by Nigel Jones
A month later illness again impedes Brooke’s hopes:
Antinous has got – the mumps! This is so horribly incongruous that it sounds like a line from one of Heine’s most bitter lyrics. He will be back in a week or two. I am a little sorry. For though I love to look upon him – as a supreme work of art – yet he is something of a tertium quid … I am writing nothing, not even a Hymn to Antinous. I am content to exist. I know now whither the Greek Gods have vanished now-a-days. They are to be found in public schools. Always, in the sunshine, and the Spring, I see them, thinly disguised, rushing over the grass, supple of limb & keen-eyed, young and beautiful. Here is Olympus, and now. I feed on the nectar of Life, from Ganymede’s hands, and from amidst my young unconscious gods, write to you now, ecstatically.
Whether Brooke achieved the longed-for ecstatic physical fulfilment with Sadler/Antinous that he dreamed of remains obscure; but there is evidence enough that Keynes’s doubts about his friend’s sincerity were soundly based. For, running parallel with his swooning over Sadler, Brooke was involved with not one, but two, rival swains. First there was Charles Lascelles, who was two years younger than himself. He was clearly infatuated with him, as a later letter to Ka Cox fondly recalls of an evening in Rugby chapel: ‘I was all eyes, & straining, for Charlie’s brunette radiance among them all – & he’d looked towards me a fraction of a second as he passed.’ Brooke’s school holiday visits to his friend Hugh Russell-Smith in the New Forest in the summer vacations of 1906 and 1907 gave him the opportunity to deepen his acquaintance with Hugh’s younger brother Denham: in his remarkable confessional letter to James Strachey of 10 July 1912, in which he gives what might be called a blow-by-blow account of his later seduction of Denham, Brooke remembers how their relationship began:
We had hugged & kissed & strained, Denham & I, on & off for years – ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two Small Dorms. An abortive affair, as I told you. But in the summer holidays of 1906 & 1907 he had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there. He had vaguely hoped, I fancy, … But I lay always thinking about Charlie. Denham was, though, to my taste, attractive. So honestly and friendlily lascivious. Charm, not beauty, was his fate.
Brooke’s taste for sailing close to the wind is illustrated by his cheekily referring to the hammock in which he and Denham petted in his letter of thanks to Mrs Russell-Smith at the end of his stay in August 1906: ‘Many thanks for tolerating me so long. I shall soon write to one of the boys. I loved it all – even the excessive physical exercise in a way – and especially one of the hammocks – the one further from the house. Please give my love to it – a delightful hammock!’
Given his sexual inhibitions, and the ferocious propaganda assault all public schoolboys were subjected to against any physical manifestation of their sexual needs, it is highly unlikely that Brooke’s relations with any of his three friends went beyond hugging, kissing and perhaps a touch of mutual masturbation. But the memory of all three boys would haunt him long after he left Rugby: he had Lascelles’s photo in his rooms at Cambridge as late as 1908. However, since both Lascelles and Sadler were at Oxford, they were out of reach. None the less, he continued to hanker: writing to Keynes in April 1913 he asks for Lascelles’s address, and the same year meets up with Sadler again in the company of Eddie Marsh. With Denham, as we shall see, he was destined to have one even more fateful encounter.
One can make too much of Brooke’s schoolboy sexual experimentation – such homosexual calf-love was commonplace in the masculine society of the public school. None the less, the fact remains that Keynes, chief guardian of Brooke’s posthumous reputation, was concerned enough about it to edit out all references to Sadler from the Collected Letters, and neither Sadler, Lascelles nor Denham Russell-Smith is even mentioned in Christopher Hassall’s massive official biography. Brooke’s half-hearted homosexual dabbling continued when he went up to Cambridge, another closed male community where a homoerotic ethos reigned supreme. The fact that he reacted violently against some of his homosexual friends at the end of his life only underlines the importance it had for him. Indeed, it could be said that these relationships, powered by the high-octane fuel of adolescent hormones, were the most intense of his life. They set a template of ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ love that he would search for in vain in his heterosexual relationships.
It was in the summer of 1904, during one of his periodic bouts of ill health – this time a throat infection – that Brooke encountered a figure who was to be instrumental in encouraging his literary aspirations. Significantly, this man, who bore the unlikely name of St John Lucas Lucas, was also a homosexual, an aesthete with a fondness for the fading decadence of the ‘naughty nineties’ associated with Wilde and his imitators. Lucas, a Rugby resident, had heard of ‘The Pyramids’, a long poem on a set theme that Brooke had unsuccessfully entered for a school prize. He found his way to Brooke’s sick room at School Field House and was entranced by the vision of the stricken young poet. Lucas, an enthusiast for French literature – he would soon begin editing The Oxford Book of French Verse – brought with him another young local writer of similar aesthetic and sexual tastes, Arthur Eckersley, a playwright and contributor to Punch. The books that this precious pair left by Brooke’s bedside – the poems of Baudelaire and Ernest Dowson – soon crept into the poems he was beginning to write, with their sighing nostalgia, their hints of unspoken sins, and their extravagantly purple imagery:
Strange blossoms faint upon that odorous air,
Vision, and Wistful Memory; and there
Love twofold with the purple bloom of Triumph
And the wan leaf of Despair.
(‘The Path of Dreams’)
Amid the fevered press
Of hot-eyed men, across the desolate sea,
Hoping a dreamer’s hope, I sought for thee
Wisdom at last I found, and weariness.
(‘The Return’)
Ah, if thou know’st this sorrow, thou art even as I;
As one who has long outlived his joy, and would forget;
Who nurses in his festered soul a slave’s dull hate
For this interminable hell of Life …
(‘Afterwards’)
This is forgivable stuff – the average schoolboy stew of overheated emotions, of objectless longing, glossed with a light dusting of ‘thou arts’ and several garlands of wilting rosebuds and a barrel or two of sun-warmed wine. There is nothing here yet to indicate that Brooke is any different from the ordinary run-of-the-mill adolescent of scant experience and limited talent.
Brooke lost no time in reporting his meeting with Lucas to Erica Cotterill: ‘I have fulfilled one of the ambitions of my life: I have met a real live poet, who has presented me with a copy of one of his books signed with his own hand. Of course, like all poets worth counting nowadays he is Celtic and very melancholy. Last but not least he knows George Meredith quite intimately! A most enchanting man. And – quite incidentally – his poems are often readable.’
Instantly, he added the pose praised by his new mentors to the accretions of pretence already in place – growing his hair longer still, cultivating a dishevelled tie and collar and hanging about the school’s library reading the Decadents. He was developing a reputation for wit and paradox, as he told Erica: ‘When I say what I mean, people tell me “O Rupert, what delightful nonsense you talk!” and when I venture on the humorous, I am taken seriously and very promptly and thoroughly squashed for “saying such strange things.”’ The same letter offers a thumbnail self-portrait: ‘washy blue eyes, tow-coloured hair, a habit of doing the wrong thing unintentionally, and a propensity for dying young …’
As a reward for his literary efforts, Brooke was allowed to edit a supplement to the school magazine called The Phoenix. It was top-heavy with the editor’s own contributions: drama reviews, a mildly satiric ‘Child’s Guide to Rugby School’ and a couple of poems. On Christmas Eve 1904 Br
ooke again succumbed to sickness. The Brooke family doctor recommended the traditional English remedy: a spell in the healing sunshine of the Mediterranean. In the New Year Brooke was packed off with Alfred to stay with Dr and Mrs Gibbons – family friends who owned a villa near the sea at Rapallo in north-west Italy. He planned to use the time to bone up on the Decadent writers recommended by Lucas and, under their influence, wrote more in the same style, which he duly sent back for his mentor’s hopefully golden opinions (‘I should like a full-grown live critic’s opinion of where they are worst’). Simultaneously he kept up his correspondence with Erica: ‘German, I find, sounds even worse than it looks, which is something awful’; and Keynes: he compared reading Tennyson to consuming ‘three basins of bread and milk with too much sugar in it’.
Behind the adolescent posing, Brooke was more serious about his early poetic experiments than he liked to admit. In response to Lucas’s critique of his verses he wrote at length about the techniques of sonnet composition and iambic pentameters, revealing a growing and quite earnest grasp of his deepening vocation. He concluded with typical self-deprecation mixed with a not-so-secret desire for approbation: ‘I really have very vague notions about technique. I generally trust to luck and put down anything that sounds all right. But the Italian winds though they may whisper many beautiful ideas in my ear, will not, I fear, teach me much about the structure of a sonnet.’
His convalescence in the healing rays of Italian sunshine proved slower than expected and he was forced to miss a term at Rugby. Reporting this with mock sorrow to Keynes, he gave an exaggerated account of the tedium of his days:
1–2 Lunch. 2–3 Lie down on a Sofa and read. 3–4 Walk up and down garden trying to compose tail end of sonnet. 4–4.30 Tea. 4.30–5.30 Walk up and down garden throwing lemons at the cats and … thinking … 5.30–6.30 … Letters. And so on. About 9 I retire to bed with the cheerful prospect of another happy, happy day when I wake. Half the night perhaps I lie awake thinking … all the time I am profoundly bored. At intervals they drag me up to Genoa and round a picture-gallery; which is wasted on me. I say ‘How beautiful!’ at every fourth picture, and yawn.
In March this world-weary existence was enlivened by a visit to Florence and a stay with two girl cousins, Margaret and Reeve Brooke. Rather than sample the cultural glories of the city, he spent most of the time dabbing laudanum on an aching tooth and avoiding the predatory attentions of Italian girls – clinging to his cousin’s arm with the injunction: ‘Promise not to let those girls get hold of me.’ Another visitor was Duncan Grant, already studying art. The pair paraded around the Piazza de Signoria, talking nostalgically of Hillbrow.
In mid-March, forbidden by his mother to stop off in Paris – belatedly she had awoken to the moral danger posed by Lucas, who was in the French capital and attempting to woo his protégé – Brooke left Italy. He passed the time on the long journey home by eagerly devouring De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, which had been sent to him by Lucas on its posthumous publication in 1905. As compensation for his missing out on the delights of Paris Mrs Brooke had sent Brooke money for a theatre visit in London.
He chose to spend the cash on seeing Peter Pan, then enjoying its vastly successful première production. It is difficult to exaggerate the effect of this play on the psyche of a boy who in many ways was to embody Peter Pan in his own life. He saw the play subsequently on repeated occasions, and while at Cambridge would fantasize that King’s College chapel had been replaced by Wendy’s tree house. The dictum of Peter’s creator, J. M. Barrie, that nothing in life matters much beyond the age of 12 chimes perfectly with Brooke’s terror of the complexities and perplexities of adulthood. One can well imagine him agreeing with Peter that ‘Dying will be an awfully big adventure’ – indeed it is explicit in the letters he wrote home from his last voyage.
His enchantment with the play’s never-never land on this first encounter is evident in his account of the event to Keynes:
Yesternight I was vastly happy. I saw Peter Pan. It was perfect. It is merely and completely the incarnation of all one’s childish dreams – the best dreams, almost that one has. Red Indians, A Pirate Captain, Faeries, and all mixed up with Home … did you see it? If not, you must, next Christmas. It is wonderfully refreshing and never silly. And it brings out people’s natures so – shows, I mean, if they are real children or no.
Brooke, for one, would remain a child in his essential nature until the day he died. As he told Keynes: ‘I have made an epigram of it. Before the age of 25 you pull the World to pieces: after 25 the World pulls you to pieces. And we are getting on for 18, you know!’
This feeling of a life hardly begun yet already running out was much in his mind as he left for another segment of his protracted convalescence with two aged aunts at their house in Bournemouth, called, presciently enough, Grantchester Dene. Duplicitous as ever, he warned Keynes against any too explicit remarks in his letters: ‘This is to say I am staying with two faded but religious aunts. They happened to be in when the post came and one of them, chancing on your letter, received quite a severe shock … you really must be careful! … I haven’t as you may surmise much to do here. However, it is I think, less like Hell than Italy is. Hell is a place where there are no English books!’
Again he filled the empty hours by rereading De Profundis, noting in the margin: ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry. Their passions a quotation.’ Brooke was not neglecting his own writing. A poem of the time ends with God ‘flinging the earth into the sun’s white fires’ while, as he confessed to Lucas’s friend Eckersley, he had started work on a school novel – a work not destined to get beyond its first page. Its opening is soaked in the exotic perfumes of decadence:
Chrysophase Tiberius Amaranth sat in his study, a small pale green room, reading. From one hand an opium-flavoured cigarette circled wreaths of odorous pallid smoke among the shadows. There was a knock at the door, and the Headmaster entered. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed genially, ‘Studying the classics, Amaranth?’ Chrysophase laid down his book. It was French, bound in dark green, and strangely scented.
‘Scarcely!’ he replied, ‘the exact opposite, in fact. A classic is read by nobody, and quoted by everybody. This book, on the contrary, is read by everybody – in secret; and quite unquoteable.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Headmaster prettily: ‘I see that you have learnt one of the two duties of the modern youth.’
‘?’
‘To embrace the world in one sentence.’
‘And the other?’
‘To embrace the world in one person,’ answered the Headmaster with a musical sigh.
‘My dear James,’ exclaimed Chrysophase, ‘you are magnificent tonight! May I offer you a cigarette?’
‘Thank you. I never smoke them. Their shape is so banal. But if you have some absinthe … Yes, just a little …’
Before Brooke ran out of inspiration his ‘novel’ concluded with the portentous words: ‘… silence is older and more terrible than speech. Man speaks. God is silent. Sooner or later we shall all yield to silence.’
At this stage Brooke’s writing is uneasily poised between gently satiric mocking of Rugby and its headmaster, Dr James, and his half-horrified fascination with the drugs and drink culture of the Decadent writers he was reading in secret.
In April he at last arrived back with his mother, rejoining the person who most epitomized disapproval of his every deviation from the straight and narrow. Mrs Brooke was installed at the Palace Hotel, Hastings. He took the precaution of warning her in advance about a development she would doubtless regard with disfavour: ‘I haven’t had my hair cut since the end of February: and it’s simply grand now! But I shall have it cut today. I daren’t face you as I am.’
His reading matter in the Sussex resort – certainly concealed from his mother’s hawk-like eyes – was Walter Pater, a fashionable Oxford critic, who urged his readers
to ‘burn always with this hard, gemlike flame’ while himself living a cautious life of cloistered rectitude. Brooke faithfully mimicked Pater’s Nietzschean hilarities in a letter to Keynes:
The only tolerable things in Hastings are dinners at this hotel. I had some soup last night that was tremulous with the tenseness of suppressed passion; and the entrées were odorous with the pale mystery of starlight … the real reason for this absurd epistle is this. I wish to warn you. Be prepared. It is this: I am writing a Book. There will only be one copy. It will be inscribed in crimson ink on green paper. It will consist of thirteen small poems; each as beautiful, and as meaningless as a rose-petal, or a dew-drop. (These are not yet written, however.) When the book is prepared, I shall read it once a day for seven days. Then I shall burn the book: and die.
Why was Brooke – who, as he emphasized, was nearly 18 – writing this sub-adolescent, self-dramatizing juvenile drivel? At one level he was guying himself; realizing that the prosaic Keynes would not be greatly impressed by his art for art’s sake pose, he gilded the everyday with a gloss of artifice that invited ridicule. Yet at the same time, as his poems attest, he believed in his self-created image as a doomed young poet indulging in nameless sins. (‘I dared the old abysmal curse,’ as one line from his verse at this time put it.) The contradiction of this Faustian figure staying quietly with his mother at a dull hotel on the south coast was, as he acutely realized, too comic for contemplation.
