The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard

The last play I saw performed was the disappointing What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck at the Mark Taper Forum. Jim and I left before the end when they bring out a local high school student to give a speech. That was January 28, ten months ago. It may be awhile before I see another, hopefully we won’t have to wait another 10 months. But I had time to read a play.

Jim recommended The Invention of Love. It’s one of the dozen or so published plays we own copies of. He said it was one of his favorites. We had seen Stoppard’s play Arcadia together, four years ago in a production at the A Noise Within theater in Pasadena. I thought it was brilliant. I would happily see it again. Arcadia came out in 1993. The Invention of Love was Stoppard’s next play, from 1997. In 1998 he won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.

The Invention of Love focuses on the English classicist and poet A. E. Housman, best known for his set of poems titled A Shropshire Lad (1896). The play begins at the end of Housman’s life, actually, just after the end, as Housman stands on the shore of the river Styx, exactly where you would place an atheist and classicist in the afterlife. Charon meets him with his boat to ferry Housman across to the underworld. Charon says “You’ll see a three-headed dog when we’ve crossed over. If you don’t take any notice of him he won’t take any notice of you.” The boat ride reminds Housman of a ride he took in a rowboat 60 years earlier at Oxford with his two roommates, Moses Jackson and Alfred Pollard, and soon we are with these three young men. From there the play swirls through two acts with scenes from various times of Housman’s life sometimes observed by the late Housman. Two scenes are set with the old Housman conversing with a younger version of himself on a park bench. It’s smart. And witty. And I hope I get to see it produced someday.

Though better known as a poet, Housman considered his scholarship to be more important. He is greatly respected in that field. The play similarly centers his work as a textual critic of ancient Latin and Greek texts, and on the works he edited and translated, rather than his poetry. The classics material is fascinating. Stoppard has Housman describe his work, presumably taken from actual examples, where the correction of a single letter changes the meaning of a word, or a misplaced comma changes the meaning of a sentence. Housman’s passion for his work is obvious, and his excitement transfers to the audience (or the reader). He reveres the genius of the classical authors. He regards his work of editing texts as a form of science, a search for the truth, a noble quest to add, however slightly, to humanity’s accumulated knowledge. Housman is also known for scathing criticism of his scholarly colleagues who don’t work with his level of skill and care, which gets him into some professional trouble.

The love theme appears in two parallel ways. Housman pinpoints the invention of love: i.e. the invention of the love elegy, to a Roman poet named Gallus, writing in the first century B.C.E. Only one line of Gallus survives. Housman speaks romantically of the lost ancient texts. He says that he would be happy to share Sisyphus’ fate in the underworld if every time the stone rolled back down the hill he could be rewarded with a single line of the lost plays of Aeschylus. Charon, who has met everyone of course, attempts to recite for Housman some lines from Aeschylus’ lost play Myrmidones about Achilles and Patroclus at the battle of Troy but the only lines he can come up with are the few that we already know. The ancient Greeks and Romans wrote love elegies to men and women. Housman, via Stoppard, quotes from them generously. Achilles and Patroclus were comrades and lovers, of one sort or another. The other love theme in the play appears through Housman’s own love, unrequited, for his Oxford friend Moses Jackson.

The irony is not lost on Housman that the classical education held up by the English university in the 19th century as the foundation of a well-developed life required admiring everything about ancient Greek and Roman culture except the same-sex sexual attraction and behavior that permeated it. “The love of comrades that gets you sacked at Oxford,” says Housman. He loves Moses. But Moses is straight. They are friends. They attempt to cast their friendship in what we call the “platonic” manner, but it cannot be. Moses marries. He leaves England for India, and later Canada. Housman never gets over him and he is haunted by his love for his friend until, perhaps, the final boat ride across the Styx ferries his feelings to oblivion.

Meanwhile, the world is moving forward. Housman crosses paths, obliquely, at Oxford with Oscar Wilde, also studying classics, and cultivating the style of the Aesthete. Housman and his friends and Victorian society don’t know what to make of Wilde. They find him unserious, but also are intrigued and challenged by him. Wilde is referred to early in Stoppard’s play, and appears in person at the end, as he, too, is crossing the river Styx to his final destiny. Housman compares the choices the two men made as a choice between “renunciation and folly.” Housman chose to suppress his desire (though it appears in his poetry) to concentrate on his scholarship, and live, probably, as a celibate, thus implying Wilde chose the opposite course, the “folly” that is all that is allowed a non-conformist in a conforming society. Wilde doesn’t see it that way. He says, “Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.” He says, “I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success.”

Housman’s life ends at age 77, in 1936. Wilde died earlier, in 1900, age 46. Housman in the play sees Wilde off on the ferry. And Stoppard’s death dream play ends with Jackson, the young Housman, then Wilde, then old Housman having the final lines.

Not in the play, but in Housman’s More Poems, published the year of his death, is this:

Because I liked you better
    Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
    To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
    We parted, stiff and dry;
“Good-bye,” said you, “forget me.”
    “I will, no fear,” said I.

If here, where clover whitens
    The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
    Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
    The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
    Was one that kept his word.