This You Will Be The One Worth Knowing

Bucky Cleven and Bucky Egan, the two squadron leaders who went down over Bremen and Münster, were the very soul of Romanticism. - A Wing and a Prayer, Harry Crosby

Masters of the Air | The Selected Poems of A.E. Housman

Books in HBO War, Part III

He spent his life in unrequited love with his best friend Moses Jackson (athletic, outgoing, straight, a bit of a philistine); Housman was very shy, stiff, and one person described him as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts".

EDIT: The daddy issues! How could I forget the parallels with daddy issues: Housman’s father was a jovial guy but a heavy drinker and bad with money, and often invested in crazy get-rich-quick schemes (like growing and preserving exotic fruits?)

His poems are rather bleak and pessimistic, with lots of talk of death and suicide, unrequited love, and the “attitude that the universe is cruel and hostile, created by a God who has abandoned it”. But he writes it with a quiet acceptance, and there’s some irony and wit to them (and in some cases a little wink, where I think he might be playing up the drama a bit.)

A lot of his poetry is laced through with queer subtext but in a few it's pretty much just text--probably most notably in two about a suicide he read about in the paper, one written after Oscar Wilde's arrest (he even sent him a copy of his book when he was in prison), "He could not stay for me" and "Because I liked you better" (those last three were only published posthumously)

Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away [...]

Given his repression of both his sexuality and his emotional/poetical side--and they way they were intrinsically linked--it's maybe not a surprise he once referred to his poetry as coming out of him like "morbid secretions"(!)(christ, my guy)

As a scholar, he was "worshiped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly". Truly, he was suuuuch a cocky little shit towards other scholars and after his death, his brother found notes with pre-written barbs awaiting assignment: “If we all knew as little as __ does, we should doubtless find the classics as easy as he does.” “Nature, not content with denying to Mr __ the faculty of thought, has endowed him with the faculty of writing.” (I ❤️ him, I'm sorry!)

He spent nearly 30 years on translating his edition of "Astronomica", a 5 book Latin poem about astronomy and astrology, which he himself described as “so dull that few professed scholars can read it”. The undertaking was summed up by others as both an opportunity to show off and establish THEE authoritative text, and as an act of self-punishment.

He was so in love with his best friend that there's an acclaimed play about it--"The Invention of Love" by Tom Stoppard (of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” fame). It's pretty dense with esoteric references (and a fair bit of Latin)--a lot of it went over my head this first read but if you just let it wash over you, the meat of it is SO good and funny and bittersweet

@hogans-heroes raised the question of whether one of the Buckies washed out of fighter pilot school intentionally to follow the other—Housman failed his final exams despite being a promising student and ended up getting a job with Jackson in the Patent Office. The Invention of Love implies it was intentional:

Jackson: Someone said you ploughed yourself on purpose. […] We got what we wanted, Pollard at the British Museum and here's me with an Examinership and three hundred a year with prospects… You were cleverer than any of us, Hous! Housman: I didn't get what I wanted, that's true, but I want what I've got. Jackson: Pushing a pen at thirty-eight shillings a week. Housman: But here we are, you and I, we eat the same meals in the same digs, catch the same train to work in the same office, and the work is easy, I've got time to do classics … and friendship is all, sometimes I'm so happy, it makes me dizzy - [...]

The play also sums up his feelings for Jackson like this (!!!):

Housman: What do I want? Chamberlain: Nothing which you'd call indecent, though I don't see what's wrong with it myself. You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself… to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him—to die in his arms, like a Spartan, kissed once on the lips… or just run his errands in the meanwhile. You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.

And that bit pulls from what his brother shared in an essay after Housman's death:

In Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence gives the following introspective account of himself: “There was my craving to be liked--so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another. The terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink from trying; besides, there was the standard; for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply, in the same language, after the same method, for the same reasons ….” Against this passage, Alfred wrote in the margin "This is me."

In that same essay he says he found Jackson’s last letter to Housman, written as he was dying in faint pencil; Housman had gone over all the letters in ink 🥺😩

If you read this far, have a bonus gif! That I cut for being too much reading lol

Happy pride to my 1940s test pilots specifically

callum turner behind the scenes of ‘rose of nevada’

What kind of man does that to his best friend?