The Etymology of Lads
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They were unlike anything else being written at the time. In 1896 the Decadents were writing poetry about urban life and what Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, called in a poem “the love that dare not speak its name.” A Shropshire Lad, on the other hand, was both pastoral and heterosexual, despite, as Parker puts it, “the faint note of suppressed homosexual desire that sounds like a muffled drumbeat throughout the book … partly because we know the biographical background to the poems, know what led Housman to write them, know that Moses Jackson was their buried mainspring.”

A Shropshire Lad contains poems that many of us memorized in school: “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” “When I was one-and-twenty,” “With rue my heart is laden,” “Is my Team Ploughing?,” and “To an Athlete Dying Young.” There are 63 in all (though Housman published more in Last Poems, a collection he assembled when he learned Jackson was dying). Poetry, Housman said in a Cambridge lecture, should produce “that thrilling utterance which pierces the heart and brings tears to the eyes.” The best of his still do. They’re poems that scan, rhyme, and are easily memorized. They were frequently set to music by English composers between the wars. And they were published at his urging in cheap editions, so that “the few young men here and there” for whom he wrote them could carry them in their pockets. They are different when you read them again after many years. Some may seem predictable, even formulaic, but they still remind you of what poetry can do in a way that the hermetic, solipsistic poems you find, say, in The New Yorker cannot.

The strangely timeless quality of Housman’s work surely comes from his immersion in Latin literature—especially Horace—which may also explain his indifference to both the Decadent movement and what succeeded it: modernism. His primary theme is mortality. But it’s not the witty lament over life’s transience that we encounter in the Elizabethans; it’s a deeply stoic melancholy that is, Parker argues, peculiarly English (though not, he says mysteriously, “to be confused with gloom”). It’s a quality that led Froissart, a historian of chivalry whom Shakespeare read, to observe that “the English take their pleasures sadly.” It’s no surprise to learn that Housman admired Matthew Arnold and was a pallbearer at Thomas Hardy’s funeral.

The woe in Housman’s poetry, however, was not just English; it was homosexual—like the work of the great pastoral poet Thomas Gray, whose “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” had a deep influence on Housman. (The most intense expression of homosexual isolation that I’ve ever read are Gray’s “The plowman homeward plods his weary way/ And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”) Gray wrote in the 18th century, Housman in the late 19th and early 20th, but some things had not changed. The prevailing attitude toward homosexuality was still what George V is reputed to have said on learning that someone he knew was homosexual: “I thought chaps like that shot themselves.”

Parker discusses two young Englishmen who did just that, one in 1895, another in 1951. The first, a soldier named Harry Maclean, shot himself three months after the second trial of Oscar Wilde. Housman wrote an angry poem about Wilde’s conviction (“Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair”), but the poem inspired by the suicide of Maclean—a newspaper clipping about the inquest was found in Housman’s copy of A Shropshire Lad—seems written out of complete despair:

Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?
Oh that was right, lad, that was brave:
Yours was not an ill for mending,
’Twas best to take it to the grave …
Oh soon, and better so than later
After long disgrace and scorn,
You shot dead the household traitor,
the soul that should not have been born.

There is another, defiant poem by Housman that goes: “let God and man decree/ Laws for themselves and not for me;/ And if my ways are not as theirs/ Let them mind their own affairs,/ their deeds I judge and much condemn,/ Yet when did I make laws for them?” But it ends with a note of bitter resignation: “Keep we must, if keep we can/ These foreign laws of God and man.” The poem that follows “Shot?” in A Shropshire Lad, however, echoes the despair inspired by the suicide of Harry Maclean: “If it chance the eye offend you/ Pluck it out, lad, and be sound:/ … But play the man, stand up and end you,/ When your sickness is your soul.”

Housman, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde were all educated in the classics; yet they lived in a Christian culture that made sex between men the vice that could not be mentioned—which is why scholars had tried to cleanse their translations of Greek masterpieces of any such reference. Housman was writing out of his isolation as a homosexual. But with the magic of art he was able to transmute his ache for a particular student at Oxford into a general lament for the English “lad”—the country boy he had grown up with whose life, like that of young men everywhere, could be darkened by so many things. It wasn’t the middle-class Jackson through whom Housman expressed his despair, it was the country boys who were betrayed by friends, murdered, shot, or sent into battle, as in the Scottish Border Ballads—an earlier tradition that influenced Housman’s poems.

This is one of Parker’s themes: that Housman was able to express his private angst with a brilliance that made his grief universally understood. For instance, Housman was writing about the public conscription for the Boer War that he’d witnessed growing up, but his poems served as epitaphs for the young men who carried copies of his verse into World War I. The celerity with which the lads of England became sacrificial lambs on the fields of France makes the chapter on the war the hardest to read. The switch from a culture that worshiped youth to one that slaughtered it is still breathtaking. The English architect Edward Luytens, Parker points out, not only designed the stage sets for the first production of Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie’s play about “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”), but also for the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval (a town in Picardy, France, where so many of them died). One of the strangest aspects of A Shropshire Lad is its anticipation of the Great War. As the American poet Robert Lowell said: “One feels Housman foresaw the Somme.” Indeed, there is no better example of the stoical detachment with which Housman faced the world than his arguing with his publisher against raising the price of his book during the war because that “diminishes the sale and therefore diminishes my chances of the advertisement to which I am always looking forward: a soldier is to receive a bullet in the breast, and it is to be turned aside from his heart by a copy of A Shropshire Lad which he is carrying there. Hitherto it is only the Bible that has performed this trick.”

The last quotation is an example of the ferocious irony with which Housman kept emotion at a distance. It’s not only because of the poetry that Tom Stoppard wrote The Invention of Love, his 1997 play; it’s that Housman was the template of the repressed homosexual, a waspish Cambridge don who spent his career editing the Latin writer Manilius—an astronomer who didn’t even write about human beings. Housman may have wanted his poems to go straight to young men’s hearts, but he so rebuffed personal intimacy that even admirers like Willa Cather and E. M. Forster were crushed by attempts to befriend him. Housman, one senses, wasn’t about to pretend that any relationship could take the place of his devotion to Jackson, much less one that came about because of the poems he’d written about that love. Cather burst into tears after leaving his apartment. Forster gave up after receiving a letter from the poet so “absolutely hateful” that he destroyed it.

THIS IS BUT ONE of the fascinating things one learns from Parker’s exhaustively researched account—which even includes an excerpt from a speech Forster gave in which he speculated that the reason Englishmen of Housman’s sort wore moustaches was to conceal the trembling lip when emotion struck. Parker’s book is really a series of marvelous essays. The first part, a biography of Housman, ends on page 158. What follows is a chapter on the idealization of pastoral England between the wars, and then a detailed survey and evaluation of the efforts by composers who set Housman’s poems to music. Next comes a chapter on World War I; a chapter on postwar England and another on the returning soldiers’ “rediscovery” of England, which included hikes to places like Shropshire, song-settings by composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, and something called Morris dancing. The final entry is a survey of Housman’s continued appeal that includes a young man reciting a poem in Chinese on YouTube and the pop singer Morrisey’s recommending that his fans read Housman. (“I thought his poems would be drivel about babies and flowers,” one fan writes, “but it’s really good stuff about suicide.”) And finally, we get the entire text of A Shropshire Lad at the end, so that you may refer to the poems while you’re reading.

The joke is that Housman never even saw many of the places referred to in A Shropshire Lad. For someone growing up in Worcestershire, Shropshire was simply a line of hills that formed the western horizon. But if this “land of lost content” with its “blue remembered hills” is indeed romanticized, it’s a persuasive idyll: a prosperous England at peace, country lanes, lads playing football. Parker’s book meanders like one of the rivers in Shropshire past one interesting thing after another. Like The Invention of Love, Housman’s Country is a love letter to a vanished time. What the poet cries out for in his final speech in Stoppard’s play is “Oxford in the Golden Age!” Still, there is nothing time-bound about the issues Housman faced. “We all have our Moses Jacksons,” Parker writes at the close (and, he might have added, our version of Manilius as well: those pursuits with which we kill our time on earth), and we all know that young men still kill themselves because they see no future as homosexuals—which is why the writer Dan Savage launched the “It gets better” campaign in the U.S.

What made Housman’s devotion to Jackson so familiar was not that he was attracted to a straight man but that this attraction seems to have been mixed with a sense of abjection—the feeling that Jackson, the handsome heterosexual athlete, was the man Housman should have been. Jackson, when he returned briefly to England from India to get married, did not even invite Housman to his wedding, which Housman had to learn of from a friend after the fact, as if Housman’s love would have contaminated or contradicted the ceremony. Indeed, if there is anything to be gleaned from reading Parker and Stoppard, it may be that the long opening of the closet in 19th-century England—from Walter Pater to Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, Housman, Henry James, E. M. Forster, J. R. Ackerley, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Alan Turing (another suicide), and Joe Orton (murdered)—may have been in large part about the problem of reconciling being homosexual with the ideal of being virtuous.

And yet, despite Jackson’s rejection, Housman does not seem to have led an entirely bleak life. The two men stayed in touch throughout their lives. Housman’s less closeted brother Laurence, a playwright (Victoria Regina), was convinced that Housman did sleep with Moses’ equally handsome younger brother, Adalbert, who died young, as in a Housman poem. And although Housman failed his exams at Oxford as an undergraduate—some think under the strain of his love for Jackson—and he had to take a job as a clerk, he eventually became a Cambridge don—not nearly as miserable as Gerard Manley Hopkins, an earlier and I think greater poet who repressed his love of another man, surrendered his life to the Catholic Church, didn’t even publish his poems, and died in exile. Housman liked Paris, though what he did there is less clear. “The truth is,” Parker writes,

that although we now know a good deal about Housman’s emotional life, we still know absolutely nothing about his sex life. W. H. Auden may have been “pretty sure” that Housman was “an anal passive,” but he based this assertion on nothing more than a hunch and a wish to shock the readers of The New Yorker. The Parisian male prostitutes and the affair with the Venetian gondolier, referred to in some books as if established fact, not only have no verifiable substance but have been more or less conclusively proved to be biographical misreadings.

Still, Housman remains one of the key figures in the history of homosexuality in Britain, that roster of writers that led the American critic Paul Fussell to ask: “Do the British have a special talent for such passions? An enquirer turning over the names of late 19th- and early 20th-century literary worthies might be led to think so.” Other countries have a similar homosexual tradition, Parker points out, but: “It is no surprise that Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s friend and champion, learned parts of A Shropshire Lad by heart so that he could recite them to the playwright when he was in prison. Housman sent Wilde a copy of his poems when the playwright was released in May 1897. ‘I have been reading your brother’s lovely lyrical poems,’ Wilde wrote to Laurence Housman.” (Traces of Housman, Parker notes, are discernible in The Ballad of Reading Gaol.) The Invention of Love not only dramatizes the relationship between Jackson and the poet but gives us a quick history of British homophobia, from Labouchere (author of the eponymous 1885 legislative amendment that criminalized sexual relations between men) to a late appearance by Wilde, who ends the play in a debate with Housman.

Toward the end of his book, Parker examines the etymology of the word “lad.” In Housman a “lad” means the sturdy English yeoman, “handsome of face and handsome of heart,” the idol in the idyll, plowing his field, playing sports, doomed to suffer romantic betrayal, conscription, early death. During World War I, Paul Fussell said, lad meant “a beautiful brave doomed boy.” For the so-called Uranian poets (more frank, less published, than the Decadents), a lad was a sunnier, more pæderastic ideal, like those nude boys swimming in the paintings of Henry Tuke. But in Housman the lad is always associated with misery. Ezra Pound wrote a parody: “The bird sits on the hawthorn tree/ But he dies also, presently./ Some lads get hung, and some get shot/ Woeful is this human lot.” Housman, who started out as a writer of light verse, put it this way: “This is for all ill-treated fellows/ Unborn and unbegot,/ For them to read when they’re in trouble/ And I am not.”

Nowadays the word “lad” connotes the hero of a Nick Hornby novel, or the young drunks who get so violent at soccer games abroad that certain Baltic countries will not allow them in, or the lovers in “My Beautiful Laundrette,” in which Daniel Day-Lewis played the gay boyfriend of a Pakistani immigrant. But the quality common to lads of different eras is simply their vulnerability. Housman’s first intimation of mortality was his mother’s death when he was twelve, and it may be that loss that lies beneath the tragic vision of A Shropshire Lad—and the futility of his love for Moses Jackson, or a particularly English melancholy. Some people find the latter to be mawkish, sentimental, and self-pitying, like the lyrics of Appalachian or country music, in which the singer is always getting shafted. But when the poems succeed, there’s no denying the beauty and rhythm of Housman’s language.

Gore Vidal predicted that in the future people would gossip about writers’ lives and not bother to read their work. Housman illustrates that to some degree. He will always stand for the tragedy of a love that had to be repressed. He has become a monument to British reserve. It’s the power of what is not said in the poems, Parker argues, that’s the secret of their effectiveness. And while everything is said by everyone about everything these days, and homosexuality could not be more out of the closet in England and the U.S., human nature remains the same. We do all have our Moses Jacksons—which is why the poems still retain their power, even in countries where gay men can marry, raise children, go on Grindr, and take Truvada to deter a disease that wiped out their immediate predecessors almost as quickly as World War I exterminated the lads of Housman’s England.

Andrew Holleran’s fiction includes Dancer from the Dance, Grief, and The Beauty of Men.