Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  In this early example of what would eventually become an enormous correspondence with a huge cast of friends, Brooke already exhibits some of the traits that would mark his entire life – including most notably the irrepressible need to both dramatize and mock himself. A devouring self-absorption is evident, along with an insistent exhibitionism. This stance, so marked at so early an age, would gradually harden until it becomes impossible to separate the poser from the pose.

  Even though Brooke lacked a scholarship, his father’s position at Rugby was enough to swing open the school’s doors, and in September 1901 he became a new boy in Parker Brooke’s School Field House. This apparently smooth progress was actually a regression. However illusory the independence Brooke had enjoyed at Hillbrow, at least the few hundred yards that separated home and school had been a step towards freedom. Now he was back under his parents’ roof, and his relations with the other boys in the House were dogged by the fact that he was the son of the housemaster and housemistress, and so had one foot in the enemy camp.

  This ambiguous position added another important dimension to the emerging divisions in Brooke’s nature. He had to balance his sheer survival in the school, eventually earning the respect and even admiration of his peers, with holding on to his parents’ approval at home. It was a precarious feat, but somehow Brooke achieved it. One strategy for survival beyond the green baize door that separated his domestic quarters from the bear garden of the school beyond was the occasional flicker of revolt against his mother. A possibly apocryphal but nevertheless revealing story has Mrs Brooke opening the dumb waiter that came rumbling up from the kitchens in the bowels of the House and finding Brooke crouched inside, with a blasphemous notice attached which read: ‘Mother, behold thy son.’

  Brooke’s first year at Rugby was largely taken up with learning the bewilderingly complex regulations governing public-school life: attending the thrice-daily roll-call; running to address the needs of older boys whenever the bellowed call of ‘Fag!’ summoned the juniors deputed to act as the seniors’ menial servants; understanding when and where it was permitted to stroll with one’s hands in one’s pockets, or meet a boy from another House: even the son of a housemaster was not exempt from the hallowed codes of Rugby life. Nor was that life a soft one.

  The boys were summoned from their narrow beds at 5.45 a.m. to endure a cold shower – the proverbial remedy against libidinous thoughts and the masturbation that accompanied them – and their first lesson before breakfast. The school curriculum consisted of 11 hours daily of solid work at Latin, Greek, English, French, Scripture, History, Geography and Maths. As his schoolfellows slowly came round to accepting Brooke’s curious double life – among them, yet not of them – they were also charmed into giving him their affection.

  He had most of the attributes that usually make for popularity among schoolboys: fresh good looks, a tall, athletic build – his full-grown height was five feet eleven – and an appropriate prowess on both the rugby and the cricket fields. Coupled with these were a deceptively uncomplicated and cheerful disposition and the first glimmerings of that charm and self-deprecating wit that were to become legendary.

  His pleasing physical appearance was now topped off by a classically handsome face with peachy, rose-petal skin. Allowed more leeway with his hair styling, he had replaced the close-cropped look of early years with a mop of hair, fair and tinged with reddish gold, which he wore increasingly long as his seniority at the school increased. This style was both a fairly safe gesture of nonconformity and a nod to the fin-de-siècle decadence of the 1890s; an aesthetic mode self-consciously adopted by Brooke, who was blissfully unaware that it was passé outside the cloistered backwater of Rugby. The radiance of Brooke’s looks was only marred by his slightly short bow legs, which won him the nickname ‘Bowes’. The bestowing of nicknames at public school, unless they are palpable insults, is invariably a sign of general acceptance as a ‘good chap’.

  Parker Brooke continued to be a dim and distant presence in his son’s life. His absent-mindedness increasing, he was knocked down by a hansom cab while standing in the middle of the road lost in a fit of abstraction. He sustained a broken arm. Behind the green baize door he coached Brooke in the Classics and watched with quiet approval his son’s elevation to the House First XI in cricket and First XV in rugby.

  Off the Close, Brooke joined Rugby’s Officer Training Corps (OTC) – an almost obligatory commitment in Britain’s public schools in an increasingly bellicose era. In the short morning of his life, as in its closing weeks, he posed for group photographs with the other officer cadets, his long hair tucked tidily inside a cap, his body clad in one of the newly issued khaki uniforms currently being given their first blooding on the South African veldt in the closing stages of the Boer War.

  If his school reports are to be believed, academically Brooke was a capable rather than an outstanding student. His form master – and godfather – Robert Whitelaw commented laconically at the end of his first term: ‘Has begun well.’ Parker Brooke tactfully left the space for the housemaster’s comments blank, though by 1903 he was emboldened to remark with forgivable paternal protectiveness: ‘Where he fails it is certainly not from want of time spent on work.’ In response, Rugby’s headmaster, Dr Herbert James, known to the boys as ‘the Bodger’, noted acidly: ‘He must think about his work as well as just give time to it.’ ‘The Bodger’ also noted that Brooke was ‘more of a linguist than a thinker’ and, in 1905, was still nagging away at his want of application: ‘[He] has much ability but he needs to work harder at the parts of his work he likes least.’

  By the Trinity term of 1906, with Brooke’s departure to Cambridge looming, his continued lack of appetite for the grind of academic application still bothers Dr James: ‘Work rather below par this term: possibly from indifferent health … [he] rather dislikes detail.’ Then, in an upbeat closing comment, he concedes: ‘Where he is good, on the purely literary side, he is capable of very brilliant results.’ Though scarcely a nonconformist, still less a rebel, Brooke was apt to indulge in minor acts of subversion, as a note from one of his teachers, R. Butler, to his father plaintively complains: ‘Dear Brooke, I fear I must complain of Rupert for bribing a musician to play during my 4th lesson.’

  Under the seemingly tranquil surface of school life, however, unsuspected or at least ignored by Mr and Mrs Brooke, darker currents swirled. Aged 14 when he went up to Rugby, Brooke was immersed in the turbulence of puberty, and in the only outlets possible for the fevered erotic longings of adolescents in an all-male public-school environment. The practical fact that the boys – at least during term time – were rigorously segregated from female company at once created and chimed with a prevailing homoerotic ethos that had, by the turn of the century, become so marked in Britain’s ruling class. The evangelizing zeal with which those hearty Christian masters hunted down physical manifestations of homosexuality within their schools, no less than the dire warnings issued from the pulpits of their chapels on the horrendous consequences of ‘self-abuse’ and the hypocritical homophobia shown in the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, testified to the obsessive interest in a subject that loomed large in the collective unconscious of England’s Establishment.

  Brooke, an attractive boy with an active libido and literary leanings, was not immune to the heavy homoerotic atmosphere that hung over the school. In succumbing to that atmosphere, he was going along with peer-group mores as he did when joining the OTC or the House cricket team. Where Brooke was unusual was in openly confessing to his homosexual feelings and activities both at the time and later. At the height of his ill-fated passion for Ka Cox in 1912 he reported a revealing exchange with his mother: ‘“Katherine Cox seems,” she almost beamed, “to go everywhere.” “Oh yes,” I agreed: and then we were fairly launched on you. I felt the red creep slowly up – Damn! It’s just as it always was; even from the time when the holiday mention, at lunch, of the boy of the moment, in the House (with apologies, dear!) left me the level
red of this blotting paper, and crying with silent wrath.’

  This passage is so replete with Rupertisms as to constitute a self-portrait in miniature. As such it is worth analyzing in some detail. The opening sentence shows his tendency to mock his nearest and dearest – especially his doting mother – but always behind their backs. ‘I felt the red creep slowly up – Damn!’ reveals his abiding sense of shame sitting oddly alongside his confession to Ka. His sense of embarrassment over this childish emotion is so strong that he seems unable to shake it off, even as an adult. While candidly owning up to his schoolboy homosexuality, he admits to carefully concealing it from his mother. Even as a grown man he cannot face confronting her with the true facts of his sexual – but by now respectably heterosexual – life. As his boyish blush betrays, he is still, in his mid-twenties, the guilty adolescent.

  The fact that Brooke chose to express his blossoming sexuality with boys is scarcely surprising given their ready availability at Rugby and the lack of a female alternative. But there was one girl in his life, the only one before his arrival at Cambridge, with whom he enjoyed the first glimmerings of an emotional relationship, albeit largely confined to their letters. Erica Cotterill was his first cousin, the teenage daughter of the Reverend Charles Cotterill, who had played a clerical Cupid to Brooke’s parents when they were courting at Fettes. Exchange visits and meetings on family holidays led to the first sustained correspondence of Brooke’s young life, beginning in 1904.

  His letters to Erica are apparently honest and even brave in their openness. Clearly, like his simultaneous letters to Keynes, which are frank in their candid revelations of his Rugby romances, they are not documents that he would have wished his mother to read. But there is also a distinct sense of showing-off already evident. A sort of smug hope that Erica and Keynes are going to be shocked by his confessions. His love is not only daring to speak its name – it is shouting it from the rooftops. Brooke’s air of preening insouciance about feelings that were presumably heartfelt would become his characteristic hallmark when writing about his many emotional involvements. This goes a long way towards explaining why many suspected him of shallow pretence when it came to affairs of the heart, and why so few were prepared to take him seriously as a mature lover for all his passionate protestations. In his early essays in the arts of love Brooke consciously plays the capering heartsick fool; but again, this pose of youth would last a lifetime.

  At Rugby, Brooke acquired a new circle of friends to replace the relationships with James Strachey, Duncan Grant and Owen O’Malley – all of whom had left for public schools elsewhere. In passing it should be noted that both Strachey and Grant would keep the homosexual colouring they had acquired at Rugby, in each case dyed a deeper shade of pink than Brooke’s most severe blush. Both would also enjoy heterosexual relationships.

  Brooke’s new circle of friends included Geoffrey Keynes, Hugh Russell-Smith and Michael Sadler (who later called himself Sadleir to distinguish himself from his identically named father). Like Strachey, Keynes was the younger brother of a more gifted and famous elder sibling who none the less managed to carve out his own distinguished niche in later life – Strachey as a psychoanalyst and translator of Freud, Keynes as a surgeon and bibliophile. Geoffrey Keynes did not share the proselytizing homosexuality of Maynard, nor his formidable intellectual powers. He was, however, possessed of a large ego, a strong will, robust health and an uncritically hero-worshipping attitude towards Brooke that would eventually make him the longest-surviving and most industrious guardian of his friend’s posthumous reputation – and thus a creator of the myth of Brooke as the boyish poet-hero, the flawless youth cut down in the springtime of life. Keynes’s longevity, coupled with his role as executor of Brooke’s estate and editor of his Collected Letters were decisive factors in shaping the Brooke legend – a fact that would have astonished Brooke himself, who saw little of him after their Rugby days. For all his upstanding morality, Keynes was not above doctoring the facts to suit the myth he wished to perpetuate, suppressing a reference here, doctoring a letter there – the whole effect being to entomb his hero behind a wall of half-truths quite as solid as the marble that covers his tomb.

  Brooke’s relations with Keynes were uncomplicated by sex. The same was true of his other great friend at Rugby, Hugh Russell-Smith, like Brooke destined to be a victim of the Great War. A scion of a wealthy Hampshire family, he was described by Brooke as ‘ever a dreamer … an idealist, a thing of shreds and patches, not wholly of this world’. The Russell-Smiths’ home, Watersgreen House, near Brockenhurst in the New Forest, was a bolt-hole to which he escaped in school holidays to breathe an air less restricted than that of Rugby. The attractions there included Hugh’s younger brother, Denham, with whom Brooke indulged the tentative first steps in a homosexual romance that was to burst into brief but explosive flower years later. Brooke, Keynes and Hugh Russell-Smith, formed a sort of Three Musketeers, as Keynes relates: ‘We made up a cheerful trio, Brooke providing most of the entertainment with a flow of hilarious nonsense. Thus we climbed up the school in parallel until we found ourselves working in the same form, known as the Twenty, under a great classical scholar, Robert Whitelaw. Brooke was at the top of the form and I was stationed firmly at the bottom.’ In an obituary of Brooke written for the school magazine, The Meteor, the year before his own untimely death, Hugh wrote:

  Rupert had an extraordinary vitality at school and afterwards, and it was a vitality that showed itself in a glorious enthusiasm and an almost boisterous sense of fun … I see Rupert singing at the very top of his voice, with a glorious disregard for the tune, the evening hymn we used to have so often at Bigside Prayers … I see him tearing across the grass so as not to be late for Chapel. I generally think of him with a book.

  Keynes’s memories, in the hindsight of old age, are tinged with the golden glow with which his memory haloed his friend: ‘Rupert, though a few months younger than I, was much wiser and more clever and he soon became the friend to whom I turned with complete confidence and admiration. I was at first unaware of the physical beauty for which he afterwards became so famous.’

  Michael Sadler was another Rugby contemporary and friend, who remained in fitful contact with Brooke in later life. Unlike Keynes and the elder Russell-Smith, however, their friendship was more of an affaire, though it is unclear how far physical relations progressed. Subsequently Sadler, too, achieved literary distinction, becoming Chief Editor at the publishing house Constable, and as such discovering two exceptional novelists: Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys. He was an authority on Victorian literature – Trollope in particular – and a novelist in his own right, most famously as the author of the classic account of Victorian sexual hypocrisy and low life Fanny by Gaslight.

  Brooke’s later years at Rugby were dominated by his growing enthusiasm for literature and his simultaneous affairs with three Rugby boys – Sadler, Denham Russell-Smith and a third youth, Charlie Lascelles. Although he is fairly frank – by the standards of the age astonishingly so – in describing the progress of these romances in his letters, he rarely refers to his lovers by name, and the fact that they overlapped makes it difficult at this distance to distinguish between them. His involvement with Sadler began in early 1906 when Brooke heard that the boy had asked the school photographer for a picture of him. As Brooke eagerly told Keynes:

  It began by Dean [the school photographer] catching me one day & informing me that ‘a gentleman’ in another House had been trying to buy a photo of me: Dean was willing, but my leave was necessary. My enormous conceit was swelled even more – and I gave leave … I secretly made inquiries and found it was one I knew of old – one with the form of a Greek God, the face of Hyacinthus, the mouth of Antinous, eyes like a sunset, a smile like dawn … Sadler. It appears that the madman worships me at a pale distance: which is embarrassing but purple … So I wander around, taking a huge aesthetic delight in the whole mad situation.

  Brooke began to refer to Sadler by the code nam
e ‘Antinous’, the beautiful boy lover of the Emperor Hadrian who was deified by the Emperor after his early death. Brooke, as he told Keynes on 4 June 1906, kept ‘a framed picture of the Roman Antinous (the prototype, of course. The reincarnation’s likeness is within a cupboard …)’. He had already candidly confessed his intention of carrying the infatuation to carnal lengths, despite the heterosexual Keynes’s disapproval. On 23 March of that year he reported that ‘Antinous’ was ill and out of action: ‘This will allay your fear of my “doing something rash” during this term. But next term you must be prepared for the worst. An English summer (and my last term) really invites one to all that is “rash”.’ A few days later (31 March) things are shaping up nicely: ‘I have obtained Antinous’s – I mean Sadler’s – photograph from him; and I employ my spare time in sending and receiving letters … His letters are quaint and a little sad … It is all rather sweet and rather unusual: and he really looks very nice.’

  Keynes, in his down-to-earth way, queries the flowery extravagance of Brooke’s feelings, and elicits the response:

  You wonder how much of my affaire is true. So do I. (So, no doubt, does he!) It does not do to inquire too closely. It is now very pleasant. Some day, perhaps we shall grow old and ‘wise’, and forget. But now we are young, and he is very beautiful. And it is spring. Even if it were only a romantic comedy, a fiction, who cares? Youth is stranger than fiction … At present he – the adorable, rose-crowned – is at Rome: and I receive affectionate pale letters from him whenever the Gods, and the Italian posts, permit.