A professional comedian’s desolate vision of hell

Since homosexuals were ‘liberated’ in 1967, formed a lobby (some would say the most powerful in the country) and became publicly aggressive and demanding, they have forfeited our sympathy. But it is well to remember the sadness of their lives. Tom Stoppard has drawn attention to newly discovered letters by A.E. Housman, one in particular showing that he was for many years deeply in love with a man who led a normal married life with children and was probably wholly unaware of the profundity and lifelong duration of Housman’s affection. Here indeed was a love that dared not speak its name. The letter in which Housman revealed his obsessive love is characteristically succinct, reporting the death of the loved one in a Canadian hospital, and adding, ‘Now I can tell myself I could not have borne to leave him behind me in a world where anything might happen to him.’

Housman was not only a considerable poet but a great letter-writer too, to judge by the examples printed in the Penguin volume, Collected Poems and Selected Prose. All his letters are short and to the point, laconic, with every word carefully considered and made to pull its full weight. They are in turn businesslike, scornful, venomous, self-critical, witty and crushing. To get one must have been a literary and sometimes a shocking event in the life of recipients. Housman was particularly hard on anyone trying to include his verse in anthologies. One such was A.J.A. Symons when he was compiling A Book of Nineties Verse. Housman wrote to his publisher Grant Richards, ‘Tell him that to include me in an anthology of the Nineties would be just as technically correct, and just as essentially inappropriate, as to include Lot in a book on Sodomites; in saying which I am not saying a word against sodomy, nor implying that intoxication and incest are in any way preferable.’