How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (28 page)

 

The reasons for Parker's failure—the reasons his
Earnest
is cute rather than lethal—are not hard to locate, and may best be understood by comparing two other films having to do with Wilde. Like the two film versions of
Earnest
, one dates from the Fifties and the other is very recent; both are biographies of Wilde himself.

The 1959 Ealing Studios picture
Oscar Wilde
, starring Robert Morley as the corpulent Wilde and Ralph Richardson as his forensic nemesis, Sir Edward Carson, dwells on Wilde's tragedy. Nearly a third of this movie—which came out when
Regina v. Wilde
was still a living memory for some people—is devoted to the trials, the almost Greek-tragic climax of which was one small comment made by Wilde during the course of his cross-examination. Asked whether he'd kissed a certain boy, Wilde disdainfully replied that he had not, as the boy in question was “singularly plain.” This, we now know, was the turning point of the trial: by suggesting that Wilde would have kissed the boy had he been pretty, it gave Wilde's foes the ground they needed to condemn him. (The organizers of the British Library exhibition “Oscar Wilde, 1854–1900: A Life in Six Acts,” which opened late in 2000 and subsequently traveled to the Morgan Library in New York City, also realized this point: the exhibition featured a copy of the official court transcript of Wilde's trial, opened to the page on which this crucial remark appears. Queensberry's calling card was also on display.) And so, in a final, terrible fail
ure to distinguish between reality and art, Wilde's need to perform, to amuse the spectators, came at the cost of his freedom—and, eventually, his life.

The film ends, as Wilde's life did, ignominiously, with a drunken Wilde drinking absinthe in a French bar, cackling dementedly to himself. If the film focuses on the tragic repercussions of Wilde's actions (“Why did I say that to Carson?” he cries: it's a good question), it does so no more than Wilde did himself. “I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy,” Wilde wrote from prison to Bosie in the immensely long, tortured letter of recrimination (and self-recrimination) that became
De Profundis
. “I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy.”

Brian Gilbert's 1997 film
Wilde
, by contrast, ends not in defeat but in erotic victory. By the time Gilbert made his film, anyone who remembered the sordid reality of Wilde's humiliation and defeat had died; living memories had been replaced by a political and cultural need to see Wilde purely as a martyr—not as a self-destructive hero-martyr, in the Greek-tragic mold that Wilde would have well understood, but as a wholly passive victim, a role that erases everything about what happened to him that is interesting from a moral and psychological point of view. (You wonder how many people recall that it was Wilde, in a moment of monumental delusion, who sued Queensberry for libel; it was during this prosecution that it was revealed, in a way that the earlier film showed but the more recent one does not, that the marquess's “libel”—“somdomite”—was in fact all too true.)

Gilbert's biopic is intended above all as a celebration of “the love that dare not speak its name”; only a few moments are devoted to the trials—presumably because we all take for granted that Wilde was simply the hapless victim of Victorian sexual hypocrisy. This film ends not with the end of Wilde's life, but with his reunion with Bosie in Italy after his release from prison. As Wilde stands in a sunlit piazza, the beautiful face of Jude Law, who plays Bosie, comes into view, smiling ecstatically. Freeze-frame, then credits. This puerile moment isn't so much misleading as dishonest. In real life, as we know, the grossly mismatched love between what Auden called “the underloved and the overloved” failed miserably to conquer all, and the awful squabbles between Wilde and the dreadful Bosie continued, as did the terrible arguments about money.

You can't understand why Wilde was important, and you certainly can't understand why
Earnest
is great, without recognizing the aspect of danger and tragedy that lurked beneath the glittering surface of his best comic creation—and of his life. Wilde the classicist understood that the flip side of
Earnest
, with its misplaced baby and last-minute recognitions between near relations, was
Oedipus Rex
. The stylistic master of dualities, of truths that were also their own opposites: in order to do justice to Wilde, to both the life and the art, we must always strive to see not only the exaltation but the humiliation, not only the pathos and suffering but the hubris and arrogance, not only the dazzling clarity of vision about the flaws in his society but a penchant for self-deception that suggested a profound self-destructiveness; not only the beauty but the peril. Wilde himself saw it all too clearly, if too late. An intricate appreciation of the complex and often deceptive relationship between things as they really are and things as we wish them to be is, after all, the whole point of his final work for the stage.

The recent film biography's failure to understand what Wilde's life was about is mirrored, in Parker's film of
Earnest
, by a failure to understand what his art was about. Both movies are characterized by a certain familiarity, a certain presumptiveness, about who Wilde was and what he meant. It's significant that Parker's direction constantly underscores the most famous witticisms and inversions of the normal (“her hair has gone quite gold with grief”) with intense close-ups—the cinematic equivalent of winking. Parker isn't doing Wilde; he's doing “Wilde.” Our own need to see Oscar Wilde as one thing only—as a cartoon martyr, as the poster boy of a modern-day movement—has dulled our vision, and reduced Wilde both as a man and as an artist. In an irony that Wilde himself would have appreciated, we have all become too earnest to do
Earnest
.

—The New York Review of Books,
October 10, 2002

T
om Stoppard's play about A. E. Housman opens with a perceptive bit of shtick. As the curtain rises, the eminent Cambridge Latinist and author of
A Shropshire Lad
has just died at the age of seventy-seven—the year is 1936—and is waiting to be ferried across the Styx. Charon, the infernal ferryman, is waiting, too: he keeps peering over “Professor Housman's” shoulder, looking for the other passenger he thinks he's supposed to be picking up:

Stoppard wastes no time, then, getting to the heart of the Housman conundrum—the “psychological puzzle,” as C. O. Brink, in his 1986
history of English classical scholarship, puts it, that even today makes the poet-scholar someone who can arouse “attention, admiration, fear, irritation, criticism, evasion, or downright detestation” in those who study him. For to all appearances, Housman
was
two different people. To study his life and work—and Stoppard clearly has studied them; his play is filled with knowing citations of Housman's letters and published writings—is to confront again and again the stark divisions, rigid distinctions, and odd, almost schizoid doublings that characterize nearly everything about him.

Housman himself set the tone. Sundering, separation, and halving are motifs in several of his best-known and most striking verses. “I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder / and went with half my life about my ways,” goes one posthumously published poem, presumably about his farewell to Moses Jackson, the hearty, heterosexual Oxford companion for whom he had a disastrously unrequited passion that was the pivotal emotional experience in his life. Demarcation and bifurcation are themes in his scholarly writing as well: hence his lifelong insistence, impossible to take seriously any longer, on divisions between intellect and scholarship, on the one hand, and emotion and literature, on the other. “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not,” goes one typical aphorism. Occasionally, the poetic and the scholarly came together: “The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do: / My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two. / But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest, / The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.” “He very much lived in water-tight compartments that were not to communicate with each other,” his sister Kate Symons observed after his death. She was referring to Housman's homosexuality, which forced him, as it did many homosexuals of his era, to live a “double life”; but duality is the leitmotif of his entire existence, professional as well as personal.

Who were the “two” Housmans? The “two different people”—a poet, a scholar—for whom Stoppard's clueless Charon waits are particularly apt symbols for the two discordant halves into which Housman's personality seemed, even to his contemporaries, to fall. (The title of W. H. Auden's review of
A.E.H.
, a 1937 memoir of Housman written by his brother Laurence, who was a popular and prolific poet and playwright in his own right—his
Victoria Regina
, starring Helen Hayes, was a huge Broadway hit—was “Jehovah Housman and Satan Housman.”) There
was the heavenly poet of
A Shropshire Lad
, first published in 1896, the elegy on dead or soon-to-be-dead youth which was so loved in its time that its author was, in George Orwell's words, “the writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young” in the years immediately before and after World War I; and yet there was also the devilishly forbidding classics scholar who, in the damning words of a contemptuous 1939 sonnet by Auden, “Deliberately…chose the dry-as-dust”:

Auden knew his classics, and the “dry-as-dust” criticism wasn't a casual bit of Philistinism: Housman devoted thirty years of his professional life to producing a five-volume critical edition of an obscure verse treatise on astronomy and astrology called the
Astronomica
, by the minor first-century
A.D
. poet Marcus Manilius.

And there were also the tender Housman, whose sympathy for the doomed young men he wrote verse about—the soldiers marching off to die in wars not of their making, the forlorn, possibly homosexual suicides, the prematurely dead village athletes, the petty criminals about to be hanged—was apparently limitless; and the vindictive Housman, whom the ineptitude of other scholars could rouse to bursts of famously annihilating—and, it must be said, quite funny—contempt. One eighteenth-century edition of Manilius, Housman dryly wrote, “saw the light in 1767 at Strasburg, a city still famous for its geese.” (Luckily, the editor responsible for the offending Strasburg edition was long dead: Housman went on to write that his “mind, though that is no name to call it by, was one which turned as unswervingly to the false, the meaningless, the unmetrical, and the ungrammatical, as the needle to the pole.”)

Finally, there was the man whom friends recalled as “an admirable raconteur,” the bon vivant who loved good food and wine and (as Housman once slyly hinted to some High Table companions) was perfectly willing to fly to Paris for lunch, the tablemate whose “silvery,” “boyish,
infectious” laughter made an impression on all who heard it, the kind and surprisingly sensitive colleague who, as his friend the classicist A. S. F. Gow noted, took pains, in the everyday business of academic life, to “defer to suggestions made by junior colleagues.” How little that Housman had in common with the aloof misanthrope recalled by the British-born classicist Bernard Knox! As a Cambridge undergraduate in the Thirties, Knox would occasionally glimpse Housman marching stiffly across the courts of St. John's College in his elastic-sided black boots, his “thousand-yard stare” intended, as was the out-of-the-way location of his rooms, to discourage casual contact.

In his history of English classical scholarship, one-fourth of which is devoted to Housman (a discussion divided, significantly enough, into two chapters: “Life and Poetry” and “Critic and Scholar”), C. O. Brink warns against indulging the seemingly irresistible urge to create one coheren figure out of all these Housmans, which seem to fall so naturally into two groups roughly aligned with “two such apparent incompatibles as pure poetry and pure scholarship.” (Those “two different people” again.) “The bearing of the one on the other,” he writes, “cannot be direct.” But the risks that the cautious academic historian, bound by the available evidence, fears to take are the bread and butter of the artist. It is to writers like Stoppard that we turn to find the answers to “puzzles” like the one seemingly posed by Housman's life.

There are many pleasures to be had from Stoppard's play, which was presented this spring in Philadelphia, in a visually striking staging. Like all of his plays, this one is a clever and articulate work written for a large popular audience. Like his 1993 hit
Arcadia
, the new play seeks, often successfully, to create drama out of technical intellectual material. (The quite emotional climax of one scene in
The Invention of Love
turns on the correct repositioning of a comma in Catullus's poem about the marriage of Achilles' parents.) And yet the playwright hasn't solved the puzzle. Or, to be more precise, he isn't interested in the puzzle. The reason for this is that the real hero of
The Invention of Love
isn't Housman at all, but a contemporary of his who cut a far more dashing figure, someone who was, if anything, the Anti-Housman—in nearly every way, his temperamental, creative, and intellectual opposite; someone who, after being gossiped about, invoked, admired from a distance, and
quoted throughout Stoppard's play, finally appears at its close for a climactic showdown: Oscar Wilde.

 

Wilde's life certainly
looks
more dramatic. “With Housman,” his most recent and most judicious biographer, Norman Page, has written, “the extent of our knowledge of the various aspects of his existence is usually in inverse proportion to their interest or significance.” We know, in other words, a tremendous amount about the meals Housman ate, the trips he took, his opinions about publishing matters (“I want the book to be read abroad, and continental scholars are poorer than English,” he wrote when urging Grant Richards, his longtime friend and publisher, to keep the sale price of the first Manilius volume low), his opinions about bibliophiles who wrote to him asking for autographs (“an idiotic class…the only merits of any edition are correctness and legibility”); and yet little if anything about the kind of emotional dramas that typically make for engrossing theater. In Housman's case there were two such dramas which, perhaps predictably, represent, between them, the heart and the mind: his unrequited love for Moses Jackson, which seems to have affected him profoundly for the rest of his life; and his mysterious, apparently deliberate failure at Oxford, the humiliation of which took him ten dreary years to recover from.

Alfred Edward Housman was born in March 1859 into a respectable if troubled middle-class Worcestershire family. (Shropshire, as he never tired of pointing out, was a place he wasn't very familiar with; the topographical details described in his poem were, he wrote two years before his death, almost always “wrong and imaginary.” The place's resonance for him was, if anything, symbolic: “Shropshire was our western horizon, which made me feel romantic about it.”) Both of his grandfathers had been clergymen. His father, who had no luck with money, drank, and seemed to have been somewhat unbalanced: Edward Housman would sometimes assemble his children at bedtime and shout his favorite Tory slogans at them. Young Alfred's adored mother, Sarah,
died just before his twelfth birthday, an event that apparently precipitated his abandonment of his grandfathers' High Church religion. “I became a deist at thirteen and an atheist at twenty-one,” he wrote to an interviewer in 1933. One of seven children, Housman was particularly close to his sister Kate, to whom he wrote frequently, warmly, and wittily throughout his life; for his brother Laurence, also homosexual, he seemed to have less esteem. Most Housman scholars agree that Alfred's decision to appoint Laurence as his literary executor was based on the cynical belief, eventually borne out, that Laurence would, contrary to his instructions, make public some revealing poems of a personal nature that Housman had never published: a passive-aggressive coming-out if ever there was one.

Housman found refuge from family troubles in reading. Despite an early passion for astronomy, his “affections,” he recalled in old age, were already “attached to paganism” by the time he was eight when, as he put it, a copy of Lemprière's classical dictionary fell into his hands. After distinguishing himself in the local village school he went up to St. John's College, Oxford, on a scholarship in the fall of 1877, at the age of eighteen. Oscar Wilde had arrived three years earlier and made a big splash with his blue china décor and his assiduous courting of Pater and Ruskin; by contrast, Housman “lived a quiet student's life,” according to a fellow student, “reading hard, and not taking any interest in the general life of the College.”

Housman did well enough, but his great passion, already at this early age, was in the unglamorous field known as textual criticism. The printed texts of the Greek and Latin classics which we read today are based on ancient and often erroneous medieval manuscripts that were themselves copied from even older and, likely, error-riddled manuscripts. Only close reading of, and comparison among, various manuscripts of an ancient author allow a scholar to surmise what that ancient author most likely wrote, assuming such a scholar has total mastery of language, grammar, manuscript tradition, lexicography, and the author's style, taste, and diction. This mastery Housman had, at an astonishingly early age. As an undergraduate, he blithely ignored the assigned readings in philosophy and instead was hard at work on a new edition of the Roman love elegist Propertius. This intellectual
inclination went against the grain of the rather romantic mid-Victorian cult, led by Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, that celebrated classical education as a means of improving moral tone among the ruling classes, and which was dismissive of what Jowett condescendingly referred to as “exact scholarship.”

Housman's Oxford experience was marked, characteristically it would seem, by not one but two distinct disasters. The first was emotional. In his first year he met, and struck up a friendship with, Moses Jackson, an athlete and engineering student who was utterly different from him: a contemporary remembered Jackson as being “a perfect Philistine…quite unliterary and outspoken in his want of any such interest.” However reticent the documentary record may be about the content of the relationship between the two, it seems clear that Housman fell swiftly and deeply in love with Jackson, whom in later life he referred to as “the man who had more influence on my life than anyone else.” Even though his feelings were not returned, Housman persisted in his obsessive crush, and he and Jackson (and Jackson's brother Adalbert, who according to Laurence Housman became Housman's lover) lived together in Bayswater for three years, after Housman was sent down in 1881 and subsequently went to work in the Patent Office, doggedly following Jackson, who'd gotten a position there after successfully completing his degree.