Edgar Vincent

Writing an interesting biography of a man who is remembered as a poet but whose only passion in life was for his abstruse work as a textual scholar of classical writers you probably haven't heard of is a daunting task. One factor which helps, a little, is that the dour sourpuss we remember Housman as is only a partial portrait; he was in a sense those things, but he was also a gourmet, a oenophile, and a man who loved music hall and was one of the first travellers to embrace commercial aviation. On the other hand, the one factor which might be thought to enhance readability, his assumed homosexuality, was never mentioned by Housman except if one counts a few elliptical allusions which could as well have expressed his reasons for preferring one checker at Walmart over another, and, for that matter, the author treats the matter in depth only near the book's end, so readers in search of titillation will long since have tired of the endless digressions, pedantry, and tangents. As for his poetry, he seemed almost to dismiss it, and to the many journalists and enthusiasts who asked him about it, he offered only a few rote answers which said next to nothing and said it over and over.

With all this in mind, as well as the mountain of minutiae that the author asks us to plow through, somehow this book did manage to arouse something like interest in me. Perhaps the very detail of it produces a sort of virtual reality/total immersion effect. Despite the many pages devoted to his squabbles with printers about semicolons, the menus, the wine lists, the querulous academic arguments about verb declensions, and his voluminous correspondence, the author manages to make this book far from the dullest book I've ever read. Faint praise perhaps, and I'd find it difficult to recommend as recreational reading, but I'm glad I spent the time on it.… (altro)