Faber & Faber

An introduction to a reprinting ...

It is now some thirty years since I was busily engaged in writing the final chapters of my biography of A. E. Housman. I had begun this work at the joint prompting of my Oxford friend and contemporary Timothy O’Sullivan and of Peter Hopkins of Routledge & Kegan Paul. Timothy had earlier secured the acceptance by Thames and Hudson of draft material for my first book, a biography of T. E. Lawrence, by telling me to rewrite it ‘as though for an intelligent 11-year-old’; and Peter, to whom Timothy was then acting as an adviser, was somewhat reluctantly persuaded to advance me £1,000 for what was to become a three-year labour of love. I was much helped in this by the kindly encouragement of the then Chairman and co-founder of the Housman Society John Pugh, whose pioneering research work is preserved in his admirable local history Bromsgrove and the Housmans.

That the publication of A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet back in 1979 was a minor literary sensation owed nearly everything to Philip Larkin. On publication day, an approving piece by him appeared in the Guardian. It was the only review that morning, but it took Housman seriously and took my biography seriously, and Larkin was then such a God in literary circles that by lunchtime the editors of a dozen or so other publications had rung Routledge claiming to have mysteriously ‘lost’ the copies they had been sent.

Before long one could hardly open the review section of any newspaper or magazine without seeing admiring notices; the next edition of Books and Bookmen contained no fewer than three reviews, all by eminent reviewers and all full of praise; Time Magazine featured the biography for many weeks; and the next time Peter Hopkins took me out to lunch with my agent Andrew Best of Curtis Brown, Peter greeted me warmly as ‘our most important author’, and he and the normally urbane and unflappable Andrew spent most of the rest of the meal congratulating each other in excited tones on their own prescience.

This did not unfortunately lead to fame and fortune. Even Larkin’s interest in the subjects of my next book, The Brothers Powys, did not prevent them from being labelled in The Times ‘A Bunch of Nutters’; and although I went on to write other well-received and now standard biographies of Richard Hughes and Robert Graves, economic necessity has compelled me for a number of years to work in an equally rewarding but very different field.
 
So it was a pleasant surprise to be emailed by John Seaton of Faber with a proposal for republication. I could not help remembering the words with which Housman greeted the proposal by a young publisher called Grant Richards when he asked if he might take over the remaining copies of A Shropshire Lad and publish a second edition at his own risk. ‘I suppose', he wrote, 'no author is averse to seeing his works in a second edition, or slow to take advantage of an infatuated publisher; and it is impossible not to be touched by the engaging form which your infatuation takes.'

In any case, though humble enough to be aware of its failings, I am also arrogant enough to believe that my A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet deserves republication. Yes, it is a young man’s book; but I believe that I found my way to Housman’s heart in a way that might have been more difficult for an older man, and my enthusiasm and inexperience carried me safely over numerous pitfalls of which I would later have been most uncomfortably and perhaps fatally aware.

Whatever the scale of my achievement, it owed much to my connection with Housman’s own Oxford College, St. John’s. My generation of historians at St. John’s was singularly fortunate in its tutors. Which of us can fail to have been influenced by the formidable lucidity of Keith Thomas, the scholarly elegance of Howard Colvin, and the flashes of illumination which sprang like lightning from the brilliant mind of Michael Hurst?

The nature of this publication is such that corrections cannot be made. This is a matter both for rejoicing and for regret.

Rejoicing, because it is all too easy for corrections to become wholesale revisions and literary history is littered with examples of remarkable works by younger writers whose middle-aged incarnations have comprehensively rewritten and seriously damaged their own work. A classic example is my late Uncle Robert’s extensive rewriting of his Goodbye to All That. The 1929 original, a work of blazing genius, has been restored to print by Berghahn Books, but Penguin persist in publishing the much inferior 1957 revision.

Regret, because - how shall I put it - there are numerous commas out of place, and I urge the future biographer of Housman not to read a word until he has secured copies of the formidable concordance to my work written in numerous articles over many years by my fellow Housman devotee, the classical scholar Mr Paul Naiditch, to whom I owe much. Indeed I now choose to break a confidence of some thirty years by thanking Mr Naiditch for very kindly correcting a draft of my chapter on Housman’s classical scholarship in advance of publication. As I recall it (and after 30 years my memory may be faulty) he expended a good deal of red ink on making a lengthy series of minute corrections. Had he only done the same with the other chapters, he might have been able to spare himself and indeed the world from the labours to which I have just referred.

As for major new biographical discoveries: there have been none. I would never be surprised should some such discoveries come to light, because as an adult Housman lived his life in separate compartments, so that individual friends were often quite unaware of other friendships. But I doubt whether these discoveries would be startling, or would fundamentally disturb that understanding of Housman which led me to conclude:

'But if ever there was a man who was truly inspired, it was Alfred Housman. Poetry welled up in him, poetry of mood and emotion, both powerfully heightened by the classical restraint of the verse-forms which he used. In the history of literature, he is important as a respected poet of his day, as the poet of the Boer War, and as the author of a number of haunting lyrics which have survived the era in which they were written. He is a fine poet of nostalgia, of sorrow, of the bitterness of life, of the sustaining power of nature, of the strength of the human spirit and of the courage to endure.'