The summit of ‘Mount Pisgah’ at sunset, Housman, aged twenty-two, and Katharine Housman, aged nineteen, looking out to the west. Some breeze.

Housman   … All the land of Gilead, unto Dan, and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah unto the utmost sea, but not including Wales which I give to the Methodists.

Kate   But what happened, Alfred?

Housman   That’s what they all wanted to know.

Kate   It’s the end of fun. We’re all frightened of you now, except me, and I am, too. Father feels the blow, in the rain of blows. We’re a house of scrimping and tip-toeing and only one fire allowed in winter. Clemence does the books to a halfpenny. Mr Millington always said if she’d been a boy he’d have been glad to have her in his Sixth Form.

Housman   Millington thought the worst thing that could happen to me was that I’d get a Second. Well, he was wrong about that. He’s asked me to take the Sixth for classics from time to time, an act of charity. I’ll be teaching young Basil.

Kate   I wish I’d had you to teach me, I wouldn’t be the dunce. You put us all on the lawn once to be the sun and planets. I was the earth, and did pirouettes round Laurence while you skipped around me for my moonlight. That’s all the astronomy I ever knew. Will you be a schoolmaster, then?

Housman   Only while I’m waiting to take the Civil Service exam.

Kate   The Civil Service?

Housman   A Servant of the Crown.

Kate   Like a diplomat?

Housman   Yes, exactly. Or a postman. My friend Jackson has got himself into Her Majesty’s Patent Office. That would be convenient for the Reading Room of the British Museum. I’m going to carry on with classics. Look at Clee now – how blue it gets when the sun goes down!

Kate   Oh, yes! – our Promised Land!

Housman   I stopped believing in God, by the way.

Kate   Oh, that’s just Oxford.

Housman   I was waiting by the river for my friends Jackson and Pollard. You don’t know Jackson. Pollard is the one who came to stay once. Mamma disapproved of his letting her see him approach the door of the lavatory. He lacked the proper furtiveness … Well, I was waiting for them on a bench by the river and it came upon me that I was alone, and there was no help for anything.

Kate   Mamma would die if she could hear you.

Housman   I won’t mention it at family prayers.

Kate   Oxford has made you smart. Do you remember what our real mother was like?

Housman   Oh, yes: when she was ill I sat with her all the time. We used to pray together for her to get better, and she talked to me as if I were grown up.

Kate   She can hear you.

Housman   I stopped believing in that part when I was thirteen.

Kate   That was only to punish Him for mother dying.

Housman   And by God, He stayed punished.

Darkness.
   In a spotlight, ‘Bunthorne’ in Patience by Gilbert and Sullivan, is singing.

Bunthorne   (sings)

Bunthorne exits.
   A station platform at night, the ‘Underground–Overground’ Steam Railway.
   Housman, aged twenty-three, and Jackson, aged twenty-four, dressed as for ‘the office’, are waiting for the train. Housman has a Journal of Philology, Jackson an evening paper.

Jackson   Wasn’t it magnificent? A landmark, Hous!

Housman   I thought it was … quite jolly …

Jackson   Quite jolly? It was a watershed! D’Oyly Carte has made the theatre modern.

Housman   (surprised) You mean Gilbert and Sullivan?

Jackson   What? No. No, the theatre.

Housman   (Oh, I see.)

Jackson   The first theatre lit entirely by electricity!

Housman   Dear old Mo …

Jackson   D’Oyly Carte’s new Savoy is a triumph.

Housman   … you’re the only London theatre critic worthy of the name. ‘The new electrified Savoy is a triumph. The contemptible flickering gas–lit St James’s –’

Jackson   (overlapping) Oh, I know you’re ragging me …

Housman   ‘… the murky malodorous Haymarket … the unscientific Adelphi …’

Jackson   But it was exciting, wasn’t it, Hous? Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything! We had an electric corset sent in today.

Housman   One that lights up?

Jackson   I’ve never thought of it before, but in a way the Patent Office is the gatekeeper to the new age.

Housman   An Examiner of Electrical Specifications may be, but it’s not the same with us toiling down in Trade Marks. I had sore throat lozenges today, an application to register a wonderfully woebegone giraffe – raised rather a subtle point in Trade Marks regulation, actually: it seems there is already a giraffe at large, wearing twelve styles of celluloid collar, but, and here’s the nub, a happy giraffe, in fact a preening self-satisfied giraffe. The question arises – is the registered giraffe Platonic?, are all God’s giraffes in esse et in posse to be rendered unto the Houndsditch Novelty Collar Company?

Jackson   It’s true, then – a classical education fits a fellow for anything.

Housman   Well, I consulted my colleague Chamberlain – he’s compiling the new Index – I don’t think he’s altogether sound, Chamberlain, he put John the Baptist under Mythological Characters –

Jackson   Do you know what someone said?

Housman   – and a monk holding a tankard under Biblical Subjects.

Jackson   Will you tell me what happened?

Housman   Oh, we found for the lozenges.

Jackson   Someone said you ploughed yourself on purpose.

Housman   Pollard?

Jackson   No. But they had him in to ask about you.

Housman   I saw Pollard in the Reading Room.

Jackson   What did he have to say?

Housman   Nothing. It was the Reading Room. We adjusted our expressions briefly.

Jackson   We got what we wanted, Pollard at the British Museum and here’s me with an Examinership and three hundred a year with prospects … You were cleverer than any of us, Hous!

Housman   I didn’t get what I wanted, that’s true, but I want what I’ve got.

Jackson   Pushing a pen at thirty-eight shillings a week.

Housman   But here we are, you and I, we eat the same meals in the same digs, catch the same train to work in the same office, and the work is easy, I’ve got time to do classics … and friendship is all, sometimes I’m so happy, it makes me dizzy – and, look, I have prospects, too!, I’m published! (He shows Jackson the journal.) I was saving it for cocoa.

Jackson   I say! –

Housman   The Journal of Philology. See?

Jackson   ‘Horatiana’ … ‘A. E. Housman’ – I say! … What is it?

Housman   It’s putting people right about what Horace really wrote.

Jackson   Horace!

Housman   Only bits. I’m working on Propertius really.

Jackson   Well done, Hous! We must celebrate!

Housman   But we have – that’s why I …

Jackson   (reminded) Oh, but I still owe you for …

Housman   No, it was my idea, and anyway you thought the electricians were the best thing in it.

Jackson   The girls were pretty, and the tunes, it was only the story.

Housman   The whole thing was silly.

Jackson   Jolly, you said. You don’t have to agree with me all the time.

Housman   I don’t!

Jackson   Well, you do, you know, Hous – you should stick to your own opinions more.

Housman   Well, that’s a bit thick when I’ve just told Richard Bentley (that) his ‘securesque’ in three twenty-six won’t do!

Jackson   Who? – Oh, veni, vidi, vici …
   What gets my goat, actually, if you want to know, is that the fellow isn’t worth the fuss, none of them are – I mean, what use is he to anyone?

Housman   Use? … I know it’s not useful like electricity, but it’s exciting, really and truly, to spot something –

Jackson   What?

Housman   – to be the first person for thousands of years to read the verse as it was written – What?

Jackson   I mean these Aesthetes – the show …

Housman   (Oh –!)

Jackson   What gets me is all this attention – you can’t open a newspaper (without … ), and cartoons in Punch every time he opens his mouth being aesthetic and better than ordinary people working at proper things … I mean what’s he ever done?, and now an operetta, for heaven’s sake, to make him the talk of the town twice over – what has he ever done?, that’s what I’d like to know.

Housman   Well, I … He’s had a book of poems …

Jackson   I’ve got nothing against poetry, don’t think I have, I like a good poem as well as the next man, but you don’t find Tennyson flouncing about Piccadilly and trying to be witty, do you? – and all that posing and dressing up, it’s not manly, if you ask me, Hous.

Housman   It wasn’t him with the electric corset, was it?

Jackson   There were several at Oxford, I remember.

Housman   Do you remember he said your leg was a poem?

Jackson   Which one?

Housman   Left. Oh – Wilde. Oscar Wilde.

Jackson   Oscar Wilde was at Oxford with us?

Housman   In our first year, he went down with a First in Greats. I went to Warren, his tutor at Magdalen. You don’t remember?

Jackson   There was a Wyld who bowled a bit, left arm round the wicket…

Housman   No, no … Blue china …

Jackson   Wait a minute. Velvet knickerbockers! Well, I’m damned! I knew he wasn’t the full shilling!

Noise and lights: arriving train. Darkness.
   A room – the billiard room, perhaps – in a London club, 1885, at night.
   Labouchere and Harris, in full evening dress – perhaps – with brandy and cigars – for example – are playing billiards, or not.
   A third man, Stead, wears an almost shabby office suit. He has a full beard and the fanatical gleam of a prophet. He is scanning a newspaper in a professional manner.

Labouchere   We invented Oscar, we bodied him forth. Then we floated him. Then we kited the stock. When D’Oyly Carte took Patience to New York, he had the idea of bringing Oscar to America and exhibiting him as the original aesthetic article for purposes of publicity, and Oscar did him proud before he was off the boat – ‘Mr Wilde Disappointed by Atlantic’ – remember that, Stead?, you gave it space in the Gazette, and I printed the Atlantic’s reply in Truth – ‘Atlantic Disappointed by Mr Wilde’. I wrote him up nicely, and Oscar, who didn’t know it was all a ramp, told people over there, ‘Henry Labouchere is one of my heroes’… all in all, most satisfactory, a job well done. But now he’s got away from us. No matter where we cut the string, the kite won’t fall. The ramp is over and the stock keeps rising. When he came home and had the cheek to lecture in Piccadilly on his impressions of America, I filled three columns under the heading ‘Exit Oscar’. I dismissed him, no doubt to his surprise, as an effeminate phrase-maker. I counted up the number of times he used the word ‘beautiful’, ‘lovely’ or ‘charming’, and it came to eighty-six. You’d think that would sink anybody, but not at all … He went off round the provinces and people paid good money to be told they were provincial… their houses were ugly inside and out, their dress dowdy, their husbands dull, their wives plain, and their opinions on art worthless. Meanwhile, Oscar himself has never done anything.

Harris   You were on the wrong end of the string, Labby.

Labouchere   Up, up, up … It shakes one’s faith in the operation of a moral universe by journalism.

Stead   It’s the aimless arrow that brings us down, the arrow fledged with one of our own feathers.

Harris   You really ought to edit the Old Testament, old man.

Labouchere   He does.

Stead   The Pall Mall Gazette is testament enough that the Lord is at my elbow, and was there today when I – yes, I! – forced Parliament to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

Harris   You know, Stead, most people think you’re mad. They thought so even before you bought a thirteen-year-old virgin for £5 to prove a point. A wonderful stunt, I wouldn’t deny – I doff my hat. When I took over the Evening News I edited the paper with the best in me at twenty-eight. The circulation wouldn’t budge. So, I edited the paper as a boy of fourteen. The circulation started to rise and never looked back.

Stead   No, by heavens, Harris! In the right hands the editor’s pen is the sceptre of power! For us, life can once more be brilliant as in the heroic days. In my first campaign, when I was still a young man in the provinces, I roused the north against Lord Beaconsfield’s Russian Policy and the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. ‘The honour of the Bulgarian virgins,’ I told my readers, ‘is in the hands of the electors of Darlington.’ I heard the clear call of the voice of God in 1876: I heard it again last year when I forced the government to send General Gordon to Khartoum; and I heard it in my campaign which today has given thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old British virgins the protection of Parliament.

Harris   General Gordon got his head cut off.

Stead   Whether he did or not –

Harris   He did.

Stead   – we journalists have a divine mission to be the tribunes of the people.

Harris   The Turko-Russia war was my blooding as a journalist. I was with General Skobeleff at the battle of Plevna.

Labouchere   (to Stead) I’m a Member of Parliament, I don’t have to be a journalist to be a tribune of the people.
   (to Harris) No, you weren’t, Frank. You were at Brighton.
   (to Stead) The Criminal Law Amendment Act is badly drawn up and will do more harm than good, as I said in my paper.
   (to Harris) In ’76 you were a French tutor at Brighton College, or so you told Hattie during the interval at Phedre.

Harris   That was a flight of fancy.

Labouchere   (to Stead) The Bill should have been referred to a Select Committee, and would have been but for the government being stampeded by your disgusting articles.

Harris   Traditionally, Parliament has always been the protector of the British virgin, but usually on a first come first served basis.

Labouchere   You have made the Pall Mall Gazette look sensational even when there’s nothing sensational in it, but the Maiden Tribute campaign was a disgrace to decency – you had errand boys reading about filthy goings-on which concerned nobody but their sisters.

Harris   Is it true you caught a mouse in the Gazette office and ate it on toast?

Stead   Perfectly true.
   (to Labouchere) When I came down from Darlington to join the Gazette –

Harris   Up.

Stead   – it never sold more than 13,000 copies and never deserved to – it kept the reader out.

Harris   Up from Darlington.

Stead   I introduced the crosshead in ’81, the illustration in ’82, the interview in ’83, the personal note, the signed article –

Labouchere   Why did you eat a mouse?

Stead   I wanted to know what it tasted like.

Labouchere   You should have asked me. I ate them in Paris during the Siege, and rats and cats.

Stead   I invented the New Journalism!

Labouchere   We didn’t eat the rats till we’d eaten all the cats.

Stead   I gave virtue a voice Parliament couldn’t ignore.

Labouchere   Then we ate the dogs. When there were no dogs left we ate the animals in the zoo.

Stead   Item! The age of consent raised from thirteen to sixteen.

Labouchere   I sent my despatches out by balloon and made my name. I suppose you were in the Siege of Paris, too, Frank.

Harris   No, in 1870 I was building the Brooklyn Bridge.

Stead   Item! Girls in moral danger may be removed from their parents by the courts.

Labouchere   That’ll be a dead letter.

Stead   But it was your Amendment.

Labouchere   Anybody with any sense on the backbenches was pitch-forking Amendments in to get the government to admit it had a pig’s breakfast on its hands and withdraw it. I forced a division on raising the age of consent to twenty-one!, and two people voted for it. My final effort was the Amendment on indecency between male persons, and God help me, it went through on the nod – (it had) nothing to do with the Bill we were supposed to be debating; normally it would have been ruled out of order, but everyone wanted to be shot of the business, prorogue Parliament, and get on to the General Election.

Stead   But – but surely – you intended the Bill to address a contemporary evil –?

Labouchere   Nothing of the sort. I intended to make the Bill absurd to any sensible person left in what by then was a pretty thin House … but that one got away, so now a French kiss and what-you-fancy between two chaps safe at home with the door shut is good for two years with or without hard labour. It’s a funny old world.

Stead   Then your mischief was timely. London shows all the indications of falling into the abyss of perverse eroticism that encompassed the fall of Greece and Rome.

Labouchere   What indications are they?

Stead   There is a scepticism of what is morally elevating, a taste for the voluptuous and the forbidden in French literature. Our Aesthetes look to Paris for their sins, which I will not name, which are so odious they should never have been allowed to leave France.

Harris   Actually, in Greece and Rome sodomy was rarely associated with a taste for French novels, it was the culture of the athletic ground and the battlefield; as in Sparta, for example, or the Sacred Band of Thebes. It so happens that I was wandering through Greece in October of 1880, travelling sometimes on foot, sometimes on horse, putting up at monasteries or with shepherds in their huts, and I arrived finally at Thebes. There was a German archaeologist there who said his name was Schliemann –

Labouchere   Harris, do you ever tell the truth?

Harris   – who told us that a young Greek lad had just discovered a very large grave at Chaeronea near by, right under the stone lion erected by Philip of Macedon to commemorate his victory there in 338 BC. It was at the battle of Chaeronea, you remember, where, according to Plutarch, a hundred and fifty pairs of lovers pledged to defend Thebes from the invader fought and died to the last man. Well, I stayed on there until we had uncovered 297 skeletons, buried together.

Labouchere   So it was you!

Harris   They were in two layers, packed like sardines. You could still see where the Macedonian lances smashed arms, ribs, skulls … Most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.

Open ground. Summer afternoon, 1885.
   Housman, aged twenty-six, is comfortable on the grass, reading the Journal of Philology. Chamberlain, a contemporary, is sitting up, reading the Daily Telegraph or similar. They are inattentive spectators at a suburban athletics meeting, the sounds of which are now some feeble applause, a few random shouts, perhaps a bandstand; all of these at a distance. A bag containing bottled beer and sandwiches lies by them.

Chamberlain   What do you think, Housman? Five pounds for a virgin. Would that mean one go? …

Housman   You can’t have two goes at the same virgin.

Chamberlain   … or do you get her to keep?, I mean. What are the parliamentary reports coming to?

Housman   Is that the quarter-mile lining up? I can’t see Jackson.

Chamberlain   It probably isn’t, then.

Housman   (anxious) Are you sure? We haven’t come all the way out to Ealing to miss it.

Chamberlain   ‘Mr Labouchere, Lib., Northampton …’ … he has a way with him.

Housman   Or is that the half?

Chamberlain   There’s no way of telling at the start, it all depends on where they stop. ‘Mr Labouchere’s Amendment …’ Oh dear oh dear oh dear, well, that’s opened up the north-west passage for every blackmailer in town; you’d think they’d know, wouldn’t you? Educated at Eton and Trinity, too, so what’s he got left to be shocked about?

Housman   I do believe it is the quarter-mile, you know. (He stands up as a distant starting pistol is heard.) Can you see him?

Chamberlain finally looks up front his paper.

Chamberlain   The quarter-mile is a flat race, isn’t it? – that’s hurdles. (He returns to his paper.)

Housman   (relieved) Oh, yes … it’s after the 220 hurdles.

Chamberlain   Running late.

Housman   (No, 220 yards … )

Chamberlain   Sit down, you’re like a nervous girl.

Distant shouts, some applause. Chamberlain studies his newspaper.

No offence, old chap. I like you more than anyone I know. I even like you for the way you stick to Jackson. But he’ll never want what you want. You’ll have to find it somewhere else or you’ll be unhappy, even unhappier. I know whereof I speak. I don’t mind you knowing. I know you won’t tell on me at the office. You’re the straightest, kindest man I know and I’m sorry for you, that’s all. I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn.

A distant starting pistol. Chamberlain stands up. They watch the progress of the runners, for form’s sake, silent, separate, remote from the fact. The race takes nearly a minute: the pauses and speeches are in real time.
   Long pause.

He’ll be in the first three if he keeps it up.

Long pause.

Housman   (watching the runners) 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. (Pause. Still without inflection) He’s going to win it. (Finally he warms into excitement as the race passes in front of them.) By God, he is! Come on, Jackson! Up the Patent Office! …
   … He’s won it!

Chamberlain slaps Housman on the back in unaffected joy. Housman thaws, catching up.

Housman   He won!

Chamberlain   We should have brought champagne!

Housman   No, he likes his bottle of Biblical Subject. (embarrassed) Well…

Chamberlain   Come on, then – I’m thirsty with all that running.

Pollard, aged twenty-six, arrives hot and bothered, in office dress, carrying a Pink ’Un edition of the Saturday afternoon newspaper.

Pollard   Housman! – there you are! Was that the quarter?

Housman   Pollard – you duffer! You’ve missed it! He won!

Pollard   Damn! I mean – you know what I mean. I couldn’t get here a minute sooner. I bet I ran faster from the station than Jackson.
   (to Chamberlain) How do you do?

Housman   Chamberlain, this is Pollard; Pollard, this is Chamberlain.

Chamberlain   Very pleased to meet you.

Housman   He’s at the British Museum.

Pollard   (to Chamberlain) Not an exhibit, I work at the library.

Housman   You are an exhibit … (He tidies Pollard’s collar and tie.) Here, look. There. We’ve got a picnic.

Pollard   Ah, locusts and honey.

Housman   The three of us used to take a boat down to Hades, with a picnic – where’s Mo?

Pollard   It was only once.

Housman   We were chums together at St John’s –

Chamberlain   (Hades …?)

Housman   – oh! – Chamberlain is an expert on the Baptist, that well-known mythological character.

Pollard   Really?

Chamberlain   He was a water-biscuit. Yes, it’s confusing but we keep an open mind at the Trade Marks Registry.

Housman   Here he is – victor ludorum.

Jackson joins them.

Pollard   Ave, Ligurine!

Housman   Jolly well done, Mo!

Chamberlain   I say! What was your time?

Jackson   Oh, I don’t know, it’s only a race, don’t make a fuss. Fifty-four, apparently. Hello, Pollard, (accepting a bottle of beer from Housman) Thanks. This is sporting of you. And sandwiches!

Chamberlain   (offering sandwiches) Age before beauty.

Jackson   (declining) I’ll get changed first, (to Pollard) Got the Pink ’Un? Good man. (taking it) How were the Australians doing?

Pollard   At what?

Jackson   Oh, really, Pollard! (He laughs, leaving with his beer and the Pink ’Un.)

Pollard   The paper is full of white-slave traffic today. Apparently we lead the world in exporting young women to Belgium.

Chamberlain   It’s disgusting, the way the papers have been hashing it up.

Pollard   Hushing it up?

Chamberlain   Not hushing it up. Hashing it up.

Pollard   Oh …

Pollard and Housman catch each other’s eye and laugh at the same thought.

Chamberlain   (after a pause) Well, we’ll never know.

Housman   It’s nothing much to know anyway. Before books were printed, often you’d have one person dictating to two or three copyists …

Pollard   … then, hundreds of years later, there’d be a manuscript in one place that’s got ‘hushing it up’ and one in another place that’s got ‘hashing it up’, only in Latin, of course, and people like Housman here arguing about which the author really wrote. Have you got something in there (the Journal)?

Chamberlain   Why?

Housman   (No.)

Pollard   And, of course, the copies get copied, so then you can argue about which copies come first and which scribes had bad habits – oh, the fun is endless.

Chamberlain   But there’s no way to tell if they both make sense.

Housman   One of them always makes the better sense if you can get into the writer’s mind, without prejudices.

Pollard   And then you publish your article insisting it was really ‘lashing it up’.

Chamberlain   Why?

Pollard   Why? So that other people can write articles insisting it was ‘mashing it up’ or ‘washing it up’.

Chamberlain   Toss a coin – I would.

Pollard   That’s another good method. (I’m) only teasing, Housman, don’t look so down in the mouth.

Chamberlain   (gets up) I’m off, apologize for me to Jackson. I’ve got to meet someone in the West End at five.

Pollard   There’s still plenty of trains.

Chamberlain   I came on my bicycle.

Pollard   Goodness!

Chamberlain   It was very nice to meet you.

Pollard   Likewise. Yes, don’t keep the lady waiting!

Chamberlain   Oh, you’ve guessed my secret. Thanks, Housman. I’ll see you on Monday.

Housman   I’m sorry you have to go. Thank you.

Chamberlain   Wouldn’t have missed it.

Pollard   Nor I.

Chamberlain   But you did.

Pollard   Oh, that.

Chamberlain goes.

Housman   No need to tell Jackson – he’d be disappointed. Why did you call him Ligurinus?

Pollard   Wasn’t it Ligurinus? – running over the Campus Martius? (From his pocket he takes about twenty handwritten pages.) Thanks for this.

Housman   What did you think?

Pollard   You won’t expect me to judge it. I’m no Propertius scholar.

Housman   But you’ve read him.

Pollard   I read a few of the elegies in my third year but Propertius is too rough-cornered for my taste.

Housman   Yes – mine, too.

Pollard   (But –?!)

Housman   To be a scholar, the first thing you have to learn is that scholarship is nothing to do with taste; speaking, of course, as a Higher Division Clerk in Her Majesty’s Patent Office. Propertius looked to me like a garden gone to wilderness, and not a very interesting garden either, but what an opportunity! – it was begging to be put back in order. Better still, various nincompoops thought they had already done it … hacking about, to make room for their dandelions. So far, I’ve improved the vulgate in about two hundred places.

Pollard laughs.

But I have.

Pollard   I’m sure you have.

Housman   What worries you about it?

Pollard   Well, the tone of some of it, it’s a bit breathtaking. It’s all right me reading it, because I know what a soft old thing you are underneath, but it isn’t the way scholars generally deal with each other, is it?

Housman   (lightly) Oh, Bentley and Scaliger were far ruder.

Pollard   But that was centuries ago, and you’re not Bentley, not yet anyway. Who is Postgate?

Housman   Oh, he’s a good man, one of the best of the younger Propertius critics –

Pollard   (What –?!) (He finds his place, on the last page.)

Housman   – he’s a professor at UCL.

Pollard   (reading) ‘…makes nonsense of the whole elegy from beginning to end …’

Housman   Well, he does. ‘Voces’ in verse 33 is an emendation to frighten children in their beds.

Pollard   ‘… But I imagine these considerations will have occurred to Mr Postgate himself ere now, or will have been pointed out to him by his friends.’… It’s so disrespectful.

Housman   Your point being that I’m a clerk in the Patent Office.

Pollard   (hotly) No! – I’m not saying that!

Housman   I’m sorry. Let’s not fall out. Have another Biblical Subject.

They open two bottles of beer.

Pollard   (explaining) I was only thinking suppose one day you put in for a lectureship at University College and your Mr Postgate was on the selection committee.

Housman   I’d only apply for a Chair at UCL.

Pollard   (laughs) Oh … Housman, what will become of you?

Housman   You’re my only friend who might understand, don’t let me down. If I’m disrespectful it’s because it’s important and not a game anyone can play. I could have given Chamberlain a proper answer. Scholarship doesn’t need to wriggle out of it with a joke. 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. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about the poetry. I do. Diffugere nives goes through me like a spear. Nobody makes it stick like Horace that you’re a long time dead – dust and shadow, and no good deeds, no eloquence, will bring you back. I think it’s the most beautiful poem in Latin or Greek there ever was; but in verse 15 Horace never wrote ‘dives’ which is in all the texts, and I’m pretty sure I know what he did write. Anyone who says ‘So what?’ got left behind five hundred years ago when we became modern, that’s why it’s called Humanism. The recovery of ancient texts is the highest task of all – Erasmus, bless him. It is work to be done. Posterity has a brisk way with manuscripts: scholarship is a small redress against the vast unreason of what is taken from us – it’s not just the worthless that perish, Jesus doesn’t save.

Pollard   Stop – stop it, Housman! – the sun is shining, it’s Saturday afternoon! – I’m happy! The best survives because it is the best.

Housman   Oh … Pollard. Have you ever seen a cornfield after the reaping? Laid flat to stubble, and here and there, unaccountably, miraculously spared, a few stalks still upright. Why those? There is no reason. Ovid’s Medea, the Thyestes of Varius who was Virgil’s friend and considered by some his equal, the lost Aeschylus trilogy of the Trojan war … gathered to oblivion in sheaves‚ along with hundreds of Greek and Roman authors known only for fragments or their names alone – and here and there a cornstalk, a thistle, a poppy, still standing, but as to purpose, signifying nothing.

Pollard   I know what you want.

Housman   What do I want?

Pollard   A monument. Housman was here.

Housman   Oh, you’ve guessed my secret.

Pollard   A mud pie against the incoming tide.

Housman   (Oh, that’s) a fine way to speak of my edition of Propertius.

Pollard   (toasting) To you and your Propertius. Who’s that with Jackson?, do you know her?

Housman   No. Yes. She came to the office.

Pollard   Well, don’t stare.

Housman   I’m not.

Pollard   (toasting) Coupled with the British Museum library! The aggregate of human progress made stackable!

Housman   (toasting) Making a stand against the natural and merciful extinction of the unreadable! How very British of it. Bring back the manuscript …

Pollard   Is it over?, people seem to be leaving.

Housman starts packing up the picnic.

Housman   When you consider the ocean of bilge brought forth by the invention of printing, it does make you wonder about this boon of civilization. I wonder about it every time I open the Journal of Philology.
   No. They’re gathering … Oh! – they’re giving out the trophies! Come on!

They go. Housman taking the picnic bag.

Elsewhere – night.
   Jackson, in his pyjamas and dressing-gown, reads aloud from a handwritten page; a modest silver trophy-cup perhaps in evidence.

Jackson  

Mmm. Did you write this?

Housman comes with two mugs of cocoa. He is wearing day-clothes.

Housman   Well, Sappho, really, more or less.

Jackson   (ponders) Mmm. What’s that one you used to have about kisses?

Housman   Catullus. ‘Give me a thousand kisses and then a hundred more.’

Jackson   Yes. She might think that’s a bit hot, though. It should really be about me being unhappy and ticking her off for her unfaithfulness, and at the same time willing to forgive. Where’s the one again where I’m carving her name on trees?

Housman   Propertius. But honestly, that’s a bit raving – she’s only said she’s staying in to wash her hair.

Jackson   But I’d got tickets and everything! After being at her beck and call …

Housman   Quinque tibi potui servire (fideliter annos).

Jackson   What?

Housman   Five years your faithful slave.

Jackson   Exactly. Two weeks anyway.

Housman   The problem we’re up against here is that the ticking-off ones make her out to be a harlot, and the happy ones make her out to be, well, your harlot … so I think the way to go is more carpe diem, gather ye rosebuds while you may, the grave’s a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace.

Jackson   She’d never believe I wrote that.

Housman   Dear old Mo, what will become of you?

Jackson   Orchestra stalls, too.

Housman   Oh, well! – ‘If that’s the price for kisses due, it’s the last kiss I steal from you’ – written to a boy, but never mind – interesting poem, by the way: vester for tuus –

Jackson   She thinks you’re sweet on me.

Housman   – plural for singular, the first use. What?

Jackson   Rosa said you’re sweet on me.

Housman   What did she mean?

Jackson   Well, you know.

Housman   What did you say?

Jackson   I said it was nonsense. We’re chums. We’ve been chums since Oxford, you, me and Pollard.

Housman   Did she think Pollard was sweet on you?

Jackson   She didn’t talk about Pollard. You’re not, are you, Hous?

Housman   You’re my best friend.

Jackson   That’s what I said, like …

Housman   Theseus and Pirithous.

Jackson   The Three Musketeers.

Housman   What did she say?

Jackson   She hasn’t read it.

Housman   I don’t understand. You mean, just from Saturday, just from going home together on the train from Ealing?

Jackson   I suppose so. Yes. It was odd Chamberlain being there that day.

Housman   Why?

Jackson   Well, it was just odd. An odd coincidence. I was going to mention it.

Housman   Mention what?

Jackson   Mention that perhaps you shouldn’t get to be pals with him too much, it may be misunderstood.

Housman   You think Chamberlain is sweet on me?

Jackson   No, of course not. But one has heard things about Chamberlain at the office. I’m sorry now I mentioned him! I know I’m all hobnails but you’re all right about it, aren’t you, Hous? You see, I’m awfully strong on Rosa, she’s not like other girls, she’s not what I’d call a girl at all, you saw that for yourself, she’s a woman, we love each other.

Housman   I’m glad for you, Mo. I liked her very much.

Jackson   (pleased) Did you? I knew you would. You’re a good pal to me and I hope I am to you. I knew I only had to ask you and that would be the end of it. I’ll tell her she’s a cuckoo. Shake hands?

Jackson puts out his hand, Housman takes it.

Housman   Gladly.

Jackson   Still pals.

Housman   Comrades.

Jackson   Like whoever they were.

Housman   Theseus and Pirithous. They were kings. They met on the field of battle to fight to the death, but when they saw each other, each was struck in admiration for his adversary, so they became comrades instead and had many adventures together. Theseus was never so happy as when he was with his friend. They weren’t sweet on each other. They loved each other, as men loved each other in the heroic age, in virtue, paired together in legend and poetry as the pattern of comradeship, the chivalric ideal of virtue in the ancient world. Virtue! What happened to it? It had a good run – centuries! – it was still virtue in Socrates to admire a beautiful youth, virtue to be beautiful and admired, it was still there, grubbier and a shadow of itself but still there, for my Roman poets who competed for women and boys as fancy took them; virtue in Horace to shed tears of love over Ligurinus on the athletic field. Well, not any more, eh, Mo? Virtue is what women have to lose, the rest is vice. Pollard thinks I’m sweet on you, too, though he hardly knows he thinks it. Will you mind if I go to live somewhere but close by?

Jackson   Why?
   Oh …

Housman   We’ll still be friends, won’t we?

Jackson   Oh!

Housman   Of course Rosa knew! – of course she’d know!

Jackson   Oh!

Housman   Did you really not know even for a minute?

Jackson   How could I know? You seem just like … you know, normal. You’re not one of those Aesthete types or anything – (angrily) how could I know?!

Housman   You mean if I dressed like the Three Musketeers you’d have suspected?
   You’re half my life.
   We took a picnic down to Hades. There was a dog on the island there, a friendly lost dog and not even wet, a mystery, he jumped into the boat to be rescued. Do you remember the dog? Pollard and I were arguing about English or Latin being best for poetry – the dog was subjoined: lost dog loves young man – dog young lost man loves, loves lost young man dog, you can’t beat Latin: shuffle the words to suit, the endings tell you which loves what, who’s young, who lost, if you can’t read Latin go home, you’ve missed it! You kissed the dog. After that day, everything else seemed futile and ridiculous: the ridiculous idea that one’s life was poised on the reading course …

Jackson   (puzzled) Dog?

Housman   (cries out) Oh, if only you hadn’t said anything! We could have carried on the same!

Jackson   (an announcement) It’s not your fault. That’s what I say. It’s terrible but it’s not your fault. You won’t find me casting the first stone. (Pause.) We’ll be just like before.

Housman   Do you mean it, Mo?

Jackson   No one will know it from me. We’ve been pals a long time.

Housman   Thank you.

Jackson   It’s rotten luck but it’ll be our secret. You’ll easily find some decent digs round here – we’ll catch the same train to work as always, and I bet before you know it you’ll meet the right girl and we’ll all three be chuckling over this – Rosa, I mean. What about that? I dare say I’ve surprised you! All right? Shake on it?

Jackson puts out his hand.
   Darkness, except on Housman.

Housman  

Light on AEH.

And went with half my life about my ways.

Darkness on Housman.
   AEH is at a desk among books, inkpot and pen.
   Elsewhere, simultaneously, a Selection Committee meets, comprising ‘several’ men. They include a Chairman, two or more speakers, designated ‘Committee’, and Postgate. They wear academic gowns.

AEH   Am I asleep or awake? We arrive at evening upon a field of battle, where lie 200 corpses. 197 of them have no beards: the 198th has a beard on the chin; the 199th has a false beard slewed round under the left ear; the 200th has been decapitated and the head is nowhere to be found. Problem: Had it a beard, a false beard, or no beard at all? Mr Buecheler can tell you. It had a beard, a beard on the chin. I only say, look at the logic. Because a manuscript has suffered loss, therefore the lost portion contained something which Mr Buecheler wishes it to have contained: and scholars have been unable to detect any error in his reasoning.

Chairman   (reading from a letter) ‘During the last ten years, the study of the Classics has been the chief occupation of my leisure …’

AEH   But I have long dwelt among men.

Chairman   Copies of Mr Housman’s testimonials are tabled.

AEH   Conjectures, to Mr Marx’s eyes, are arranged in a three-fold order of merit: first, the conjectures of Mr Marx; second, the conjectures of mankind in general; third, the conjectures of certain odious persons.

Committee   A Post Office clerk?

Chairman   Patent Office … supported by the Professors of Latin at Oxford and Cambridge, of Latin and Greek at Dublin – the editor of the Classical Review … Warren, the President of Magdalen …

AEH   The width and variety of Francken’s ignorance are wonderful. For stupidity of plan and slovenliness of execution, his apparatus criticus is worse than Breiter’s apparatus to Manilius, and I never saw another of which that could be said.

Chairman   (to Postgate) Is he well liked?

AEH   Confronted with two manuscripts of equal merit, he is like a donkey between two bundles of hay, and confusedly imagines that if one bundle were removed he would cease to be a donkey.

Postgate   He is … well remarked.

AEH   The notes are vicious to a degree which well nigh protects them from refutation, so intricate is the tangle of every imaginable kind of blunder, and his main purpose in withholding useful information is to make room for a long record of conjectures which dishonour the human intellect.

Committee   (reading) ‘When Mr Housman took my Sixth Form he proved himself a thorough and sympathetic teacher …’

AEH   Having small literary culture, he is not revolted by illiteracy or dismayed by the hideous and has a relish for the uncouth; yet would defend pronos against Bentley’s privos as being very poetical, although Bentley never denied it was poetical, he only denied it was Latin.

Committee   (reading) ‘… the sagacity and closeness desiderated by Bentley …’ That’s Warren. ‘… one of the most interesting and attractive pupils I can remember …’

Chairman   … and Robinson Ellis of Trinity … ‘Personally I have always found Mr Housman an amiable and modest man.’

AEH   No word is safe from Ellis if he can think of a similar one which is not much worse. Trying to follow his thoughts is like being in perpetual contact with an idiot child. Here is the born hater of science who fills his pages to half their height with the dregs of the Italian renaissance, and by appeals to his reader’s superstition persuade him that he will gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles.

Chairman   Well… Professor Postgate?

Postgate   Mmm.

AEH   But Mr Postgate’s morbid alertness is cast into deep sleep at modo in verse 11, and it’s goodnight to grammatical science.

Committee   Yes. What do you say, Postgate?

AEH   Of Mr Postgate’s ‘voces’ for ‘noctes’ in 33, I am at a loss to know what to say.

Postgate   I have to declare an interest.

AEH   (continuing) The alteration makes nonsense of the whole elegy from beginning to end.

Postgate   Mr Housman is applying for this post at my urging. He is, in my view, very likely the best classical scholar in England.
   Though he is not always right on Propertius.

Chairman   (closing the meeting) Tempus fugit. Nunc est bibendum.

Light fades on Committee.

AEH   When I with some thought and some pains have got this rather uninteresting garden into decent order, here is Dr Postgate hacking at the fence in a spirited attempt to re-establish chaos amongst Propertius manuscripts. All the tools he employs are two-edged, though to be sure both edges are blunt. I feel it a hardship, but I suppose it is a duty, (to) …

Light on Postgate.

Postgate   (angry) Your stemma codicum is fundamentally flawed – not to mince words, it is almost totally wrong. Your reliance on Baehrens’s dating of the Neapolitanus was a blunder.

AEH   Have you seen the paper?

Postgate   I am in the act of replying to it. I intend to make you ashamed.

AEH   The paper.

Postgate   Oh …

AEH   Oscar Wilde has been arrested.

Postgate   Oh …

AEH   I had no idea I had offended you, Postgate.

Postgate goes.
   Light on Stead, Labouchere and Harris with open newspapers. Perhaps in a railway carriage.

Stead   Guilty and sentenced to two years with hard labour!

Labouchere   (reading) ‘The aesthetic cult, in its nasty form, is now over.’

Harris   (reading) ‘Open the windows! Let in the fresh air! … By our Dramatic Critic.’

Labouchere   Convicted under the Labouchere Amendment clause!

AEH  

Harris   I begged him to leave the country. I had a closed cab waiting at Hyde Park Corner and a steam-yacht at Gravesend to take him to France …

Labouchere   (to Stead) Two years is totally inadequate.
   (to Harris) No, you didn’t, Frank. You told him to brazen it out at the Café Royal.
   (to Stead) I wanted a maximum of seven years.

Harris   … With a lobster supper on board and a bottle of Pommery, and a small library of French and English books.

Labouchere   Look, it wasn’t a yacht, it was a table at the Café Royal.
   (to Stead) The Attorney General of the day persuaded me that two years was more likely to secure a conviction from a hesitant jury.

Harris   You did it to scupper the Bill – that’s what you told me.

Labouchere   Who’s going to believe you?

Stead   If Oscar Wilde’s taste had been for fresh young innocent virgins of, say, sixteen, no one would have laid a finger on him.

Labouchere   I did it because Stead happened to tell me just before the debate that in certain parts of London the problem of indecency between men was as serious as with virgins.

Harris   There’s no serious problem with virgins in certain parts of London.

Stead   With virgins, there are tastes in certain parts best left to the obscurity of a learned tongue.

Harris   My point.

Light fades on them.

AEH  

Three Men in a Boat row into view. Jerome has the oars, Chamberlain (George) is trying to play a banjo. (Frank) Harris has a first edition of A Shropshire Lad.
   Chamberlain, eleven years older, with a moustache, wears a blazer striped in violent colours. Jerome and Harris wear tweed jackets with their ‘cricket trousers’.

Chamberlain   Ta-ra-ra … pull on your right, J. Ta-ra-ra-boom –

Jerome   Do you want to take the oars?

Chamberlain   No, you’re doing splendidly… boom-di-ay …

Harris/Jerome   Shut up, George!

Harris   Anybody hungry?

Chamberlain   Harris hasn’t done any work since we left Henley.

Harris   When Chamberlain said take a boat up the river, I understood him to mean a boat which takes passengers from one place to another, not an arrangement where the passengers take the boat. Personally I had no reason to want this boat removed from where it was; as far as I (was concerned) –

Chamberlain/Jerome   Shut up, Harris!

Chamberlain   Where are we, J?

Jerome   Getting towards Reading.

Chamberlain   Reading!

They look up-river.

Will we pass the gaol?

Jerome   Perhaps Oscar will see us going by … he always asked for the river view at the Savoy.

Harris   (solemnly) The prostitutes danced in the streets.

Chamberlain   So did J.

Jerome   I did not. It’s true that as the editor of a popular newspaper I had a duty to speak out, but I take no pride in the fact that it was I as much as anybody, I suppose, who was indirectly responsible for the tragic unfolding of –

Chamberlain/Harris   Shut up, J!

Jerome   I’m not sorry. I might have been sorry, if he’d kept his misfortune to himself like a gentleman.

Chamberlain   Posing as a gentleman.

Jerome   Exactly. His work won’t last either. Decadence was a blind alley in English life and letters. Wholesome humour has always been our strength. Wholesome humour and a rattling good yarn. Look at Shakespeare.

Chamberlain   Or your own work.

Jerome   That’s not for me to say.

Chamberlain   Right, Harris, take his legs.

Harris   Robbie Ross gave me this man’s poems. He got several off by heart to tell them to Oscar when he went to see him in prison.

Jerome   Oh, yes – Gosse said to me, who is this Houseboat person Robbie likes?

Harris   Not Houseboat. A. E. Housman.

Chamberlain   Alfred Housman?

Harris   I think he stayed with the wrong people in Shropshire. I never read such a book for telling you you’re better off dead.

Chamberlain   That’s him!

Harris   No one gets off; if you’re not shot, hanged or stabbed, you kill yourself. Life’s a curse, love’s a blight, God’s a blaggard, cherry blossom is quite nice.

Chamberlain   He’s a Latin prof.

Jerome   But of the Greek persuasion, would you say, George?

Chamberlain   Three or four years ago he was just one of us in the office.

Jerome   Uranian persuasion, I mean.

Chamberlain   How can one tell?

Jerome   I could. Is there something eye-catching about the way he dresses?

Harris   As opposed to George, you mean?

Jerome   That’s a point, eh, George?!

Chamberlain   Pull the other one, J.

Jerome   Do you want to take the oars?

The boat goes.
   AEH alone under a starry night sky. Distant bonfires. Jubilee Night, June 1897.

AEH  

Chamberlain, at the age we saw him but in street clothes, has joined him on the hilltop.

Chamberlain   (simultaneous with AEH)

Pull the other one.

AEH   (pleased) Chamberlain! I haven’t thought about you for years! You’ve got a moustache.

Chamberlain   Hello, old chap. I’m not sure about it, but it’s growing on me.

AEH   Oh, I say, that’s a good one.

Chamberlain   Fancy you living to a ripe old age, I wouldn’t have put a tanner on it the way you looked.

AEH   When?

Chamberlain   Most of the time. Happy days, I don’t think. When Jackson went off to be a headmaster in India, No – worse before. No – worse after, when he came home on leave to be married. No, before – that time no one could find you for a week. I thought: the river, and no two ways about it. But you turned up again, dry as a stick. I did tell you, didn’t I?

AEH   Tell me what? Oh … yes, you did tell me.

Chamberlain   Still, you probably wouldn’t have written the poems.

AEH   This is true.

Chamberlain   So it’s an ill wind from yon far country blows through holt and hanger.

AEH   If I might give you a piece of advice, Chamberlain, mangling a chap’s poems isn’t the way to show you’ve read them.

Chamberlain   I’m word perfect. ‘Oh were he and I together, shipmates on the fleeted main, sailing through the summer weather …’ What happened to Jackson?

AEH   He retired, settled in British Columbia, died of cancer.

Chamberlain   Well, early though the laurel grows, it withers quicker than the rose.

AEH   This is a revolting habit, Chamberlain – I forbid you.

Chamberlain   Oh, I like them, I really do. Holt and hanger. Cumber. Thews. Lovely old words. Never knew what they meant. But proper poetry, no question about that. You old slyboots. You must have been writing poetry all the time you were in Trade Marks.

AEH   Not so much. It was a couple of years after, something overcame me, at the beginning of ’95, a ferment. I wrote half the book in the first five months of that year, before I started to calm down. It was a time of strange excitement.

Chamberlain   The Oscar Wilde trials.

AEH   Oh, really, Chamberlain. You should take up biography.

Chamberlain   Yes, what about those ploughboys and village lads dropping like flies all over Shropshire? – those that didn’t take the Queen’s shilling and get shot in foreign parts.

AEH   The landscape of the imagination.

Chamberlain   ‘Because I liked you better than suits a man to say …’

AEH   Could you contain yourself?

Chamberlain  

Did you send them to Jackson, the ones you didn’t put in the book?

AEH   No.

Chamberlain   Saving them till you’re dead?

AEH   It’s a courtesy. Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending. Can you see the bonfires? It’s the old Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. I was a Victorian poet, don’t forget.

Katharine joins, aged thirty-five.
   Chamberlain stays.

Kate   From Clee to Heaven the beacon burns!

AEH   It was a grand sight. I counted fifty-two fires just to the south and west. Malvern had the biggest but it burned out in an hour.

Kate   The Clent fire is a good one. The boys are here.

AEH   Do I know them?

Kate   Your nephews, Alfred!

AEH   Oh, your boys, of course I know them.

Kate   And the Millingtons. Mrs M. says you’re no guide to Shropshire – she went to look at Hughley church and it doesn’t even have a steeple!, never mind a graveyard full of suicides.

AEH   That can surely be rectified. I never expected a two-and-six-penny book which couldn’t sell out an edition of 500 copies to draw pilgrims to Hughley. I was never there, I just liked the name.

Kate   Laurence thought he was the poet in the family, and now he knows your book by heart and recites his favourites. He met someone who told him A Shropshire Lad was his best yet.

AEH   I hope no one is attributing his poems to me.

Kate   It’s sweet of him to be proud.

AEH   It is, yes.

Kate   We’re all proud, and astonished. Clem said, ‘Alfred has a heart!’

AEH   No, not at all, I was depressed because of a sore throat which wouldn’t leave me. I might have gone on writing poems for years, but luckily I remembered a brand of lozenges and was cured.

Kate   A sore throat!?

AEH   (A) punishment for a disagreeable controversy in the journals. You were clever to be a dunce, Kate, before it found you out.

Kate   Oh – listen! – The larks think it’s daybreak.

AEH   Or the end of the world.

Kate   Oh, you! Same old Alfred. (She goes.)

AEH   But I intend to change. The day nurse will get the benefit of my transformation into ‘a character’, the wag of the Evelyn. I have been practising a popular style of lecture, as yet confused with memories of University College, but it’s based on noticing that there are students present. I shall cause a sensation by addressing a remark to my neighbour at dinner in Hall. I am trying to think of a remark. My reputation at Trinity is for censoriousness and misanthropy. Some people say it’s only shyness – impudent fools. Nevertheless, I am determined. Affability is only suffering the fools gladly, and Cambridge affords endless scope for this peculiar joy. I introduced crème brulée to Trinity, but if that isn’t enough I’ll talk to people. Do you still ride a bicycle?

Chamberlain   Yes, a Robertson. I know your brother Laurence. We belong to a sort of secret society, the Order of Chaeronea, like the Sacred Band of Thebes. Actually it’s more like a discussion group. We discuss what we should call ourselves. ‘Homosexuals’ has been suggested.

AEH   Homosexuals?

Chamberlain   We aren’t anything till there’s a word for it.

AEH   Homosexuals? Who is responsible for this barbarity?

Chamberlain   What’s wrong with it?

AEH   It’s half Greek and half Latin!

Chamberlain   That sounds about right.
   What happened to me, by the way?

AEH   How should I know? I suppose you became a sort of footnote. (listening) Listen!

The ‘Marseillaise’ is faintly heard.

Chamberlain   The ‘Marseillaise’. That’s unusual, isn’t it? – for the Queen’s Jubilee.

AEH   Oscar Wilde was in France, on the coast near Dieppe. I’d sent him my book when he came out of prison.

Darkness on Chamberlain.
   The faint sound of children singing the ‘Marseillaise’ is overtaken by Oscar Wilde’s strong fluting voice reciting.
   Wilde, aged forty-one, is reading aloud from his copy of A Shropshire Lad. He is drinking brandy, and smoking a cigarette.
   Around him is the debris of a Diamond Jubilee children’s party. There is bunting, Union Jacks and Tricolours, and the remains of a large decorated cake.

Wilde  

This is not one of the ones Robbie learned for me, but your poems, when I opened your parcel, were not all strangers.

AEH   To me, they’re importunate friends when they take the floor.

Wilde  

Poor, silly boy!

AEH   I read a report of the inquest in the Evening Standard.

Wilde   Oh, thank goodness! That explains why I never believed a word of it.

AEH   But it’s all true.

Wilde   On the contrary, it’s only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination.

AEH   I assure you. It was not long after your trial. He was a Woolwich cadet. He blew his brains out so that he wouldn’t live to shame himself, or bring shame on others. He left a letter for the coroner.

Wide   Of course he did, and you should have sent your poem to the coroner, too. Art deals with exceptions, not with types. Facts deal only with types. Here was the type of young man who shoots himself. He read about someone shooting himself in the Evening News, so he shot himself in the Evening Standard.

AEH   Oh, I say –!

Wilde  

Still, if he hadn’t shot himself before reading your poem, he would have shot himself after. I am not unfeeling. I dare say I would have wept if I’d read the newspaper. But that does not make a newspaper poetry. Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes. I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything. It is the truth about me. Shakespeare’s Dark Lady probably had bad breath – almost everybody did until my third year at Oxford – but sincerity is the enemy of art. This is what Pater taught me, and what Ruskin never learned. Ruskin made a vice out of virtue. Poor Pater might have made a virtue out of vice but, like your cadet, he lacked the courage to act. I breakfasted with Ruskin. Pater came to tea. The one impotent, the other terrified, they struggled for my artistic soul. But I caught syphilis from a prostitute, and the mercury cure blackened my teeth. Did we meet at Oxford?

AEH   No. We once had a poem in the same magazine. Mine was for my dead mother. Yours was about the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria.

Wilde   Oh, yes, I swore never to touch Turkish champagne, and eat only Bulgarian Delight. Do you eat cake? I invited fifteen children from the village to celebrate Jubilee Day. We toasted the Queen and the President of the Republic, and the children shouted, ‘Vive Monsieur Melmoth!’ I am Monsieur Melmoth. We had strawberries and chocolates and grenadine syrup, and the cake, and everyone received a present. It was one of my most successful parties. Did you come to any of my parties in London? No? But we must have had friends in common. Bernard Shaw? Frank Harris? Beardsley? Labouchere? Whistler? W. T. Stead? Did you know Henry Irving? Lily Langtry? No? The Prince of Wales? You did have friends?

AEH   I had colleagues.

Wilde   Once, I bought a huge armful of lilies in Covent Garden to give to Miss Langtry, and as I waited to put them in a cab, a small boy said to me, ‘Oh, how rich you are!’… ‘Oh, how rich you are!’ (He weeps.) Oh – forgive me. I’m somewhat the worse for – cake. I have tried to give it up, whenever I feel myself weakening I take a glass of cognac, often I don’t eat cake for days at a time; but the Jubilee broke my will, I allowed myself a social eclair out of politeness to my guests, and remember nothing more until I woke up in a welter of patisseries. Oh – Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can’t be helped. The betrayal of one’s friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. ‘Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy’s beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,’ and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made – the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.) You are kind to listen.

AEH   No. My life is marked by long silences. The first conjecture I ever published was on Horace. Six years later I withdrew it. Propertius I put aside nearly fifty years ago to wait for the discovery of a better manuscript, which seemed to me essential if there were the slightest hope of recovering the text. So far, silence. Meanwhile I defended the classical authors from the conjectures of idiots, and produced editions of books by Ovid, Juvenal and Lucan, and finally of Manilius, which I dedicated to my comrade Moses Jackson, and that will have to do, my sandcastle against the confounding sea. Classics apart, my life was not short enough for me to not do the things I wanted to not do, but they were few and the jackals will find it hard scavenging. I moved house four times, once, it was said, because a stranger spoke to me on my train to work. It wasn’t so, but it was the truth about me. In Diamond Jubilee year I went abroad for the first time.

Wilde   There’s my boatman. It was he who told me you were a Latin professor, but he’s profligate with titles and often confers professorships on quite unsuitable people – many of whom turn out to have chairs at our older universities.

AEH   I’m very sorry. Your life is a terrible thing. A chronological error. The choice was not always between renunciation and folly. You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song sung unto all posterity … and not now! – when disavowal and endurance are in honour, and a nameless luckless love has made notoriety your monument.

Wilde   My dear fellow, a hundred francs would have done just as well. Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness – sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your ‘honour’ is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. You are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? – think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin’s and Pater’s heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new – the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?

AEH   At home.

Wilde   Couldn’t you at least have got a New Tailor?
   Are we going together?

AEH   No. I will be coming later.

Wilde   You didn’t mention your poems. How can you be unhappy when you know you wrote them? They are all that will still matter.

The Boatman helps Wilde aboard.

But you are not my boatman! Sebastian Melmoth à votre service.

Boatman   Sit in the middle.

Wilde   Of course.

The Boatman poles Wilde away.
   Housman is sitting on the bench by the river with a couple of books.

AEH   What are you doing here, may I ask? Housman Classics, sir.

AEH   Ah.

Housman   My final year.

AEH   So am I, indeed for all practical purposes I’m dead. And how are you? (He picks up Housman’s book.)

Housman   I’m quite well, thank you, sir.

AEH   Propertius!

Housman   The first of the Roman love elegists. Actually, Propertius is not set for Finals. I should be cramming, everybody expects me to get a First, you see. My family, too. I’m the eldest and I’ve always been … a scholarship boy … I ought to put Propertius aside now, but we’re already all of us so late! – and there’s someone with his Propertius coming out next year, Postgate he’s called. Who knows how many of my conjectures he’ll anticipate?

AEH   Yes, who knows? Before you publish, by the way, the first of the Roman love elegists was not Propertius, strictly speaking. It was Cornelius Gallus.

Housman   Gallus?

AEH   Really and truly.

Housman   But I’ve not read him.

AEH   Nor I. Only one line of Gallus survived. The rest perished.

Housman   Oh!

AEH   But strictly speaking – which I do in my sleep – he was first.

Housman   One line for his monument!

AEH   Virgil wrote a poem for him: how much immortality does a man need? – his own poetry, all but a line, as if he had never been, but his memory alive in a garden in the northernmost province of an empire that disappeared fifteen hundred years ago. To do as much for a friend would be no small thing.

Housman   Yes. (Pause.) Was it a good line?

AEH   Quite suggestive, as it happens. I’m not sure about dead for love, though. He fought on the winning side against Antony and Cleopatra, and afterwards was put in charge of Egypt, which is not bad going for a poet. But he got above himself and was admonished by the Emperor: whereupon he killed himself. But by then he’d invented the love elegy.

Housman   Propertius mentions him. ‘And lately how many wounds has Gallus bathed in the waters of the Underworld, dead for love of beautiful Lycoris!’ Lately. Modo. Just recently. They were real people to each other, that’s the thing. They knew each other’s poems. They knew each other’s girls. Virgil puts it all in a Golden Age with pan-pipes and goatherds, and Apollo there in person – but you can trust it, that’s what I mean. Real people in real love, baring their souls in poetry that made their mistresses immortal! – and it all happened in such a short span. As if all the poetry till then had to pass through a bottleneck where a handful of poets were waiting to see what could be done with it. And then it was over, the love poem complete, love as it really is.

AEH   Oh, yes, there’d been songs … valentines – mostly in Greek, often charming … but the self-advertisement of farce and folly, love as abject slavery and all-out war – madness, disease, the whole catastrophe owned up to and written in the metre – no; that was new.

Housman   (Oh –!)

Jackson   (off-stage) Housman!

Pollard   (off-stage) Housman!

Housman   I’m sorry, they’re calling me.

Pollard   (off-stage) Hous! Picnic!

Jackson   (off-stage) Locusts! Honey!

Jackson and Pollard arrive in the boat.

Housman   (to the boat) I’m here.

AEH   Mo …!

Pollard   It’s time to go.

Housman goes to the boat and gets in.

AEH   I would have died for you but I never had the luck!

Housman   Where are we going?

Pollard   Hades.
   Pull on your right, Jackson.

Jackson   Do you want to take the oars?

Housman   Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

The boat goes.

AEH   ‘And they stretched out their hands in desire of the further shore.’ Cleverboots was usually good for a tag. Thus Virgil, Aeneas in the Underworld, the souls of the dead reaching out across the water ripae ulterioris amore, you couldn’t do better with a Kodak, and those who were unburied were made to wait a hundred years. I could wait a hundred if I had to. Seventy-seven go quick enough. Which is not to say I have remembered it right, messing about in a boat with Moses and dear old young Pollard on a summer’s day in ’79 or ’80 or ’81; but not impossible, not so out of court as to count as an untruth in the dream-warp of the ultimate room, though the dog is still in question. And yet not dreaming either, wide awake to all the risks – archaism, anachronism, the wayward inconsequence that only hindsight can acquit of non sequitur, quietus interruptus by monologue incontinent in the hind leg of a donkey class (you’re too kind but I’m not there yet), and the unities out of the window without so much as a window to be out of: still shaky, too, from that first plummet into bathos, Greek for depth but in rhetoric a ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace, as it might be from Virgil to Jerome K. Jerome if that is even a downward slope at time of speaking, and when is that? – for walking on water is not among my party tricks, the water and the walking work it out between them. Neither dead nor dreaming, then, but in between, not short on fact, or fiction, and suitably attired in leather boots, the very ones I was too clever for, which – here comes the fact – I left in my will to my college servant. They were too small for him but it’s the thought that counts, and here is one to be going on with: In December 1894 Jerome K. Jerome, the celebrated author of Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), made an attack on an Oxford magazine, The Chameleon – which, he wrote, appeared to be nothing more or less than an advocacy for indulgence in the cravings of an unnatural disease. It was, he said, a case for the police. Oscar Wilde had contributed a page or two of epigrams, to oblige an Oxford student he’d befriended, Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas himself had a poem – the one which ended ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name’. Jerome’s article goaded Douglas’s father into leaving a card at the Albermarle Club, ‘to Oscar Wilde, posing as a Sodomite’. From which all that followed, followed. Which goes to show, I know what I’m doing even when I don’t know I’m doing it, in the busy hours between the tucking up and the wakey-wakey thermometer faintly antiseptic under the tongue from its dainty gauze-stoppered vase on the bedside cabinet.

Light on Jackson, then Housman.

Jackson   What will become of you, Hous?

Housman  

Jackson   I never took to it, you know – all that veni, vidi, vici …

Housman   When thou art kind I spend the day like a god; when thy face is turned aside, it is very dark with me. I shall give thee wings. Thou shalt be a song sung unto posterity so long as earth and sun abide. And when thou comest to go down to the lamentable house of Hades, never – albeit thou be dead – shalt thou lose thy fame.

Darkness on Housman and Jackson.
   Dimly, Charon is seen poling Wilde across the Styx.

Wide   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.

AEH   Oxford in the Golden Age! – the hairshirts versus the Aesthetes: the neo-Christians versus the neo-pagans: the study of classics for advancement in the fair of the world versus the study of classics for the advancement of classical studies – what emotional storms, and oh what a tiny teacup. You should have been here last night when I did Hades properly – Furies, Harpies, Gorgons, and the snake-haired Medusa, to say nothing of the Dog. But now I really do have to go. How lucky to find myself standing on this empty shore, with the indifferent waters at my feet.

Fade out.