|
If wit and elegance are in short supply in contemporary literature (and
they seem to be), they are everywhere apparent in these two recent plays
by Tom Stoppard. What makes these characteristics most welcome, perhaps,
is that they are specifically aesthetic, as the act of writing ought to
be. The creation of rounded believable characters, for example, reveals
an author to be psychologically adept, although his writing as writing
may be simplistic and cliched. A well-constructed, intriguing plot, by
the same token, displays an author's architectural skills, but he need
not be any better, as a literary technician, than John Grisham.
Arcadia and The Invention of Love exhibit a sure hand at
characterization and plot, but it is their literary skill--Stoppard's
way with the language--that begs us to consider them as literature
rather than "mere" entertainment.
 Arcadia, to be sure, is a far more successful work than its
successor, a fact owing primarily not to any lapse in Stoppard's ability
as a writer of fine lines in Invention, but rather to his decision in
Invention to focus on an "issue." Invention, that is to say, often
descends from literature to polemic, leaving the reader (and audience
member, I presume) with the feeling that he is being ensnared both by the
character Housman's delightful dialogue and by the playwright Stoppard's
concern with "the homosexual question." Though Arcadia likewise
assumes a stance--the skewering of literary scholars and academicians--
it does so via the momentum of the plot and the believable conversation
of the characters. I never felt, while reading it, that its characters
were mouthpieces for Stoppard. Invention tends, on the other hand, to
"set up" the situations necessary to an examination of Housman's
"predicament" as a homosexual man in Victorian England.
Was Housman a homosexual? Is his homosexuality an established
fact or a literary commonplace? Did he leave the university in disgrace
because he was inadequately prepared for his exams, or was the exam
failure a "cover" for expulsion due to homosexual activity? I don't
know, and I don't know that anyone else does. Stoppard's play assumes
the homosexuality--which is fine since a play is, by definition, a
fiction. But in "dealing with the issue," Stoppard ought not to use it
to preach to his audience.
In one essential scene, Stoppard presents the crucial point at
which Moses Jackson (whom Housman presumably loved) addresses the
question. Moses tells Housman that his [Jackson's] fiancee has said that
Housman is "sweet" on him. Moses finds the idea ludicrous, though (or
because) he and Housman have been friends for years, and even roommates.
But Housman takes this opportunity to admit that Rosa is correct--and
his admission comes by way of a discussion of the ancient Greek
partnership of loving heroes. In this scene Stoppard's touch is deft and
convincing--the dialogue flows as we can believe it might have. And, as
the nineteenth century seems to have been a time of intense same-sex
friendship, we can believe both Moses's failure to realize the depth (or
direction) of Housman's feelings and Housman's need, finally, to express
them. But in other scenes, the topic seems to be trotted out for our
edification, and I can only assume that Stoppard intends us to have one
of two reactions: if we are homophobic, we are to realize that our
feelings are as misplaced as were those of the late Victorians; if we are
not homophobic, then we can laugh at the backwardness of the characters.
I don't want, however, to indicate that Invention deals with
nothing but "Greek love." In fact many of the play's felicities are
rooted in Housman's classical scholarship and legendary reticence and
acerbity. In the opening scene, for example, as Charon ferries Housman
over the River Styx, Housman launches into a diatribe about the failings
of Oxford's classical scholars. If such a diatribe sounds deadly dull,
it is not. "There are places in Jebb's Sophocles," Housman says, "where
the responsibility for reading the metre seems to have been handed over
to the Gas, Light and Coke Company."
A clever line, which might not kick in, especially for a
playgoer, until several other lines have passed. But Charon responds,
"Could you keep quiet for a bit?"
"Yes, I expect so," Housman says. "My life was marked by long
silences."
And so it was. From the beginning, just after Housman's death,
the play moves fluidly back and forth through his life, even allowing the
dead Housman to encounter his earlier, University student self.
Arcadia too plays with time, though in a more orderly fashion. Until
the final scene, in which the present and the early nineteenth century
flow through one another, the scenes alternate between past and present.
Stoppard juggles several balls in the plot of Arcadia without
letting any of them drop. These include Fermat's theorem, fractal
geometry, scholastic careerism, and the knowledge inevitably lost to
time, even a time as recent as 1809. The central characters of the
Romantic period are a teenaged noble girl, quite possibly a mathematical
genius, and her twenty-something tutor. The non-intellectual subjects
which dart in and out of and around their relationship at the play's core
are the various sexual liaisons going on at the manor, the reformation of
the manor grounds into a "Romantic" [or Gothic] style, and the literary
activity of an invented poet named Ezra Chater. These themes are all
reflected in the activity of the contemporary characters, three of whom
belong to the same noble family as the teenaged genius. Thus Stoppard
presents us with a scholar of gardens and landscapes who is studying the
manor grounds; the family's heir, a graduate student, whose research into
the fluctuation of grouse populations (as indicated by the family's
centuries-old hunting logs) mirrors the work of his long-dead cousin; and
a literary academic, convinced that Lord Byron spent a few days at the
manor before leaving for Europe. These quite disparate elements--though
all involve, in some way, the search for knowledge--tangle in and out of
one another breathlessly, as Stoppard's biting and incisive dialogue
hurtles the action forward.
The play begins with the 13-year-old Thomasina, in 1809, asking
her tutor, "Septimus, what is carnal embrace?" Septimus replies, "Carnal
embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef."
But the tutor's attempt to keep his charge "innocent" fails when she
reveals to him her reason for asking: she has overheard one of the
servants talking about Mrs. Chater (the poet's wife) who "was discovered
in carnal embrace in the gazebo." As Septimus prods for more detail, we
begin to suspect that his curiosity to learn how widely the knowledge of
this carnal embrace has spread is because Mrs. Chater's partner was
Septimus himself.
Finally Thomasina confronts her tutor. "I think you have not
been candid with me, Septimus. A gazebo is not, after all, a larder."
The tutor's response? "I never said my definition was complete." But in
the playing out of the consequences of his infraction with Mrs. Chater
and of the poet's demand for "satisfaction," events complicate
themselves. Pieces of "evidence" are left in a copy of the poet's book,
and Byron's presence at the manor is confirmed by the hunting logs, but
the rest of the situation is "lost" to time. Thus, in the present, the
academic Bernard Nightingale can use the evidence which has survived,
along with a linguistic analysis of unsigned contemporaneous reviews of
Chater's work, to conclude that Byron wrote the reviews attacking Chater,
"compromised" Chater's wife, and killed Chater in a duel.
In the meantime the ties between past and present begin to seem
more like knots. Thomasina may have indeed solved Fermat's theorem and
"visioned" fractal geometry long before it was technologically possible
to do so, as the grouse researcher discovers. The nineteenth-century
"hermit" who lived in the Romanticized ground's quaint hermit's hut seems
to have been Septimus, who spent most of his adult life working out the
implications of Thomasina's math, by hand, on paper, after the girl's
death in a manor fire. The intellectual ferment contained within the
play's treatment of these topics is delightful, especially as it is all
developed through the eminently "British" tone of the dialogue. And lest
we question too closely whether actual human beings can be witty with
such regularity, we do well to remember that virtually every character
is, if not a genius, still certainly among the intellectual elite of
England.
That 100-page plays can offer more intellectual content and more
honestly and fully developed characters than most 300-page novels is a
testimony to the elevated level at which Stoppard writes and an
indictment of the bloated flaccidity of most fiction. That such plays
should come resplendent as well with the sly humor that Stoppard displays
almost constantly is a gift beyond the asking--and yet it has been given
to us.
|
