A.E.H.

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22389, 30 April 1938, Page 18

A.E.H.

Memoir

Mr Laurence Housman will not seem to any admirer of A. E. Housman's poetry to have done wrong by printing here about 20 poems which he excluded from "More Poems," a book intended to rank with "A Shropshire Lad" and "Last Poems" in "constituting the canon" of the poet's work. More positively welcome is the sheaf of Housman's light verse and parody, a few specimens already known through Mr Laurence Housman's autobiography, "The Unexpected Years," but most of them certain to be new to readers. In selections from the notebooks left by the poet, he opens a direct view of the deliberate, painstaking search and experiment by which his brother reached characteristic perfection in the choice of single words and in the shaping of line and stanza. To give one example only of his testing for the right word and finding it:

Take . . . the description of the clock striking the quarters in the "Eight O'Clock" poem. One, two, three, four, to market place and people It tossed them down. "Tossed" was only arrived at after the following had been tried and rejected: loosed, spilt, cast, told, dealt and pitched.

And to give one example of complete revision, here are the first and final versions of the ninth stanza of "The Merry Guide ": (i) By windy shires of woodland With steeples dim-revealed, •And cloudy shadows raping On all the endless weald. (ii) By blowing realms of woodland With sun-struck vanes afield And cloud-led shadows sailing About the windy weald.

Besides, about 80 pages are filled with or extracts from letters

of Housman's, over half a century or so; and very good they are—good in a diversity of ways, and so illuminating, especially, that it is, impossible not to wish that Mr Laurence Housman had sought for more instead of contenting himself with what he had at hand and what came easily to hand. It should be added that a natal horoscope of Housman, worked out by Professor Broad, is included and is well worth studying. But the most important section of

Some Remains and a

A.E.H. Some Poems, Some Letters, a nd a Personal Memoir by His Brother. Laurence Housman. Jonathan Cape. 286 pp. (10s 6d net.)

the book is certainly Mr Laurence Housman's memoir of his brother. A biography he excludes from possibility, "except in a collaboration which I might name but which is hardly likely to materialise." The changes in Housman's career —Oxford, the Patent Office, London University, Cambridge—became the means through which his reserve shut out anyone from close knowledge of more than part of his life; and he was himself a witness whose "idle thoughts" of putting together something autobiographical—and sending it "to the British Museu-i to be kept under lock and key for fifty years"—came to nothing. "There is no biography of Matthew Arnold," he said, "so there certainly need be none of me." Mr A. S. F. Gow's delightful and valuable sketch, however, was, within, its severe limits, a complete account of the scholar, at least. [lt was reviewed here on January 16 last year.] Mr Laurence Housman's memoir is an equally delightful and valuable supplement, of wider range. If it leaves much still to be looked for, ncrhaps in vain, it contributes much that the reader needs in order to know the whole man, "totus teres et rotundus," and nothing that could be spared. In the variety of Mr Laurence Housman's record there appears, for instance, his brother's delicate generosity; there appears that strange self-division which enabled him, while he impressed the majority only by his silence and severity, to seem to his sister-in-law "always ... to enjoy things ai.d to be happy"; there appears his own acceptance, in explanation of himself, ■ of T. E. Lawrence's selfanalysis: There was my craving to be liked—so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another. The terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink from trying; besides, there was the standard; for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply, in the same language, after the. same method, for the same reasons.

There was a craving to be famous; and a horjror of being known to like being known. Contempt for my pas. slon for distinction made me refuse every offered honour. . . . Against this passage Housman wrote in the margin, "This is me.'\ He refused the Order of Merit. Nine photographs are reproduced in this excellent book, which no lover of the scholar, the wit, and the poet will willingly forgo the pleasure of owning.