Housman's Housman

MY BROTHER, A. E. HOUSMAN--Laurence Housman--Scribner ($3).

When a writer is dead, his admirers feel that at least he is now safe: there will be no senile juvenilia from him. Then comes the literary executor. And the executor publishes more, and more, and more posthumous stuff, each batch a little feebler than the last. Such was the case with Katherine Mansfield; such is now the case with A. E. Housman. Admirers of Housman who have to sit helplessly by while his brother Laurence continues his well-meaning but damaging publications may well feel that the line from A Shropshire Lad

Shot? so quick, so clean an ending? has now taken on an added force.

Laurence Housman's latest memoir of his late brother contains a brief (104-page), eminently unsatisfactory biographical note, whose tantalizing omissions are half discretion, half plain lack of knowledge; a few unpublished letters; 31 poems, their general level far inferior to Housman's sensibly strict standard; and the best Housman parody (by Hugh Kingsmill) extant:

What, still alive at twenty two, A clean upstanding chap like you. Sure, if your throat is hard to slit, Slit your girl's and swing for it.

Like enough, you won't be glad, When they come to hang you, lad. But bacon's not the only thing That's cured by hanging from a string.

When the blotting-pad of night

Sucks the latest drop of light,

Lads whose job is still to do

Shall whet their knives and think of you.

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