I know we're all going to die once I feel all right

[sovay]

I spent almost all of the previous day with my internal soundtrack set to A.E. Housman, meaning that anyone riding shotgun with me on various errands would have heard me reciting as much as I have committed to memory of A Shropshire Lad (1896), which is generally as much as I have heard set to music, and the three-eighths of "The Oracles" that I find haunting as opposed to highly alliterative. I can't recite "Twice a week the winter thorough," but I may pettily side-eye Edith Sitwell forever for writing it off so wittily in Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934):

It is claimed by admirers of cricket and of war that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. If this may be held to be true, cricket did, on that occasion, bring a great many men to their death. But I do not think that Professor Housman has explained to us clearly enough how it is that cricket has saved men from dying. If he means us to understand that cricket, and cricket alone, has prevented men from committing suicide, then their continuation on this earth seems hardly worth while.

It's true that some of what Housman's narrators experience as pathos is legible as bathos to the reader, e.g. the plangent discovery of the last couplet of "When I was one-and-twenty." There are other poems in the collection where disappointment in love translates credibly into despair of the world; in that one it seems mostly a function of being two-and-twenty. One of the other narrators will come by in a bit and give him the only advice there is, which is far less often to put the pistol to your head than to shoulder the sky and drink your ale. Or play sports, if the routine is what gets you through the seasons day by day. I can understand Sitwell's sarcasm about the first two verses; phrases like "See the son of grief at cricket" are exactly the stupid stuff Housman has his anticipated critics deride. And then the last verse just plunges off the pitch into the appalling existential prospect—not at all sentimental or adolescent and desperately familiar—that our most stalwart institutions may be nothing more than a distraction from self-destruction, our best efforts reduced to the trivializing "mirth" which may yet be the only thing keeping us this side the grave. It isn't about cricket or football or any other human endeavor. It's about the impossibility of believing that these things will really help and keeping on with them all the same. "No harm in trying." If the narrator doesn't sound convinced by his own resolution, he's still here to make it. There's much worth while in that.

It is entirely possible that I am arguing partly with a straw man. Sitwell was known for her invective and Aspects of Modern Poetry is as much slapfight as criticism, most memorably with her contemporary enemies: "As for the interpretation of the stressing, it is sad to see Milton's great lines bobbing up and down in the sandy desert of Dr Leavis' mind with the grace of a fleet of weary camels." She did no lasting damage to Housman and I'm sure he had defenders on the spot all those almost ninety years ago. But everybody has something and cricket is no sillier than the gas fire you light instead of lying down in front of, to jump tracks to another Terence and the problem of staying alive, which is to say in trouble, for remedy of which we have poetry, whether it helps or not.

Comments

[sovay]

While I am happy to see F.R. Leavis flattened, I am much happier to see your defense of Housman. I think he is more nuanced than Sitwell thinks, and your exegesis was really lovely.

Thank you!

(F.R. Leavis falls into the category of people where statistically the exception must exist, but I have never run across anyone who didn't want to flatten him. I think I heard of him first in A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), where the reference is not flattering.)

Now I want to see a production of "The Invention of Love."

I never have. I was a classics student at Brandeis when it was produced on Broadway and somehow it did not happen that I traveled to see it. I read the play. A friend who is no longer on LJ/DW, who had seen the production, said that he thought of me at the outraged line "It's half Greek and half Latin!"

[pameladean]

I studied him in graduate school, very earnestly and uncritically; but reviewing some of his work just a few years later, was very much in the flattening mood. That hasn't changed much over the years. I was an extremely uncritical young person, I have to say. Later generations impress the heck out of me by coming out the gate ready to flatten as necessary.

P.

[sovay]

Later generations impress the heck out of me by coming out the gate ready to flatten as necessary.

I will just point out that if you were taught him uncritically, that would affect your readiness to flatten. When you came around to him on your own time, it sounds like the banhammer came out.

[pameladean]

Also, with regard to "The Invention of Love," and the discussion further along in these comments about Housman's sense of humor, I went with a group of eight or nine people who among us had a reasonable amount of classical knowledge; we were fortunate, in the small theater, then called the Guthrie Lab, where the play was produced, to get front-row seats. Whereupon we disgraced ourselves by laughing uproariously and repeatedly at the many, many classical jokes. Stoppard's Housman has a sense of humor, and while Stoppard will poke at almost anybody, this production at least made it feel as if there were camaraderie between the playwright and his subjects. I think a different production could, had it wished, have produced a different effect, the text is so protean. But we were lucky in that regard as well.

I later made a friend who worked backstage at the Guthrie, and who had been working that production; and eventually we had a conversation in which she said, "That was YOU? The actors LOVED it." So we felt better after that.

P.

[sovay]

"That was YOU? The actors LOVED it." So we felt better after that.

As well you should have!

I was the one person in the theater for the NTLive broadcast of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art in 2010 who laughed out loud at a line repurposed from the rehearsal tapes of the War Requiem, partly because I was delighted to recognize it, but it's also a funny line on its own, so I wasn't sure what everyone else's problem was.