The laureate of repression

In 1927, while delivering the lectures that would later be published as Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster made a shy attempt to get to know his Cambridge neighbour, the classical scholar A.E. Housman. At first all appeared to be going well. After one lecture the two men dined together, and Housman told Forster ‘with a twinkle’ that he enjoyed visiting Paris ‘to be in unrespectable company’. Emboldened by this confession, Forster ‘ventured to climb the forbidding staircase’ that led to Housman’s rooms in Trinity College. The door was firmly closed against him. He left a visiting card; it was equally firmly ignored. What might have been the start of a long and happy friendship turned out to be the academic equivalent of a one-night stand.

Such stories still serve as a warning for anyone hoping to get close to Housman — a writer who even his own brother described as ‘shy, proud, reserved, reticent, taciturn, staid, sardonic, secretive,
undemonstrative, and glum’.