by Nigel Jones
As rehearsals for Eumenides went enjoyably forward, Brooke resumed his friendship with James Strachey, who was up at Trinity, putting as much energy into his sex life as Brooke did into drama. James’s promised weekly letters to Brooke had lapsed during 1906, preoccupied as he was by brief affairs with his cousin Duncan Grant and an on-off liaison with the Trinity Classics lecturer Walter ‘Watty’ Lamb, with whose younger brother, Henry, Brooke was destined to tangle disastrously during the last years of his life. The flavour of James’s louche life at Cambridge is conveyed in a letter to Grant on 8 November 1906: ‘This is a dreary hole; where one divides one’s time between buggering the senior dean’s sons and hearing Donald Tovey massacre The Appassionata … [Among other accomplishments, James was a distinguished critic of music.] I suppose you’ll be coming to see the Rajah in his tights and spangles.’ The reference is to Brooke’s costume as the Herald in Eumenides, which received its première on 30 November. Brooke, clad in a red wig, with cardboard helmet and armour and a short, sequinned skirt which inordinately excited his admirers but was so tight that he was afraid to sit down in it, duly blew on his mock trumpet and struck his statuesque pose before an audience, according to one witness largely composed of ‘Hellenists and paedophiles’. The gay librettist of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, A. C. Benson, noted in his diary: ‘A herald made a pretty figure, spoilt by a glassy stare.’ Also there was Eddie Marsh, a wealthy and influential civil servant with an equally passionate interest in the arts and handsome young men: he was to become Brooke’s most powerful patron and mentor. Writing in retrospect, Marsh nostalgically recalled ‘the radiant, youthful figure in gold and vivid red and blue, like a Page in the Riccardi Chapel, [who] stood strangely out against the stuffy decorations and dresses’. Instantly smitten by this vision, Marsh remained devotedly in love with Brooke until the very end.
At the post-performance party Brooke met other figures who were to play a prominent part in his future. There was Francis Cornford, a junior Classics don at Trinity, Jane Harrison, a don at Newnham, one of Cambridge’s two women’s colleges, who overheard Brooke coin one of his instant Wildean epigrams: ‘No one over thirty is worth talking to’; and there was Charles Sayle, who worked in the university library. Hovering on the fringes was James Strachey, who gave his reaction in a note to Brooke that same night: ‘Dear Rupert, In the excitement of the moment I must just write to tell you (a truism) that you were very beautiful tonight. How sorry I shall be tomorrow morning that I sent you this! How angry you will be when you read it! Vogue la galère. [Let’s risk it.] Yours in admiration, James.’ There – it was out – a first declaration of love and devotion. Another admirer was added to a lengthening list. Brooke would use the weapon that James had handed to him quite ruthlessly in the years to come.
Also with James at the party was George Mallory, a Magdalene man and protégé of the Magdalene don A. C. Benson. Mallory, ‘with good looks in the Botticelli style’, in Geoffrey Keynes’s estimation, was an early pioneer of the sport of rock climbing and was doomed to find immortality when he died during an attempted first ascent of Mount Everest in 1924. He too had enjoyed affairs with the indefatigable Duncan Grant and the incorrigible James Strachey, and, along with James, was a member of a tightly-knit gay Cambridge coterie whose members included Oscar Browning and Charles Sayle – one of the most ecstatic of Brooke’s legion of male admirers.
Browning had been the first to attempt to lure Brooke into his slightly sticky web – hardly surprisingly since he shared the top floor of Staircase A in Fellows’ Buildings with him. A former master at Eton, which he had left under a cloud of suspicion for ‘messing about’ with the boys, Browning, universally known as ‘the O.B.’, was a History Fellow who enjoyed a slightly sinister reputation as a serial seducer of pretty boys. He played Beethoven on a harmonium in his rooms and is rumoured to have employed a string quartet of elderly ladies to provide a suitable accompaniment from behind a screen while he made love to James Strachey. He was apparently unable to do the same to Brooke, who dutifully reported to the Ranee: ‘I went to lunch with the “O.B.” on Sunday. He was rather quaint to watch but I did not much like him. He was so very egotistical, and a little dull.’
Brooke took more to Charles Sayle, the 42-year-old university under-librarian, whose home at 8 Trumpington Street was a well-known centre for the Cambridge gay crowd. Sayle, who had been a friend of J. H. Badley at Rugby, was ‘small, fussy and spinsterish’; his camp persona was summed up in his nickname ‘Aunt Snayle’. His tastes ran to young, working-class boys, whom he called ‘Angels of Earth’, though he also fell in love with George Mallory – and with Brooke. His besotted journal entries about Brooke make one understand why Bertrand Russell called Sayle ‘a well-known ass’: ‘I do not know in what language to moderate my appreciation of this great man,’ Sayle wrote of Brooke. ‘Great in his ideals, great in his imagination, great in his charm. The world will learn to know him later on. It has been mine to know him now.’ Brooke lapped all this up and was a regular visitor to Sayle’s house as long as he lived in Cambridge – although there is no evidence that they were lovers.
After the excitement of Eumenides Brooke returned to the grind of his studies. With little interest in the Classics he was studying, he was in danger of relapsing into the depressed cynicism in which he had arrived. Even at this early stage he was tempted to change to English, especially under the influence of the brilliant but abstracted scholar Walter Headlam, who refired his interest in Elizabethan drama – particularly in Webster. Hugh Dalton’s breezy friendship was another antidote to his gloom, and he enjoyed the weekly meetings of the Carbonari, to whom he read his paper on modern poetry and a new poem of his own, ‘The Song of the Beasts’:
Unswerving and silent follow with me,
Till the city ends sheer,
And the crook’d lanes open wide,
Out of the voices of night,
Beyond lust and fear,
To the level waters of moonlight,
To the level waters, quiet and clear,
To the black unresting plains of the calling sea.
Brooke returned to Rugby, where his mood matched the flatness of the Cambridgeshire Fens: he had briefly been a star, and had attempted quite consciously to carry out the personal plan outlined to Geoffrey Keynes:
I shall be rather witty and rather clever and I shall spend my time pretending to admire what I think it humorous or impressive in me to admire. Even more than yourself I attempt to be ‘all things to all men’; rather ‘cultured’ among the cultured, faintly athletic among athletes, a little blasphemous among blasphemers, slightly insincere to myself … However there are advantages in being a hypocrite, aren’t there?
Even then, the cynicism hid a nagging dissatisfaction: how many of those who eagerly sought him out wanted to know the real Brooke, and how many were beguiled by the surface charm? In a sense his speechless stage role had been appropriate – for was he not all show and little substance? His secrecy and guile, his play-acting and downright lying were all weapons aimed at deflecting the demands his appearance and ‘radiance’ inspired in others. Having no ready response to their expectations, he dissimulated. The ambivalence of his appearance, and his obvious attractiveness to both sexes only served to deepen his confusion. His mother’s prudishness was at war with an open and healthy libido – as witness his Rugby dalliances – and the result was inner chaos. Jacques Raverat got a glimpse into this when Brooke told him of seeing a working-class woman under a lamp-post locked in the arms of her lover, with her pale, ordinary face transfigured by the aura of love. He could, he admitted, feel only ‘sick with envy’.
Brooke arrived home to find his mother ill with flu, along with his brother Dick, whose health had never been robust. On cue, and for the third Christmas in a row, Brooke joined them on the sick list. In his enforced idleness he wrote to two of his old correspondents, his cousin Erica Cotterill and Geoffrey Keynes. He told Erica of his escapist ambition to go and live
in Paris or London ‘like a great red flame’. To Keynes he narrated a dream that would have provided rich pickings for James Strachey in his later profession of Freudian psychoanalyst:
I was in the Gardens of Heaven walking between great odorous beds of helichrys and asphodel. Turning a corner I met the present Headmaster of Rugby School in his shirt-sleeves. He was digging up all the beautiful flowers. I hit him severely on the nose, and asked what he was doing. He said he was uprooting the useless flowers and planting vegetables for food instead. I told him that in Heaven one subsisted entirely on beautiful thoughts. He replied that he would starve, and continued to dig, muttering. He began to swell as I gazed, and, still grunting ‘Cabbages and Onions’, grew so big that he blotted out all the sky …
Dr Herbert James figured large in Brooke’s subconscious as a father-figure in lieu of the real thing. Here he clearly represents the philistine in full flight. While in heavenly mood Brooke enclosed a new sonnet, ‘The Vision of the Archangels’, which pictures God in a ‘little dingy coffin’ dropping for ever ‘Into the emptiness and silence, into the night’. Keynes responded with a weary plea for Brooke to give up his pretence of poetic gloom. Brooke responded: ‘I have thought over your idea of my at length giving up the pose of discontent and taking to optimism in my old age. I think not. The change might be refreshing, but I scrape along very well as I am; and the pessimistic insincerity pleases ME at any rate, which is the main thing.’ Another sonnet, inspired by his illness, ‘To My Lady Influenza’, finds Brooke in playfully grotesque mood:
… so cometh now
My Lady Influenza, like a star
Inebriously wan, and in her train
Fever, the haggard soul’s white nenuphur,
And lily-fingered Death, and grisly Pain
And Constipation who makes all things vain,
Pneumonyer, Cancer, and Nasal Catarrh.
But ‘Pneumonyer’ was soon to cease to be a source of light relief to Brooke. He was just packing for his return to Cambridge in mid-January when a message came from Southsea, where his brother Dick worked, to say that Dick was desperately ill with pneumonia. Parker Brooke left at once and was at his eldest son’s bedside when he died on 13 January. Although as charming as his younger brother, Dick had always been emotionally and physically frail and, after beginning a business career in Southsea, had taken to the bottle, which further undermined his health. He was six years Brooke’s senior and the two had never been close, but Brooke shared his parents’ grief and offered to stay on in Rugby to help them bear it.
However, Mr and Mrs Brooke preferred to shoulder their sorrow alone, as Brooke explained in a note to Charlie Lascelles:
I am very glad to get away before you all return. This sounds rude. But I am feeling terribly despondent and sad, and I feel that I could not face everybody. The only thing was if I could help Father and Mother by staying, but they say not, and I do not think so. And if I stayed I know I should break down. There is an instinct to hide in sorrow, and at Cambridge where I know no-one properly I can be alone … I hope you’ll be gentle to my pater at first. He has had a terrible time, and is very tired and broken by it.
Indeed, Parker Brooke retreated still further into his shell, and his grief for his son probably contributed to his own early death.
To distract himself from mourning for Dick, Brooke plunged into work on his return to Cambridge. Not content with catching up on his studies, he proposed to review poetry for the Cambridge Review and offered this and the Westminster Gazette his own current compositions. On 14 February 1907 the Review published ‘The Call’, a poem saturated with feeling for his dead brother:
Your mouth shall mock the old and wise,
Your laugh shall fill the world with flame,
I’ll write upon the shrinking skies
The scarlet splendour of your name.
The Gazette also printed a couple of his other offerings, signed for the first time with his own name, indicating an increasing confidence in the worth of his work. He was unimpressed by the verse he read for the Review, telling Lucas: ‘I frequently wonder whether I have not written several of them myself under a pseudonym, and forgotten about it.’ His resulting notices were so savage that the Review’s editor felt compelled to tone them down, although he left in scathing remarks like ‘It is a relief to turn from the merely silly to the merely dull.’ In March Brooke went to London and saw Peter Pan yet again.
Before Easter, Hugh Dalton introduced Brooke to a forceful character who was to have a decisive influence on his hitherto amateurish dalliance with politics. Ben Keeling was a third-year undergraduate at Trinity who was the driving force behind the university’s infant Fabian Society, a mainly middle-class group of radicals who provided much of the intellectual underpinning of the nascent Labour Party. Shaw, H. G. Wells and Beatrice and Sidney Webb were among the Fabians’ leading lights. They advocated a doctrine of peaceful and gradualist transformation of society towards socialism, in which an informed élite, armed with a ‘scientific’ analysis of social injustice, would slowly educate workers and government alike in the necessity of a change of course. When Keeling arrived at Cambridge in 1905 he found only half a dozen Fabians, but by the time Brooke met him his single-handed efforts had transformed the situation, and scores of students and dons were involved. Keeling master-minded Cambridge socialism from his rooms overlooking Trinity’s gatehouse, which were adorned with a massive poster of workers advancing with clenched fists under the slogan ‘Forward the Day is Breaking’. This later inspired Brooke’s poem ‘Second Best’:
Yet, behind the night,
Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar,
Some white tremendous daybreak …
Keeling’s propagandist tactics included inviting the Labour Party’s founder, Keir Hardie, to address the Fabian Society. When right-wing ‘hearties’ threatened to disrupt the event by kidnapping the veteran socialist, Keeling countered by deploying several decoy Hardies, kitted out in authentic-looking beards and red ties, to confuse the opposition. Hardie duly completed his address.
One revolutionary feature of the Fabians’ programme was its espousal of women’s rights and feminism, a current hot potato, with the women’s suffrage campaign getting under way. The Cambridge Fabians were the first student society to admit women as equals, and their first treasurer was Amber Reeve, the current mistress of the libidinous H. G. Wells.
At his first meeting with Keeling, an awed Brooke listened wide-eyed to his host’s account of his running battles with his Tory opponents – which included, at one stage, smearing his stairs with margarine and rigging up an electrified barbed-wire barrier to deflect a determined raid by ‘hearties’. Dalton had become a committed Fabian and urged Brooke to follow suit, but a cautious Brooke, conscious that such an association would not go down well in Rugby, held back. Full membership of the Fabians entailed signing a document known as ‘the Basis’, which set out their beliefs, but sympathizers not ready to go this far were allowed to become Associates of the Society and, for the moment, Brooke contented himself with this. He told Dalton: ‘I’m not your sort of socialist – I’m a William Morris sort of socialist.’
But the seeds of socialist belief had been sown, however thinly, and Brooke began to read radical texts like William Morris’s Utopian novel News from Nowhere and a pamphlet written by his own maternal uncle, Clement Cotterill, entitled ‘Human Justice for those at the Bottom from Those at the Top’. Impressed, he wrote to the author expressing his hopes of converting the Cambridge Fabians to ‘a more humane view of things … Of course they’re really sincere, energetic, useful people, and they do a lot of good work. But, as I’ve said, they seem rather hard … They sometimes seem to take it for granted that all rich men, and all Conservatives (and most ordinary Liberals) are heartless villains.’
Adding Keeling to his growing circle of Cambridge friends, Brooke elected to spend the first half of the Easter vacation on a walking tour of Sussex with an earlier ch
um: Hugh Russell-Smith. Perhaps he was influenced by praise of the open-air life by his Bedalian friends Justin Brooke and Jacques Raverat. Sussex was also the heartland of one of his favourite current writers, Hilaire Belloc, whose verses were continually on Brooke’s lips, especially the quatrain:
*
From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.
Planning their route, Brooke revealed in a letter to Russell-Smith his ignorance of the great outdoors that was soon to form a central part of his life: ‘I have never been on a “walking-tour” (damned word) before … describe to me the satchel I shall bear … on my head, what? A cap, I suppose … And within the napzak [sic], what? …’ Their ramble took them through the sleepy settlements of West Sussex and Hampshire, to end up at Easter at the Green Dragon inn at Market Lavington in Wiltshire, from where he reported to Lucas: ‘I am terribly Fabian; which in our family is synonymous with “atheistical”, “Roman Catholic”, “vulgar”, “conceited”, and “unpractical”.’
The second half of the holiday was taken up by a trip to Italy in the company of his brother Alfred, known as ‘Podge’. They travelled by train to a pensione in Florence, chiefly populated by elderly English gentlewomen, one of whom fazed Brooke when he playfully asked her to identify his school. After eyeing him for a minute she accurately pronounced, ‘Rugby!’ Brooke dutifully took Alfred round the galleries, but himself remained impervious to their glories: ‘I have made the final and irrevocable discovery that I hate and am perfectly blind to all painting and sculpture.’
Before Brooke left for Italy he had received a plaintive letter from James Strachey reproaching him for having avoided him since his declaration of adoration on the night of Eumenides and imploring him to ‘be kind’. In his reply, written from Florence, Brooke denied intending to drop or cut James, and blamed his invisibility on the depression that had accompanied his bereavement. ‘All this explains my not coming to see you. No doubt it was very selfish. But as my friends will tell you, I am wholly selfish. I never think of others’ feelings. I am entirely taken up with pitying myself. Indeed, if you are still foolish enough to want it, you can know me “as Mr Dalton knows” me – or more closely …’ He concluded by inviting James to tea. When, back at Cambridge, James took up the invitation, the encounter was brief, according to his report of the event to Duncan Grant:
