Inventing Love: Tom Stoppard, A.E.Housman, and the Classics
First published in “The Real Thing”: Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration on his 75th birthday, edited by William Baker and Amanda Smothers, Cambridge Scholars, U.K., 2013
Viewed one way, Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love (1997) is perplexingly, maddeningly dense. A portrait of the scholar-poet A.E.Housman (1859-1936), it bristles with layers of complex information not just about the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome but about the scholarship that, over centuries, has been applied to them, some of which becomes central to the play's exposition. If you had no prior knowledge of Theseus, Pirithoüs, Ligurinus, and the odes in which Horace includes them, if you had no clue about how the poems of Catullus were preserved, if you had no understanding of the textual criticism of ancient Greek and Latin texts, The Invention of Love soon plunges you deep into these matters. (And the study of classics is only one aspect of the play, which also bombards its audience with passages of exposition about the Oxford dons of the mid-nineteenth century, about Oscar Wilde, aestheticism, and the Labouchere amendment.)
Viewed from another perspective, The Invention of Love becomes a reflection of the ways in which a single character lives in terms of separate kinds of thought and feeling. Its overlapping memories form a deliberate, sensuous clutter, a memory-scape whose kaleidoscopic patterns keep returning, as if by accident, to certain themes. All members of the audience, whether steeped in the classics or ignorant of them, will find themselves asking: What parts of all this information matter? And why?
These are core questions with Stoppard. Most or all Stoppard plays are about epistemology: about the various ways in which our brains apprehend and address the world, the range of possibilities whereby experience and thought become knowledge. (Carnal knowledge is very much one possibility.) And the nature of knowledge – what has been lost, forgotten, mistaken? – is an abiding theme. The study of the ancient world – of which so much has been lost, so much misunderstood – provokes some of the finest scenes in Arcadia and Rock ‘n’ Roll. But it is in The Invention where Stoppard’s fascination with knowledge of the classics is most sustained and most eloquent. Epistemology is anyway a core area of Greek philosophy, recurring in Plato’s dialogues (not least The Republic). And in The Invention, more than any other Stoppard play, epistemology becomes drama.
* * * *
The very title of The Invention of Love is a quintessential Stoppard paradox. Love is miraculous, eternal, universal, all-powerful - and yet it’s an inherited cultural artifact, something invented and refined by civilized man. The love that Housman feels for Moses Jackson, his friend since their days as contemporary Oxford undergraduates, is the overpowering emotion of his life – “Oh, Mo! Mo! I would have died for you but I never had the luck!”<1> – but it’s also a species of conformism. His colleague Chamberlain tells him about its characteristics without Housman's telling him (“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 upon the lips…”)<2> This attitude to love is a formula, going back to Plato. In the Jowett translation of Plato’s Symposium that Housman knew, Phaedrus says:
“I know not any greater blessing to a young man beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved youth. For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live--that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work. And I say that a lover who is detected in doing any dishonourable act, or submitting, through cowardice, when any dishonour is done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected by his beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any one else. The beloved, too, when he is seen in any disgraceful situation, has the same feeling about his lover. And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour; and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at one another's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post, or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the soul of heroes, love of his own nature inspires into the lover.”<3>
Even when Housman says to Jackson “You’re half my life,” he’s reiterating a way of talking that goes back to the Greeks: in particular both to the poems of Theocritus (“Half my life lives in thine image”)<4> and Plato’s Symposium (with the famous theory advanced there by Aristophanes that humans seek to find their other halves).
The Greeks and Romans were there first. The Invention keeps teasing us with the idea that, at some point, certain things may have been actually new. Who invented the love lyric? Who invented the attitude that love was slavery and war and catastrophe? Who invented the loved one? Who invented love as an emotion? As you proceed through the play, the answers keep changing, dizzyingly. In an early conversation, Housman, Jackson, and A.W.Pollard - Oxford undergraduates and close friends - are seen together, speaking of, among other things, Catullus (who, a younger contemporary of Julius Caesar, died around 54 BC at about the age of thirty). Pollard tells Jackson, a scientist, that Catullus invented the love poem.
“Like everything else, like clocks and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented. After millenniums of sex and centuries of poetry, the love-poem as understood by Shakespeare and Donne, and by Oxford undergraduates – the true-life confessions of the poet in love, immortalizing the mistress who is actually the cause of the poem – that was invented in Rome in the first century before Christ.”<5>
(Jackson replies “Gosh” – the same response Pollard made a minute earlier when Jackson told him “Oh – love! You’re just ragging me because you’ve never kissed a girl…. Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.”<6>)
A central device of the play is that the dying Housman and the young one are played by separate actors: Stoppard names them AEH and Housman respectively. The senior one sometimes watches the junior; and in two important scenes he converses with him - though the younger man never realizes to whom he is speaking. In a later scene, young Housman tells elderly AEH that Propertius was “the first of the Latin love elegists.”<7> His point is that, though Catullus came first as a love poet, Propertius was the first to make the elegiac couplet a standard genre for love poetry. (Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, all born between 70 and 43 BC, were the foremost of the glorious generation of poets who added deathless lustre to the cultural regime of Octavian under the second Triumvirate and later when Octavian became the emperor Augustus. Virgil, Horace, and Propertius were all protégés of the celebrated patron Maecenas, who effectively became Octavian’s minister of culture. Propertius probably wrote in the years 25-19 BC. Tibullus and Ovid soon followed - though some sources suggest Tibullus, probably the older, preceded Propertius as a love elegist. Quintilian, writing in the next century, considered Ovid the last of the Latin love elegists.)
But was Propertius first? It’s characteristic of a Stoppard play that there’s always another answer. When AEH meets Housman again in Act Two, he tells him how the first of the Roman love elegists, strictly speaking, was not Propertius but Cornelius Gallus (c.70-26BC), all of whose poetry was considered lost in Housman’s day.<8> (A few of his lines have been discovered since.)
AEH also makes here the larger point that this wave of Roman poets invented a new idea of love: “Oh yes, there’d been songs… valentines – mostly in Greek, often charming…. But the self-advertisement of farce and folly, love as abject slavery and all-out war – madness, disease, the whole catastrophe owned up to and written in the metre – no, that was new.” <9> This reminds us of Horace’s Ligurinus poem (Carmina IV, 1) that recurs throughout the play; in the speech closing Act One, AEH discusses its view of love as warfare in the word “bella.”<10> And though AEH does not say so, Housman also took knew that Horace took a comparable pride in invention. A Horace poem, mentioned in the play by both AEH and Housman, includes this boast:
“…of me it shall be told,
That, grown from small to great, I first
Of all men subtly wrought
Aeolian strains to unison
With our Italian thought.” <11>
It is unclear, admittedly, why Horace (who probably began publishing poetry around 30BC) felt he had done something his predecessor Catullus had not. Meanwhile Virgil, a few years senior to Horace, had already been at work since 43BC in dactylic hexameters, the genre employed in Greek by Homer and other poets. Ovid, their junior but their contemporary, in due course became so much the master of love poetry that his collections include the Heroides (twenty-one poems, in elegiac couplets, each impersonating a celebrated mythological heroine afflicted by love), the Amores (three books about love, partly didactic, in elegiac couplets), and the Ars Amatoria (three more books in elegiac metre, taking an entirely didactic approach to love).
And is it true that the Roman poets really invented the idea that love was “abject slavery and all-out war – madness, disease, the whole catastrophe”? Again and again, the play refers to the precedent of the Greeks, whose view of erotic affliction seems far more substantial than AEH’s description as “songs, valentines… often charming.” AEH tells Housman of how Aeschylus introduced Eros into the love of Achilles for Patroclus. Charon, the ferryman of the dead, and AEH have already quoted Achilles in Aechylus’s Myrmidones: - “Does it mean nothing to you, the unblemished thighs I worshipped and the showers of kisses you had from me?” <12> – an extraordinary statement of passion. In Act One AEH quotes, from Sophocles’s play The Loves of Achilles, “Love is like the ice held in the hand by children” <13>; and in Act Two Oscar Wilde refers to the same line (“the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go” <14>). In the play’s final scene between Housman and Jackson, Jackson reads aloud the English rhyming couplets of “Blest as one of the gods is he” and asks Housman if he wrote it. Housman’s reply is “Well, Sappho, really, more or less.”<15> Stoppard does not make Housman spell out that the most famous translation of this Sappho poem was in Latin by Catullus (“Ille mi par esse deo videtur”)<16>, but it is certainly another moment when we feel the Greeks invented everything about love that the Romans later inherited. Perhaps most movingly of all, AEH quotes two lines of Greek verse in the play’s closing minutes. He does not say they are by Theocritus, but he then gives them in English: “When thou art kind I spend the day like a god; when thy face is turned aside it is very dark with me.”<17>
What’s original? (“Am I the first to have thought of this?” is a question that recurs throughout Arcadia.) In that last scene with Housman, Jackson goes on to ask “Where’s the one again where I’m carving her name on trees?” Most English listeners might at once think he is referring to Orlando in Shakespeare’s As You Like It; but Housman replies “Propertius.”<18> Both Orlando and Propertius were using what was already a literary trope.
Something that was no literary trope, however, was the Sacred Band of Thebes, the troop of one hundred and fifty pairs of male lovers who fought together and epitomized the heroic side of Greek male love; and they become another theme throughout The Invention. AEH in Act One<19> quotes the most celebrated account of the Band, from Plutarch<20>; Frank Harris, however unreliable an eyewitness, gives in Act Two testimony of the grave at Chaeronea where their bodies were found. Much research has been done on this area since Housman’s day; Stoppard’s version subtly catches how it must have struck Victorian sensibilities.
On first acquaintance with several of Stoppard’s later plays, it often seems that he needed to show off how much homework he has done in his chosen area. Live long enough with them, and the reverse proves true. Gradually, it becomes apparent that The Invention refers to, or draws from, many works it never mentions. One of these is surely John Addington Symonds’s book A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), which has subsequently won renown as the earliest published defence of homosexuality in the English language and which Housman is most likely to have come to know. Symonds’s book begins with a study of how Greek literary treatments of the love of Achilles and Patroclus developed over the centuries; it then goes onto include, among other accounts from “semi-legendary history,”<21> this account by Plutarch. It also dwells on the Megara of Theognis<22> - to whom AEH refers, telling Wilde “You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song sung unto all posterity.”<23> And Symonds discusses and quotes the same fragments of Aeschylus and Sophocles about the love of Achilles and Patroclus as AEH. <24>
When Symonds suggests that the attitude to same-sex male love in Greece was far more generous than the one that ofsubsequent Western civilization, he encourages us to feel that Greek civilization was a bygone ideal. Housman takes this up. When he tells Oscar Wilde “You should have lived in the Megara of Theognis,” we find another favorite Stoppard idea: the invocation of an idyllic lost realm (Arcadia and the Native State, in the plays that bear those names) that proves subject to dispute.
* * * * * *
One of the play’s many satisfying perfections is that it begins with the extraordinary image of its protagonist waiting for the ferryman Charon by the Styx, the river of the dead. A.E.Housman was a divided character - others before Stoppard remarked on how he separated the sides of him that were poet and scholar - but poet and scholar had both met in the Underworld long before he died.
Housman the scholar often revisited the Styx and the Underworld; these zones occur, after all, in Homer, Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, and other poets. The most celebrated vision of Charon, the Styx, and the Underworld is that of Virgil in Aeneid VI, which AEH is soon quoting:
tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore <25>
The shades of the dead “stretched out their hands in love of the further shore.” In Latin, the line has often been held up as one of poetry’s greatest; in his lecture “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” A.E.Bradley devotes a paragraph to its connection of sound and meaning and its resistance to English translation. <26>
Housman’s beloved Horace, the poet whom Housman and many others admired most of all, addresses the Underworld more than once, notably in the closing lines of “Diffugere nives.” The original, partly quoted in the play, is:
infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum
liberat Hippolytum,
nec Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro
vincula Perithoo.” <27>
The young Housman of The Invention says the poem “goes through me like a spear.”<28> The older Housman translated it, though leaving his version to be published posthumously.<29> And the play’s great dialogue between the two Housmans includes the older one quoting the final lines of his translation:
Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Perithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.<30>
Housman’s poems are famously deathlorn. He visited the Styx most specifically in this one:
Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee.
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.
The brisk fond lack to fetch and carry,
The true, sick-hearted slave,
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave.<31>
It is always worth reading this poem with Randall Jarrell’s 1939 essay “Texts from Housman”<32> as a companion; Jarrell greatly admired William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity(1930) – and his essay, as a study of poetic ambiguity, out-Empsons Empson. The other Housman poem it addresses, equally concerned with a lover’s death, is this:
It nods and curtseys and recovers
When the wind blows above,
The nettle on the graves of lovers
That hanged themselves for love.
The nettle nods, the wind blows over,
The man, he does not move,
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love.<33>
Jarrell observes that “The lover of the grave” suggests not just that the lover in the grave but that it was the grave – death – with which he was in love when he killed himself.
“The triumph at being in the grave, one with the grave, prepares us for the fact that it was the grave, not any living thing, that the lover loved, and hanged himself for…. For the lover to have killed himself for love of a living thing would have been senseless; but his love for her was only ostensible, concealing – from himself too – the 'common wish for death,' his real passion for the grave.”<34>
I mention this point here because this death wish is likewise implied by both Virgil’s line “ripae ulterioris amore” and Stoppard’s play. The ghosts in Virgil feel “love” (“amore”) for the realm of the dead, the shore on the far side of the Styx. And the realm of the dead has long been the only place where AEH has expected to find fulfillment – he who, as the play reminds us, left instructions that, after his death, some of his most remarkable work was to be burnt.
* * * * * *
Interviewed about The Invention in 1998, Tom Stoppard remarked that all his plays really were about the same thing: “the man who was two men”.<35> In Arcadia, he turns the duality into a joke about Ezra Chater. (Bernard: “Ezra wasn’t a botanist! He was a poet!” Hannah: “He was not much of either, but he was both.”<36>) Other two-for-one examples abound in Stoppard’s plays. It’s tempting to interpret Stoppard’s remark as casting light on the playwright and his divided natures: both Czech and English, autodidact and scholar, joker and philosopher, with lives both private and public. More important, however, is to recognize that pluralism and ambiguity are central to Stoppard’s thought. His plays – The Invention is a virtuoso example – abound in remarks or questions that have two or more different but equally valid answers, in puns and paradoxes, in multiple layers that tell us of the complexity of humanity.
But the point about “the man who was two men” could only have come so explicitly to the surface of even this playwright’s mind at the time of his having recently made The Invention. No other Stoppard protagonist is so split – and therefore no other Stoppard play is more remarkable in terms of psychodrama. Housman kept his lives as poet and scholar so apart from each other that many writers before Stoppard spoke of him as a split being. C.O.Brink, one of his successors as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge, noted that, while the observer might see how Housman’s gifts as poet and scholar “came out of one root:… a quite extraordinary sensitivity and alertness that allowed him to touch, as it were, the very quick of language,” Housman himself nonetheless “kept the two gifts as separate as possible.”<37> John Berryman, writing of Housman the “absolutely marvelous minor poet” and “Housman the “great scholar”, remarked “You are dealing with an absolute schizophrenic.”<38> Stoppard makes the man’s duality a central point of the play – funnily so in the opening scene. Charon the boatman thinks he is waiting not for one person but two: “A poet and a scholar is what I was told… It sounded like two different people.” AEH replies wryly “I know.”<39>
Stoppard gives us at least two other splits within A.E.Housman. Soon we see the younger man as well as the old, a device from which meanings flow. Housman and AEH embody the French motto “Si la jeunesse savait; si la vieillesse pouvait.” (“If youth knew; if old age could.”) Housman does not know he will never fulfill all his potential; AEH is more than resigned to it. But the play takes a long time before showing us another dualism: that between Housman and Oscar Wilde. Age does not separate these two; Wilde was less than five years senior, overlapping for a year (1877-78) at Oxford, where both read Classics. Wilde, however, fulfilled or pursued the homosexual desires that Housman merely suggested in his verse; and Wilde engaged with the modern world as Housman did not. In The Invention, Wilde serves the same function that Hamlet does in Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Byron in Arcadia: mainly he is a celebrated figure offstage of whom others speak, a force who makes the play’s central character or characters seem as if they themselves are only playing supporting roles, a Godot for whom they wait. Wilde and AEH do meet and converse here, though; and some of the play’s most ambiguous existential points arise from this one late meeting. AEH says:
“Your life is a terrible thing. A chronological error….You should have lived in Megara… and not now! when disavowal and endurance are in honour, and a nameless, luckless love has made notoriety your monument.”<40>
Wilde, in his flamboyant reply, rejects Megara; he is proud to have lived when he did and to have lived in the age of “the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?” AEH replies “At home.”<41> Even more than Housman’s younger self, Wilde makes us ask how much the older Housman has lived at all.
Ask but not answer. The word “monument” is a motif. In Act One, Housman asks AEH “How am I to leave my mark?” and quotes the magnificent “Exegi monumentum” poem<42> (“I have raised a monument”) in which Horace boasts he will live forever because his verse will endure – “a monument more lasting than bronze as Horace boasted, higher than the pyramids of kings, unyielding to wind and weather and the passage of time?”<43> The older Housman takes time before he remarks, with wonderful irony, "If I had my time again, I would pay more regard to those poems of Horace which tell you you will not have your time again.”<44>
AEH continues:
“Life is brief and death kicks at the door impartially. Who knows how many tomorrows the gods will grant us? Now is the time, when you are young, to deck your hair with myrtle, to drink the best of the wine, to pluck the fruit. Seasons and moons renew themselves but neither noble name nor eloquence, no, nor righteous deeds will restore us.”
This passage compresses the Epicurean sentiments that recur throughout Horace’s Odes and then settles down into “Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain…”:<45> the great close of Diffugere nives, the poem Housman translated.
We are, in fact, addressing here a division in Horace’s thought as well as in Housman’s. Horace’s poem Diffugere nives recurs throughout the play. Housman in Act One says to AEH “Horace must have been a god when he wrote ‘Diffugere nives’”<46>; in Act Two, a few years later, he speaks of it to Pollard and adds
“Nobody makes it stick like Horace that you’re a long time dead – dust and shadow, and no good deeds, no eloquence, will bring you back. I think it’s the most beautiful poem in Latin or Greek there ever was; but in verse 15 Horace never wrote ‘dives’ which is in all the texts and I’m pretty sure I know what he did write. Anyone who says ‘So what?’ got left behind five hundred years ago when we became modern, that’s why it’s called modernism. The recovery of the ancient texts is the highest possible task – Erasmus, bless him. It is work to be done.”<47>
So Housman has been applying himself to what he recognizes as a great cause after all. And here and in a few other points he comes far closer to the Wildean spirit than when he and Wilde meet in person. Here he praises useless knowledge above useful knowledge. (The rejection of mere utility was a key tenet of Wildean aestheticism.) In Act One, when Pollard quotes Wilde’s famous line “Oh, I have worked hard all day – in the morning I put in a comma, and in the afternoon I took it out again!,” Housman accepts it as a serious statement, not hearing it as a joke.<48> And we know why he reacts that way. Not long before, he has told his younger self “There is truth and falsehood in a comma”<49> – and then illustrates precisely, with reference to a single Latin line in Catullus’s long poem The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis,<50> “By taking out a comma and putting it back in a different place, sense is made out of nonsense in a poem that has been read continuously since it was first misprinted four hundred years ago.”<51> What Wilde presented as funny becomes, with Housman, work of passionate seriousness. When he says to Wilde “The first conjecture I ever published was on Horace. Six years later I withdrew it.”, <52> he sounds both far from Wilde’s spirit and close to it: far from Wilde’s flamboyance and humor, close to his fastidious aestheticism and absurdity. (The play touches<53> only fleetingly on Housman's most brilliantly absurd feat, the "Fragment from a Greek Tragedy" pastiche that hilariously catches the locutions and conventions of Greek drama in the original.)
Housman fulfilled himself neither as Moses Jackson's lover nor as a definitive Propertius scholar. And yet Stoppard does not tell us that his life has been ill spent. One could argue that Wilde and AEH are two opposite kinds of tragic hero: the one suffers for having lived as he did, the other for not having lived at all. The play, though, offers them both as alternative figures of pathos rather than tragedy; and it's worth noting how Stoppard continually makes Housman funny.
We come closest to tragedy when Jackson brushes aside Housman’s love in their final scene, and when Housman, left alone and quoting his own poem, then says
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.<54>
Half my life: again the echo of Theocritus and Plato. The Invention is, it's important to recognize, an astonishingly compassionate account of homosexual repression. Whereas the fulfilled Wilde is all of a piece, the partly unfulfilled Housman is a split soul. Existential questions arise behind the play’s dualism. Which life is better? How is life best lived? And the play accumulates a great interest in the unlived life - which connects to the many aspects of loss in the play. Though Housman tells Jackson “You are half my life,” we can hardly miss that the other half is devoted to ancient texts – and that Housman is as passionate about the lost lines of Aeschylus as he is about Jackson.
When Housman parts with Jackson that last time, we are as near to crisis as anywhere in the play. And the next speech for AEH begins “Am I asleep or awake?”<55> - which sounds like an expression of trauma. But the scene that follows is comedy, with scholars dealing with AEH’s excoriating remarks about their own poor scholarship. The change of tone is an extraordinary feat.
* * * * * * *
Further themes in The Invention are the frustrations of translation and lost literature. AEH says to Charon “I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.”<56> As soon as the elderly AEH quotes four lines from his version of Horace’s Diffugere nives, the young Housman just remarks “ – yes, it’s hopeless, isn’t it?” – a line to which Stoppard gives the expressive direction “cheerfully.”<57>
Many followers of Stoppard’s work will know that these issues are not exclusive to this play. An unforgettable scene in Arcadia begins with Thomasina translating to Septimus from Latin an account that (Septimus reveals) is the famous one of Cleopatra's barge<58>: famous to us because of the version spoken in English verse by Enobarbus in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. But Enobarbus’s account - though Stoppard's characters do not point this out - is remarkably close to the words used in Plutarch's Greek life of Antony; Shakespeare, again, was unoriginal. And so we’re dealing with a translation of a translation of a translation. (English from Latin from English from Greek.) Variants on this idea of literary recycling recur throughout The Invention of Love, two of them subtly implicit in quick succession in the final scene between the young Housman and his beloved Moses Jackson: Sappho wrote the poem we also associate with Catullus, Propertius wrote the image (writing the name of the beloved on trees) we associate with Shakespeare’s Orlando.
In Arcadia, the mere mention of Cleopatra prompts Thomasina into a lament for the vast quantities of Greek literature that were lost when the library at Alexandria was burnt. Septimus's consolatory reply is beautifully philosophical: what's lost will be re-made. But Stoppard, who has said his sympathy is with Thomasina,<59> returns to the theme of lost classics in The Invention of Love. Housman to Pollard:
“Have you ever seen a cornfield after the reaping? Laid flat to stubble, and here and there, unaccountably, miraculously spared, a few stalks still upright. Why those? There is no reason. Ovid’s Medea, the Thyestes of Varius who was Virgil’s friend and considered by some his equal, the lost Aeschylus trilogy of the Trojan war… gathered to oblivion in sheaves, along with hundreds of Greek and Roman authors known only for fragments or their names alone – and here and there a cornstalk, a thistle, a poppy, still standing, but as to purpose, signifying nothing.” <60>
In an early scene in Rock 'n' Roll, Eleanor takes a student, Gillian, through a Sappho poem.<61> We're shown the painstaking hard work involved in understanding the words and constructions of another language, especially a dead one. We're also shown the extraordinary penetration of Sappho's thought, emerging from the Greek to speak of passion with an intensity and immediacy still remarkable today. (“Eros is amachanon, he’s spirit as opposed to machinery. Sappho is making the distinction. He’s not naughty, he’s – what? Uncontrollable, Uncageable.”)<62> Sappho's distance from us and her nearness to us grow simultaneously.
And this is Fragment 130 of Sappho. Fragments are a motif of The Invention. In one of its most bittersweet jokes, AEH tries to lead Charon into remembering lines from Aeschylus’s Myrmidones (one of his lost trilogy of the Trojan war); but the only bit Charon recalls - “Does it mean nothing to you, the unblemished thighs I worshipped and the showers of kisses you had from me?”<63> – is, of course, what has already come down to posterity as a fragment. AEH quotes <64>, and Wilde refers to<66>, the fragment from Sophocles’s Loves of Achilles - “Love is like the ice held in the hand by children.” What can the rest of these plays have been like?
* * * * * * * *
What matters and what does not? The remark or question that has more answers than one – a device so dear to Stoppard – comes up more than once in the play's use of the scholarly phrase “point of interest.” When Jackson, Pollard, and Housman have been talking about kissing girls and Catullus’s famous poem V about kisses and the invention of the love poem, Housman, reverting to a line in the Catullus, suddenly remarks: “Basium is a point of interest. A kiss was always osculum until Catullus.” Pollard: “Now, Hous, concentrate – is that the point of interest in the kiss?” Housman: “Yes.”<66> When AEH and Housman touch on Catullus 99, the scholarly AEH remarks “vester for tuus is the point of interest there.” The idealistic young Housman, however, replies “No, it isn’t!... The point of interest is – what is virtue?, what is the good and the beautiful really and truly?”<67>
This seems like a rebuke to the pedantic, dryasdust, side of Housman. But AEH’s reply returns to the loves of Achilles and Patroclus, of Theseus and Perithous, to the fragments of Aeschylus and Sophocles and the lost Perithous of Euripides, and so, via Plato’s Phaedrus, to the Sacred Band of Chaeronea. And his speech begins:
You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life’s meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions which made it nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer.<68>
And the play lets us find no answer. In the superb speech that ends Act One, AEH begins with the high comedy of tutorial work in translation – comic because he seems so indifferent to the pain he causes his students. But the beauty and feeling in the Horace poem that he and they are translating<69> brings him up short – or rather leads him into dream soliloquy:
But, sed – cur heu, Ligurine, cur – but why, Ligurinus, alas why this unaccustomed tear trickling down my cheek? – why does my glib tongue stumble to silence as I speak? At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you in the field of Mars, I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity.<70>
As he speaks, AEH sees (as does the audience) the athlete Moses Jackson running. And AEH takes twelve words (“I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity”) to translate Horace’s final five (“te per aquas, dure, volubilis”<71>). In particular, with “dure," he takes five words to draw out its meaning (“and you show no pity”). Latin is famously concise, stunningly so here. ("Dure " is “hard” in the vocative – “you hard - muscularly solid, emotionally obdurate - man.” "Volubilis" - applied to "aquas," "waters " - means "revolving," "mutable." The oxymoron achieved by juxtaposing these two adjectives is one of Horace's characteristic masterstrokes.) Housman’s English version has, by contrast, an especially lingering quality. When faced with the force of Eros – amachanon – even his scholarship pales away beside feeling. And so this monologue leads the play back to the central emotion of Housman’s life: the amorous trauma that that divides him into two people. Yet in quoting Horace, his two halves – lover of Jackson, lover of Latin literature – are once again reconciled.
NOTES
1.Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, Grove Press, New York p.5
2.Ibid,pp.64-5.
3. Plato, Symposium, translated by Benjamin Jowitt, quoted by John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics – Studies in Sexual Inversion, University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii, reprinted from the 1928 edition, section VII, p. 9.
4. Symonds, op. cit., p. 20. Symonds does not identify this as Theocritus, but subsequent scholars have identified it as his poem 29 or as from the Paidika attributed to him (“probably an Aeolian poem of much older date” http://rictornorton.co.uk/symonds/greek.htm) .
5. The Invention, p, 13.
6. Ibid, p.11.
7.Ibid, p. 32.
8.Ibid pp. 98-99.
9.Ibid, pp. 98-99.
10.Ibid, pp.47-48.
11. Horace, Carmina III, 30, as translated in 1869 by British prime minister W.E.Gladstone. Horace in English, edited by D.S.Carne-Ross and Kenneth Hayes with an introduction by D.S.Carne-Ross, Penguin, UK, 1996, pp.229-30.
12. The Invention, p.28.
13.Ibid. p.43
14.Ibid, p.95.
15.Ibid, p.73.
16.Catullus, LI.
17. Symonds, op. cit, p.20. This is a continuation of the same poem cited in note 4.
18. The Invention, pp. 73-4.
19. Ibid. p.42.
20. Plutarch, Pelopidas, 18, quoted by Symonds, IX, pp.24-25, 35, 77.
21. Symonds, IX, p. 24
22. Ibid, pp. 37ff.
23. The Invention, p. 96
24. Symonds, XII, pp.43-5.
25. The Invention, pp. 5, 100. Virgil, Aeneid VI, l.314.
26. A.E. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Macmillan and Co. London, 1930, pp.20-1.
27. Horace, Carmina, IV, 7, ll. 25-28. Quoted in The Invention, pp 5,39.
28.The Invention, p. 71.
29. A.E. Housman, More Poems V, “The snows are fled away”.
30.The Invention, p.39
31. Housman, More Poems, XXIII.
32. Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden, & Co., Carcanet Press, UK, 1981, pp.20-8.
33. A.E.Housman, A Shropshire Lad XVI.
34. Jarrell, op. cit, p. 27.
35. Stoppard, interview with Alastair Macaulay, The Financial Times, “The man who was two men,” October 1998.
36. Stoppard, Arcadia, Faber and Faber, UK, 1983, p.89.
37. C.O.Brink, quoted by Christopher Ricks, Introduction, A.E.Housman, Collected Poems and Selected Prose, Penguin, 1989, p. 7.
38. John Berryman, quoted by Ricks, ibid, p.8.
39. The Invention, p.2
40. Ibid, p.96.
41. Ibid, pp. 96-7.
42. Horace, Carmina, III, 30.
43. The Invention, p. 35.
44. Ibid, p. 39.
45. Ibid, p. 39.
46. Ibid, p. 40.
47. Ibid, p. 71. “Dives,” meaning “rich” and applied to Tullus, is still, however, given in most texts. But Housman’s translation avoids “rich,” translating lines 14-16 as
Come we where Tullus and good Ancus are,
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.
James Michie (The Odes of Horace, Penguin, UK, 1964, p.243) has
We, who, when once we have gone
Downwards to join rich Tullus and Ancus and father Aeneas,
Crumble to shadow and dust. (ll. 14-16)
Guy Lee (Horace, Odes and Carmen Saeculare, with an English version in the original metres, published Francis Cairns, UK, 1998, p.177) substitutes “pius” for “pater” (about “Aeneas”) and writes:
We having gone down to join
Aeneas the true-hearted and millionaire Tullus and Ancus,
Then are but dust and a shade.” (11.14-16)
48. Ibid, p. 47.
49. Ibid, p. 37.
50. Catullus LXIV, l. 324. “Emathiae tuatmen, Opis carissime nato,”. Housman’s emendation is acknowledged in the notes to the 1958 Oxford Classical Texts edition.
51. The Invention, p. 38.
52. Ibid, p. 95
53. Housman, “Fragment of a Grerek Tragedy,” first published in The Bromgrovian, 8 June, 1883 and reprinted several times in Housman’s lifetime. See A.E.Housman, Collected Poems and Selected Prose, Penguin, UK, 1989, pp. 236-8. Its opening line, “O suitably attired in leather boots” is referred to by AEH in his last long monologue, The Invention, p.101.
54. Housman, Additional Poems, VII. Quoted in The Invention, p. 78.
55. The Invention, p. 78
56. Ibid, p. 27.
57. Ibid, p. 41.
58. Stoppard, Arcadia, Scene Three, pp. 35-9.
59. Stoppard, 1998 interview with Alastair Macaulay.
60. The Invention, pp. 71-72.
61. Stoppard, Rock ‘n’Roll, Faber and Faber, 2006, pp. 22-23.
62. Ibid, p. 23.
63. The Invention, p. 28.
64. Ibid, p. 43.
65. Ibid, p.95.
66. Ibid, p. 13.
67. Ibid, p. 41.
68. Ibid, p. 41.
69. Horace, Carmina IV, 1.
70. The Invention, p. 49.
71. Horace, op. cit., l. 40.
@Alastair Macaulay 2022
1: Cover of National Theatre programme for Tom Stoppard’s play “The Invention of Love”, 1997
2. Michael Bryant as Charon, the ferryman of the dead, with John Wood as AEH in the 1997 production of “The Invention of Love” by Tom Stoppard, directed by Richard Eyre.
4. Paul Rhys, as Housman, with John Wood, as AEH in the 1997 premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love”, directed at the National Theatre by Richard Eyre.
5. John Wood as AEH (the elderly Housman), National Theatre.
6. Cover of original Faber & Faber print edition of “The Invention of Love”, 1997.