The Englishman in the Closet Brilliant Victorian poet and scholar A.E. Housman spent his life loving a straight classmate; Tom Stoppard’s play at the Alley explores the way love travels at many levels by D.L. Groover

When the June floodwaters of tropical storm Allison breached the downtown tunnel system, they inundated the Alley Theatre’s underground arena stage and destroyed the company’s costume and scene shops, which were in preparation for Tom Stoppard’s evocative, mysterious The Invention of Love. Fortunately, the rainbow appeared, and this haunting play, a phantasmic puzzle on the life of A.E. Housman, is now on stage through June 23 in time for Gay Pride week. What better way to reflect on one of our most cherished, most tormented, most talented forefathers.

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again

–from A Shropshire Lad, XL, A.E. Housman

Alfred Edward Housman, through his two short books of poetry (A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems) became the voice of post-World War I England. His melancholic elegies on a half-imagined idyllic country town, with vague and not-so-vague homoerotic undertones, reverberated through war-sick Britain. Concurrently, Housman was equally celebrated as the preeminent classical scholar of his time, emendating ancient Greek and Roman works while dissecting contemporary colleagues with barbed-wire wit and staggering insight. He was also gay, in love with straight-arrow heterosexual Moses Jackson, a fellow student at Oxford. Mo was Housman’s unrequited, foolish, unconquerable passion; he pined for him his entire life.

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.

–from Additional Poems, VII

After a horrendous meltdown during finals–some biographers attribute his psychotically blank and/or scribbled examination books to be the manifestation of his realization that Jackson would never be his–Housman followed Mo to London, worked next to him at the Patents Office, and shared an apartment with him and Mo’s brother Adelbart, who became Housman’s lover, a kind of consummation by proxy.

Housman seemed to split himself in two, sublimating his love for Jackson into intellectual passion for dead ancients. His smothered emotional life was a Hades, but his brilliant mental pursuits were Olympian. Naturally, Housman’s dual existence wasn’t as neatly cleaved as Stoppard depicts. Contemporaries, while astonished at his diffidence, also marveled at the raconteur and witty bon vivant whose "infectious laughter" would sing out at dinner parties. He traveled to France and Italy to have affairs, so he certainly knew pleasures. But he was the original man in the closet, whose overwhelming, all-consuming feelings of love centered on a straight man.

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.

–from Additional Poems, XVII

Alley Theatre artistic director, Gregory Boyd, who directs The Invention of Love, and John Tyson, who plays the elder Housman, share a dialogue about the enigmatic A.E. Housman and his stage recreator, Tom Stoppard.

John Tyson: I read two biographies about him. It was more for my own interest than perhaps how it was going to affect what I did on stage. As I learned, his life was even more complicated than Stoppard was willing to investigate. He took as much of Housman’s life as he needed, but he left a lot of really interesting things out.

Gregory Boyd: Which is what Housman did himself. No one would have known that Housman was gay if Lawrence [Housman’s gay brother, playwright of Victoria Regina, and novelist] hadn’t published the posthumous poems. The way I understand it, Housman self-published his first two books of poems in his lifetime, and then left this body of work unpublished, because–well, we can surmise whatever reason we want to surmise. Lawrence was gay, and found the poems.

Tyson: These papers were left to be burned when A.E. Housman died, and his brother disobeyed Housman’s wish, because he found the poems moving and, I suppose, wanted the world to know Housman’s true story. He didn’t start releasing them until long after his brother’s death.

Boyd: And Mo’s death [Moses Jackson]. But there are also other artifacts that are in the papers, like that incredible page from the journal. There’s one page that has nothing written on it except, Wrote to him today. Sitting on this blank page. It’s so heartbreaking.

Tyson: Even in his own private papers, he would never say his name. Every once in a while he would write about Moses and always refer to him as he or him. It’s so moving. That was the trigger for Stoppard. He wanted to write a play about this very famous poet, who he then found out was considered the greatest classical scholar of his day. Well, then he found out that he had this very secret life that he had repressed even from himself.

Boyd: Stoppard couldn’t find a way into the play until he found this other life that Housman had.

Tyson: Stoppard usually says more than one thing at the same time. That’s the problem, and the joy of it. He’s the greatest. I would much rather walk the plank with a play like this.

Boyd: When Stoppard started to write the play, he said he didn’t know it would be a play about a gay man, although it turned out, obviously, to be that. He did know it was going to be a play about how people misapprehend, or sometimes mis-feel, or confuse what is love, what is romance, what is romantic love, and how they screw that up.

Tyson: It explains what it needs to explain. The fact that they’re all getting buzzed about Greek and Roman translations is not important, specifically. Smart people fall in love, too, and smart people fall apart when they fall in love, too. When I saw the production in New York, it was an audience of tourists; they weren’t all Latin scholars, and they loved the show. It’s a play that people will understand and be moved by.

Boyd: A gay audience, or a theater-savvy audience, or a Stoppard-loving audience, but, also, anyone who’s interested in love is going to find something in it. It’s such a feeling play by a writer who’s often been accused of being merely clever. It’s very sexy and very theatrical.

Oh, said I, my friend and lover,

take we now that ship and sail

outward in the ebb of hues

and steer upon the sunset trail;

Leave the night to fall behind us

and the clouding counties leave:

Help for you and me is yonder

in a haven west of eve.

–from "The Land of Biscay"

Alfred Edward Housman is a hard nut to crack. Playwright Stoppard, with his theatrical flair, crystalline writing, and own brilliant flights of fancy, applies enough pressure on this eminent Victorian to turn his muffled emotional life into a blinding diamond. One in whose facets we clearly see ourselves.

The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard will be performed at the Alley Theatre through June 23. 615 Texas Avenue, 713/228-8421.