A speech delivered at the opening of the National Book League Exhibition “The Three Housmans” on 4 February 1975
My only valid excuse for talking to you tonight is that I am a co-founder of the Housman Society and that I was born in the same hilly corner of north Worcestershire as Alfred Edward, Clemence, and Laurence Housman. A.E.H.’s ‘Blue remembered hills’ were my hills. Our boyish aspirations (although separated by more than fifty years) turned towards the same green hinterland, and, for both of us, Severn was the frontier of our dreams. Hardly surprising, then, that I should have seen the Shropshire countryside through A.E.H.’s eyes, and that even today his words invest it for me with a limpid and magical light. It is, too, the countryside of which Laurence Housman wrote:
Where among the Midland hills,It must not be thought that the three Housmans whose work is shown in this exhibition represent the first flowering of literary ability in that remarkable family which traces its ancestry back to Flemish weavers who settled in Yorkshire in the fourteenth century. There was, of instance, the Reverend Robert Housman (1759-1838) who is represented in the British Museum Catalogue by five weighty theological works. His nephew Robert Fletcher Housman (1807-72) is remembered for a biography of his uncle and for A Collection of English Sonnets which was published in 1835 and which contains as exhaustive a preface on the history and form of the sonnet as is likely to be found in the whole of English literature. His son, William, an expert on shorthorn cattle, was sufficiently a man of letters to write and publish three works on that esoteric subject. We must mention too the Reverend Henry Housman (1832-1912), A.E.H.’s uncle, with some fourteen books to his credit, including a book of poems and a hobbies book for boys which still makes fascinating reading. And lastly among the Housman ancestors, John Housman (1766-1802) whose Topographical Descriptions of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire was one of the first guides to the Lake District and ran into eight editions.
Wooded blue the distance fills.
But all the literary members of the Housman family born in the second half of the ninteenth century are represented in this exhibition (if we except Katharine Housman, who was a thwarted authoress, but who has to her credit a very competently researched school history and some excellent biographical articles on her ‘Shropshire Lad’ brother). She had intended to write a history of the Housman family which was to be called ‘Housman Patchwork’ and I have in my possession copies of some of the notes she made with this end in view. They contain a surprising explanation of the vast enigma of A.E.H.’s personality, which, in the nature of things, has never been made available to the biographers who have tried to reconcile the frigidity of Housman the classicist with the homosexual and earthy passions expressed in his poems. Katharine could not bring herself to think of her brother having homosexual leanings. “It is quite likely”, she says, “that he was not restrained from irregularities by moral fears, but by physical fears; by fastidiousness and by other restraints”. She goes on to relate how their father (who was a somewhat unbalanced character and ended up a chronic alcoholic) was always ready to listen to any health crank who happened to accost him. Apparently, when Alfred was quite a grown boy, Housman Senior became obsessed with the idea that circumcision was absolutely essential for the future health of his boys. ‘I do not think’ Katharine wrote, ‘that he sought to fulfil a scriptural rite, for there was no Abrahamic tradition in our family, but thought on sanitary Mosaic lines. I think he considered it would contribute to their physical salvation - as perhaps it did. But he ought to have thought of it in their babyhood. It was a severe treatment, mentally and physically, for well-grown boys.” It certainly did not contribute to the boys’ physical future; only one of the five boys married, and he produced no children, while Lawrence himself was a self-confessed homosexual at a time when Oscar Wilde was paying a severe penalty for similar morals fifty years in advance of his time. An interesting speculation here - but for the traumatic boyhood experience of the Housmans would we have had such verses as:
Because I liked you betterPerhaps in putting together in one exhibition the works of the famous Housman brothers you are inviting the same sort of confusions as have been recorded previously. One which I think has previously passed unnoticed occurs in the index to Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s My Diaries 1900-1914, published by Martin Secker in 1920. The index states blandly ‘Houseman, Laurence, author of “A Shropshire Lad”. Then, of course, there was the clerical ignorance of Foxley Norris, Dean of Westminster, who, when sitting next to A.E.H. at dinner, told the poet that he had long been wanting to thank him for the amusement he had derived from A.E.H.’s writings, especially those about Queen Victoria and her ministers. ‘So’, comments A.E.H. wryly in telling his brother of the incident, ‘if I bring you money, you bring me fame.’
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.’
‘I will, no fear’, said I.
If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.
Laurence tells the story of a lecture he gave (not, incidentally, on poetry) at the end of which a man came up to him and asked him if he was the author of A Shropshire Lad. ‘No’, I said. ‘Any relation?’, asked the man. ‘Yes’, replied Laurence, ‘I am his brother.’ ‘Ah, well’, the man rejoined, ‘I, too, have a brother who is the better man.’ Then writing to Laurence in February 1908, A.E.H. wrote ‘So overpowering is your celebrity that I have received an official letter from my own college addressed to Professor L.Housman.’
But what of Laurence, that many sided genius that flitted from sect to sect and faith to faith who finally ended up as a Quaker; that angry young man of the nineties; that hippie before his time? If posterity remembers him for anything it will be for his Victoria and St. Francis play sequences. In an interesting letter in the Street Collection he has this to say: ‘G.B.S. wrote St. Joan to save her from John Drinkwater; I wrote St. Francis to save him from Bernard Shaw.
Then Clemence, of whose considerable literary output (poems, essays, novels, broadsheets) the only survivals we have are three curious novels; the Arthurian Sir Aglovale de Galis, the lycanthropic The Werewolf, and The Unknown Sea. Yet Laurence is on record as saying that she was a better writer than he, while Reginald Reynolds (who should have known what he was talking about) states, in writing of Sir Aglovale, ‘She is the greatest of the Housmans. It is the most amazing book I have ever read.’ I would agree with the second part of his statement!
Clemence at nine, standing at her mother’s deathbed, promised she would always ‘look after little Lawrence’ (then only five). She certainly kept her promise for from 1883 until her death in 1955 they lived together. Theirs was a curious mènage á deux. Laurence always wrote to her in terms of marital rather than fraternal love. Indeed, in one of the Street letters (undated) and written from the Lake District, he suggests that they should go there ‘to celebrate our golden wedding or something’. The Housman nephews (Katharine’s children) derived some amusement from this uncle and aunt. Clemence had a deep voice while Laurence’s was high pitched and squeaky. The couple were privately known to the iconoclastic nephews as ‘Uncle Clem and Auntie Laurence’.
In his lifetime Laurence enjoyed rather more fame than did the self-effacing A.E.H., but posterity has relegated to the literary rubbish heap much of what Laurence wrote and virtually all of Clemence’s known work. Of A.E.H.’s poetry there is no doubt that most of it will survive as long as English is spoken. Perhaps the words of one of Housman’s contemporaries, James Elroy Flecker, are apt:
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,The Romsley and Hunnington History Society has kindly supplied this article from its extensive collection of Joe Hunt's work, which encompasses literary, humourous and dramatic work, especially on North Worcestershire and Birmingham. You can email the Society on EJHumphreys@compuserve.com
Student of our sweet English tongue
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
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