by Nigel Jones
Brooke also made an impression on another guest, E. M. Forster, whose novel The Longest Journey had been published the year before, and whose latest story, ‘The Celestial Omnibus’, Brooke happened to be carrying about in his jacket pocket. As he told James Strachey, in a preparatory postcard from Torquay confirming his intended presence at the Green Dragon: ‘having the pleasant tolerance of the old (or at least old-fashioned), I am not especially bored even with the wise.’ James was delighted by Brooke’s decision to attend. He remained passionately in love, and had even jettisoned his Conservative political allegiance to follow Brooke into the Cambridge Fabians. As such, he had accompanied his beloved to a political debate in London, where Brooke, he reported excitedly to Duncan Grant, had actually seized him by the arm. ‘I felt decidedly at the time that he was deliberate … That he’d been meaning to do it for some time, and jumped at a chance. I can’t believe that he didn’t know it was important. Why else was he so absurdly shy?’
For his part Brooke heartlessly enjoyed the game of making the prematurely old, spinsterish souls of Forster and the Stracheys pine for him. In contrast to his disturbing experience at Andermatt, there were no glamorous women around to share his limelight, and he basked in the admiring attention, without, as yet, worrying too much about the implications of being a pin-up of such a desiccated group.
From Market Lavington, he returned directly to Cambridge for the new term, where his first act was to sign the Fabian Basis as promised. His sponsors in this step were Hugh Dalton and Ben Keeling. Brooke was now publicly committed – at least in theory – to a fundamentalist socialist programme, including the abolition of rent and private property, the ‘disappearance of the idle rich’ and the complete equality of men and women. It was a set of beliefs that he was to find easier to honour in the breach.
The newly fledged Fabian found himself invited by Ben Keeling to his rooms at Trinity on 10 May. The guest of honour was Sir Sydney Olivier, whose beautiful daughter Bryn had so bewitched Brooke at Andermatt. Following the frugal one-course socialist meal (with fruit), the company adjourned to Francis Cornford’s nearby rooms for coffee. Behind the scenes at this apparently innocuous and high-minded event an emotional and sexual maelstrom was let loose that was to have unforeseen and momentous consequences both for Brooke’s personal life and for the development of the Fabians.
A late arrival at the feast was Wells, who as a result had to sit in a window seat, awkwardly balancing his plate on his knee. It was noted with raised eyebrows that he was accompanied by the Newnham student Amber Reeve, Ka Cox’s predecessor as treasurer of the Cambridge Fabians. Wells was a close friend of Amber’s father, William Pember Reeve, the Fabian director of the London School of Economics, which had been founded by two more senior Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Beatrice was a great sniffer-out of political and sexual unorthodoxy, and her shrivelled nostrils were already twitching disapprovingly in the direction of the sexy young Amber: ‘An amazingly vital person, and I suppose very clever, but a terrible little pagan – vain, egotistical, and careless of other people’s happiness.’
On this occasion Amber confirmed Beatrice Webb’s worst fears by taking Wells to her Newnham bed. Their passionate lovemaking caused them to arrive late and flushed for Keeling’s party. Wells was already in deep trouble with senior Fabians – only the previous month he had stormed out of their annual general meeting after being censored for supporting Winston Churchill, the Liberal candidate in an Oldham by-election, against a socialist. His reputation for seducing nubile Fabian daughters physically and susceptible Fabian wives intellectually meant that a terminal break with the movement’s leadership could not long be delayed. His open affair with Amber Reeve, begun that May evening, was to be the catalyst that caused it.
Brooke’s attention, however, was distracted by the presence at the party of another guest, who was to become the main romantic focus of his life for the next four years. Sir Sydney Olivier had brought with him to Cambridge not only his wife, Lady Margaret, but three of his four daughters – Margery, Daphne and Noel; Bryn had been left in Jamaica. Brooke knew Margery already, but he had never met Daphne or Noel. Placed opposite Noel at the dinner table, he was almost instantly smitten – transfixed like one of the rabbits that the young Noel liked to pin down and dissect.
Born on Christmas Day 1892, and hence just 15 at the time of her meeting with Brooke, Noel, youngest of the Olivier sisters, had spent an idyllic childhood divided between the English countryside and Jamaica, where her father was Colonial Secretary before being appointed Governor. In contrast to Brooke’s strait-laced upbringing, Noel and her sisters had felt the benefits of their parents’ dedication to their radical ideals. From their privileged colonial lifestyle of polo and ponies in Jamaica, to wanderings in the woods of the North Downs near their father’s cottage at Limpsfield Chart in Surrey, freedom had been the keynote of Noel’s young life.
Limpsfield Chart was something of a progressive nexus in the otherwise stuffily conservative county of Surrey. The Oliviers’ neighbours in the scattered rural community, with its views over Box Hill to the west and the Weald of Kent to the south, included Fabian families like the Peases and the Hobsons and Russian exiles drawn by other neighbours, the literary critics and translators of Russian literature, Edward and Constance Garnett. The Garnetts’ son, David – known from his early days as ‘Bunny’ – was a childhood playmate of Noel’s. He shrewdly observed of the Oliviers’ ruling family ethos: ‘They were all aristocratic creatures, pride was the moving force of their lives; they felt contempt easily; pity did not come naturally, except for animals.’ In Noel’s case, even animals were excluded. From her youngest years she had a penchant for collecting the cadavers of dead creatures and dissecting them. As Bunny Garnett recalled: ‘We collected skeletons, we stuffed birds; we skinned rabbits and moles and tanned their skins.’ The two would go out at dead of night to collect nocturnal specimens: each kept a string attached to their big toe dangling from their bedroom windows to summon each other for their secret explorations.
The open beech and pine woodlands of the countryside around Limpsfield Chart were the sisters’ element, and the liberty allowed them by their parents, coupled with the sense of being members of a gifted élite removed from the common herd, combined to produce, in Noel’s granddaughter’s words: ‘Four self-confident, independent girls, whose clannish arrogance often led rather too swiftly to contempt of others. Like Sydney, they could be unbelievably insensitive at times, often hurting the feelings of others over issues which they considered trivial.’
Bunny Garnett, who knew all four sisters from their childhood, describes the eldest, Margery, as ‘tall, brown-eyed and brown-haired, handsome, with the impulsive warmth and sudden chilliness of her father’. Brynhild, the second sister, was the beauty of the family, who grew, says Bunny, a noted connoisseur of feminine charms, ‘into the most beautiful young woman I have ever known. She was rather fairer than Margery; with the most lovely bone structure, a perfect complexion with red cheeks, and starry eyes that flashed and sparkled as no other woman’s have ever done.’ The third sister, Daphne, soon to join Margery at Newnham when Brooke met her, was ‘darker, more dreamy, and, in her childhood, wrapped in the skin of some beast, or crowned with flowers’. But Bunny, like Brooke, reserved his real fascination for the youngest sister, because, he says, ‘she became far more important than any of her family … She was quiet and the least conspicuous of the four.’ But still waters run deep, and Noel was to outstrip all three of her elder sisters in intelligence and achievement.
It is easy to see what attracted Brooke to the Oliviers. They shared his charm and physical attractiveness and his propensity to regard less favoured mortals with contempt. At that fateful dinner, Noel regarded him silently as he chatted to her sister Margery, cracked nuts and flashed her the occasional smile. When the guests decamped to Cornford’s rooms for coffee, Noel dropped a precious small green coffee cup and was mortified as it smashed to pieces.
Instantly Brooke saw his chance and pounced, swiftly putting the flustered schoolgirl at her ease as he swept up the broken shards.
Later that month the owner of the broken cup, Francis Cornford, persuaded Brooke to entertain forty members of St Pancras Working Men’s Club in his rooms, and the young Fabian earnestly quizzed these genuine members of the proletariat on their attitudes to property and Empire. Meanwhile Brooke was deepening a tie with Cornford’s future wife, the poet Frances Darwin, who expressed admiration both for his glamorous person and for his poetry.
Both Francis and Frances were deeply involved in the Marlowe Dramatic Society’s production of Comus, the rehearsals for which were now entering their final stage. Frances recalled a conversation at this time with Justin and Brooke that showed how skin-deep Brooke’s new-found commitment to sexual equality really was:
Rupert: When I marry I shall settle absolutely everything in my own house. My wife must completely obey me.
Justin: Oh, Rupert! I should hate that! I do want a wife who can stand up to me.
Rupert: No. I shall settle everything.
Frances: But may she not ever have her own way, even about the children?
Rupert: I suppose she may just settle little things about them when they are quite small. That’s all.
Frances, like the Olivier sisters, had a wild, outdoors side to her nature – she was prone to striking poses in diaphanous gowns in picturesque sites – and she tended to romanticize Brooke for his similarities to herself. She was pivotal in attracting him into her circle of Cambridge women, a group that provided a powerful counterpoint to his previously predominantly male society. Her cousin Gwen Darwin, Ka Cox, Sybil and Ethel Pye (by coincidence neighbours of the Oliviers at Limpsfield Chart) and the Olivier sisters themselves were all drawn into various aspects of Comus as June became July, and Brooke, the harassed stage manager-cum-second lead actor, chivvied his teams of seamstresses, scene painters and costume designers into ever greater efforts. The pace grew too hot for Justin, preoccupied by his Finals, and for Frances herself, always prone to the inherited Darwin weakness of depression, and both fell by the wayside. By the time the production opened, on 10 July, Brooke, energized by his responsibilities, stood almost alone as the commanding figure. For once he did not fall ill.
Brooke’s own lack of stage skills were all too apparent to those who saw the piece in rehearsal. According to the critic E. J. Dent, who had also observed him in Dr Faustus, Brooke was an indifferent speaker of verse, with the family impediment of a harsh, grating and monotonous voice. But he was willing to learn: his new women friends gave him tips on how to hang down his head and shake his luxuriant hair loose. Frances tells how afterwards he was seen staring in a mirror, dreamily running his fingers through his hair and asking no one in particular: ‘Is it right now? Will my hair do now?’ On a more serious level, he was genuinely moved by his discovery of Milton; telling Frances theatrically that the Puritan poet had joined that select company who made his hand tremble with anticipation as he prepared to take down a volume of theirs from a bookshelf.
Brooke’s acting abilities notwithstanding, James Strachey was smitten anew by the sight of him in costume at the dress rehearsal, as Maynard Keynes reported to Duncan Grant: ‘James went to a rehearsal last night and declares that Brooke’s beauty was so great that he couldn’t sleep a wink last night for thinking of it.’
The day before the production, Brooke suffered a loss which affected him almost as deeply as Dick’s death. His Greek teacher, Walter Headlam, the man who had originally suggested a performance of Comus, died after collapsing at Lord’s at the early age of 42. Brooke was devastated, describing Headlam as not only the best writer in Greek since the Greeks themselves, but also the man who had awakened him to poets like Donne, Webster and Milton himself.
Brooke was so affected by the loss of Headlam and the accumulated strain of organizing almost every aspect of the production alone that he spent much of the day of the performance slumped in a chair in E. J. Dent’s garden in a state of nervous collapse. He did not even rouse himself to receive his mother when she arrived to see the play, leaving James Strachey and Frances Darwin to entertain her to tea.
Brooke had pulled off an amazing PR triumph for what was essentially an undergraduate production of a fairly obscure work: apart from several representatives of the local and national press, the opening night was attended by a galaxy of the literary good and the great, including both the reigning and future Poet Laureates, Alfred Austin and Robert Bridges; Thomas Hardy; and the foremost critic of the day, Edmund Gosse. Not all the celebrities were impressed: Bridges left before the end; and Gosse, asked what he thought now that he had heard Comus, replied: ‘I have overheard it.’
The hospitable Charles Sayle gave his customary post-production party for the cast, and they assembled again the following morning at his home for a celebratory breakfast at which the guest of honour was Hardy himself. The legendary man of letters, reported Brooke, was ‘incredibly shrivelled and ordinary’ and ‘made faintly pessimistic remarks about the toast’. The second and final performance of Comus was given for paying punters the same afternoon at the New Theatre.
The critics’ verdicts on the performance were generally kind, although opinion on Brooke himself was mixed. In contrast to E. J. Dent, The Academy praised his ‘voice and comely presence’ while the Cambridge Daily News found him ‘somewhat stilted’. Lytton Strachey, in the throes of an emotional crisis caused by the desertion of his lover, the fickle Duncan Grant, for the arms of Lytton’s friend Maynard Keynes, rallied sufficiently to write a review for what was virtually the Strachey family’s house journal, the Spectator. In it, he damned Brooke with faint praise, admiring the beauties of the verse but passing over the way it was delivered.
That evening the cast assembled again, in full costume, at Newnham Grange, the Darwin family’s home on the Cam. The show was the talk of the town, especially for its daring innovation of using women to play the female roles. Once again Brooke found himself the centre of an attentive and admiring throng. He was unable to enjoy the adulation in complete ease since he was unable to sit down owing to the tightness of his skimpy, star-spangled sky-blue costume. But he managed to hold court standing with his back to a wall.
Keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings was the Ranee, who was introduced by her son to some of his new female friends. Her disapproval was obvious and her reaction instantaneous: she wasted no time in gathering up an admittedly exhausted Brooke and sweeping him off to Rugby, without giving him the chance to say a proper farewell to his friends or help them to strike the Comus set. He did, however, find the time to pose for a series of photographs in his costume taken by the Cambridge studio of Scott & Wilkinson. Brooke could never resist the temptation to back into the limelight.
Recovering in Rugby under his mother’s ministrations, a guilt-stricken Brooke wrote to Frances Darwin to excuse his hurried departure: ‘The fun being over, I sneaked away on Monday and left you all to clear up the mess … My mother (I can plead) packed me up and snatched me here to sleep and recover … I felt a deserter.’
During the preparations for Comus Brooke had used his dominant position as de facto director to exact a curious promise from his fellow-Thespians. They should all, he sternly demanded, pledge not to pair off and get engaged for at least six months after the production. Feeling the tug of love himself towards Noel Olivier, his innate puritanism surfaced in a blind panic that the fragile community of young talent he had created around Comus would fracture into separate ties. The romance of a show played out at the end of term in the fevered heat of a Cambridge summer could, he feared, kindle warmth and loyalties that would run out of control. Still more curiously, such was the power of his winning ways that each member of the cast agreed to his bizarre request. However, unknown to him, two of them were about to ‘turn with traitor breath’ and break the solemn bond.
Frances Darwin and Francis Cornford had dared to become engaged. Their roma
nce, started in Cambridge, had been carried on by correspondence while Frances was spending her summer vacation in Ireland. Cornford, at 34, was 12 years older than his fiancée, with a settled academic career. He was a safe choice, and the marriage proved an exceptionally happy one. After the initial shock of the news, Brooke forgave his friends and continued to see them and correspond with Frances, who acted as a valued mentor and adviser in his various emotional and romantic entanglements. But the couple’s marriage had placed them on the outer margins of Brooke’s friends, and he continued to regard matrimony as the ultimate betrayal of the friendship he fetishized. Marriage was an infallible sign of the maturity that he dreaded so deeply to attain.
However, he had his own romantic fish to fry. With little to do in Rugby, he turned his mind to a subtle plot he had developed to bring him in touch with Noel. Two women stood in the way of his plan’s realization – his mother and Noel’s eldest sister, Margery. Craftily, he intended to use them both to bring about his heart’s desire. He suggested to the Ranee that the Olivier sisters should be invited en bloc to visit Rugby. An invitation was duly sent to Margery, who was acting in loco parentis while Sydney and Margaret Olivier were away in Jamaica. Brooke had to tread carefully, for Margery was on the lookout for a mate and was half-protective and half-jealous of male attention paid to her more attractive younger sisters. He hinted at the difficulties in a letter to his sensibly studious Cambridge friend Dudley Ward:
There is a Young Person at present in Rugby (I’ve not seen her) who hails from Jamaica – is, indeed, a friend of the Oliviers – is going soon to stay at Limpsfield. Mother met her; said ‘Oh yes we’re going to have two of the Oliviers to stay with us, do you know them?’ ‘My, yes!’ the person shrilled. ‘The Oliviers! They’d do anything, those girls!’ Mother (whose anything is at once vastly ominous and most limited) is, and will be for months, ill with foreboding. She pictures, I think, Margery climbing on the roof at night, or throwing bread about at table, or kissing the rural milkman.
