by Nigel Jones
On 15 April 1905, after a three-month absence, Brooke returned to Rugby. His immediate task was to complete the long poem on a set theme for the school’s annual poetry competition, which he had narrowly failed to win the previous year. This year the subject was ‘The Bastille’, of which he touchingly confessed his ignorance in a letter to Lucas: ‘my knowledge of it is a little vague at present. I have only a suspicion that it was a prison, and fell in the French Revolution … However, facts don’t really matter I suppose.’ The resulting poem was scornfully dismissed by the poet himself as: ‘the worst I have ever written. They [the lines] have no ideas. They don’t scan. And … are as dull and vulgar as a Bank-holiday.’ All the same, and perhaps inevitably, he won the prize.
As a result, Brooke found himself declaiming ‘The Bastille’ before an admiring throng at the school’s prize day on 24 June. With him on the platform, to provide accompaniment on the piano, was Rugby’s star music student, Denis Browne, a future composer. A contemporary and friend of Brooke, he was destined to become a fellow-officer in the last weeks of Brooke’s life and to help conduct his funeral.
It was at this auspicious moment that another lifelong friend, James Strachey, absent from Brooke’s life since Hillbrow days, decided to reestablish contact. James’s initial letter set the pattern for their relationship with a supplicating plea for a weekly exchange of mail. Brooke’s mock-disdainful reply was also characteristic: ‘I promise to do my best, and if at any time my resolution lapses, pen me a few fierce vitriolic words and you shall receive by the next post a lachrymose & abject apology.’ Thus began a regular – if not quite weekly – correspondence that was to follow the ups and downs of Brooke’s life until 1914. Strachey’s attitude was and remained idolizing – he nurtured an unrequited physical passion for Brooke, tempered by the clear-eyed cynicism that was the hallmark of his family. Brooke’s side of the correspondence was by turns teasing, confessional and boastful. Through it all he casts Strachey in the role of deluded clown and himself as smilingly superior; though in truth the real roles were almost the exact reverse – it was Strachey who was worldly-wise, Brooke the cloistered, childlike romantic.
Strachey at once attempted to lure Brooke into meeting him – although Brooke’s calendar for the long summer break was already full, composed of cricket matches, an OTC summer camp at Aldershot and a stay with the Russell-Smiths at Brockenhurst. On 30 July Brooke reported: ‘In two days the Summer Term will be over, & already people are going about bidding sad farewells. All of which is highly mournful, & may account for the pessimistic tone of this letter. My time is at present divided between playing cricket with gigantic vigour, reading Swinburne on a grassy bank, and toying with mildly foolish examination papers …’
It was at this point that Brooke first became drawn into the Machiavellian machinations in which the Strachey clan delighted. James’s elder brother, Lytton, who was ending his fifth year at Trinity College, Cambridge – where James himself was bound the following year – had become intrigued by his younger brother’s description of his Rugby friend and asked James to set Brooke a questionnaire to determine his views on life, and whether he could be admitted to the inner circle of the Stracheys and their intellectual, cynical friends. The questions James posed to Brooke were: ‘Do you approve of the Royal Academy? What are your views on Wagner, Mr Chamberlain and Christ? Are you in favour of War at any Price? Why are you going to Oxford? [An error: Brooke, too, was bound for Cambridge.] Does Jackson play such a good all round game as [C. B.] Fry?’ Ignoring the cricketing question Brooke replied that he approved of the Royal Academy and all other ‘forms of charitable institution’. He continued:
Certainly I approve of war at any price. It kills off the unnecessary. As for Mr [Joseph] Chamberlain I detest him. He is a modern politician, and I hate modern politicians; he comes from Birmingham and I abhor Birmingham; he makes a noise, and I loathe noises; he is utterly materialistic … About Wagner I have no views, I am very sorry, but I can’t help it. I have tried very hard for years, but I cannot appreciate music. I recognize that it is a fault in me, and am duly ashamed. In Literature, and a little even in Painting, I humbly believe in the Beautiful, but I am born deaf. This is a Tragedy. For Christ – I am so obsessed by ‘De Profundis’ that I have no other views on this subject than those expressed therein. The Perfect Artistic Temperament.
His response to the Strachey catechism must presumably have satisfied the stringent requirements of his interlocutors. On the strength of Brooke’s anti-Toryism, and his espousal of Oscar Wilde’s artistic values, Lytton concluded that it would be worth keeping an eye on James’s bright young friend with a view to welcoming him to Cambridge the following year.
Another powerful Cambridge contact with an interest in Brooke was Maynard Keynes. Brooke was not averse to exploiting the connection, and wrote to Geoffrey angling for an introduction. In the meantime he met Lytton himself face to face when he succumbed to James’s entreaties and in September went to stay at the Stracheys’ rented summer residence, Great Oakley Hall, near Kettering in Northamptonshire. His reported response – ‘Lytton Strachey I found most amusing, especially his voice’ – may have offended the languid scholar, who was often teased for his high-pitched, squeaky tones, had he got to hear of it. At all events Lytton was interested enough, as he reported to Duncan Grant, to take Brooke for a morning stroll around the Hall’s park, where ‘he talked about Poetry and the Public Schools as decently as could be expected’. Reporting in more detail to Maynard Keynes, Lytton recorded his impression of his brother’s friend in terms of cool disdain:
I wasn’t particularly impressed. His appearance is pleasant – mainly, I think owing to youth – complexion, hair etc. Of course he’s quite incredibly young [he was seven years Lytton’s junior] so it’s rather difficult to talk. I felt he wanted to attack the subject of Platonic Love etc. but the whole thing seemed so dreadfully commonplace that I couldn’t manage it. He’s damned literary, rather too serious and conscientious, and devoid of finesse. The Cambridge-Oxford question still hangs in the balance. I didn’t make any great effort to obtain him.
Lytton’s lukewarm response is partly explicable as a reaction to the extravagant praise heaped on Brooke by James. However, there is no doubt that initially he regarded the Rugby star as not quite up to par intellectually, describing his diction as ‘vile’ and his jokes as feeble. He was miffed by Brooke’s popularity, his radiant good looks and the aura of effortless success that always seemed to accompany him. As a result, he determined, Brooke suffered from ‘complacent egoism’. Nevertheless he suspended final judgement – Brooke’s saving graces included general innocence, an acute sensitivity to character and situation and the germ of an interest in interesting things. In short, something might yet be made of him, and, while Lytton did not actively attempt to recruit Brooke into his Cambridge coterie, neither would he discourage him.
One unintended but permanent result of Brooke’s brief stay with the Stracheys was the birth of his nickname ‘the Ranee’ for his mother. Lytton, hearing unfounded rumours that the Rugby Brookes were related to the famous Victorian Imperialist of the same name who had helped colonize Indonesia, began referring sardonically to Brooke as ‘the Rajah of Sarawak’. Learning of this, Brooke promptly baptized Mrs Brooke by the title of the Rajah’s wife – ‘the Ranee’. In the way of nicknames that stick, the title suited her and ‘the Ranee’ she remained.
The Oxford–Cambridge dilemma did not long remain unresolved. In mid-September Brooke made a flying visit to King’s College, Cambridge, where his father’s elder brother, Alan England Brooke, had now risen to be Dean. It was agreed that Brooke should try for a Classical scholarship at King’s the following year. On his return to Rugby, a Classics tutor was engaged to coach him in a subject in which, thanks to indolence and illness, he had fallen behind. Just before the melancholy Michaelmas term resumed, there was a piece of cheering news: one of his first poems appeared in public print as a prize-winner in
a competition run by the Westminster Gazette, a leading Liberal newspaper. Brooke’s effort, a sonnet titled ‘The Sea’, is unremarkable:
Hushed is the homeless sea’s unfinished song,
Its treasures lie forgot in desert space
but its mere appearance in print, coupled with a tangible prize of ten shillings and sixpence, was enough to bestow on the poet a measure of glory as he returned to his unwelcome labours.
As he sweated away over Pindar and Propertius, his correspondence with Lucas continued as a necessary outlet for his literary urges. One poem written to his mentor’s order, ‘Vanitas’, positively reeks with a summons to wild excess:
Laugh now and live! our blood is young: our hearts are high;
Fragrant of life, aflame with roses.
Surfacing again from his studies in late November he addressed Eranos, the Sixth Form literary society, with a paper on Swinburne. Soon after came a new sonnet, ‘The Dawn’, which he sent to Lucas. It begins:
When on my night of life the Dawn shall break,
Scatt’ring the mists of dreams, the old sad gloom,
Before the terrible sunrise of the Tomb …
It concluded:
Nor see the pale cloud of her tossing hair
Laugh and leap out along the desolate wind.
The images of this poem would remain a constant in Brooke’s verse, even though the form he used to express them grew more skilful. His mature verse is full of nights and dawns, of tossing heads and blowing winds.
That Christmas Brooke again travelled to Cambridge, this time in the company of his fellow-Musketeers Hugh Russell-Smith and Geoffrey Keynes. They stayed with Keynes’s family – including Maynard – in Harvey Road while they took the Cambridge scholarship exams. Maynard, primed by Lytton’s reports, took the opportunity to inspect Brooke at close quarters and refused to be bowled over by what he saw; agreeing with Lytton that Brooke’s charms were overrated and chiefly attributable to his youth and beauty.
As a result of his Christmas efforts, Brooke – along with Russell-Smith, who went to St John’s College – won a Classical scholarship to King’s. Geoffrey Keynes opened the door to his glittering medical career with an exhibition in natural sciences at Pembroke College. However, true to form, Brooke then collapsed on Christmas Day with a fever and retreated to his bed. His sickbed reading matter consisted of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, and the Elizabethan dramatists, whose plays, he boasted to Keynes and Strachey, he was devouring at the rate of three or four a week.
With the exams behind him, Brooke rewarded himself with a trip to London during which he saw Shaw’s Major Barbara, having been impressed by the same author’s John Bull’s Other Island earlier in the year. Even more to his taste was Peter Pan, which he saw for the second time. He raved to James Strachey: ‘I found it enchanting, adorable and entirely beautiful. In reality, no doubt, it is very ridiculous. I am very aged & this mania for children’s plays is a token of advanced senility.’ By contrast he found Shaw’s study in salvationism, as he told Erica Cotterill, ‘a brutal, sordid play, difficult to understand and very interesting’. Beneath the man-of-the-world role he liked to play, Brooke was still in many ways the wide-eyed provincial boy.
3
* * *
‘Every hour as golden’
* * *
Nineteen hundred and six opened with a general election. The new year saw the era of Tory Imperialist hegemony end with a Liberal landslide victory that inaugurated an age of social reform and unrest that would last until Brooke’s death.
The Brooke family threw themselves enthusiastically into the local electoral struggle in Rugby. Parker Brooke signed the adoption papers of the Liberal candidate, Corrie Grant, and Brooke’s brothers went out canvassing while he languished in his sickbed. Moved by all the excitement, he rose before he had fully recovered, to join the fray. While the Ranee wooed wavering voters over tea and scones, Brooke edited a Liberal news-sheet, The Rugby Elector, specializing in roundly abusing the Tory candidate. He found time to report to Keynes: ‘We are having a ferocious fight down here … figure me, covered with Liberal rosettes, rushing about the town … I have made 37 mortal enemies in 4 days. And the immense joke of the matter is that I really take no interest in politics at all.’
This dilettante attitude continued when he reported the Liberal victory to Erica: ‘I fell on the neck of a whiskered and bespectacled nonconformist minister who stood near me and we both wept in silent joy.’ Typically he added that he was now posing as ‘a rabid Socialist’ – but without knowing what the term really meant. His new-found radicalism had another outing on 27 January at the school’s debating society, when he opposed a motion deploring the rise of the Labour Party. Despite Brooke’s eloquence, the motion was carried. In his speech he castigated opponents of Labour and the working class for their ‘ignorant prejudice and class feeling’. He concluded: ‘Liberty will make its voice heard in some way. We should welcome the chance of letting it make itself felt by a peaceful and constitutional revolution.’
In March he was again felled by his recurrent complaint of conjunctivitis – a condition that he attributed to ‘gazing too often on Butterfield’s architecture’. Accompanied by Hugh Russell-Smith, who had the same symptoms, he was laid up in the school sickbay, where, reading being precluded by their condition, a new work by Hilaire Belloc was read to them. Belloc was a robustly patriotic poet and essayist whose writing was to have a profound influence on Brooke. By this time Geoffrey Keynes had left Rugby and was spending a miserable five months in Germany in preparation for Cambridge. Brooke continued to cheer his friend with regular letters, in one of which he jocularly reported, ‘I have converted half the House to Socialism and the rest to Mormonism.’
With his entrance to Cambridge secure, Brooke was free to indulge his private interests in his final months at Rugby. He continued to excel on the sports field – though his long locks tended to flap about his face during strenuous moments on the pitch; and took to wearing a ‘poetic’ black silk tie, a form of floppy neckwear that he would adopt for the rest of his life. His reading was maturing: he recommended the Jacobean dramatist John Webster to Keynes – the then obscure Webster would continue to be an enthusiasm for Brooke and would form the subject of his Cambridge thesis.
Alongside sport and study, Brooke indulged his simultaneous passions for Sadler, Russell-Smith and Lascelles, and these feelings helped fuel his premature nostalgia for his schooldays as the fearful prospect of leaving loomed ever closer. He confessed to Keynes: ‘It is terrible to feel that one is exchanging the cynicism of youth for the bright optimism of manhood; it is very sad to outgrow one’s disillusions.’
After a delay caused by Brooke’s sickness, his family set out on an Easter holiday in Italy. This time the destination was Venice; but the jewel of the Adriatic was no more impressive to Brooke’s jaundiced eye than Florence had been the previous year. He wrote to Keynes: ‘Venice is an American colony, chiefly peopled by Germans. There is also a small Italian element in the population. It is a little out of date, but the steamers and hotels are rapidly supplanting the old-fashioned gondolas and palaces … I hate it. It is hot and malodorous … the place is befouled by a mob of shrieking tourists. Moreover my family are extremely obnoxious people to travel with.’
A ten-day stay, prolonged by flying visits to Padua and Verona, concluded with stop-overs in Paris and Oxford en route to Rugby. Once there Brooke prepared for his final golden summer at the school. He told Keynes: ‘The Summer Term has dawned. It is my last, and I weep. The same fantastic things happen, there is that strange throng of young beings, unconscious of all their youth and wonder. Another Spring dies odorously in Summer … But I am quite happy. To be here is wonderful, and suffices. I live in a mist of golden dreams. Afterwards life will come, cold and terrible. At present I am a child.’
To the older Lucas, Brooke wrote in similarly elegiac terms: ‘After this term is over the world awaits.
But I do not now care what will come then. Only, my present happiness is so great that I fear the jealous gods will requite me afterwards with some terrible punishment, death, perhaps – or life.’ This final, Wildean paradox embodies a lasting truth about Brooke’s overriding fear of life, which runs beneath his apparent eagerness to embrace it so extravagantly.
As each day passed, he told Keynes: ‘I am beginning to value the things around me more every day, the good and the bad in them. This school-life, with its pathetic transience and immense vitality, calls to me with a charm all the more insistent that I am soon to lose it … I am both actor and spectator.’
Squeezing the last drops of juice from his glory days, he reaped the final fruits that Rugby had to offer by winning the King’s Medal for Prose for an essay on the unlikely subject of William III, joining the First XI in cricket and taking unheard-of liberties in his hair and dress styles. He addressed the Eranos literary society again, this time on the subject of James Thomson, the doomed poet who wrote ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. In collaboration with Denis Browne he wrote an ‘Easter Day Song in Praise of Cremation’, which his friend set to music. Ironically, in view of the fact that Browne would arrange his burial, the poem expresses Brooke’s horror of interment:
In that unwilling bridal of the tomb
To lie
Through the slow hours of stifling gloom
In shameful, helpless agony,
Changed by the worm’s unnatural cold lust
To slime and dust!
Following up his talk on Thomson, Brooke addressed Eranos yet again, on ‘Modern Poetry’. Despite such Wildean aphorisms as ‘Beauty cannot be moral or immoral: it is white or coloured: that is all’, his lecture showed how seriously he took his chosen subject, and the notebooks he kept at this time, with their lists of arcane words and remarks on poets from Dryden to Keats, attest to the depth and breadth of his reading.
