The Invention of Love Book

Unexpectedly moved (it was late) by a recent poem of the week, I've been reading the new Penguin edition of A. E. Housman, and (in turn) its introduction by Nick Laird prompted me to dig out The Invention of Love. I missed Stoppard's play when it premiered at ACT in 2000 - why? I don't remember, but I'm ashamed.

As usual with Stoppard, the drama is a dazzling bricolage of biography and literary quotation. If I hadn't read Laird and Richard Ellmann's matchless biography of Wilde, I would have missed much more than I did. Stoppard's a genius and he can't help showing off. AEH, the ghost of Housman standing on the bank of the Styx, is hardly a subject you'd expect to find moving - but accompanied by the banter of other ghosts boating by (Wilde, Ruskin, Pater, and various comely lads), the dead man is eloquent.

He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.

Yes, it's all very sad (that was Housman shaking hands with the Oxford chum he was in love with, who shrugged him off, moved to India and married), and Stoppard makes everything of the pathos and pathetic comedy of Housman. He was a queer one, both an acerbic scholar of the classics ("beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time"; "a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly"*) as well as a sentimental poet of homoerotic necrophilia - elegant elegies to "all those ploughboys and village lads dropping like flies all over Shropshire," as one of Stoppard's characters remarks. The first readers of A Shropshire Lad "might well have been puzzled by its corpse-strewn landscape and wondered what massacre or epidemic had laid so many of Terence's friends low; if they're not in the pub it's because they're already in the churchyard." The book made barely an impression when it was published in 1896, but it seemed to be "in every pocket" of the doomed young men marching off to France in 1914. "As Robert Lowell observed, it was as if Housman had foreseen the Somme." (All this from Alan Hollinghurst's introduction to the very slim ff selection.)

This review is already too long for saying so little about Stoppard - but one more footnote. In 1887 Édouard Dujardin published a "stream of consciousness" novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés. James Joyce credited it with inspiring the "interior monologues" of Ulysses. When it was translated into English in 1938, it was titled We'll to the Woods No More, which resonates with the fading echoes of Edwardian England and inspired all manner of melodies. One night poking around the internet, I discovered how this happened. Housman, of course, translating a French line from Théodore de Banville - and this review will fade out itself with these perfectly plaintive lines:

We'll to the woods no more,
The laurels are all cut,
The bowers are bare of bay
That once the Muses wore;
The year draws in the day
And soon will evening shut:
The laurels all are cut,
We'll to the woods no more.
Oh we'll no more, no more
To the leafy woods away,
To the high wild woods of laurel
And the bowers of bay no more.