I found The Invention of Love in Spiritual Friendship by the gay Christian author Wesley Hill. Hill refers to it several times throughout, with two particular quotes I found very poignant and meaningful. The first is a description of A. E. Housman's feelings for his friend Jackson that Hill uses as a model:

Nothing which you'd call indecent, though I don't see what's wrong with it myself. You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself... to be ship-wrecked 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 on the lips... or just run his errands in the meanwhile. You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply in the same language.

It evokes a depth of relationship that I have similarly yearned for, and I think others do as well. The second quote is a re-quoting of Sophocles: "Love is like the ice held in the hand by children. A piece of ice held fast in the fist." The quote is hard to understand, but I loved Hill's elaboration:

Like a wedge of cold, brilliant crystal, the love you grasp will sear your skin. You’ll want to escape the pain. And before you know it, you’ll be staring at a hand shiny with moistness, but the ice will be nowhere in sight. First pain, then futility. The disappearance of friendship. You’ll read that line from Sophocles and think, That’s the perfect description of trying to love your best friend when he doesn’t love you back, or at least not in the way you wish he would.

The story of The Invention of Love centers on the love of literary critic A. E. Housman for his friend Jackson. Jackson himself doesn't return the feelings, and eventually gets married leaving Housman feeling bereft for the rest of his life. The book takes place at the turn of the 20th century during the famed trial of Oscar Wilde for sodomy, and thus Housman took his secret to his death. Housman did, however, leave many of his feelings in the form of poems. One such poem captures his inner turmoil:

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.

The book is a fairly difficult read, and for several reasons. First, the setting. The book takes place in 20th century Britain, and much of the historical context and language can go over one's head if one isn't familiar with it. Second, the medium. As a work of drama, one has to piece together the scenes in one's head. The absence of intonation can make it difficult to interpret. For example, does that "Oh" indicate a sudden burst of realization, or a quaint acknowledgment? A third difficulty arises from Stoppard's complex narrative. It is anything but linear jumping from young 20-year-old Housman to 70-year-old Housman to dead Housman to young and old Housman talking together in Hades. Fourth, much of the meat of the play is in the language of literary criticism. As one of the foremost critics in 20th century Britain, Housman was very familiar with Greek and Latin authors, and the text uses his work as means of exploring deeper themes.

Despite its difficulty, the book is absolutely beautiful in portraying the human conditions. Life is messy. The difficulty of being gay in a world that rejects your identity is a microcosm in which we can explore the pain inevitable in mortality.

The views of Oscar Wilde and A. E. Housman on homosexuality are interesting to contrast as well. Wilde was the poster boy of the aesthetes: art for art's sake. One telling quote near the end summarizes his approach to life:

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
One should always be a little improbable.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

I have read several of Wilde's works, and this attitude is prevalent throughout. The Picture of Dorian Gray for example. Housman, on the other hand, is respectful towards the society he is in. In one conversation, he remarks, "I was a Victorian poet, don't forget." I feel like this statement of Housman about his scholarship equally could be used to describe his deep feelings of love:

Scholarship doesn't need to wriggle out of it with a joke. It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for it's own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.

They are something beautiful, even if in the end they don't lead anywhere.

A great read to get you thinking.

I did not develop an appreciation for the writing by "reading" a play script. I caught the drift, appreciated the dialog, and think I would have enjoyed seeing a performance. But reading the script for pleasure, well, not for me.

I would love to see this live.

There is something so magical in the way Tom Stoppard writes. I’m speechless after finishing this

This was not what I expected, but it was very good.

I don’t feel even remotely wise or eloquent enough to review this play. Just for you to get an idea, I’ll admit to not knowing who A.E. Housman was when I started reading this. Pretty dumb, eh, considering HE IS IN THE COVER?!

The plot: A.E. Housman dies an old man, and in his way to the Underworld (ferried through the Styx/Thames), he sees scenes of his life in Oxford pass before him… Literally. His friends (including the love of his life), his teachers (John Ruskin!), the famous & disreputable alumni (Oscar Wilde!), all discuss, essentially, love: in theory, in academia, in poetry, and only in A.E. Housman’s particular case, love in real life—or the lack of it.

The most academic bits (the invention of love of the title refers to the first poems about love, Roman and BC) were, sometimes, difficult to follow. But not the kind of difficult that makes you want to stop reading, but the kind that makes you want to understand it and makes you read it and re-read it an research it. What Stoppard does, like in Arcadia, is question the job of the academia, but emphasizing the importance of the search for knowledge.

The play was beautiful. Housman’s unrequited love for his friend Moses was sad and beautiful, and the writing was splendid, of course. It takes some guts to write famous writers (and great epigraph-er Oscar Wilde) and make up new words for them.

I loved it and enjoyed it, and although maybe this one is more ~~intelligent (I don’t think that’s the word, but I lack the one I’m thinking of), Arcadia was better. More beautiful, more poignant, and better. To me—OF COURSE.

I think this is my third or fourth time reading this play and it gets richer each time. I saw it in its original Broadway run twice. I think, after Arcadia, it is my favorite Stoppard play. It is a sort of temporally disjointed dream fantasy which takes place on the River Styx as A.E. Housman (scholar/poet) is being ferried to the Underworld. The elderly Housman confronts himself as a young man and the Victorian mileu in which he grew up, most importantly his unrequited love for Moses Jackson, the young athlete Housman meets at Oxford, and how that bond changed Housman's life.

It is also about the end of one era--the Victorian era--and the transition to another--the 20th Century. In this we might see A.E. Housman and Oscar Wilde (another character here) as transitional figures in the play and as foils: Housman, whose unrequited love he turns to textual scholarship, and a kind of stoic and faithful loneliness; and Wilde the asthetic genius brought to financial ruin and an early death by publicly acting on his passion and turning his life into a work of art. Both Housman and Wilde are tragic figures. They are also transitional figures, commas, so to speak.

"There is truth and falsehood in a comma," Housman says in the play. In another scene another character reports one of Wilde's quips about commas “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” Here is the difference between the two men in a nutshell, as Stoppard depicts them. Housman is talking to himself as a young man. Wilde to his contemporaries. One regards the comma a toy, the other a dividing line between worlds.

But they do not seem to be adversaries to me, even though Wilde is inclined to criticize Housman. Housman never criticizes him back. Wilde sacrifices his life to his art. So does Housman. At least here, if I am understsnding the play. Housman quietly makes those little corrections in the texts of the ancients where homosexuality had been written out. Where the sexes of pronouns were changed. By passing on a line of Aeschylus. Where some insertion corrupts the text, he seeks the truth. He dissolves his affection into scholarship. It is a thankless task. But somebody has to do it. Theseus has to at least try to free his friend, Pirithous, chained in Hades, even if he can't.

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.

i think there was a lot hinging on classic authors that i am unfamiliar with, so i think a lot of the details kind of breezed by me. i really liked the method of displaying memories as different scenes or staging, and i think it would be interesting to see on stage. i'm gonna loop back to this later.

“aeh: i would have died for you but I never had the luck!”

there is so much beautiful language in this play. some of the descriptions of love are so well written and contain so much emotion that they made my jaw drop. here’s another favorite quote:

“housman: what do I want?
chamberlain: nothing which you’d call indecent, though I don’t see what’s wrong with it myself. 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 on the lips... or just run his errands in the meanwhile. you want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.”

Here is where I say that if you saw me reviewing like a maniac on my Anne Carson kick recently (If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Autobiography of Red), you have probably noticed by now that I have a thing for my memories of high school Latin, and for classicism in general. You will if you are some creepy expert on me (or actually know me in real life) also know that I'm a total sucker for Arcadia: A Play, which is honestly more hilarious and well-crafted and heartbreaking than any other play I can think of written in my lifetime off the top of my head.

So what I'm saying is, how did I not find THIS until now? (Read someone else's review for the summary. I'm in rapture mode here.)

I will note, for your information and my own amazed serendipity, that I happened to be retranslating last week precisely the Horace poem this whole play hinges on (classical scholar Housman's favorite, which is probably why my high school Latin teacher's favorite, which is probably why MY favorite), which so apropos of this exact time of year runs:

Horace Ode IV.7
TRANSLATION by me.
(the only word I leave untranslated is pietas and its adjective pius, which is sort of the word they would have used for if you crossed mythic cherry-tree George Washngton with Gandhi with Patrick Henry--pious, selfless, virtuous, and utterly abjectly devoted to everything a good Roman should do, even at the cost of his own life. Its usage here is rather shocking.)

The snows have passed away, and now the grass returns to the fields,
and the leaves upon the trees.
The earth is changing faces, and the waning rivers
overflow their banks.

A Grace, with (all) her Nymphs and sisters twinned,
Dares to lead a chorus in the nude.
"Do not hope for immortality," warns the year, and the hour
which snatches away the kindly day.

(This) warm breeze softens the frost, (but) summer soon will trample spring,
and then itself begin to die, just as, when
fruitful autumn has poured out its bounty, without delay
the stifling winter hastens back.

For speedy moons restore in time their losses in the sky:
but when we sink below
to where pius Aeneas and wealthy Tullus and Ancus wait,
we are but dust and shadows.

Who knows if any gods above will tack tomorrow
to the running total of our days?
All that will outwit posterity's greedy hand
Is what you deed your own delightful self.

And when you sink below, to where Minos
sits his solemn judgment,
Torquatus, (friend!): not family ties nor eloquence
nor even pietas will bring you back.

For Diana cannot free her chaste Hippolytus
from the shades beneath,
nor Theseus ever from dear Perithous
rip the chains of Lethe.

-----------
Ahem.

It's really those last two lines, far superior in the Latin, which haunt this play. In the tattered mythology that remains to us, Theseus and Perithous were kings, dearest of friends, close in that particular ancient Greek male way that blurs the homosocial and the erotic. In a twist on the Orpheus tale, the literature holds that they BOTH go down to the underworld on a quest to drag off Persephone as Pirithous' wife (They'd already stolen an underage Helen, who creepily enough was going to be locked away till she was of age--obviously she doesn't stay kidnapped by them, because fate has made an appointment for her in Troy), and are trapped by Hades. It isn't until (in one of those comic-book-like crossovers that pop up in ancient myth) Herakles rolls through on one of his labors, sees a fellow hero in a jam, and drags Theseus out to the light. But Perithous is out of luck, because he has offended the gods by wanting a goddess as his wife--when Herakles tries to tear him from the spot he is chained, the whole Earth shakes and he is forced to give up.

It's about death, hilariously so (as Housman being ferried by Charon over the river Lethe crashes into Three Men in a Boat including Jerome K. Jerome), but more than that it is of course about love (especially frustrated, hidden, unrequited, forbidden love), and what it cannot conquer (time, prejudice, the closet, and our own naivete). Amid a swirl of British Public School buggery jokes, nods to the Aesthetics, Wilde swallowing up the horizon, and endless obsessive little comic battles over the translation of the 10 or so poems I know anything about in Latin -- not to mention, as with the Carson, the terrible sense of loss of so many beautiful works -- well, this play is among other things about how no beauty you ever perceive in your entire life will evade death, no love no matter how strong will slow it down, and how all the dreams of being transmuted into heroism you ever hold will shatter against the sturdy certainties of life--including those that say "the love of your life may not love you back, or be ABLE to love you back." But it tells you so, in the soaring tradition that Arcadia seems to have started, by making one laugh to tears and then revealing profound beauty and poignancy, which is how art makes all of this bearable and even noble, even as at other times it has been complicit in fostering all the illusions life tends to shatter. And it will accomplish this by first making you laugh and then by making you wonder and then by making your heart stop cold in your throat, where only then you realize it had been beating for the past half hour. And then offering perhaps its greatest solace in the giddy Wildean perversity where it began.

And I really should be asleep but I wanted to say that some things are worth going giddy over, and I will probably see this in the morning and tear it to pieces. (Yes, I edited this in the morning. Amazing how coherent I could be while literally passing out in bed on melatonin, but worth pulling out other themes than merely the mortal ones.)

can fully understand why this won't be everyone's cup of tea but i really liked it :) the more effort i put into reading it (jotting down quick notes to track themes/ideas, skimming wikipedia entries for various characters, looking up housman's poetry) the more i enjoyed it. yay

“It’s where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God."

absolutely tragic that the only video recording i can find of this play doesnt include the last quarter or so .. gutting!