Volume 31, Number 4 · March 15, 1984
Closet Modern
By Bernard Knox
A.E. Housman: A Critical Biography
by Norman Page
Schocken, 236 pp., $29.95
Whewell's Court, a rather dowdy nineteenth-century Gothic annex of Trinity College, Cambridge, lies across the road from the splendid main gate of the college, the entrance to Great Court. Coming from St. John's, Trinity's next-door neighbor, I often had occasion to cross the road to Whewell's, on my way to visit my friend Michael Straight, whose rooms were on a staircase at the far end of the court, facing Sidney Street and Jesus Lane. Sometimes, in the afternoon, I would pass, in one of the narrow courts or even narrower passages between them, a white-haired old gentleman, wearing a stiff stand-up white collar and black elastic-sided boots, who was proceeding in the opposite direction; his eyes were fixed directly forward on some far-off object—a look that promised brusque refusal of any attempt at contact and that strangely resembled what I later came to call, with fellow soldiers, the 'thousand-yard stare.' This was the Kennedy Professor of Latin, A.E. Housman, out for his long afternoon walk, which often brought him back through the four courts of St. John's (in 1934 it had only four) on his way home to his rooms in Whewell's court.
Review, 4064 words
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