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’. Biographers face a particular challenge. ‘Nothing very remarkable has happened,’ concludes one of Housman’s early letters, and the curdled regret and relief in that phrase continued to echo throughout his later life, where he took some care to ensure that nothing very remarkable ever happened. Occasionally details surface that suggest a riptide of hidden passions — a list of male prostitutes in Paris, or information about a gondolier in Venice — but these usually turn out to be biographical dead ends.

For a modern critic like Peter Parker, this means having to rely on stories that have been rubbed smooth from handling over the years, such as the list of waspish insults Housman assembled with blanks left for new names to be inserted. Otherwise there is little to report. For decades Housman remained in a groove of his own making, a spiky academic for whom the most interesting long-term relationships were with the dead rather than the living — figures like the Roman poet and astrologer Manilius, who Housman cherished and corrected for many years as he assembled a five-volume edition of the Astronomica.