How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (29 page)

The extreme emotional tensions bound to make themselves felt in a ménage like the one in which Housman and his two love objects found themselves aren't hard to imagine, and it broke up in 1885, apparently after some kind of blowup between Housman and Moses Jackson. (Stoppard has the nice conceit of making the proximate cause of the break the news of the passage, in that year, of the infamous Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made acts of “gross indecency,” even between consenting adult men, punishable by up to two years' hard labor: it was the law under which Wilde would be convicted.) Moses soon left England for India, returning briefly in 1889 to marry, but by that time the relationship was over; Housman heard about the wedding secondhand. Jackson retired in 1911 and moved to Canada, where he died of cancer in 1923. Adalbert Jackson died at twenty-seven, in 1892. Till the end of his life, Housman kept portraits of the two brothers over the mantel in his rooms at Trinity. It is worth
noting that Housman's two bursts of poetic activity—the composition of
A Shropshire Lad
in the mid-1890s, and that of
Last Poems
(1922) in the early 1920s—coincided with crises related to Jackson: in the first case, the awful, awkward separation, in the second, the news that Jackson was seriously ill.

 

The second disaster was an academic one. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, and about which Housman himself remained silent, he failed his final exams in May 1881. Housman was a scholarship boy from a financially beleaguered family; his failure meant that avenues of possibility that Oxford could have opened for him were (or at any event seemed at the time) forever closed. What is striking is the almost willful manner of his downfall: one of the examiners later reported that he had barely written anything at all in response to the examination questions. Various explanations for the catastrophe have been put forth over the years. A week before he sat for the exams, Housman had received news that his father had suffered a life-threatening breakdown; Housman had contemptuously ignored the set curriculum, heavy as it was with philosophy, in order to work on his edition of Propertius; there was some kind of confrontation with Jackson about the true nature of Housman's feelings for him.

A posthumously published lyric that appears as
More Poems
XXXIV—“For me, one flowery Maytime, / It went so ill that I / Designed to die”—suggests that the real explanation was, in fact, a combination of all three. Indeed, this allegedly great mystery of Housman's life won't seem very mysterious to anyone who has gone to college. It is easy to imagine that Housman, upset by the terrible news from home, was at long last jarred out of the rebellious undergraduate fantasy that he didn't have to prepare the set curriculum; with only days before the exams, he panicked. In his overwrought state, we can further imagine, he sought comfort from Jackson, and in so doing inadvertently betrayed the intensity of his feelings—or, indeed, was made aware of their intensity for the first time. (It may even be that he unconsciously welcomed the crises as a way of finally forcing a confrontation with Jackson.) Hence the disaster, the willed collapse, the “design to die”: if not literally then, certainly, symbolically.

The Oxford and Bayswater fiascoes marked the nadir of Housman's life; from that point, it was, more or less, all uphill. Even during the decade between 1881, when he left Oxford, and 1892, when he got his first professorial position at University College, London—a period to which Norman Page refers as “the years of penance”—a typical bifurcation is in evidence. By day, Housman worked at the Patent Office and lived as an ordinary working man, an existence the details of which he described in vivacious letters to his stepmother, Lucy Housman, which display the often outrageous humor that characterized so much of his prose writing (a quality that the “dry-as-dust” school of Housman critics conveniently ignores). “One butcher's man,” he wrote to her in 1885 after having served with great glee on a coroner's jury, “…cut his throat with a rusty knife and died a week after of erysipelas (moral: use a clean knife on these occasions).”

Nights he spent in the reading room of the British Museum, where he began producing a series of papers on the texts of Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and other classical authors that almost immediately won the admiration of the international scholarly community—the more so because the author had no official academic affiliation. His first published paper, “Horatiana,” appeared when he was twenty-three, and reads like the work of a man three times as old. Housman's reputation was sufficiently established ten years after flunking out of Oxford that he won the appointment to the Chair of Latin at University College, London. In 1903 he published the first volume of his magnum opus on Manilius, and by 1911, when he was elected Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge University, his reputation as a scholar who deserved to be ranked with his intellectual idols, Scaliger and Bentley, was secure. He remained at Cambridge until his death. The last of the millions of words he wrote appeared on a postcard to Kate, mailed five days before his death. “Back to Evelyn nursing home today (Saturday). Ugh.”

 

In an onstage conversation that took place in December 1999 at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where
The Invention of Love
had its
American première, Tom Stoppard rightly asserted that “the appeal [of Housman as a dramatic subject] was to write the play about two people who inhabited the same person.” There are indeed two Housmans in Stoppard's play, but they're the wrong ones. With the exception of a few disparaging references to
A Shropshire Lad
in the second act, which Stoppard puts in the mouth of the journalist and Wilde memoirist Frank Harris (“I think he stayed with the wrong people in Shropshire. I never read such a book for telling you you're better off dead”), Housman the well-loved sentimental poet is virtually nonexistent. Instead,
The Invention of Love
focuses on the formation of Housman the classical scholar, who is here split in two: the young, emotional, idealistic “Housman,” and the dead, cynical “AEH,” whose postmortem reveries of his youth, from his Oxford days through his appointment to his first academic position at the age of thirty-three, constitute the play's dreamlike action. What contrast there is between them is less a matter of the suggestive differences between Poetry and Criticism, or angels and devils, than one of age. “Housman,” who spends the play getting into as much of a lather about misspellings and misplaced punctuation as he does about Jackson, and into whose mouth Stoppard puts many of the more acidulous aphorisms for which Housman became famous (“the passion for truth is the faintest of all human passions”), isn't different in kind from “AEH,” who says pretty much the same things; he's just more wide-eyed and enthusiastic.

To be sure, much of Stoppard's presentation of Housman the developing scholar is engrossing; certainly the Philadelphia audience thought so. (The run there was extended several times; at the time of this writing, there are no plans to bring the play to New York. The rumors are that cautious producers fear that the subject matter is too esoteric.) Few playwrights delight in the surface dazzle of intellectual activity, the theorems, the Latin phrases, the arcane allusions, as much as Stoppard does, and—superficially, at least—he seems to honor his subject's intellectual energy and love of learning for its own sake. There's a wonderful scene toward the end of the first act in which the young Housman exults, apropos of that correction in the Catullus passage, that

When I saw the play in March with a classicist friend of mine, we were amazed to see that the audience was rapt as Housman explained, in technical language that refused to condescend to the nonclassicist, how his emendation worked. (“So
opis
isn't power with a small ‘o', it's the genitive of
Ops
who was the mother of Jupiter. Everything comes clear when you put the comma back one place.”)

But as the play proceeds, it becomes evident that Stoppard himself isn't all that preoccupied with the kind of small victories over ignorance and error to which Housman devoted his life as a scholar. In the Inaugural Lecture he gave on assuming his position at University College, Housman the scrupulous scholar warned against what he called “dithyrambic” tendencies: self-indulgence on the part of the critic, reckless emotionality and idealization in interpreting texts, as opposed to cautious evaluation and strict consciousness of the author's, rather than the interpreter's, tastes and cultures. For all his interest in intellectual esoterica, Stoppard has always been the dithyrambic sort—a romantic at heart. However much it fussed over Fermat's last theorem, and over some of its characters' worries about “the decline from thinking to feeling,”
Arcadia
ultimately celebrates the imperfectability of knowledge, and exalts the messiness of love and sex (“the attraction which Newton left out”). Henry, the playwright protagonist of
The Real Thing
, which is currently enjoying an excellent revival on Broadway, may be impatient with intellectual softness, and may have no patience for vulgar politicized writing, but everyone else realizes—with relief—that he's really “the last romantic,” despite his reputation as someone who doesn't get “bothered” by things (as Housman was thought not to). The point of this popular play of love and infidelity among very clever people is to make Henry realize this, too. “I don't believe in behaving well,” he exclaims toward the end of the play, when he realizes how fiercely he loves his second wife. “I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn't seem much different from not loving.”

As it happens, similar words mark the climax of
The Invention of Love
, where a character rapturously catalogs the effects of love: “the
self-advertisement of farce and folly, love as abject slavery and all-out war—madness, disease, the whole catastrophe owned up to…” The character is Housman, but he's describing not love itself but love poetry—as near to the real thing, we are meant to feel, as this erotically thwarted man ever got. The structure of his play suggests that—as Auden might have done—Stoppard believes that Housman's devotion to the life of the mind was essentially a repressive (and depressive) reaction to, and a sublimation of, his failed love for Jackson.

This is where Wilde comes in: emotionally foolhardy, aesthetically flamboyant, Stoppard's Wilde is clearly intended as a foil to his Housman—he's the kind of character Stoppard likes to have triumph. (Stoppard's Wilde is valued here for his emotional messiness rather than his intellectual brilliance.) References to Wilde run like a basso continuo through the play from the very beginning, first in breathless undergraduate rumors of his notorious “Aesthete” excesses while at Oxford, and then in more grown-up gossip about his trial and conviction. In the climactic scene, set after Wilde's release from prison, he and Housman finally meet. (They never actually did, but Housman sent Wilde a copy of
A Shropshire Lad
, and we know that Wilde's intimate friend Robbie Ross recited some of the poems to Wilde when he was in prison.) There's little question of where your sympathies are meant to lie. It's no accident that in this play, the news of Wilde's trial and conviction comes at precisely the moment when Housman gets his first academic appointment, as if Housman's success were somehow predicated on Wilde's failure. And as Wilde himself is rowed across the Styx in the last scene, he recites some of his wittiest and most famous aphorisms, while Housman, standing upstage, recites some of his most vicious and mean-spirited.

“I'm very sorry,” AEH says to Wilde in this final exchange:

If Housman stands for renunciation in Stoppard's eyes, Wilde stands for glorious folly:

This exchange got a big laugh when I saw the play, but I have to think that it came at the price of intellectual fairness. Housman, after all, was an artist too, and a very good one. But then, it often seems like the point of
The Invention of Love
is to make Housman into the representative of timid, thwarted, dry-as-dust “scholarship” and “science,” so that Wilde can become the heroic and tragic representative of “poetry” and “emotion”—a dithyrambic type for whom the playwright evidently has more fellow-feeling. And in fact, in his Philadelphia comments, Stoppard acknowledged as much: he talked there about Housman as an outwardly “successful person whose life—and this the play does try to do, does try to show—whose life is essentially a failure in many ways. He failed to live his own personality,” whereas Wilde for him is “this other man who crashed in flames…[whom] we now see, for perfectly obvious reasons, as being somewhat of a heroic figure and a successful person.”