The Letters of A. E. Housman (review)

When Henry Maas edited the letters of A. E. Housman in 1971 (Cambridge, Mass.), his volume contained 438 pages. Burnett’s two-volume edition, admittedly still incomplete, contains over 1,200. It also has the virtue of being more accurate. When I took advantage of my stay at the University of Illinois in the mid-1970s to read, with Maas in hand, the originals of over a hundred of the letters in the university’s rare book room, I discovered that he had copied carelessly, even omitting some paragraphs; one page folded under another was not copied at all. And editorial choice led to the omission of many letters, some, it is true, quite short, but none totally without interest. Checking over my notes, I see that Burnett includes every one omitted by Maas, and that his level of accuracy is much higher: most errors found are trivial, although I question some of Burnett’s editorial practices. In particular, although the footnotes for each letter begins with number 1, all are printed at the bottom of the page, so that one frequently finds footnotes numbered 1 and 1, and occasionally even 1, 1, and 1, which may require some seconds of looking up and down again to sort out. A strange practice which Housman would have written a letter to his publisher to decry, asking (firmly) for this to be altered before publication.

In Housman’s day (and long afterwards), a letter sent in the morning would be delivered, even in London, let alone tiny Cambridge, by the afternoon. One could, like Catullus, invite someone over to one’s digs the next day or that very evening—a state of affairs restored to us thanks to e-mail. And, as with e-mail, letters were often quite short, with a chain of letters on the same subject passing back and forth over the course of a few days. Some were indeed to do with such ephemeral matters as dinner engagements; others had to do with Housman’s dealings over many years with his publisher and friend Grant Richards; and still others dealt with the matter dearest to Housman’s scholarly heart, the minutiae of Latin (and some Greek) texts. Maas relegated this last group to a back section of his book, perhaps thinking these of secondary importance, perhaps rendering a service to those classicists who care only about this aspect of Housman’s life. Burnett, I think wisely, has chosen to print all the letters in chronological order regardless of subject matter. Let both classicists and those who read him for his poetry, whether scholars or simply lovers of literature, see him whole: the dutiful son and brother; the author annoyed by printers, bibliophiles, and those who wanted to set his poems to music; the traveler and bon vivant; the teacher dealing with college affairs; as well as the scholar who corresponded with, to name only a selection, A. S. F. Gow, Maurice Bowra, Franz Cumont, Henry Stuart Jones, and Arthur Darby Nock, all of whose letters are interspersed with those to such famous men as Max Beerbohm and E. M. Forster, to say nothing of men so obscure that even the scrupulous Burnett cannot identify them in his useful annotated list of recipients.

What are these letters like? Those looking for the vitriol so amply supplied by Housman’s prefaces or the elegance on view in his published letters will be disappointed. As suggested above, he was often firm about the accuracy of his books and protective of his poetry—none was to be gathered in collections along with those of others; none was to be set to music except in their entirety—but he proves surprisingly accepting of the fact that typographical errors will occur and he did allow Vaughan Williams to set some of Shropshire Lad to music, although denying him the right to print the text in the concertgoer’s program. Note his letter of...