Classicists know A.E. Housman as the most brilliant Latinist of the late Victorian era. General readers—if they know of Housman at all today—know him as a poet, author of A Shropshire Lad, a set of elegiac poems about young men and missed chances.
Tom Stoppard’s moving play about Housman explores this divided self—romantic poet and scrupulous scholar—pulled between two passions: one for scholarship, the other for a more forbidden love. He does this in part by putting two versions of his protagonist on stage.
There’s the elderly Housman (“AEH”), first seen bantering with the mythical boatman Charon and then encountering his younger self as he takes an imaginative voyage across the Styx, revisiting memories as he nears the end of his life. And there’s the younger self (“Housman”), the university student passionately devoted to classical scholarship—and to his roommate Moses Jackson.
Hampstead Theatre’s recent production of The Invention of Love shows how the theater’s long association with Stoppard has fostered a sympathetic understanding of one of his more challenging plays, a play that expects its audience to care about textual analysis of Catullus and Horace.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that in this production AEH is played by Simon Russell Beale, one of the great actors of his generation, an actor equally at home in tragedy and comedy.
The play begins with AEH on the bank of the river Styx, waiting for Charon to ferry him across to Hades. As AEH and Charon cross the stage on the raft, another boat appears. It’s three young men, Oxford students on an outing. Here Stoppard beautifully suggests how the fluidity of memory, much like a river, carries us from one place to another. As the elder AEH on his raft sees his younger self row by with friends, he longs to recapture those fleeting moments.
And in a collapse of all rules of time and space, AEH is able to meet and converse with his younger self.
Well, this is an unexpected development. Where can we sit down before philosophy finds us out? I’m not as young as I was. Whereas you, of course, are.
This conversation between the young Housman (a sweetly innocent Matthew Tennyson in this production) and the older AEH is sprinkled with such wit, but also with the two passions that ran through his life. There’s his desire for love, or as Housman imagined, a perfect comradeship, like that of Theseus and Pirithous. And then there’s the longing for the perfect manuscript.
Neither passion will be wholly satisfied, but he will spend his life correcting manuscripts, adding to the sum total of human knowledge. And he tells his younger self that scholarship is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction:
It is good just by being knowledge… You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having.
That paradoxical statement “there is no little too little to be worth having” reveals not just Housman’s commitment to scholarship, but the power of Russell Beale’s performance as well. He is subtle, restrained, and slyly witty, all while suggesting with the slightest glance the sorrow that lies under it all.
These two passions come together in the emotional heart of the play at the end of Act I. In the Hampstead production the lights come up as AEH comes downstage to lecture to us, his students, who sit in an intimate horseshoe around him, much as I remember lectures from my college days. His topic: Horace’s Ligurinus ode, which ends with a dreamlike vision of the loved one slipping from one’s grasp.
I blinked away tears as Russell Beale, just feet from me, brought to life this professor whose harsh criticism of his students’ inadequate translations might, in another context, seem simply pedantic. But the play has led us to see something deeper: a fiercely controlled academic trying to control his own broken heart. His seemingly offhand comment to a student he has insulted skates close to a confession of his own feelings:
You don’t mind? You don’t mind, Miss Burton, when I make you cry? Oh, Miss Burton, you must try to mind a little. Life is in the minding.
The inward quiet of Housman’s emotional life finds a surprising counterpoint in Act II, when Stoppard introduces a very different man who suffered for love: Oscar Wilde. It makes for a startling contrast, one that may even threaten to destabilize what we have so far understood the play to be: a clear-eyed and sympathetic portrait of a gifted and deeply conflicted man. Wilde is such a forceful presence, his appearance has even led some to feel he takes over the play.
In this imaginary encounter, Housman tries to sympathize with Wilde and his sordid fate:
I’m very sorry. Your life is a terrible thing. A chronological error… You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song sung unto all posterity … and not now!
Wilde will have none of this sympathy from someone who, to his mind, has refused to live.
Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light…
Yes, Wilde is far more dramatic (more theatrical!) than Housman, but his dramatic presentation—played with perfect bravado by Dickie Beau in this production—is just that: a presentation, an affectation. Housman’s rueful self-knowledge (“My life is marked by long silences…”) touches us more deeply.
For all Wilde’s brilliance, the play is Housman’s story. His silences, not Wilde’s speeches, are most poignant. It’s the contrast between Housman’s brilliance and his broken emotional life that remain with us.
Those Act I scenes of Housman rowing into view as he chats with his friends Pollard and Jackson? In the Hampstead production, director Blanche McIntyre has the three students enter severally, each in a fragment of a boat. As they come downstage, they join and lock their fragmented boats into one. The Spectator’s critic calls this bit of stage business “technically brilliant, artistically pointless and oddly satisfying.”
It is indeed satisfying but not, I would suggest, artistically pointless. So much of the play deals with painful divisions and distinctions: intellect and feeling, scholarship and poetry and, of course, the unbridgeable gap between Housman and Jackson. That striking image of fragments coming together to make a unified whole is deeply satisfying within this melancholy play.
It’s no accident that this is the image we see from Housman’s undergraduate years. Many of us look back on our college years as a kind of lost paradise. Everything seemed possible in that time of shared intellectual banter—whether rowing along the Thames or, in my case at Middlebury, playing frisbee on the green hills of Vermont..
McIntyre’s fleeting vision of a lost whole—something akin to that lost original manuscript Housman seeks—remains for me the most enduring image from this wonderful production.
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