h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Stoppard. The Invention of Love.




It came in the mail two days ago.



Oh, my.


What a piece of work!


Propertius, for goodness' sake!


Stoppard has moved from his youthful Shakespeare phase into a phase in which all of Western Literature is a simple and vitally necessary background to his totally modern voice.

I'm breathless after a first reading of a third of the play.

Oh, marvelous!

I've just about finished a second read of "The Invention of Love."

This is for you, Effers. Wilde speaking to Houseman:





". . . 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. You '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, steal, 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-- the New Drama,the New Novel, the New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. . . "

Thank you for that. It's brilliant...but then he's rarely anything else.

Just finished act one of Stoppard's "Indian Ink". It was written at the hight of his Felicity Kendal period, it seems, hence her nude scene.

But, although it sounds puerile when baldly described, but the writing seems to be pulling it off, if you'll pardon ...

I'm catching up on my Stoppard reading.

More later maybe.