OUP’s Edition: Housman Letters

Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) was so risk averse in his correspondence that only two examples in the Burnett edition of 2,327 letters and fragments, succeeding the Henry Maas edition of 1971 with its 883 selected letters, suffice to furnish the shockingly expensive two volumes with their exceptional interest. Presumably these were not accessible to Maas, who is excoriated by Burnett for publishing only about half of the letters he traced. Yet in making up the "shortcoming," Burnett, editor in 1997 of the collected poems of Housman, includes fragments from the surviving notebooks, and prints every known letter, no matter how trivial, "to allow as full a revelation as possible of a man whose reserve was legendary." Thus hundreds of brief messages appear in Burnett's bulky volumes which deal with the minutiae of proofreading and payments, which deny permission to reprint, which authorize composers to set verses (if uncut) but not to quote them in their programs, which assent to autograph—or refuse to sign—books, and which agree—or turn down—invitations to dinner. The alternative, to Burnett, perhaps too sweepingly, is "incomplete representation," which "can allow unwarranted hypotheses to flourish." What hypotheses he has in mind are unstated.

Although most non-library owners of the earlier edition who are not focusing exclusively on Housman can do without the two new volumes, they have more than the quirky quality of completeness. Burnett urges reader caution about all previous texts of the correspondence: "Maas's edition contained many errors of transcription, as well as errors of other kinds, and the other printed sources are very far from immaculate." Maas also skimped on the earliest and the later years, although some earlier years also draw a blank in Burnett, as the documentation has not surfaced. As an added bonus of inclusiveness, Burnett contends, readers will discover "a gentler, more amiable, more sociable, more generous, more painstaking, and altogether more complex person than the biographies and the previous edition of the letters led me to believe." The essential Housman, however, remains the writer of the letter (5 October 1915) to his sister, Katharine Symons, published earlier in Maas. Adapting Leslie Stephen's perspective, Housman tells her that "the essential business of poetry … is to harmonise the sadness of the universe." That vision is not so much in his letters as in his verse, perhaps the smallest body of poetry in English to resonate so profoundly with readers.

Of the early letters, perhaps the most remarkable (it is also in Maas) is Housman's youthful, and even jolly, description (29 November 1877) of an Oxford lecture by John Ruskin, "a great outburst against modern times," which details the newly dramatic style by which the cranky sage made his points, using a brush to paint and soap over a glassed and framed picture by Turner, to show how industrialization had ravaged Ruskin's landscape, then reading an account of the scene as it appeared much earlier from Shakespeare's Henry VIII. "A puff & cloud of smoke all over Turner's sky," Housman (then eighteen) closes, "& then the brush thrown down, & Ruskin confronting modern civilisation amidst a tempest of applause, which he always elicits now, as he has this term become immensely popular, his lectures being crowded, whereas of old he used to prophesy to empty benches." To add to the flavor of the account, Burnett footnotes part of a letter from Housman's future brother-in-law Edward Symons about a similar performance.

One letter in particular confirms what has been understood about Housman's emotional thwarting for many decades. On 19 October 1922, realizing that his Oxford contemporary Moses Jackson, with whom he had shared post-college lodgings nearly forty years earlier, was dying of stomach cancer far off in British Columbia, Housman sent him a letter to accompany Last Poems, just released in London. His modest second volume, intended as a final statement in verse in his lifetime, was in...