BOOKS
`The Colour of His Hair'
By PETER QUENNELL wo more remarkable and strangely divergent 1 characters than the Kennedy Professor of Latin and the author of A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems have rarely inhabited the same body and sheltered behind a single name. The great Latinist was an almost perfect image of the scholarly recluse as popular legend represents him —dry, reserved, frequently sharp-tongued : the supreme authority on Manilius, an arid second- rate writer whose works his fellow Latinists very seldom troubled to explore, and whose chief literary merit was a knack of 'doing sums in verse' : a lover of wine and good dinners, but often a moody, self-absorbed companion : above all, a secretive celibate fiercely attached to his personal privacy. The author of A Shropshire Lad, on the other hand, gave the impression of being a wayward romantic, a man who had seen and suffered much, and had spent his early life in a round of vigorous rural pleasures, drinking and sometimes roistering with a group of hand- some, hot-blOoded friends. Many of his closest friends had been exceptionally ill-starred; and their loss had caused him to develop a strain of vague autumnal melancholy, which made death by hanging and the suicide's fate particularly appealing subjects. When Last Poems appeared in 1922, twenty-six years after the publication of A Shropshire Lad, the poet's melancholy had acquired a deeper tone, and some of his pastoral pretences had been laid aside. But the 'golden lads,' his beloved comrades of the past, still haunted his imagination, and • thwarted desire and irremediable loss were still the themes that stirred his creative energy.
Since each personage possessed conspicuous talents and their odd relationship has never been fully explained, it is hot surprising that a literary analyst should at length have decided to enter the field and should have produced the kind of biographical study that A. E. Housman himself Would probably have least welcomed.* The fault, however, was largely Housman's own. A writer Who unfolds his sentimental history in a long series of poetic ideograms, where fact and fantasy seem to be combined with the deliberate intention of confusing the reader, must expect to arouse a good deal of curiosity about the personal back- ground of his thoughts and feelings. What were the origins of his mysterious sadness? Whence did he derive his obsession with the idea of death? Why did an air of impenetrable reserve gather around him during his later period? Housman's bio- grapher is clearly not in a position to answer all the reader's queries. But some he answers, and for some he suggests an answer, marshalling, and * A. E. HOUSMAN: A DIVIDED Lisa. By George L. Watson. (Hart-Davis, 25s.) drawing deductions from, such scraps of evidence as are now available. Housman, to begin with, was not a native of Shropshire; nor had he ever led a carefree rustic life. His actual birthplace was Bromsgrove, today absorbed into the suburbs of Birmingham, his father being a country solicitor, while his mother came of a clerical family settled in the Cotswolds. Edward Housman ',vas a feckless parent who, battered by an unkind world, eventually took to heavy drinking; and Alfred Edward Housman appears to have despised his father but cherished and adored his mother, who succumbed to an agonising disease when her son was twelve years old. Existence at Bromsgrove was drab and overclouded,. though the distant outline of the Shropshire hills lay on the horizon like a land of promise; and the sensitive, talented, industrious boy longed to escape from this 'broken, disconsolate' household and breathe a fresher, more inspiring air. He went up to Oxford in 1877, but soon experienced a crushing and permanent reverse.
The protagonist of the drama that ensued was a stalwart youth named. Moses John Jackson, an 'effortless honours student' and a 'natural athlete,' one of those self-confident 'all-round men' who treat the whole world as their willing football. Jackson appreciated Housman's qualities; but Housman evidently worshipped Jackson; and his adoration (according to the poet's new biographer) threatened to defy control and to pass beyond the proper limits. Jackson, of course, found it impossible to respond—at least as fervently as his friend wished. His method of handling a difficult situation was characterised (Hous- man's biographer assumes) by a mixture of instinctive humanity and delicate intuitive tact. He 'jollied his friend along,' to use an idiom that he might himself have employed, hoping that the errant admirer would eventually regain his senses. But Housman never recovered his senses, so far as the idol he had chosen, his 'kind and foolish comrade,' was concerned, even though, after they had both left Oxford, Jackson announced his engagement to an eminently suitable young woman who bore him happy, healthy children, severed his link with England and accepted a teaching post in Northern India. Housman agreed to dismissal but could not stifle his sorrow or forget his defeat. He commemorated them in some revelatory lines printed among his Last Poems:
Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away.
To put the world between us We parted stiff and dry; 'Good-bye,' said you, `forget me.' will, no fear,' said J.
The crisis that followed Housman's recognition of his inveterate emotional tendencies may have been responsible, suggests Mr. George L. Watson, for his astonishing failure to pass his Oxford Finals and the temporary breakdown of his. academic career. The brilliant undergraduate,. ignominiously ploughed, was condemned to more than a decade of Civil Service drudgery. During those years, however, he seems to have deter- mined on a line of moral conduct. Among the documents he preserved to the end of his life was a report, cut from a daily newspaper, of the pathetic message that an eighteen-year-old Wool- wich cadet had composed just before his suicide. His motives (the young man told 'the Coroner) included a sense of 'utter cowardice and despair. There is only one thing . . . which could make me thoroughly happy; that one thing 1 have no earthly hope of obtaining . . . 1 have absolutely ruined my own life; but I thank God that . . I have not morally injured . . . anyone else. Now 1 am quite certain that I could not live another five years without doing so. . .
Housman's brother Laurence discovered this cutting pressed between the pages of a poem, the forty-fourth poem in A Shropshire Lad: Shot? so quick, so clean an ending? Oh that was right, lad, that was brave : Yours was not an ill for mending, 'Twas best to take it to the grave.
The ill that he could not mend, and could only partially sublimate with the help of literature, he determined that he must bury at a depth from which it would never re-emerge. One of his posthumously published poems is yet more signi- ficant—the fable of the young man with oddly coloured hair, written in 1895, the year of Qscar Wilde's tragedy: Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience- stricken air?
Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
•
Having once recognised the 'colour of his hair,' Housman gradually resigned himself to a life of scholarship and solitude. That, in brief, is Mr. Watson's thesis; and, although a good many pas- sages of his book are based upon inspired guess- work—he has been barred from some important sources; but the poet's nephew and Moses Jack- son's son have both of them provided useful material—he has succeeded in producing a notably vivid and sympathetic picture. We need not, I think, regret his temerity : Housman's reputation is sufficiently well founded to warrant intensive personal research. True, he was a minor poet; but he had a highly individual talent. He can be parodied : he cannot be imitated. The literary style he evolved could be handled by no other writer, with its odd blend of classical and modern elements, its lilting—almost jaunty— music, its touches of superficial pessimism and the heart-felt melancholy of the underlying re- frain. Despite a somewhat mannered and circum- locutory approach, Mr. Watson's description of the man who created that style deserves to be read by all who enjoy the poems. Certainly, his book increases our respect for Housman, the victim of a life-long conflict with emotions that he could neither subdue nor ignore.
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