Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  The main advocate of Brooke’s membership was James Strachey, who had himself become an Apostle as a result of his brother Lytton’s influence. James had lobbied tirelessly for his friend’s admission to the elect ever since Brooke had come up to Cambridge. Lytton and Maynard Keynes, who, as already mentioned, had not been greatly impressed by Brooke when they had met him as a Rugby schoolboy, were reluctant, but eventually yielded to James’s importunities. By the time the university broke up for the Christmas holiday in 1907, Brooke’s elevation to the Apostles’ ranks had become a certainty.

  Brooke had been invited to spend Christmas with a group of Cambridge friends at Andermatt in the Swiss Alps. The party contained a strong seasoning of Fabians, including several women members. Foremost among these was the Cambridge Fabians’ new treasurer, who had just replaced Amber Reeve in that post, Katharine Laird Cox, known to her many friends as ‘Ka’.

  Born in the same year as Brooke, Ka was a recent orphan – her wealthy stockbroker father Henry having died in 1905, leaving Ka and her two sisters, Hester and Margaret, more than well provided for. A student of Newnham College, Ka had a flat in Westminster that she shared with Hester and a substantial country house, misnamed Hook Hill Cottage, on her father’s estate near Woking in Surrey. In appearance, Ka was far from beautiful, being heavy and thick-set, with unflattering pince-nez for her severe myopia and a tendency to let her mouth hang open. Her large breasts and surprisingly trim ankles were permanently concealed by long dresses. Her personality, however, more than made up for this unpromising exterior. She was one of those rare people who seems to have instinctively put the needs of others before her own. The fact that she had been forced by her mother’s early death to care for her father and sisters had reinforced this innate motherly trait. Her generous, easy-going nature made her extremely popular with her friends, who looked to her for solace in times of emotional stress. One of them compared her calming presence to sitting in a field of green clover, while Brooke himself was to describe her almost submissive support as ‘a cushion, or a floor’.

  Another Newnhamite at Andermatt was Margery Olivier, also a prominent Cambridge Fabian, and, like Ka, used to taking responsibility for her younger sisters. There were three of these: Brynhild, Daphne and Noel, the progeny of Sir Sydney and Lady Margaret Olivier. Sir Sydney uneasily combined a career as a colonial administrator – he had been appointed Governor of Jamaica the previous April – with advanced Fabian views. Margery, less attractive than her sisters, had brought with her to Andermatt the stunningly beautiful Brynhild. Brynhild shared the film-star looks of her cousin Laurence, who had just been born, and was less intellectual than the bluestocking Margery, who enviously kept a protective shield around her siblings. Brooke instantly noticed the dazzling ‘Bryn’, and was tongue-tied in the presence of these bright young things skiing and sledging in the Swiss snow.

  He had dreaded the prospect of being among so many free – and female – spirits for the first time in his life, writing to Erica only half-jokingly that his companions would be ‘mostly young, heady, strange. Females. I am terrified.’ Once installed at the Grand Hotel he reported to his cousin: ‘I’m a bad person to be one of a party of merry people like these. I’m too dull and sulky.’ But he grudgingly conceded: ‘Even the Newnhamites and others of their sex and age are less terrible than they might be … several are no duller to talk to than the males.’

  The group staged a reading of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in the hotel ballroom, and as the undoubted stars of the show Brooke and Bryn were assigned the plum parts of Algernon and Cicely. Brooke was both excited and disturbed to be close to such an alluring woman. ‘There is One! … oh there is One,’ he wrote to Erica, ‘aged twenty, VERY beautiful & nice & everything … My pen is dragging at its bit to run away with me about her.’ Then comes the protective, cynical pay-off: ‘I adore her, for a week.’

  As he travelled back to Cambridge and the bore of more exams, Brooke was ablaze with heady memories of the Alpine holiday. Andermatt was the first of many occasions in the coming years when he would be among young men and women with ‘advanced’ ideas on political, social and sexual matters. The fact that such ideas – especially those concerning sex – were rarely acted upon in cold reality increased the excitement – and the frustration. Even on the ski slopes the girls kept on their long dresses, and the adult chaperones were never far away. Altogether he felt safer and more comfortable in the male-only society to which he now returned. But a door had swung ajar.

  Back at King’s, Brooke heard that he was about to learn his fate over admission to the Apostles. Maynard Keynes had continued to have his doubts about him as recently as that October – ‘I’m damned if I know what to say,’ he had written to Lytton. ‘James’s judgements on the subject are very nearly worthless; he is quite crazy. I have been to see R. again. He is all right I suppose and quite affable enough – but yet I feel little enthusiasm.’ However, such doubts had at last been overcome and Brooke was duly elected as the first new Apostle for two years.

  It fell to James to convey the good news to him. But almost immediately he too was assailed by doubt as to whether Brooke would prove worthy of the honour. He told his brother: ‘How dreadful it is to satisfy a violent desire … I completely forgot, of course, to tell him it was secret – so he’s probably retailing it all at this very moment to Geoffrey Keynes … it was I alone who saw, in a ghastly moment as he went away, his incredible stupidity.’

  In fact it was the secrecy of the Apostles that most appealed to Brooke, particularly to the conspiratorial side of his nature. He did not, as feared, brag of his election and kept his regular attendance at meetings a secret from his friends who were outside the charmed circle. He accepted with equanimity the overt homosexuality of the group, but if James had hoped that his efforts to get Brooke elected would be rewarded by an admission to his bed he was bitterly disappointed, as Maynard Keynes indicated in a letter to his lover Duncan Grant in early February: ‘James’ ups and downs with Brooke seem to be almost more violent than usual … There is an understanding between Brooke and Gerald [Shove – a King’s economics student and distant friend to Brooke] – they sit together every evening – to which he feels that he doesn’t belong.’

  Brooke was quite prepared to play fast and loose with James’s feelings and to flirt outrageously with other men. But the sincerity of his own sexual feelings remains open to doubt. Most probably he was unsure of them himself. The almost exclusively homoerotic ambience of Rugby and Cambridge had cemented themselves around his personality, and he would remain permanently susceptible to homosexual emotions. But the experience of Andermatt had proved to him that he was attracted to – and attractive to – women as well. Although he would never be able to conduct a fully mature heterosexual relationship, and his emotions would stay mired in an adolescent swamp, his yearning to prove himself a lover of women would be as much a part of his make-up as his early homoeroticism.

  For the remainder of the term, much of Brooke’s energy was poured into simultaneous political and dramatic activity. On 23 January he attended his first meeting of the Fabian steering committee with Ka Cox, who, in the words of one of his biographers, began to ‘slip almost invisibly into some inner room of his being, and … warm it like a log-fire so slow burning that he was for a long time hardly aware of it’. At the same time he was elected President of the Marlowe Dramatic Society, which was in the throes of preparing for a major production as a follow-up to Dr Faustus.

  One of Brooke’s tutors, Walter Headlam, and Dr A. C. Shipley, Master of John Milton’s old college, Christ’s, had independently arrived at the idea of celebrating the poet’s tercentenary with a production of his masque Comus. Justin Brooke, with his habitual energy, seized on the idea as a perfect vehicle for the Marlowe Dramatic Society and swiftly enlisted Brooke to be stage manager and to play the part of the Attendant Spirit. Two Cambridge cousins, Frances and Gwen Darwin, granddaughters of the great scientist, were a
pproached by the Brookes to help make the costumes and paint the scenery. Thus two more friends of Brooke were made. Frances was an able and original poet, Gwen an equally accomplished artist. As preparations for the ambitious enterprise went ahead, more friends were persuaded or bullied into joining the project – including Ka Cox, who agreed to be a dancer and help with the set design.

  Brooke’s absorption with the theatre still left room in his life for his deepening political interests. Invited by Geoffrey Keynes to hear H. G. Wells address a Pembroke discussion society, Brooke took the opportunity to ask the great man to give a lecture to the University Fabians. Afterwards Wells agreed to give a talk to a private meeting of Brooke’s Carbonari on the subject of ‘the family’.

  Wells was the unofficial leader of the Fabians’ more radical wing. He wished to carry the social revolution that they advocated to the wilder shores of replacing marriage by ‘free love’ – a shocking proposition for older Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs. Wells certainly practised what he preached, rarely passing up an opportunity to seduce any young woman who seemed remotely susceptible to his dubious charms. Not a few succumbed. Soon Wells acquired a roguish reputation, both for his revolutionary ideas and his colourful private life. The one outraged the conservative Right, the other offended the censorious Left.

  Brooke was captivated by Wells’s vision of a new society guided by an intelligent élite whom the tubby novelist christened the ‘Samurai’, after Japan’s warrior caste. No doubt Brooke saw himself as a member of just such an élite, but there was with Wells, as with Belloc, a sinister side: Wells too was a convinced racial supremacist who believed in using science to repress both lesser breeds and the unenlightened masses. An enthusiastic advocate of eugenics, the elimination of the mentally and physically unfit and other proto-Nazi ideas, Wells held a vision of socialism as an authoritarian society run for the convenience of people much like himself, rather than a community of free and equal men and women. The concept appealed to him as a tidy way of eradicating poverty and ushering in a hygienic and controlled hierarchy in which the enlightened few would lord it over the ignorant many.

  Listening with Brooke were fellow-Carbonari like Dalton, Arthur Schloss, Gerald Shove and Ben Keeling, along with distinguished older guests like Lowes Dickinson. As the organizer, Brooke felt he was shining in the company of his most brilliant Cambridge contemporaries. At last he was at the centre of things, and among people who mattered. ‘Wells is a very pleasant little man,’ he reported condescendingly to his mother, ‘insignificant in appearance and with a thin voice (he has only one lung) and slight Cockney accent (“thet” for “that”). He is rather shy.’

  The meeting with Wells nudged Brooke to the very brink of becoming a fully-fledged Fabian socialist by signing ‘the Basis’. As he looked back on the Lent term he could pat himself on the back with a sense of real achievement. He was now a prominent and sought-after member of three university organizations that were setting the agenda of Cambridge life: the Apostles, the Fabians and the Marlowe Dramatic Society. He had made good and lasting friends – sometimes overlapping in all three spheres. The fact that he could juggle these three interests and keep them in largely separate compartments appealed to him. In short, he had conquered Cambridge and regarded the city with all the contempt of a victorious general looking down on a vanquished citadel. He wrote to the absent Jacques Raverat from ‘the Hinder Parts, the faeces or crassamentum or dregs, the eastern Counties; a low swamp, a confluence of mist and mire, a gathering-place of Dankness, and Mud, and Fever; where men’s minds rot in the mirk [sic] like a leper’s flesh, and their bodies grow white and soft and malodorous and suppurating and fungoid, and so melt in slime.’

  Brooke was having fun and, as a result, his carapace of cynicism had begun to slip. Merriment and a sheer zest for life kept breaking through, accompanied by an aching realization that he would never enjoy himself with quite the same delight he was feeling now. Portentously, he told Hugh Dalton: ‘There are only three good things in the world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.’ He felt that poetry put him in touch with a current that continually powered and invigorated him in some mystical way.

  After another conversation on the nature of beauty, the two friends were sitting late at night at a window overlooking Kings Parade when a group of students, returning well lubricated from a dinner, passed below, whistling and yelling as they staggered home. ‘Those fellows,’ remarked Brooke, ‘would have thought us very old if they had been in this room tonight, but when they go down and sit on office stools they will grow old quite suddenly, and, many years hence, we will still be talking and thinking about this sort of thing – and we will still be young.’

  In some sense, Brooke was right – he would never grow old as Dalton did; even so, his obsessive fear of ageing and losing his youthful élan would haunt him for the few remaining years he had. Also held in contempt was the vulgar herd obliged to work for a living at humdrum jobs. Brooke equated growing up and settling down, getting married and having children with a betrayal of youthful idealism and spirit. His poetry is replete with gibes against the old and shuddering diatribes about ageing and bodily decay. Lodged like a beautiful golden insect inside the amber of his inner world, Brooke welcomed an early death as his one chance of escaping the fate of decrepitude.

  One of his new friends, Frances Darwin, encapsulated Brooke’s image in his early Cambridge career in a verse that came to embarrass both its subject and its author. Nevertheless it contains more than a grain of truth:

  A young Apollo, golden-haired,

  Stands dreaming on the edge of strife;

  Magnificently unprepared

  For the long littleness of life.

  6

  * * *

  Fabian Summer

  * * *

  It was Hugh Dalton who first learned that Brooke was ready to take another step on his faltering journey towards socialism. Writing to his friend from Torquay in early April 1908, where he was spending the first ten days of the Easter vacation, Brooke forgivably boasted that he had been invited to meet H. G. Wells at his London club and, under the great man’s influence, had ‘decided to sign even the present Fabian Basis, and to become a member (if possible) of the central Fabian Society’.

  The meeting with Wells at the National Liberal Club – soon to become one of Brooke’s own London bases – was an epochal event for Brooke. As we have seen, he was impressed by Wells’s vision of a new society inaugurated by an intellectual élite which would sweep aside an effete civilization. While in Torquay he noted, ‘how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.’ Intellectually, at least, Brooke was serious in his study of socialist texts – neglecting his Greek studies, the ostensible purpose of his seaside stay, to make copious notes in the margins of William Morris’s News from Nowhere and the Fabian tracts that Wells had pressed into his hands.

  From his quayside lodgings at 3 Beacon Terrace, Brooke would set out for strolls along the promenade with his varied reading matter, which included a new play written by Erica Cotterill and sent by her for his comments. As he frankly wrote to her, it served a more mundane purpose: ‘I carry it about with me and sit on it at intervals.’ At the same time he wrote to Geoffrey Keynes, holidaying at nearby Lulworth: ‘I am not a poet – I was, that’s all.’ But Brooke lied. His daily routine at Torquay informed a sonnet, ‘Seaside’, which contains lines of real maturity, quite foreign to the strident poses of his earlier self:

  Swiftly out from the friendly lilt of the band,

  The crowd’s good laughter, the loved eyes of men,

  I am drawn nightward; I must turn again

  Where, down beyond the low untrodden strand,

  There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown

  The old unquiet ocean. All the shade

  Is rife with magic
and movement. I stray alone

  Here on the edge of silence, half afraid,

  Waiting a sign. In the deep heart of me

  The sullen waters swell towards the moon,

  And all my tides set seaward.

  From inland

  Leaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune,

  That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,

  And dies between the seawall and the sea.

  From Torquay, Brooke made his way to the northern edge of Salisbury Plain and the isolated village of Market Lavington, where Hugh Russell-Smith and he had ended their walking tour exactly a year before. This time the Green Dragon was to be the venue for an Apostles reading party organized by John Maynard Keynes. It was the first such gathering Brooke had attended since his election two months earlier and he must have felt some qualms about his own modest intellectual attainments in the presence of such big guns as Keynes, Lytton Strachey, the critic Desmond MacCarthy and, above all, the philosopher G. E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica, published in 1903, provided the guiding principles for the Apostles as well as the Bloomsbury group that grew out of them. Brooke need not have worried. Moore’s principal contribution to the relaxed proceedings was to play Schubert songs on the pub’s piano, accompanying himself in a high baritone voice until the sweat glistened on his egg-shaped head.

  Characteristically, Lytton Strachey refused to take part in the fun and games, withdrawing to his room to read Racine and complaining to his friend and Bloomsbury ally in cattiness, Virginia Stephen, about ‘the coldest winds you can imagine sweeping over the plain, and inferior food, and not enough comfortable chairs’. Despite this whinge, Lytton concluded magnanimously: ‘I was quite amused.’ One element which kept him smiling was the presence of Brooke, a centre of attention among so many confirmed bachelors. ‘Whenever I began to feel dull,’ Lytton told Virginia, ‘I could look at the yellow hair and pink cheeks of Rupert.’