How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  A speech that Stoppard has chosen not to quote in his play—the 1892 Inaugural—suggests a different picture of Housman. The poet-scholar declared that

  Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.

  It hasn’t occurred to Stoppard, or indeed to many of those writing about Housman, that although he never received Jackson as a full-time lodger in his life, Housman could actually have been, for the most part, happy. Pace Stoppard, Housman was no grim Stoic. (“I respect the Epicureans more than the Stoics,” he wrote.) Stoppard’s Frank Harris gets Housman all wrong when he grumbles that the point of A Shropshire Lad is that “you’re better off dead.” If you read beyond the melancholy and obsession with mortality, the point that emerges is, if anything, an Epicurean one: tomorrow we shall surely die, so today we must live—and be happy as best we know how. “My troubles are two,” Housman wrote, and this troubled Housman is all The Invention of Love cares about; but what about “My pleasures are plenty”?

  During their climactic exchange at the close of The Invention of Love, Wilde mischievously tweaks Housman’s famous devotion to scientific “truth,” a passion that pervades both his poetic and scholarly utterances. (“It is and it must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them,” he wrote in the UCL Inaugural; and in the penultimate poem of A Shropshire Lad, the narrator says of harsh poetic truths that they are worth having even “if the smack is sour.”) Stoppard’s Wilde is somewhat more sanguine about the relation between facts and truth, and shuns unpleasant realities. “It’s only fact,” he tells Housman, referring to a newspaper report about a young cadet who killed himself because he was a homosexual—the incident that was the basis for one of the most searing and implicitly self-revealing of A Shropshire Lad’s poems (“Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?”). “Truth,” Wilde goes on, “is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination.”

  You’re meant to applaud this line, which ultimately provides the explanation of the play’s title. Wilde knows that Bosie is nothing more than a “spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented” young man, but those are merely the boring “facts.” The “truth” is that for Wilde, Bosie is divine Hyacinthus. “Before Plato could describe love,” Stoppard’s Wilde says, “the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention.” This exaltation of “invention” over “reality,” of complaisant fantasy over unpleasant facts, couldn’t be farther from Housman’s hardheaded view of things. (He loathed Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” which he disdainfully summarized thus: “Things must come right in the end, because it would be so very unpleasant if they did not.”)

  Of the cold realities of life, Housman got an early and bitter taste; his reaction was to abandon illusion, “invention,” and devote himself to laying bare reality as he saw it. If love, as Stoppard wants us to believe, lives in the province of the imagination—if it is, essentially, an invention—then Housman’s handicap, we are meant to feel, was his limited, science-bound, fact-obsessed, philological mind. Even if you accept the dubious and disturbing proposition that we could never love people if we could see them for who they really are, Stoppard again isn’t playing entirely fair here. Having erased all traces of Housman the poet, the amiable colleague, the warm and hilarious correspondent, there’s nothing to stop the playwright from claiming that Housman wasn’t a fully realized human being, wasn’t capable of “inventing.” This, in turn, allows him to deliver to his audience the always welcome news that scholars are dull and haven’t got satisfying emotional lives, whereas other people live life to the hilt.

  Had Stoppard dug deeper, been really interested in considering what the soul of a man who was both genuinely creative and rigorously intellectual might be like, he might have penetrated to the mystery of the “two different people” that Housman was. With his playwright’s imagination and presumed interest in the textures of human character, he wouldn’t have had to dig very deep. Is the “puzzle” of Housman’s divided nature all that difficult to solve? To my mind, the fierceness of his scholarly invective is simply a mutation of the fierce protectiveness he felt for the beautiful lads he eulogized. A Shropshire Lad is a bitterly ironic antiwar poem: “The saviours come not home to-night, / Themselves they could not save,” goes a line from the sequence’s first lyric, which refers to the thousands of young men fighting and dying in the Empire’s wars, and which is set on the night of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, as choruses of “God save the Queen” ring out into the bonfire-illuminated sky. Housman loves his young men, and hurts to think of them wounded (“lovely lads and dead and rotten,” he spits), and scorns those who would wound them. So too with his beloved texts: he loves them, and hurts to think of them wounded.

  And surely the life-altering rejection by Jackson has much to do with the tone and character of Housman’s two personae. The two emotions that underlay this hopeless, humiliating incident—desire (his for Jackson) and contempt (Jackson’s, implicitly, for him and his world)—each found its own outlet: desire in the elegies for young men, contempt in the vituperative footnotes. (Housman wryly dedicated his magnum opus to Jackson the contemptor harum litterarum—“the one who has contempt for these writings.”) Indeed, that contemptuous “thousand-yard stare” seems all too clearly to have been a self-protective device, a way of distancing himself from the intense emotions that young men—students—could so easily arouse. For this we ourselves should feel sympathy, not contempt.

  Desire, contempt; poetry, criticism. Housman’s classical papers, abstruse as they may be, are filled with flashes of wit; they are also masterful examples of elegant and precise English. (Among his contributions to textual criticism was to make of what had been a truly dry-as-dust genre, characterized by terse, abbreviated notations, an almost literary one.) There’s a strange moment in one of these, an early review of a new edition of Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians, in which, during a discussion of textual matters, emotion suddenly kindles: Euripides’ Hippolytus, the author fiercely writes, was “by far the most faultless tragedy of Euripides, if not indeed the most faultless of all Greek tragedies with the exception of the Antigone alone.” In Euripides’ play, Hippolytus is portrayed as a proud and solitary youth who devoted himself to the austere cult of the virgin goddess Artemis; he perishes, as the indirect result of an unwanted erotic advance, because he would not break an oath of silence. Small wonder the play appealed so much to Housman, who in life had played not one but both of its great leading roles: the desire-maddened, rejected would-be seducer, and the solitary youth whose austere enthusiasms were a refuge from erotic confusions for which he claimed contempt.

  As for Housman’s exceedingly rarefied intellectual enthusiasms, we need not look to pathology to explain them. Of course it’s tempting to think that there was, in his choice of Manilius as the object of his life’s work, something deliberately perverse; it’s as if, to punish the “system” that had punished him, he chose to waste his awesome talents on someone wholly beneath him. (It wouldn’t have been the first time.) In 1984, Professor Knox lamented about this waste in The New York Review: “When I think of what Housman might have done for the improvement and elucidation of our texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides instead of devoting thirty years to the verses of an astrological hack, I am tempted to use his own words against him: “The time lost, the tissues wasted…are in our brief irreparable life disheartening to think of.”

  But even if there is some truth in the theory that Housman’s choice of subject was deliberately perverse (after all, he had every reason to resent the system, and to want to subvert its needs and desires), to complain in this way is to inflict, as Housman might put it, the literary
on the scientific. We may be interested in possessing the most accurate possible texts of the three great tragedians, but Housman’s interest was to find corrupt texts and repair them—“to strike your finger on the page and say, ‘Thou ailest here, and here.’” It is important, too, to remember that among Manilius’s previous editors were the great scholars Scaliger and Richard Bentley, whom Housman so revered. Whatever his modest refusal to be counted their equal, it would be inhuman to expect him to resist embarking on a project that, quite apart from its intellectual and technical appeal, would link his name permanently to theirs. And let us not forget that childhood fascination with astronomy. Why shouldn’t Housman have had a Proustian motivation?

  If Stoppard’s interest in intellectuals and their lives and passions extended beyond his desire to use them as garnish for his essentially romantic, pop vision—if, for instance, he’d taken more seriously, and investigated more closely, the contexts for and nuances of Housman’s utterances about classical learning and the role of the scholar—he’d have found many things to admire. (And would have had to write a different play.) Not least of these would have been the very trait which, in this play, is too often an object for fun: Housman’s insistence on “scientific” scrupulousness in dealing with ancient texts. “The only reason to consider what the ancient philosopher meant about anything is if it’s relevant to settling corrupt or disputed passages in the text,” AEH declares in Act 1, as the audience, echoing Jowett—who also makes a appearance—sniggers knowingly. (How narrow he is, how horribly he has failed to see the glory that was Greece!) And again, toward the end of Act One, AEH is lecturing young Housman on the qualities of a good textual critic; among these was “repression of self-will.” This also got a solid giggle on the night I saw the play, perhaps because people were making a connection—as I suspect Stoppard intends them to—between Housman’s mania for intellectual “repression” (by which he meant, of course, the effort to filter out the critic’s own prejudices) and the alleged sexual and emotional repression for which, thanks to Auden and others, he is so well known.

  Like many lines in this play, the one about self-repression is, in fact, a quotation from Housman, but Stoppard doesn’t provide the idea with its proper context. In his Cambridge Inaugural Lecture of 1911, Housman argued passionately that scholars of ancient texts must repress their own tastes—what we today might call their cultural biases. He derides an appraisal of some lines by Horace as being “exquisite”:

  Exquisite to whom? Consider the mutations of opinion, the reversals of literary judgment, which this one small island has witnessed in the last 150 years: what is the likelihood that your notions or your contemporaries’ notions of the exquisite are those of a foreigner who wrote for foreigners two millenniums ago? And for what foreigners? For the Romans, for men whose religion you disbelieve, whose chief institution you abominate, whose manners you do not like to talk about, but whose literary tastes, you flatter yourself, were identical with yours…. Our first task is to get rid of [our tastes], and to acquire, if we can, by humility and self-repression, the tastes of the classics.

  In the context of the fuzzy Victorian romanticization of classical culture, this is shockingly refreshing. The past thirty-five years of classical scholarship have, in fact, been devoted to stripping away our cultural preconceptions about and woolly idealization of the Greeks and Romans and trying to see them “cold,” for what and who they were—which was, as often as not, strange and off-putting, despite our desire to make them into prototypes for ourselves, to “invent” them as “Hyacinths” even when the “facts” suggest otherwise. Stoppard has AEH recite most of this speech in his play, but you wonder whether he does so without being aware of its implications, without realizing how startlingly prescient and contemporary this musty old character was. Fact-loving, scientific Housman was unsentimental about the Greeks and Romans—and therefore more modern by far, when all is said and done, than “Hyacinth”-loving Wilde.

  The back cover of the printed edition of The Invention of Love, like the play itself, is less interested in the two Housmans than in comparing Housman and Wilde; in so doing, it makes a little joke of A. E. Housman. On it, the publisher rhapsodizes about Wilde’s superior allure, about the fact that although his life was short and tragic, he had, at least, lived: “The author of A Shropshire Lad lived almost invisibly in the shadow of the flamboyant Oscar Wilde”—this, of course, isn’t true; Housman was hugely popular—“and died old and venerated—but whose passion was truly the fatal one?”

  After seeing Stoppard’s one-sided play about this fascinatingly two-sided figure, I was moved to ask a different question. Let’s say that Stoppard’s Wilde is right—let’s say he did invent the “new” twentieth century, mad as it is for everything new. And indeed, so much of what he was famous (and infamous) for inventing in the nineteenth century has become commonplace in the twentieth: media celebrity, and the celebrity trial; personality as a form of popular entertainment; glittering pronouncement as ideology; “image” culture; the adulation and tireless pursuit of idealized, rather than real, love objects. So let’s say that Wilde (or at least the Wilde of Stoppard’s play), the one who preferred silvery, seductive, vaporous images to unappealingly humdrum “facts” and unpleasant realities, invented that—gave us the world we now inhabit. And let’s say that Housman, after failing—or refusing—to “invent” the one he loved, chose to be unglamorous, to devote himself to facts, to reality, to the dull task of bringing to light hard truths unlikely to endear him to a public hungry—as Stoppard’s public is—for sentimental fantasies. Let’s give Wilde that much, and Housman that little. Who is the greater hero?

  —The New York Review of Books, August 10, 2000

  The Truman Show

  It comes as no surprise to learn, as you do in the preface to Too Brief a Treat, a new volume of Truman Capote’s letters, that the author was as eccentric in his spelling as he was in pretty much everything else. Still, it’s fascinating to find out that three words in particular gave him trouble—so much so that Gerald Clarke, Capote’s biographer and the editor of the letters, decided in the end to let them stand uncorrected in the published text. One of the three trips up a lot of people (“receive”). But the other two are generally less troublesome—if only because one is a word that most of us dare not use of ourselves, and the other is a word we prefer not to use. Given all we know about Capote, his difficulties with both seem significant.

  The first word was “genius”—or, as Capote sometimes spelled it, “genuis.” At the beginning of his life and career the word cropped up often. “We all thought he was a genius,” said the writer Marguerite Young, after the diminutive, flamboyant youth arrived at Yaddo, the artists’ colony, in the spring of 1946. Capote was then only twenty-one, but had already attracted considerable attention. This was partly for his writing—a couple of macabre short stories, published in Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar—and perhaps more for his public antics. He’d been fired from The New Yorker for impersonating an editor (he was a copyboy at the time) and was a regular at El Morocco and the Stork Club, swank nightspots where he would appear with fashionable young women like Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona O’Neill. At Yaddo, though, he worked hard: he was writing a novel for which he’d received a contract from Robert Linscott, an editor at Random House, who like so many others found Capote’s combination of elfin charm and childlike vulnerability irresistible. “Truman has all the stigmata of genius,” Linscott declared in 1948, after publishing the young author’s first novel.

  That novel was the career-making Other Voices, Other Rooms, an exercise in Southern Gothic that, as one newspaper put it, had “critics in a dither, as they try to decide whether he’s a genius.” In fact, many if not most of the major critics dismissed the novel, an overspiced gumbo of rape, murder, homosexuality, disease, madness, and transvestism. (“A minor imitation of a very talented minor writer, Carson McCullers,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in The Partisan Review.) What made the book
’s reputation was the sensational publicity concerning the author’s jacket photo, which showed the twenty-three-year-old Capote lying on a divan staring at the camera with the hungry look of a seasoned rent boy. Capote himself later acknowledged that it was the “exotic photograph” that marked “the start of a certain notoriety that has kept close step with me these many years.”

  When you pick up Other Voices today and slog through the Spanish-mossy plot and the overinflated sentences (“he knew now, and it was not a giggle or a sudden white-hot word; only two people with each other in withness”), it can be hard to see what the fuss was all about. And yet a powerful presence is unmistakable—you can see how clearly the deliberate, almost Wildean aestheticism of Capote’s prose stemmed from his outré pose. Both excited an entire generation. Cynthia Ozick would later recall how brandishing a copy of Other Voices was like waving a banner against the “blight” of the drabness of the postwar milieu; Capote himself would work at the exquisiteness of his sentences until it became a hallmark of his mature style. Norman Mailer summed up the consensus of that generation of writers when he declared that Capote wrote “the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm,” of any of them.