MAN OF LETTERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 19, 24 January 1938, Page 18

MAN OF LETTERS

LAURENCE HOUSMAN

WROTE "VICTORIA REGINA"

MANY BANNED PLAYS

Either to his diffidence or liis pugnacity we are indebted for a rare autobiographical outline of Laurence Housman, bachelor, Quaker, pacifist, and internationalist, to say little of him at this stage as the author of "Victoria Regina,!' says a writer in the Melbourne "Age.". Housman, white-beard-ed and elegant at 72, is today one of the world's wealthiest playwrights. His play, which ran for nineteen months in New York, yielded him a royalty of £300 a week. Its long run in London, which still continues, is estimated to bring him £200 a week. But until December 3, 1936, Laurence Housman was distinguished chiefly as the-author of thirty-two plays which had come under' the ban of English censorship. He was.the world's most censored dramatist, and poor with it. 'Of that diffidence which engendered pugnacity'in Housman we must hear in the monograph which the English playwright, novelist, and illustrator contributed in 1933 to "Authors Today and Yesterday," .which is quoted literally and paraphrased hereunder. He was born on July 18, 1865—a1l other authorities differ as to. the date —the sixth of a family of seven. Laurence .was an ugly; child —at least, so he thought—and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved. He was told this by) one of his sisters as a. rather surprising fact; he did not discover it for< himself. In those early years also he was rather a weakling, bad atj athletics, slow at running, not fond of exercise, an intense but slow reader, lazy at work; in solitary leisure a persistent day dreamer; in company a victim of what is now called; "the inferiority complex," from which he has never got free, and is still in. consequence, defensively pugnacious. Thus he provided himself., with more enemies than he need do; he probably had fewer than he imagined. FATHER A LAWYER. His father was a lawyer, and a clever one; but was unfortunately possessed with the idea that his real gift was fot mechanical invention, on which he spent more money than, he could af-, ford, and never gained a penny by it. He also cooked,. gardened, and composed poetry. Living persistently aboye his income, he landed .his family in dire straits just at the time when their education was at its finishing and most expensive stage. The mother—a charming and clever woman —died in the author's fifth, year; but years later her place was 'taken by a valiant stepmother, to whom; in those years of financial strain, the> family owed much. At the age of eighteen Laurence left school; and went with an elder sister, Clemence, to London, studying at South Kensington as an art student, Five or six years later he turned definitely to authorship, beginning with fairy tales, legends," and poems, illustrated by himself. His first—almost his only popular success until 1936— came by accident He wrote and published anonymously "An Englishwoman's Love Letters," which, having been refused by two American publishers, was afterwards "pirated" by fifteen of them. It is probable also that for every copy of the book sold in England, ten were sold in America without the author getting one penny. The success of this book was due to the fact "that the public insisted on believing the letters to be genuine, and attributed them to forty different people, from Queen Victoria downwards." EFFECT ON HIS WORK. The success of the Letters operated against the author's serious attempts to be recognised as a serious writer. His play "Bethlehem" (1902) was censored, but produced privately, at the author's expense, by Gordon Craig, for whose genius in stage production he wished to provide an opportunity. ■ Hpusman was encouraged to continue writing for the uncommercial stage by Granville-Barker,1 with whom he col> laborated in "Prunella,", which was staged at the Court Theatre in 1904. Since then he has written long plays and short plays, about 100 of them "Pains and Penalties" (1911), an historical play of the days and doings of George IV., met the official fate of "Bethlehem"—"royalty being regarded in England as sacred characters, as little suitable for public representation as the 'holy family.'" The censorship was later withdrawn, though it persisted (in 1933) for the "Palace Plays" dealing with the life and character of Queen Victoria. Between 1912 and 1918 the author published three novels—"John of Jingalo," "The Ebyal Kunaway," and "The Sheepfold." Recently "John of Jingalo" was republished in America because of its supposed similarity to the case of the former King Edward VIII. In its depiction of a king who was roused, after twenty-years, to ask the "why" of things, however, it has, perhaps, more in common with Shaw's play "The Apple Cart." A British Cabinet Minister conflded.to the author that he continued to read this novel once a year. But the private secretary to another Cabinet Minister was angry that it should ever have been written at all. "How did he manage to find these'things out?" was his comment On its revelations. The author's,answer is: "I didn't; but merely guessed—and guessed right." Guessing is a novelist's and dramatist's licence in modern lierature. MORE POLITICAL SATIRE. Political satire in, the form of fiction appealed to Housman. "Trimblerigg" and,"The Life of H.R.H. the Duke of Flariborough" led on to the "Palace Plays," to the writing of which the author found himself drawn largely by the .success of his "Angels and Ministers" (1921), a set of plays which dealt with incidents in the lives of Queen Victoria and, her two great Ministers, Disraeli and Gladstone. Having by 1933 completed his largest series of plays, "Little Plays of St. Francis" —36 in . all—he engaged on what amounted to little plays, "Little Plays of St. Francis"—36 in all—he engaged on what amounted to little plays of Queen Victoria, though these really appeared under other titles—a series of almost equal length—from which "Victoria Regina" has been constructed. Mr. Housman declared that the source of facts used in the Victoria series would never be revealed by him. Four years ago he, expressed the conviction that his best work, and that which would most likely live, was the playcycle of the life of St. Francis. "Not by calculation; but in very genuine devotion and affection," he wrote, "I have taken hold of one of the most attractive characters in world history, who, belonging to the Middle Ages, lives still by virtue of a form of saintliness which remains as vital as ever in1 its appeal to modern minds." Laurence Housman's learned brother, the late Alfred Edward Housman, professor of Latin', at Trinity College, Cambridge, was the poet who in 1896 gave literary life to the country boy exiled in London in "A Shropshire Ead." His "Last Poems," published in 1922, had an immediate success greater ijEbah iinV-Joihes bo* of jwetryida-Itog-

land during the century. He was strongly averse to publicity. GREATLY ADMIRED. The dramatist had great admiration for his brother, "who, however, did not return the compliment." 'Living with a group of Quaker Friends in a village two miles "from Glastonbury (famous for its legendary Thorn), the playwright produces plays for recreation—sometimes his own, but more often other people's. For the University College Dramatic Society he read, as an epilogue to his "Little Plays of St. Francis," a scene representing his own death bed under the title "Nunc Dimittis." In this scene the author himself took the part of the dying author—"with such success that it threatened to become an annual event until the representation becomes a reality." But a note of humour, in celebrity vein, is sounded in "Unexpected Years" (1937). On December 3, 1930, Mr. Housman was spending the day in London with a journalist . friend, who received the following telephone message:— "The King has told the Lord Chamberlain that he is to licence 'Victoria Kegina,' and there is a constitutional crisis." "This is how the news reached me. The King .lad done an up-to-date and sensible thing," wrote the dramatist, "and in consequence the Lord Chamberlain and the Cabinet were all going to resign. But Mr." Charles Morgan, English critic, who would abolish ths censorship, refused to regard the play's release as a stick .with which to beat the Lord Chamberlain. It is fitting to close this article with the dramatist's emphasis, in his preface to "Victoria Kegina," on the intensely human side of Queen Victoria. "Her encumbering prejudices matter so little today," he writes "that one can enjoy, them and see through their intellectual limitations, what a remarkable and forceful cfiaractef she wa« to the last."