A professional comedian’s desolate vision of hell
Since homosexuals were ‘liberated’ in 1967, formed a lobby (some would say the most powerful in the country) and became publicly aggressive and demanding, they have forfeited our sympathy. But it is well to remember the sadness of their lives. Tom Stoppard has drawn attention to newly discovered letters by A.E. Housman, one in particular showing that he was for many years deeply in love with a man who led a normal married life with children and was probably wholly unaware of the profundity and lifelong duration of Housman’s affection. Here indeed was a love that dared not speak its name. The letter in which Housman revealed his obsessive love is characteristically succinct, reporting the death of the loved one in a Canadian hospital, and adding, ‘Now I can tell myself I could not have borne to leave him behind me in a world where anything might happen to him.’ Housman was not only a considerable poet but a great letter-writer too, to judge by the examples printed in the Penguin volume, Collected Poems and Selected Prose. All his letters are short and to the point, laconic, with every word carefully considered and made to pull its full weight. They are in turn businesslike, scornful, venomous, self-critical, witty and crushing. To get one must have been a literary and sometimes a shocking event in the life of recipients. Housman was particularly hard on anyone trying to include his verse in anthologies. One such was A.J.A. Symons when he was compiling A Book of Nineties Verse. Housman wrote to his publisher Grant Richards, ‘Tell him that to include me in an anthology of the Nineties would be just as technically correct, and just as essentially inappropriate, as to include Lot in a book on Sodomites; in saying which I am not saying a word against sodomy, nor implying that intoxication and incest are in any way preferable.’ He adds a footnote: ‘If Mr Symons ever feels sad, he ought to be able to cheer himself up by contemplating his handwriting.’ Housman was in his lifetime, and remains, a mysterious figure — one reason that Stoppard has written a play about him, The Invention of Love. A scholar of St John’s, Oxford, and a passionate student of the Classics, he nevertheless for reasons still unclear contrived to fail his finals, and was obliged to take an obscure job in the Patent Office (like Einstein). There he slowly worked his way into the top rank of Latin experts, ending with an Oxford chair. His poetry, like his letters, was meagre, or perhaps attenuated is a better word, gouged out of his inhibited and savagely disciplined emotions with terrifying pain. His sexual life was as desolate as the surface of the moon, though just as distinct under the well-lit radar-telescopes of modern literary scholarship. Not hard to imagine the torture this enemy of the smallest personal disclosure endures reading what is written about him now, from his scholastic cell on the other side of the Styx, until one remembers that, in the afterlife, such things have no significance. But a brief and pointed letter from Housman confirming this would be welcome.
These thoughts have been provoked by reading the Diaries of the comedian Kenneth Williams, a comic actor of immense versatility and skill, but with a standard personality, on or off stage, of camp caricature. The Diaries were published in the early 1990s, but I have only just discovered them. He kept them for over 40 years, and they were cunningly boiled down from more than four million words to a big book of 800 pages by Russell Davies. As a diarist Williams was one of the best to emerge in the 20th century, on a par, say (though totally different in content), with Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Chips Channon and Alan Clark. He is totally uninhibited about himself and often bleak and frightening in his honesty and stripped-down self-portraiture the very opposite of Housman.
He came from a working-class background, and was uneducated but brilliantly self-taught, a persistent and often perceptive reader, capable of arguing with F.R. Leavis about literary criticism or Bertrand Russell about moral philosophy. Like Housman he was succinct and his talent with words leaps from every page, and occasionally breaks into verse:
Determined to hide it and not give a sign, Of the desperate ego and id that is mine Never to speak of my love for a man: I hope that God loves me, for no one else can.
He has the essential merit of a good diarist: honesty. His weaknesses — talking too much and too loudly, especially when in liquor, welltargeted shafts of malice slipping out — are bleakly recorded, as are their relentless consequences in unpopularity, contrition and prayers for strength. Here he resembles Boswell and, like him, describes his shameful descents into vice (usually on sex holidays in Tangier), and the fears of infection and the realities of pubic lice which follow. Williams had a reputation, whether deserved or not is unclear, of never allowing visitors to use the bathroom lavatory in his flat. There he kept the medicaments for his chronic piles, described in horrific detail in diary entries. Though he wished to remain celibate and usually succeeded, he gives devastating and often furious glimpses into the homosexual world. The torments to which his predicament subjected him are revealed with what I can only call brutal sensitivity. We feel the pain. It is hard to say which is more penetrating: Housman’s ominous silence or Williams’s high-pitched screams.
These Diaries also provide a devastating picture of the harsh underbelly of showbiz. It is all there: starring in the West End (there is a moving portrait of Ingrid Bergman); directing second-rate actors in a flop; the necessary grind of the Pinewood Carry On movies, with Hattie Jacques and Barbara Windsor (both of whom he loved) and Sid James (whom he loathed). He was never paid more than £5,000 for these grubbily ill-written roles, but they lasted 15 years. He got as much for a twominute commercial. There were also endless TV and radio series and appearances. His face and voice became familiar to the point where he was constantly button-holed in the street, often loudly insulted by strangers as a ‘poofter’ and a ‘queen’. He loathed all this, but the constant recognition was an index of marketability — always in the Diaries is the fear of the silent telephone and no offers coming in. Young people determined on acting careers should not read these chilling pages.
Even greater was the constant fear of a mirthless audience. His career flourished or withered by his continuing ability to get laughs. In the end it was all that mattered. The need to make the stalls laugh — and the terror of failing to get even a nervous titter is one of the great constants of showbiz, from Yorick through Rigoletto (whose ‘On with the Motley’ is the most heartbreaking of arias) to the suicides of TV comics, of which Williams records many — not his own, of course. The agony behind that laugh has never been so bitterly conveyed. He put his own vision of hell into verse:
Though the wicked will not burn They’ll be forced to entertain us With an everlasting turn, Hitler and Napoleon and even Genghis Khan. Made to do a tap-dance Or to tell a funny yarn The audience sitting comfortably No heckling and no chaff, And the poor benighted beggars Getting not a single laugh.
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