anyone, and there’s little reason to doubt that Moses Jackson was his only real love. The two men stayed distantly in touch, with Housman becoming a godfather to one of Jackson’s children and lending Jackson a large sum of money when he retired to British Columbia and tried, unsuccessfully, to make it as a farmer there. Housman, after finally overcoming his Oxford failure and achieving distinction as an academic, wrote to Jackson, “I would much rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots.”

More than half of “A Shropshire Lad” was written during a charged five-month period in 1895, when Housman seems to have been missing Jackson acutely. Readers with advanced gaydar, like Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster, early on detected a note of suppressed homosexual desire in the book, especially in poems like the one that begins:


Look not in my eyes, for fear
They mirror true the sight I see,
And there you find your face too clear
And love it and be lost like me.


The young Forster even wrote Housman a fan letter, and years later, after dining with him at his Cambridge college and hearing Housman say “with a twinkle” that he sometimes went to Paris to be with “unrespectable company,” ventured up the staircase to Housman’s rooms. He slipped his card under the door, but there was no reply.

Parker says that many early readers of Poem No. 44, addressed to a young man who has killed himself rather than face a life of “disgrace and scorn,” would have known that it referred to the well-publicized case of Henry Maclean, a young soldier who shot himself in a London hotel, apparently out of homosexual shame. And he makes the provocative suggestion—which could equally well be applied to other Housman poems, including the strange one that recommends plucking out your eye and cutting off your hand or foot if it offends you—that not every line need be taken at face value and the whole thing might be meant angrily or ironically:


Oh you had forethought, you could reason,
And saw your road and where it led,
And early wise and brave in season
Put the pistol to your head.


But one reason “A Shropshire Lad” has been so successful is that readers find there what they want to find. In 1929, a financial expert hired by Housman’s publisher declared that “A Shropshire Lad” was the “filthiest book I have ever read: all about rogering girls under hedges.” During the First World War, British soldiers carried copies in the breast pockets of their tunics, believing the author to be a kindred spirit and a war poet—though Housman knew little about war and soldiering. His main credential was his sense that life passes too quickly and death is always standing by, or, as one of his most famous poems has it:


Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.


After the war, “A Shropshire Lad” travelled in the breast pockets of the generation who had taken up rambling and rediscovering the English countryside, even though—aside from a few place names, like Bredon Hill and Wenlock Edge, evidently chosen more for euphony than for anything else—it’s not much of a geographic guide. The landscape of “A Shropshire Lad” is an all-purpose landscape, not a particular one, and, far from being the unspoiled countryside imagined by Brexiteers, it’s a place mostly of unhappy love and early death. Long past rogering each other, if they ever got that far, most of the Shropshire lads and lasses are already in their graves. Even the poems ostensibly celebrating seasonal rebirth, like the one beginning “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough,” contain within them, like a canker, a note of foreboding, and wind up sounding like laments.

Housman’s morbidness so bothered Ezra Pound that he wrote a famous parody:


O woe, woe.
People are born and die
We also shall be dead pretty soon.
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.


What Pound missed was Housman’s music, which so lent itself to composers—the intensity of his tone and the tautness and compactness of his expression. Parker sees Housman’s habit of plainness and terseness as manifestations of English traits that amount to a sort of polite national understatement: modesty, restraint, stiff-upper-lipness. Housman is tight-lipped, certainly, but that doesn’t account for the feeling you sometimes get that the poems are so repressed they ought to bear warning signs like those found on tanker trucks: “Caution: Contents Under Pressure.”

Housman insisted that the task of poetry was “to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought”; it was to make your throat clench and your hair stand on end. The emotion his own poetry most often elicits is that of overwhelming sadness. Parker sees him, quite rightly, as belonging to the long tradition of English melancholia, but despite the sometimes old-fashioned ways in which it is framed—the lads and lasses, the ploughed fields, the shimmering weirs—Housman’s melancholy is a more angsty, modern version, untethered from any religious or artistic consolation. He’s less like Keats, say, than like Hardy, his near-contemporary, whose bleakness, both personal and poetic, at times outdoes even Housman’s. (Hardy once wrote to Rider Haggard, after the death of Haggard’s ten-year-old son, “To be candid I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.”)

Some of Housman’s brand of sadness also carries over into the poetry of Philip Larkin, who was an admirer, especially in poems like “Cut Grass” and “The Trees,” which borrow the characteristic Housman form of short lines in just a few stanzas. In some ways, even Larkin’s life mirrors Housman’s: the small output of poems fastidiously worked over, the seemingly dull career as an academic librarian, the solitary bachelor flat (though we now know, of course, that he wasn’t nearly as lonely and sex-starved as he pretended). It’s not hard to imagine the two of them huddled over a couple of pints and taking great pleasure in reminding each other of all the ways in which the world is going to hell.

Loss, weariness, diminishment, the sense of a golden age long gone—you could make a case that for the past hundred and twenty years or so this has been the authentic, dominant note of Englishness in poetry, more than a wistful, Brexity yearning for a pastoral countryside. Part of Housman’s charm, even now, is the way he makes that sadness sound and feel so sweet:


Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content.
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.


But that sweetness, verging on sentimentality, is also Housman’s limitation: the lads and lasses slumbering under the grass, never growing old or sick or worrying about how to find a job. Sadness in Housman is a one-size-fits-all emotion, not one rooted in particulars. It puddles up automatically. And reading “A Shropshire Lad” you can find yourself becoming narcotized against feelings that are deeper and more complicated. That may be the real secret of the book’s enduring popularity, the way it substitutes for a feeling of genuine loss the almost pleasant pain of nostalgia. ♦


This article appears in other versions of the June 26, 2017, issue, with the headline “The Land of Lost Content.”
Charles McGrath is a former deputy editor of The New Yorker and a former editor of the Times Book Review.

[Front-Ranger]

Thanks for posting this, John. I particularly liked this paragraph, that made me think of Ennis:

What Pound missed was Housman’s music, which so lent itself to composers—the intensity of his tone and the tautness and compactness of his expression. Parker sees Housman’s habit of plainness and terseness as manifestations of English traits that amount to a sort of polite national understatement: modesty, restraint, stiff-upper-lipness. Housman is tight-lipped, certainly, but that doesn’t account for the feeling you sometimes get that the poems are so repressed they ought to bear warning signs like those found on tanker trucks: “Caution: Contents Under Pressure.”

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Thanks for posting this, John. I particularly liked this paragraph, that made me think of Ennis:


What Pound missed was Housman’s music, which so lent itself to composers—the intensity of his tone and the tautness and compactness of his expression. Parker sees Housman’s habit of plainness and terseness as manifestations of English traits that amount to a sort of polite national understatement: modesty, restraint, stiff-upper-lipness. Housman is tight-lipped, certainly, but that doesn’t account for the feeling you sometimes get that the poems are so repressed they ought to bear warning signs like those found on tanker trucks: “Caution: Contents Under Pressure."

Wow. Good catch, Lee!

Look at this too:

But he could also be rude, aloof, brooding, and difficult. He suffered fools not at all, and was unable to tolerate a compliment. Willa Cather, who so admired his poetry that she made a pilgrimage to meet its author, found him “gaunt and gray, and embittered.” The whole encounter, she said, gave her “a fit of dark depression.” As Housman’s obituary in the London Times   put it, “In his attitude to life, there seemed something baffled and even shrinking, as though he feared criticism and emotion alike more than he relished experience. . . . He valued confidence, but held back from intimate relations, and seemed to prefer isolation to giving himself away.”


And there's this,
something to really make you think,
this illustration from “A Shropshire Lad”:

From "A Shropshire Lad" by A.E. Housman, illustrated by wood engraver Agnes Miller

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol
was written in the summer and autumn
of 1897 at Berneval, near Dieppe,
where Oscar Wilde stayed after his
release from prison. The poem was
inspired by A.E. Housman, in which
the following verses occur:"

ON moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four crossed ways.

A careless shepherd would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.







http://www.foliosociety.com/book/SPL/shropshire-lad



A Shropshire Lad
A. E. Housman
This timeless collection of Housman’s 63 elegiac poems features the
wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker created for the 1940 edition.

FYI:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5720/5720-h/5720-h.htm

and

http://www.hoasm.org/AShropshireLad.html

IX

On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
  The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
  Fast by the four cross ways.
  
A careless shepherd once would keep
  The flocks by moonlight there[*],
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
  The dead man stood on air.
  
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
  The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
  To men that die at morn.
  
There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
  Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
  Than most that sleep outside.
  
And naked to the hangman's noose
  The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
  Than strangling in a string.
  
And sharp the link of life will snap,
  And dead on air will stand
Heels that held up as straight a chap
  As treads upon the land.
  
So here I'll watch the night and wait
  To see the morning shine,
When he will hear the stroke of eight
  And not the stroke of nine;
  
And wish my friend as sound a sleep
  As lads' I did not know,
That shepherded the moonlit sheep
  A hundred years ago.
 
[*]Hanging in chains was called keeping sheep by moonlight.

ALSO, interestingly:


http://www.online-literature.com/forster/room_with_view/12/

A Room With a View
E.M. Forster

Part Two.
Chapter XII: Twelfth Chapter

It was a Saturday afternoon, gay and brilliant after abundant rains, and the spirit of youth dwelt in it, though the season was now autumn. All that was gracious triumphed. As the motorcars passed through Summer Street they raised only a little dust, and their stench was soon dispersed by the wind and replaced by the scent of the wet birches or of the pines. Mr. Beebe, at leisure for life's amenities, leant over his Rectory gate. Freddy leant by him, smoking a pendant pipe.

"Suppose we go and hinder those new people opposite for a little."

"M'm."

"They might amuse you."

Freddy, whom his fellow-creatures never amused, suggested that the new people might be feeling a bit busy, and so on, since they had only just moved in.

"I suggested we should hinder them," said Mr. Beebe. "They are worth it." Unlatching the gate, he sauntered over the triangular green to Cissie Villa. "Hullo!" he cried, shouting in at the open door, through which much squalor was visible.

A grave voice replied, "Hullo!"

"I've brought some one to see you."

"I'll be down in a minute."

The passage was blocked by a wardrobe, which the removal men had failed to carry up the stairs. Mr. Beebe edged round it with difficulty. The sitting-room itself was blocked with books.

"Are these people great readers?" Freddy whispered. "Are they that sort?"

"I fancy they know how to read--a rare accomplishment. What have they got? Byron. Exactly. A Shropshire Lad.  Never heard of it. The Way of All Flesh.  Never heard of it. Gibbon. Hullo! dear George reads German. Um--um--Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so we go on. Well, I suppose your generation knows its own business, Honeychurch."

"Mr. Beebe, look at that," said Freddy in awestruck tones.

On the cornice of the wardrobe, the hand of an amateur had painted this inscription: "Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes."

"I know. Isn't it jolly? I like that. I'm certain that's the old man's doing."

"How very odd of him!"

"Surely you agree?"

But Freddy was his mother's son and felt that one ought not to go on spoiling the furniture.


(....)

[serious crayons]

But what would Mr. Shawn say? 

"Angsty" he might frown upon. "Gaydar," even in his final year as editor (1987) might leave him puzzled. Or if it didn't, he's think it certainly might confuse the readers. Now it's hard to imagine a New Yorker reader not being familiar with that term.

But let's face it, by now the magazine has supplied Mr. Shawn with plenty of material to roll in his grave about. 

[Jeff Wrangler]

But let's face it, by now the magazine has supplied Mr. Shawn with plenty of material to roll in his grave about. 

 

(Personally I usually associate angsty with teenage girls, like, maybe the girl in the Twilight books.  )

[Front-Ranger]

Wow, John, I didn't realize that Ennis had so many literary ancestors! If the New Yorker was writing about Ennis today, I wonder if it would describe him as sheepish, sheepy or sheepsty!

And now we're into that awkward situation of leapfrogging discussion topics!

[serious crayons]

(Personally I usually associate angsty with teenage girls, like, maybe the girl in the Twilight books.  )

I haven't read them, so I wouldn't know. But I would imagine hanging out with people who'd like to drink your blood would make you angsty.