To put the world between us
We parted stiff and dry
'Good-bye,' said you, 'forget me.'
'I will, no fear,' said I.

A. E. Housman, author of A Shropshire Lad, has always been considered a victim of unrequited love. He spent much of his life smitten by Moses Jackson, a heterosexual fellow student, keeping a photograph of his beloved 'Mo' to his final days. Because of this, we are told, Housman wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language since Shakespeare.

Yet how this can be true of a man who was born in a place in Worcestershire called Fockbury and was familiar with the vulgarities of classical literature?

For many years Housman vacationed in Venice, always employing the same gondolier. 'A man', according to Percy Withers, 'who proved much to his liking.' This was in 1900, when Housman was forty-one and the gondolier twenty-three. Year in year out, Housman faithfully returned.

One Christmas Housman received bad news. The gondolier was ill and unable to work again. Withers continues: 'Mid winter though it was, Housman straightway posted off to Venice, visited the gondolier in his home, and there had a legal document drawn up providing a sufficient income to secure the man's comfort so long as he lived.'

After that, Housman never went back to Venice, although they kept in touch by letter.

The grief of the young man's eventual death must have been prolonged by the pestering of his relatives, hoping that Housman would continue his payments; when he refused they turned to 'anger and vituperation'. Was there a case for blackmail? We will probably never know.

Aside from Venice, Housman frequented the male brothels of Paris, whom he was introduced to by his friend Horatio Brown. Housman would often dine with Brown at the Café Royal, when in London together, which had associations with the naughty nineties. An unpublished poem records their association. In it figures the campanile of St Mark's, which had fallen into disrepair and had been rebuilt, a phallic symbol, if ever there was one:

It looks to north and south,
It looks to east and west,
It guides to Lido mouth
The steersman of Triest.
Andrea, fare you well;
Venice, farewell to thee
The tower that stood and fell
Is not rebuilt in me.

Near the end of his life, Housman had one last kick at the profession, which had initially rejected him, by publishing a catalogue of necessary, but thoroughly obscene, expressions in Latin literature.

The book was never printed in England, but was published in Germany, a country to which he had a life-long aversion. Evidently, he considered it a suitable receptacle for smut!

Despite his closeted lifestyle, Housman's life was a constant battle to reveal the humbug and cant at the centre of English society. Light verse came easily to him, as the following example, of how he emended a rather absurd Cambridge poem, shows:

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
O fat white woman whom nobody loves?

Which was amended to:

O why do you walk through the fields in boots,
O fat white woman whom nobody shoots?

His published letters (those to Jackson are still withheld) reveal a man with an altogether more genial, more human side, to his otherwise frosty countenance. Far from being a po-faced moralist he was actually a closet romantic, who appeared to have enjoyed a healthy, if rather convoluted, sex life.

© Howard Watson 2009