Here's That Rainy Day

Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams?
Funny, but here’s that rainy day.
Here’s that rainy day they told me about
And I laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way.
Where is that worn out wish that I threw aside
After it brought my love so near?
Funny, how love becomes a cold rainy day.
Funny, that rainy day is here.


Of all the days of the year that it had to choose from, a typhoon passed directly over my island on Christmas Eve – at 9 PM, no less. For two hours I listened to the approach and departure of one express train after another. At 11 PM it tapered off, with an occasional train swinging back to remind me of the storm’s power. I managed to drift off to a nervous night’s sleep after midnight, blowing out my candle and only using the battery-powered fibre-optic Christmas House that I bought in a fit of nostalgia 11 years ago as a much-needed nightlight.

A snowstorm would’ve been preferable. A snowstorm would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. Indeed, if it had been a powerful blizzard that dumped three feet of snow, with drifts burying cars, that paralyzed transport, cancelling flights and closing the airport, it would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. If the mayor told everyone to stay home, to not venture out, who needs to go anywhere on Christmas Day? And even if there were a power failure, as always happened whenever it snowed or sleeted in the South when I was a boy, it would call forth the image of a family huddled for warmth, perhaps before a blazing fireplace, sharing the priceless gift of being together.

Here, when the power fails, my electric fan stops working and, even at night, I begin to sweat. The only difference, now that I am acclimated, is that I no longer mind sweating as much as I once did. And early last Wednesday on Christmas morning, everyone ventured out to survey the devastation. Whole groves of banana trees had been felled; trees that had hung on to their branches were denuded of leaves. You could almost see a horizon. Houses you didn’t know were there appeared, missing their jungle cover. The sun was unobstructed and incredibly bright. The shade of the palm trees was no longer there. But if I showed you a picture, before and after the typhoon, you wouldn’t be able to see much difference. Natural disasters, that come in many guises in the Philippines, expose the fragile infrastructure to devastating damage. It seems at such times that the country is only held together with scotch tape and string.

I feel like I’ve blundered into the last stanza of Larkin’s “Here”:

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Since my arrival in these climes of tropical weather, I have seen my personal record of successive days living without electricity broken three times. (My original record was three or four days, established, if memory serves me right, in 1971, when an ice storm knocked out the power in Columbia, South Carolina.) Here on my island in 2008, a typhoon called Frank knocked out all the power for nine days. Then, in 2011, an earthquake left me without power for 14 days. And then, as a sort of culmination, typhoon Haiyan, called Yolanda here, took it away for thirty-seven days. It would be wise, I suppose, to learn to live without electricity, since its absence brings about so much – what else can I call it but suffering? But that would require the unlearning of a lifetime of habits with which I am unable part.

If I wanted to describe to you what it’s like to have power restored, for a bare lightbulb on the ceiling to suddenly come to life and shine through the darkness (oh, what darkness!), I might allude to the experience of a prisoner of war, tunneling his way toward freedom, and after interminable days of labor and subterfuge, always on the point of being caught and finding all of his labors go to waste, he climbs out of the hole to find that he is outside the wire, that he made it. Now the run to freedom begins in earnest.

So here it is - the last day of the year. If I bothered about auspices, this moment is most auspicious. Alas, the circumstances couldn’t be less auspicious. One of the most common superstitions among these people who live in the dark (and who seem to like it there) is when the palm of your left hand itches, it means money is coming. But you mustn’t scratch it, or the money won’t come. Just like living here – having an itch you can’t scratch. As much of a skeptic as I strive to be, I find myself annoyed by such folk ways. Yet whenever my left palm itches, I sometimes stop myself from scratching it. It reminds me of Primo Levi, who once found himself in a situation - in Auschwitz – in which he came close to renouncing atheism:

This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (The Drowned and the Saved)

I wouldn’t want my skepticism to be tested on the point of death. I don’t think I could be so resolute.

As for my resolutions, I hope to be wiser one year from today. If I can be richer, let my riches come in many forms. Out goes the bad old year. In comes the new.

Numerology

I turned 61 today - or yesterday. I live in the Far East, but my thoughts are somewhere in North America. A friend wished me a happy birthday and then said "come home". I will, I will. But first there's this rough patch to get through, this unnecessary detour. It's unavoidable, can't be helped. But for now, time to reflect on my progress.

Poets always put a patina on it, getting old, I mean. Like découpage. Two poets I have long admired talked about the common perceptions of age, without really feeling them in themselves. Thomas Hardy saw how his spirit, still willing, had to contend with his flesh, which had altered:

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’

For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

Hardy felt betrayed, by the changes in others and the changes in his physical appearance. But the incongruity of his still youthful passion against the image in his mirror was too much for him, too absurd to accept. Only one can be true, but which one?


Philip Larkin, who was a great admirer of Hardy, felt deeply the difference between his life and the lives of others; a disconnect between what was expected of his life and what his life had amounted to. Not by regret, but by the refusal of others, people he once knew, to imagine their own lives otherwise.

‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Ah, but Larkin was afraid of dying - not so much death as the moment when he would die. He anticipated it, just as Shakespeare had in Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

And Shakespeare died at 52! "Death is but the shifting wind that fills the living sail." I wrote these words when I was 20. How did I know it at 20? "The idea is to die young as late as possible," wrote the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. And Oscar Wilde's lovely line, "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." And poor Oscar was dead at 46!

I feel myself to be exactly the same at 61 as I was at 20 - as I was at 10! One's age is unimportant.

The Seventh Seal

Listening to some considerably lesser filmmakers than Ingmar Bergman ridicule his film The Seventh Seal has compelled me to look at it again. It was my very first Bergman film, which was shown at some parent/teacher meeting in 1972 or '73 when I was attending a Catholic school. A nun (most of my teachers were nuns, which only became a problem when we were instructed in sex education) had seen the film and had given in to its religious implications. As I learned later on, Bergman had been preoccupied with the ultimate question - the great WHY of existence - when he made the film, but he came up with the novel approach of addressing it directly rather than obliquely. Not long after he made it, however, he lost interest in the subject, even though it continued to appear in several of his subsequent films. But it was no longer a problem to be solved for him, but only a problem without ready-made solutions. (It is in this respect that I am one of those critics who found Wild Strawberries unsatisfying, since it confronts Isak Borg's imminent death momentarily, but loses its nerve, probably because Bergman loved Victor Sjöström too much to see through with his quietus. He is given an utterly unconvincing contented ending instead.)

However much Bergman may have moved on from the issues he confronts in The Seventh Seal, it is a stimulating confrontation. He didn't settle the matter, he simply let go of it. The argument (put forward by Alexander Payne in the documentary Trespassing Bergman) that the film somehow no longer "holds up" is preposterous. What he meant to say, of course, is that filmmakers no longer have the balls to confront such unwieldy subjects. Barry Levinson includes a scene in his masterpiece, Diner, in which two of his characters are in a Baltimore movie theater watching The Seventh Seal. When Death appears, Steve Guttenberg asks Tim Daly who that's supposed to be. "Death," Daly replies. "Oh, come on," Guttenberg says. "I've been to Atlantic City a thousand times and I never saw Death walking on the beach." "It's symbolic," Daly tells him.

But, of course, it's NOT symbolic at all. It isn't a symbol of Death in The Seventh Seal, walking on that stony beach, but Death personified. After the typically terse opening credits, a title appears that reads: It is the middle of the 14th century. Antonius Blok and his squire, after long years as crusaders in the Holy Land, have at last returned to their native Sweden, a land ravaged by the Black Plague.

We then hear a voiceover intoning lines from the New Testament's Book of Revelation, Chapter 8: "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. . . . And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound." The opening scene is justly famous, but it has contributed to an image of Bergman that he had to work long and hard to escape. At dawn, the knight and his squire are lying on a deserted beach. A figure dressed in black with a pale white face appears suddenly and startles the knight, who asks him "Who are you?" "I am Death," the man in black replies matter of factly.

Two scenes, early in the film, make Bergman's intentions explicit. Jof awakes in his wagon and tumbles out into the brilliant morning. As he practices juggling, he sees a woman and a baby walking alone together. Jof smiles ecstatically and rubs his eyes. But when he opens them again the woman and child are gone. He climbs back inside the wagon and wakes Mia, his wife.

JOF: Mia, wake up. Wake up! Mia, I've just seen something. I've got to tell you about it!
MIA: (sits up, terrified) What is it? What's happened?
JOF: Listen, I've had a vision. No, it wasn't a vision. It was real, absolutely real.
MIA: Oh, so you've had a vision again!
MIA's voice isfilled with gentle irony. JOF shakes his head and grabs her by the shoulders.
JOF: But I did see her!
MIA: Whom did you see?
JOF: The Virgin Mary.
MIA can't help being impressed by her husband's fervor. She lowers her voice.
MIA: Did you really see her?
JOF: She was so close to me that I could have touched her. She had a golden crown on her head and wore a blue gown with flowers of gold. She was barefoot and had small brown hands with which she was holding the Child and teaching Him to walk. And then she saw me watching her and she smiled at me. My eyes filled with tears and when I wiped them away, she had disappeared. And everything became so still in the sky and on the earth. Can you understand...
MIA: What an imagination you have.
JOF: You don't believe me! But it was real, I tell you, not the kind of reality you see every day, but a different kind.
MIA: Perhaps it was the kind of reality you told us about when you saw the Devil painting our wagon wheels red, using his tail as a brush.
JOF: (embarrassed) Why must you keep bringing that up?
MIA: And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails.
JOF: Well, perhaps that time I made it up. (eagerly) I did it just so that you would believe in my other visions. The real ones. The ones that I didn't make up.
MIA: (severely) You have to keep your visions under control. Otherwise people will think that you're a half-wit, which you're not. At least not yet as far as I know. But, come to think of it, I'm not so sure about that.
JOF: (angry) I didn't ask to have visions. I can't help it if voices speak to me, if the Holy Virgin appears before me and angels and devils like my company.

But Jof IS a fool - the kind whose truths are mistaken for jokes. The second scene that makes Bergman's intentions somewhat more explicit is in a church where Jons encounters a man painting inside.

To the right of the entrance there is a large fresco on the wall, not quite finished. Perched on a crude scaffolding is a PAINTER wearing a red cap and paint-stained clothes. He has one brush in his mouth, while with another in his hand he outlines a small, terrified human face amidst a sea of other faces.
JONS: What is this supposed to represent?
PAINTER: The Dance of Death.
JONS: And that one is Death?
PAINTER: Yes, he dances off with all of them.
JONS: Why do you paint such nonsense?
PAINTER: I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die.
JONS: Well, it's not going to make them feel any happier.
PAINTER: Why should one always make people happy? It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in awhile.
JONS: Then they'll close their eyes and refuse to look at your painting.
PAINTER: Oh, they'll look. A skull is almost more interesting than a naked woman.
JONS: If you do scare them...
PAINTER: They'll think.
JONS: And if they think...
PAINTER: They'll become still more scared.
JONS: And then they'll run right into the arms of the priests.
PAINTER: That's not my business.
JONS: You're only painting your Dance of Death.
PAINTER: I'm only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.
JONS: Just think how some people will curse you.
PAINTER: Maybe. But then I'll paint something amusing for them to look at. I have to make a living, at least until the plague takes me.

For all the talk about God and the Devil, Bergman made The Seventh Seal to directly confront his fear of death. There is a scene, shot in just one day, in which a procession of flagellants passes through a village, led by a half-crazed monk who screams at the gathering of townsfolk.

MONK: God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced!

The monk (impressively played by Anders Ek) never mentions salvation or damnation. Why bother, when Death is much more imposing and terrifying? It is as if Bergman himself stood on a stage and addressed us in the audience directly. "You back there with the swollen nose ..." If I were in the audience, perhaps I would suddenly feel self-conscious about my nose.

The film was made on a tight budget with the expert resources of Gunnar Fischer's utterly raw black-and-white imagery, P. A. Lundgren's inventively economic design, and Erik Nordgren's evocatively authentic-sounding music. Max von Sydow is imposing as Blok. Gunnar Björnstrand is marvelous as the skeptical squire, Jons. Nils Poppe probably got fed up with comparisons to Chaplin, but, for once, they are earned. Bibi Andersson is captivating as Mia. And there was no better Death than Bengt Ekerot.

I have mentioned before that fewer people are reading and being enthralled by Dante's The Divine Comedy because, since hardly anyone continues to believe in personal immortality, heaven and hell have ceased to be interesting to readers even as abstract concepts. But death continues to be a perplexing problem - a problem that needs to be faced, rather than solved. When Bergman wanted to address the problem, he refused to face it in the usual philosophical or metaphysical terms. Especially since film is - as it should be - so damned literal. People in films are given visions, but they never appear to us the way they appear to the character in the film - as visions. Some special photographic or lighting effect may give them a strangeness that signals to us that what we are seeing, through the character's eyes, isn't supposed to be taken literally. When Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw, he clearly wanted the reader to continually wonder if the ghosts that the children's governess sees are genuine ghosts or simply figments of her - presumably sexually - overheated imagination.

But in The Seventh Seal Bergman wanted to treat his subject in an utterly unambiguous, head-on manner. So why do so many responsible people respond to the film the same way Steve Guttenberg did in Barry Levinson's Diner? Could it be because they're made uncomfortable by it? Sneering at the film doesn't diminish its power or invalidate its argument. As Philip Larkin wrote,

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
("Aubade")

I think Larkin (and Bergman) would be incredulous of anyone who claimed that they weren't afraid of death. I think they would both have laughed at Woody Allen's line, "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be around when it happens."

Running to Ruin

This week I was reading a conversation in Forbes with Rupert Everett about Oscar Wilde. Everett has just directed and stars in The Happy Prince, a film that concentrates on Wilde's last three years.

Why did you want to make a film focused on the final, tragic years of Oscar Wilde's life?

Oscar Wilde had an appointment with the gutter from very early on. Self-destruction always seems like something made up for books, because you can't really imagine why we deliberately ruin things for ourselves. But it does happen and he had it very strongly. As he himself said, "why does one run towards ruin?" He was a big star, the most famous man in London, the life and soul of the Café Royal. And it's fascinating to me, how big stars become blind ... I wanted to create the impression that it happens to us all at some point — we do something so wrong that the universe freezes around us and the whole world watches in horror as you make this move you won't ever be able to retrieve yourself from.(1)

I'm not sure specifically what Everett meant that Wilde had done wrong that made the universe recoil in horror. Was it his open homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, his decision to sue Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, that Marquess of Queensberry) for libel when he called Wilde a "sodomite", or was it Wilde's refusal, after his libel case collapsed and he was going to be charged with sodomy (illegal in 1897), to flee to safety in France?

In any case, Wilde was tried and eventually found guilty. The judge sentenced him (with extreme prejudice) to the maximum penalty allowed by law: two years in prison at hard labor. So, the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, who had been the toast of London literary society just weeks before, was escorted first to Newgate Prison and then to Reading Gaol to serve out his sentence. At last permitted books and paper, he wrote a 50,000 word letter to Lord Alfred, which was published in expurgated form in England as De Profundis, and the long poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

On his release, Wilde finally went to live in France (two years too late) under an assumed name. Reading the conclusion of Richard Ellmann's magnificent biography of Wilde, he relates that at the end of November 1900, Wilde was stricken with what was then called meningitis and died. Ellmann speculated that he could possibly have died from tertiary syphilis - a disease he contracted at Oxford from a (female) prostitute. Those present at the moment of his death reported that an extremely noxious smelling black liquid oozed from all of his orafices.


But I go back to the words of Rupert Everett: that Wilde had destroyed himself, that he had been running toward ruin for some time when ruin descended on him. Someone close to me recently told me something in an email that filled me with apoplectic indignation. I get that way whenever someone accuses me of doing something that I didn't do. Something to do with my seeming to make the same great mistake in my life in 2007 that I made in 1995 - by leaving the Navy in 1995 and coming straight to the Philippines (to be married) only to realize within a month that I had made a huge mistake and I needed help getting myself back home to the States. Then, 12 years later, divorced, I did it again - leaving my sister's house in Alaska and coming back to the Philippines, only to (within weeks) realize I had made a huge mistake a second time - though under entirely different circumstances. This person close to me admitted that if they had helped me in 1995 to get myself out of the mess I'd made, they would be reluctant to help me again. So, I'm the boy who cried wolf.

In Proverbs, it says, As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. But I have often said, after the fact of course when it was too obvious to overlook, that I am my own fool and I will make my own folly. My own folly. My sister liked to say that she didn't "suffer fools," as in another Proverb: Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him./Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. This meant that, especially towards the unexpected end of her life, my sister managed to drive some friends and potential friends away from her.

But Blake said that if the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man. And I have persisted. But have I become wise? Yes, but after the event. Giacomo Casanova, writing his memoirs in his old age, concluded that the wisdom that age had brought him had stolen his youth into the bargain. What good was wisdom when it came too late?

I have paid for my latest mistake by being exiled to an island in a foreign country for 10 years of my life. Not at hard labor. But I have grown old, which is immeasurably harder than Reading Gaol's treadmill. "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." So wrote Oscar Wilde, who didn't live long enough to see old age. I haven't had a medical examination since I was 49. I am losing all of my teeth. And an as yet undisclosed portion of the small government pension upon which I have depended all these years is about to be taken away from me.

The Greeks believed in the Furies, a divine force that intervenes at the moment in our lives when we somehow make up our minds that the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to us, transgressing laws that we never suspected were written down somewhere. Are our own lives not our own property, to do with as we see fit? I am learning that they are not.

44 years ago, Philip Larkin had this to say about "A Life With a Hole In It":

When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your own way
A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) . . .

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get.  Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly.  Years.



One of my all-time favorite movie lines occurs in Cutter's Way, in which the late John Heard, who plays a disabled Vietnam vet, looks into his alcoholic wife's eyes and says, "Some day in Tahiti we'll look back on all this and laugh." At this stage, and for quite some time now, I would settle for Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Secaucus, New Jersey - anywhere in the Contiguous United States from which to look back on this and laugh. Some day.


(1) Forbes, "Drinking Absinthe With Rupert Everett (And Talking About Oscar Wilde)" by Adam Morganstern, October 15, 2018.

Larkin, Eagleton and the Old Fools

Terry Eagleton is a Lancaster University professor of English literature. He is also an outspoken socialist. Normally, this shouldn't make any difference. George Saintsbury was the kind of extreme Tory that doesn't exist today, or not openly. World events since the Victorian Age, and developments in the arts and literature, have made such a world view as Saintsbury possessed indefensible. Yet Saintsbury's literary criticism is still valuable because he never allowed his political prejudices to interfere with his aesthetic values.

Using the words "aesthetic values" will immediately have some people reaching for their pistols. But Terry Eagleton, unlike Saintsbury, refuses to check his politics at the library door. Eagleton seems to view all literature as divisible between progressive and reactionary tracts. Since the death of Harold Pinter, he sees contemporary literature as having acquiesced to the perceptible shift in British politics to the Right. But he has always been disinclined to accept the established view of literary legacies. In 1993, he appeared on the BBC Four programme Without Walls to present his J'accuse against the poet Philip Larkin:

"It was Philip Larkin who wrote,

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

A verse that was supposed to have opened up a Brave New Era in modern poetry. But rarely, in my view, have we been more thoroughly duped. The truth is that it's Larkin who 'fucked up' his readers by seducing them into his own dingy world of boredom, self-pity, and disgust."

And so on the programme goes - an extreme exception to the common reception of Larkin - for another 25 minutes. Eagleton called in a number of people, including some of Larkin's closest friends, to confirm what we already know: that Larkin was a miserable specimen of a man, smugly conservative, exactingly selfish in his affairs with women, a bigoted racist, an avid collector of bondage pornography, who entertained pedaephilic fantasies.

But he was also self-loathing in the extreme. He clearly saw his own shortcomings as a human being and in his poetry regretted them some of the time but also sometimes celebrated them. I can think of few poets who had a more thorough and devastating self-awareness. But he made his weaknesses and shortcomings into strengths by making them into a central theme. It isn't exactly his own voice speaking in "A Study of Reading Habits," but it might as well be:

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar.  Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

(20 August 1960)
           
Exactly where did all that reading get him? And where did all the renown as a poet get him? Left alone with himself, as we all are at the end of the day, he wondered if any of it was worth it. What good was the fame (he was offered, but declined the Poet Laureate title), or the money, when it couldn't improve his looks, his goodness, his worthiness of love and happiness? Those things were for others, not for Larkin. What else could he write about, if not himself? Written in 1954 but not published until 1973, "Continuing to Live" stands alone, like a summation:

Continuing to live - that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
 
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
 
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
 
And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
 
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
 
(24 April 1954/A Keepsake for the New Library, 1973)


For Eagleton, the truth that Larkin knew about himself must be rejected because it is not universal. Eagleton is a theoretic critic (as opposed to the non-ideological "belles lettrists"), and he is justifiably defensive about it: "To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem." Of course, if all we have to go on is what is "on the page," academics and critics would have no function outside of simply explaining to us what we have just read. So we are presented with all the salacious stories about a writer's life, his or her sexuality, politics, tastes. Last month I asked, apropos of V. S. Naipaul, if a writer's personal life should have anything to do with our evaluation of his writing. The private Naipaul was a considerably nastier specimen than Larkin, yet his fiction is outstandingly good.

Nobody said you have to like Larkin or, for that matter, any important writer. Plenty of people never liked Shakespeare, and said so in no uncertain terms. One of the people who didn't like Shakespeare and was appalled by his continuing reputation as a great playwright and poet was Leo Tolstoy. When he finally had had enough, Tolstoy wrote a diatribe against him in 1903.(1) All his life, Tolstoy confesses, he had read Shakespeare, first in Russian and German translation and later in English, but he had never been able to agree with the common conclusion about his greatness. Finally, in old age, he could take it no more, so he wrote his pamphlet, which has not, as far as I can tell, changed anyone's mind. It is almost like the book, written in the 1960s by a Swede who would not otherwise be remembered, called Anne Frank's Diary: A Hoax, that tried to convince people that Anne Frank and the Holocaust that consumed her was a scurrilous invention and a slander on the German people.

Terry Eagleton has probably read but hasn't learned from George Orwell's essay, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool." Orwell used the Tolstoy pamphlet twice, once in 1941 and again in 1947, as illustrations of "the frontiers of art and propaganda." Orwell was, like Terry Eagleton, a socialist. But he scrupulously rejected orthodoxy, especially when it interfered with judgement. Orwell was aware that every æsthetic preference "is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-æsthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug."(2)

All art is propaganda, Orwell claimed. But he also insisted that not all propaganda is art. "Æsthetic scrupulousness is not enough, but political rectitude is not enough either."(3) "Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or play or poem or what-not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning - a residuum of something we can only call art."(4)

Orwell had in mind the Marxist critics who were his contemporaries, like Edward Upward. But he could have had Terry Eagleton in mind when he wrote:

"It is strange how invariably his æsthetic judgements coincide with his political ones. . . The basic trouble with all orthodox Marxists is that, posessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads."(5)

After parading a selection of witnesses for the prosecution, Eagleton concludes his video essay in the same tone with which he began:

"Defeatist, lugubrious, mean-spirited, implacably negative - in Philip Larkin, post-imperial Britain got the poetic talent it deserved. The Less Deceived, or, one might translate, No Flies on Philip, is the title of one of Larkin's early volumes, though few poets have been more deceptive. His poetry makes a virtue out of incapacity, and the ultimate value is just to live hopelessly, in solitude, without self-deception. Of course, you might claim the poet has a right to his or her misery. It's a way of seeing, after all. But Larkin made a career out of being a miserable old so-and-so who raised boredom, emptiness and futility to a fine art. He was a death-obsessed, emotionally retarded misanthropist who had the impudence to generalise his own fears and failings to The Way Things Are. And in the process he trapped his readers with him in a state of permanent casualty."

Eagleton has the ability to tell us everything he thinks is wrong about Larkin except why so many people continue to read - and enjoy - his poetry. By targeting his readers, Eagleton does manage to explain the origin of his distaste for Larkin. I think the reason Larkin is so widely read is because he writes poetry that avoids being deceptive, difficult, and diffuse. His language is the everyday, yet he often addresses subjects that are immense. Take this "death-obsessed" poem, "The Old Fools," as a prime example. Larkin doesn't avert his - or his readers' - eyes from the terror that awaits us all:

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taking breath, and them crouching below
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
 
(12 January 1973)


The points that Eagleton makes against Larkin are actually the very qualities that make him great, however negative they may seem. As Orwell wrote in closing his answer to Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare:

"There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible. And if this test is valid, I think the verdict in Shakespeare's case must be 'not guilty'. Like every other writer, Shakespeare will be forgotten sooner or later, but it is unlikely that a heavier indictment will ever be brought against him. Tolstoy was perhaps the most admired literary man of his age, and he was certainly not its least able pamphleteer. He turned all his powers of denunciation against Shakespeare, like all the guns of a battleship roaring simultaneously. And with what result? Forty years later, Shakespeare is still there, completely unaffected, and of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which hardly anyone has read, and which would be forgotten altogether if Tolstoy had not also been the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina."(6)


(1) "Shakespeare and the Drama," published along with another pamphlet, "Shakespeare and the Working Classes" by Ernest Crosby.
(2) "Charles Dickens," 11 March 1940.
(3) "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," The Listener, 29 May 1941.
(4) "Tolstoy and Shakespeare," The Listener, 4 June 1941.
(5) Review of The Novel To-Day by Philip Henderson, New English Weekly, 31 December 1936.
(6) "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic, 7 March 1947.

Six Poets: Philip Larkin

The qualities that distinguish the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) - accessibility both formal and syntactical, traditional meter and rhyme - practically guaranteed two things: popularity with a public, most of whom never liked poetry (or never read it), and a difficult relationship with literary critics and scholars, many of whom equate accessibility with a lack of discipline and rigor. The facility with which the average reader can enter a Larkin poem in no way makes it easy to maneuver within the poem and find everything of value there. It is precisely the kind of problem faced by Robert Frost and by those who find greatness in some of his poetry. Frost was long thought to be an unofficial Poet Laureate. Larkin was actually offered the post when John Betjeman died, but turned it down.

Most great poets restrict themselves to certain subjects that become their métier. With Larkin they were solitude and non-conformity (both as sources of sorrow and strength), life as ultimately disappointing, the unfair tradeoff of youth for wisdom, the inability to find fulfillment in women or in love. I think of "Reasons for Attendance":

The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative,
Draws me a moment to the lighted glass
To watch the dancers - all under twenty-five -
Shifting intently, face to flushed face,
Solemnly on the beat of happiness.

- Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat,
The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here?
But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what
Is sex? Surely, to think the lion's share
Of happiness is found by couples' sheer

Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned.
What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like) whose individual sound
Insists I too am individual.
It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well,

But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. Therefore I stay outside,
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.

30 December 1953


But Larkin occasionally tackled subjects that were otherwise outside his purview, like the long tour de force, "Show Saturday," "Faith Healing," or poems that are uncharacteristic of him, like "The Trees," "First Sight" the late poem "The Mower," or "An Arundel Tomb," with its most incongruous (for Larkin) last line, "What will survive of us is love." Really? Many another Larkin poem would beg to differ.

I think most would agree on what I think are his best poems, "Church Going," "The Whitsun Weddings," "Dockery and Son," "The Old Fools," and "Aubade."

Larkin simply wasn't difficult - or difficult enough - to impress the "new" critics who happened along in the Sixties just when he was hitting his stride. His problem was similar to Frost's, although Larkin didn't live long enough to become a parody of himself. As Randall Jarrell said of the late Frost collection, Steeple Bush: 

"Steeple Bush" is no book to convert intellectuals to Frost. Yet the ordinary "highbrow" reader is making a far greater mistake when he neglects Frost as commonplace, than the academic reader makes when he apotheosizes him, often on the basis of his most complacent or sentimental poems.

After Larkin's death, a one time friend, Andrew Motion, published a biography of Larkin that made his detractors hate him even more and gave them a completely unjustified sense of vindication: it turned out that Larkin was a frightful Tory, held racist and sexist views, and had a definite taste for bondage pornography. No wonder his poetry was liked by so many! 

What made matters worse was how succinctly and beautifully Larkin defended his own poetic practice:

"It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all."

The most remarkable thing about Larkin today is that, though it has been 33 years since his death, and his Collected Poems has been compiled and published, new poems continue to be discovered and authenticated. One such, called "Unfinished Poem," was left in typescript at his death:

I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.

That was a way to live—newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!

For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thought was my whole care,
Yet down among the sunlit courts, yes, he was there,

Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.

So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind

With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black—so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he'd keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;

And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.

Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor

Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dipped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold

Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?


I'm not sure why this was left unfinished or called "Unifinished Poem." It reads as a complete poetic statement. Perhaps Finis (The End) was intended?

The Poet of Unhappiness

I read somewhere that A. E. Housman, Oxford scholar and author of the stubbornly popular poem cycle A Shropshire Lad, was a pallbearer at the funeral of Thomas Hardy. While there is plenty of reason why Housman should be a prominent player in the ceremony, I wonder if the anecdote is apocryphal, since Housman was 68 when Hardy died, and Oxford dons aren't known for their physical fitness.

It is now 82 years since Housman's death, since his being eulogized as the greatest elegist since Gray, and since the inevitable reaction against such fulsome praise - Cyril Connolly's critical attack on his poetry, Edmund Wilson's devastating demolition of his character (based on his life's work as a scholar of Latin), and a poem by W. H. Auden (which he later suppressed):

A.E.Housman

No one, not even Cambridge was to blame 
(Blame if you like the human situation): 
Heart-injured in North London, he became 
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, 
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer; 
Food was his public love, his private lust 
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions 
He timidly attacked the life he led, 
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead, 
Where only geographical divisions 
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.(1)

Connolly may have provided a much-needed correction of Housman's overblown reputation ["(in A Shropshire Lad) the word 'lad' (one of the most vapid in the language) occurs sixty-seven times in sixty-three poems"], and Wilson, who only wanted to discover something new about Housman, gave us a window through which Housman's extreme professional jealousy - or zealotry - became clear. As for Auden, who perhaps might have been relied on to express some sympathy for Housman's extreme emotional limitations, the great wall he built around his love's grave, he knew well enough by then (1936) that real poetry could never enjoy as much popularity as A Shropshire Lad enjoyed. There must have been another reason for Housman's fame.

What was it? In his essay, "Inside the Whale," George Orwell noted that "Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born around 1900?" Orwell identified the deep nostalgia of a newly urbanized people for "country matters" and for rustic folk in much closer contact with the elements and the elemental nature of life.

But he also noticed that "all his themes are adolescent - murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple, intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the 'bedrock facts' of life." The power of Housman's poetry derives from its severe limitations. No matter where you open a volume of his poems, whether it's A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems (1922), or indeed the posthumous More Poems (1936) and Collected Poems (1939), "It is all more or less in the same tune." 

Edmund Wilson got more personal. Limiting his analysis to Housman's classical scholarship, whose life's work was the editing and annotating of the extant works of Manilius, the Astronomicon in five volumes, a Roman author whom Housman himself believed was, according to his colleague and earliest biographer A. S. F. Gow, "a facile and frivolous poet",(2) Wilson concluded that "It was a queer destiny, and one that cramped him - if one should not say rather that he had cramped himself.... There is an element of perversity, of self-mortification, in Housman's career all along.... Housman is closed from the beginning. His world has no opening horizons; it is a prison that one can only endure. One can only come the same painful cropper over and over again and draw from it the same bitter moral.... And Housman has managed to grow old without in a sense ever knowing maturity." Grouping him with the "monastic order of English acetics, Walter Pater and Lewis Carroll, Wilson comes closest to Housman's problem without actually naming it: "Alice and the Shropshire Lad and Marius the Epucurean are all beings of a looking-glass world, either sexless or with an unreal sex which turns only toward itself in the mirror of art."

Yet Wilson was moved sufficiently by Housman's fate to write a paragraph that glows with brilliant insight and emotion:

"It is only in the Latin verses - said to have been called by Murray the best since the ancient world - which Housman prefixed to his Manilius, in his few translations from Latin and Greek, and in his occasional literary essays, that the voice of the Shropshire Lad comes through - that voice which, once sped on its way, so quickly pierced the hearts and the minds of the whole English-speaking world and which went in vibrating for decades, disburdening hearts with its music that made loss and death and disgrace seem so beautiful, while poor Housman, burdened sorely forever, sat grinding and snarling at his texts. Would he have called back that voice if he could, as he recalled, or tried to recall, so much else? There are moments when his ill humour and his pedantry, his humility which is a perverse kind of pride, almost makes us think that he would."(3)

All of this suggests that Housman as a poet is a "special case" and undeserving of his fame. But, as Orwell suggested, "There is no need to under-rate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago. Although one gets into trouble nowadays for saying so, there are a number of his poems ('Into my heart an air that kills', for instance, and 'Is my team ploughing?') that are not likely to remain long out of favour." Within his limits, Housman remains a fine - minor - poet.

I'm not sure if close textual analyses as that commonly practiced today would have disclosed the nature of Housman's great "fault" or if it could've been inferred from certain individual poems. A. E. Housman's brother Laurence was entrusted by him with his literary remains, among which was a diary that he'd kept when he was a student at Oxford in 1888-1891. Out of fear, perhaps, that it would tarnish his brother's reputation (which he had so scrupulously cultivated), in a move that now seems incredibly - almost calculatedly - prescient, in 1942 Laurence Housman handed a sealed packet containing the diary along with a 20-page essay in Laurence's handwriting titled "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicitia'", over "to Trustees of the British Museum with the stipulation that it was to remain unopened for twenty-five years."(4) True to the terms of their trusteeship, the packet was unsealed in 1967 and its contents turned over to Jonathan Cape, Housman's publisher. Laurence Housman's essay was published in the magazine Encounter. 

Laurence Housman's essay explicitly discusses A. E.'s feelings for a man, a Canadian, named Moses Jackson,[see photo] whom he had first met at Oxford in 1877 at the age of eighteen. They became close friends and remained so even after leaving Oxford and working in the Patent Office together until 1887. But A. E. had fallen in love with Jackson, a love that Jackson could neither accept nor return. "Around 1885," according to Laurence, A. E. and Jackson had a falling out and A. E. went what we would call "off the radar" for an entire week. No explanation was made for the disappearance, and it was never mentioned again. Jackson departed England to work in India at the end of 1887. In his diary of the period, A. E. tracks the progress of Jackson's ship all the way to its destination. Jackson didn't return to England until October 1889. His purpose for returning wasn't divulged to A. E. until afterward, when he was informed that Jackson had been married. Jackson and his bride departed for India without A. E. ever meeting him. They met for the last time on May 22, 1891. 

A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896. Although Housman continued to write poems, it wasn't until 1922, when he learned that Moses Jackson was dying in British Columbia that he submitted Last Poems for publication and he inscribed a copy and had it sent to Jackson's family. Jackson died the following year. However much Housman's sexuality was a secret to the general public, some of his poems that had something closer to autobiographical content suggested as much on close reading. Housman left these poems for his brother to publish after his death.

Et ce fût tout. Moses Jackson doesn't explain Housman's sad life, but Philip Larkin, who called Housman "the poet of unhappiness," said of him that "no one else has reiterated his single message so plangently." Reviewing a biography of Housman in 1979,(5) Larkin  closes with a curious paragraph:

“To be more unhappy than unfortunate suggests some jamming of the emotions whereby they are forced to re-enact the same situation even though it no longer exists, but for Housman it did still exist. If unhappiness was the key to poetry , the key to unhappiness was Moses Jackson. It would be tempting to call this neurosis, but there is a shorter word. For as Housman himself said, anyone who thinks he has loved more than one person has simply never really loved at all.”

Larkin was probably telling more about himself than he wished to, but he was saying what he knew about love, and at a point in his life (only a few years before his own death) when he was certain that it was true.


(1) Ironically, what is today probably Auden's most popular poem, "Stop all the clocks," is quite Housmanesque.
(2) Laurence Housman included in Additional Poems, an inscription "written by A.E.H on the flyleaf of a copy of Manilius, Book I, which he gave to Walter Headlam":

Here are the skies, the planets seven,
And all the starry train;
Content you with the mimic heaven,
And on the earth remain.
(3) Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (London: John Lehman, 1952).
(4) Sixteen days after the publication of Laurence Housman's essay, on July 27, 1967, homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain under the Sexual Offences Act .
(5) Richard Perceval Graves, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (London: Oxford University Press, 1979).