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in Victorian England |
Housman, who was born in 1859, was very much a creature of the late Victorian period: an era when the sun never set on the British Empire and when English "moral superiority," especially as practiced by the snugly taken care of "suburban classes" (from which sprang E. M. Forster, another much-closeted English writer of Maurice, Room With A View, and other Merchant-Ivory effluvia) was a belief set in concrete. "Moral superiority," rather like today's "political correctness" had hardened into a kind of dental calculus, keeping any wiggly teeth, i.e. the sexually outlawed or adventurous, very tight in their own sockets--or closets. To a great degree, the accepted religion said that it was this "natural superiority" of the Anglo-Saxon race that destined it to rule over an eighth of the world's population. The English, unlike the French and the Germans, had never been very good at acquiring other living languages. The old joke was that the educated English could read French, but why bother to speak to people who had a special device for washing the private parts and ate unthinkable things like frogs and snails? Since familiarity with foreign living languages became unnecessary to the English of genteel birth, and foreigners were known to engage in all sorts of practices you could not even speak about at home, an absolute worship of dead languages, specifically Latin and ancient Greek, set in. At its peak, Victoriana began to reconstruct a fantasy of "classical" life in which, they, the Victorians, were the reincarnated players. As Victorian life became extremely militaristic (the military was one the few professions open to a gentlemen), "sporty," and fearful of both feminism and femininity in any form, this wonderfully glossy dream of the classical world began to seem strangely real, a dream in which the "new" reborn heroes of the Golden Age of Greece and Rome were now Englishmen in toga drag, kind of like vintage Hollywood movies in which the ancients always speak with a polished "old boy" English accents. The problem though, as Stoppard points out over and over, was how to be both Greekly virtuous--as old Greece was reinvented--and Christianly "pure" at the same time. Greece had to be reseen, re-felt, and re-understood. It became a place of open sportsmanship and delicately hidden genitals. Unfortunately, the real Greece itself, with its open lust for young boys, kept getting in the way. A lot of the background of The Invention of Love has become almost cliché now. We all know how damn repressed the Victorians were (although not all that damn repressed: prostitution was one of the thriving urban industries in Victorian London); how hypocritical (although not all that hypocritical, especially after our own Monica Lewinsky scandal); and how caught up in the workings of the new gutter press, which thrived on scandal and outrage-truly different from our own shy media, always lurking after some new revelation or schlock shock. That was the background.
Being "real," being "the real article," a "real man," a "real sport," a "real gentleman," a "real Englishman," was very, very important to the old Vics, just as in our own image-obsessed period it is to us. Victorianism actually invented the idea of the "regular guy," an idea which has reached a recent high or low point with the ascension of George Bush, Jr. Bushie is indeed regular, if he's nothing at all; although, truthfully, he really is nothing at all. However, a fact like that never bothered the Victorians much. Image was everything then--as now--and the image of "moral purity" and "regular guyism" became, in its own way, simply enough, moral purity and guy regularity itself. (An interesting aside is that to the Victorians, constipation was also seen as a sign of moral turpitude: the "regular guy" did not masturbate, or have a difficult time "evacuating." In order to keep regular guys clean and regular all over, doctors devised "anti-masturbation diets" that were high in fiber, "natural," and "homey." We still have some of the remnants of these foods in grapenut flakes and Graham crackers.) The Greeks were seen, then, as the most "moral" people who ever lived, because they embodied the "image" of moral purity. They "invented" gamesmanship in the Olympics; philosophy, the "science of truth"; and democracy, which had a special meaning to Victorians. To Victorians, democracy meant that every Englishman was equal to every other Englishman in his allegiance to the crown, in his desire to be a good old chap, and in his desire never to let his fellow Englishmen down. If you were not that sort of Englishmen, then you were simply not worthy of democracy, and any rights you had could be quickly taken away. The English, as we know, never had a Constitution; so democracy was a privilege practiced for, and by, the privileged few. Housman came from this world of suburban gentility, the same world that only a few years later would produce Virginia Woolfe and Bloomsbury; a world in which there was a "core" value of "authentic individuality," as long as that "individuality" did not disturb anyone's place in the social order. Sexuality in general, and homosexuality, specifically, could disturb that social order. Unhampered, unhypocritical sexuality could mean mixing with the unwashed, uninhibited lower classes, those who could not read Greek or Latin; in fact, those who, like the Irish and the Welsh, could barely speak, read, or write "authentic" English at all. Even worse, opening up this sexual Pandora's box in any way in public might allow people to question the English upper class's own "moral" qualifications to rule and exploit the world.
What still attracts people to Housman was that in 1896 he self-published A Shropshire Lad, a slim book of short rhymed poems that rhapsodizes over the charms of "plain English youth." These were the kind of blond, chisel-featured, Anglo-Saxon "by-gum" lads who would later die by the millions in World War I and in World War II, and whose more blasé, distant cousins would later inhabit Bruce Weber's not quite so coy, bare-chested shots in Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues. The poems are literally engorged with repressed homoerotic feelings. Housman made them virtually lap at every seam with queerness; but their true charm is that if you don't try to look very hard at them (which a large audience did not want to do, anyway), they come off as an almost perfect tribute to a golden age now gone: to lost youth; to sweet, innocent crushes; to a type of apple-cheeked innocence that Americans in the decade of Goth fashions and Columbine killers can barely imagine-despite A & F. Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad only a year after Wilde's second trial, when Wilde was sentenced to two years at hard labor, was publicly disgraced, and when for the first time the problem of "beastliness" between men surfaced to become the cause of vast public wrenching. He sent Wilde a copy of the book, and Wilde was "cheered" by it. The fact that men in Victorian society, which was so very gender segregated, had been doing "beastliness" by the millions for a very long time was either no secret--at that time, ten percent of the English never married, as opposed to, say, today, when about four percent don't--or, was a total secret, depending upon how stupid you could actually allow yourself to be. Or, or how far up the social ladder you sat. Those very far up knew all--and said nothing. Those very far below knew all, too, but were never going to be allowed to say anything.
Stoppard, in his annoyingly clever play, can connect all the sexual misery and the various homo-cultural dots, but he seems to leave out one very important item. For many people in this period, from late or High Victorianism down into the "long afternoon" of the Edwardian summer, life was incredibly comfortable. It was virtually all cakes and ale; ices and lemonade. As long as you questioned nothing, using the right toeholds of birth and connections, you could get along beautifully. A whopping fourteen percent of Victorian England did not work at all. It lived off the Empire, off of old, family-invested bonds in the East Indian Company, the China Company, the Canadian Company, and various solid-as--a rock railroads and African diamond mines. As long as England was capable (through English militarism) and qualified (through moral superiority) to hold the Empire together and to keep about a billion woggy natives shining Sahib's boots and ironing Memsahib's elaborate dresses, thousands of young men like Housman could spend a lifetime parsing Latin verbs in order to become "qualified" to take their places as gentlemen. What was important was that you never asked any questions at all, certainly not the wrong ones. Stoppard's play does a good job with all its handwringing about Wilde's fate and the attitudes of the people behind it. The sheer weight and almost silliness of Victorian hypocrisy is always good for a laugh. This was an era, remember, when a piano's legs were described as its "limbs," because the word "leg" was considered too blatantly sexual. We learn once more, for the umpteenth time, how Oscar's highborn friends did not want him to go through his defeat--they planned for him to escape to France, where he could have lived very well off his royalties. But Wilde was also a sad glutton for his own narcissism, very much like Bill Clinton, and the thought of being the total center of all this attention quickly sucked him into it. In France, away from the center of action, where would he have been? He would have ended up the prototype of Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, who abdicated and went to live in Paris with his wife Wally, becoming both a royal eunuch and a tabloid curiosity, with no power at all. As the Wilde character in The Invention of Love says, "The fact that I did something is not nearly as important as the fact that people are talking about it. Facts mean nothing: only Art can produce the truth." The truth about A. E. Housman is how much he really did feel, both for the man he loved and all the men he would have loved. Would have loved not simply "virtuously" as he protested in the wordage of High Victorianism, which elevated and valued "pure" friendship to the point of farce (you wonder where were all of Wilde's "pure" friends, when they avoided him like the plague), but would have loved physically as well. Stoppard cannot ever really deal with this endless depth of yearning for an emotional and physical connection. To present that feeling would not be clever, wicked, or bright, which is what The Invention of Love is really about. In the one scene that has any emotional and dramatic validity, the youthful Housman breaks down in front of Moses Jackson because Jackson's girlfriend has noticed--in fact, could not help but notice--that Housman is "sweet" on the young man. They have been "flatmates," and at first Housman denies it. Vehemently. Then he says, suddenly, they will have to live apart. Jackson, who is a true "brick," and thick as one, asks why. He is dumbfounded. He cannot understand why they cannot go along being pals. Then Housman, in complete tears, confesses that he is, indeed, "sweet" on Moses; that it is true. Jackson says, "I had no way of knowing. You seem like anyone else. You're not one of those 'aesthetes,''' the Victorian code word for homosexual. What makes the scene so moving, so really heartbreaking, is that Housman really was like "anyone else." It's just that hardly anyone else in his time, knowing Housman's own deeply held, terribly painful, sexual secret, would have believed it. Housman died absolutely in the closet, like Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and so many other men of arts and letters then. Going through some of the hardest emotional archeology I can go through, I still find it hard to imagine the depth of pain these men must have suffered. Yet, there was a deep romantic vein, very thrilling, running through their lives, and that was that no matter how secret and unsayable their own feelings were, they were, indeed, "authentic" in the truest sense. They were truly felt. They were not simply flung out for the cheap thrills of exposure. People often say how happy Wilde would be today, knowing that all that he died for is now, for the most part, open. The "love that dare not speak its name" has now really said it. In fact, as Bob Hope, a real dope, once said, "It can't shut up." But I don't think Wilde would be so thrilled. Neither would Housman, nor James, nor any of the other tortured aesthetes of their period. I cannot quite see them in this age of high-gloss porno magazines; steroidic "circuit" clones who barely talk much rather read; and the rest of contemporary homoculture as a "consumer option." These men were not so much interested in consuming as in finding themselves. And they lived in an age in which they were allowed an amazing amount of comfort to do it--as long as they did not look too hard in any of the wrong places. Perry Brass is the author of Angel Lust, An Erotic Novel of Time Travel, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Gay & Lesbian Science Fiction and Fantasy. This summer he'll be publishing Warlock, a Novel of Possession. He can be reached through his website, www.perrybrass.com. |
A.E. Housman: Struggling with homosexuality in the Victorian Era 
Oscar Wilde: Benchmark in the Victorian period 
Honoring Housman: A statue to the writer 
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