by Nigel Jones
With these complex schemes in play, Brooke left Rugby for the first station on his tortuous path through south-west England – Becky Falls, where he arrived in the last week of March with Hugh Russell-Smith in tow. He stayed with the Herns, a farming family whose house overlooked the Falls themselves, an impressive 70-foot waterfall tumbling over granite rocks. He described his regime in a letter to Erica Cotterill:
I am leading the healthy life. I rise early, twist myself about on a kind of pulley that is supposed to make my chest immense (but doesn’t), eat no meat, wear very little, do not part my hair, take frequent cold baths, work ten hours a day and rush madly about the mountains in flannels and rainstorms for hours. I am surprisingly cheerful about it. It is all part of my scheme for returning to nature.
The regime reminds one of a combination of the Rugby and the Bedales life – clearly the pull of the old school was not one that Brooke could easily escape. He waxed lyrical about his surroundings in letters to Dudley Ward (‘I dance through the rain, singing musically snatches of old Greek roundelays’) and Jacques Raverat: ‘The sunsets were yellow wine. And the wind! – oh! there was never such a wind to take you and shake you and roll you over and set you shouting with laughter.’
Sated with such physical boisterousness, at the beginning of April Brooke moved on, alone, to join a party of Apostles organized by G. E. Moore at Penmenner House on the Lizard, Britain’s southernmost promontory. If Dartmoor had been a celebration of the body, the meeting at the Lizard was to be a more cerebral gathering. The cast was a reunion of the group from Market Lavington the previous year: Moore, Desmond MacCarthy, C. P. Sangar, R. S. Trevelyan and James Strachey. In addition, Brooke met for the first time Leonard Woolf, an intellectual civil servant, destined to woo and wed his childhood friend Virginia Stephen. Reporting to Raverat, Brooke enthused: ‘Cornwall was full of heat and tropical flowers: and all day I bathed in great creamy breakers of surf, or lay out in the sun to dry (in April!); and all night argued with a philosopher, an economist, and a writer. Ho, we put the world to rights.’
Once again James Strachey suffered the sweet sorrow of having Brooke at his side, yet still strangely distant. He told Lytton: ‘This afternoon, for the first time in my life, I saw Rupert naked. Can’t we imagine what you’ld say on such an occasion? … But I’m simply inadequate, of course. So I say nothing, except that I didn’t have an erection – which was … fortunate?, as I was naked too. I thought him – if you’ld like to have a pendant – “absolutely beautiful”.’
As Brooke crossed intellectual swords with G. E. Moore, who launched a determined assault on his Fabianism; and fended off James, who mounted an equally determined, and equally unsuccessful attempt on his body, his mind was busy with the next, and most exciting stage of his pilgrimage: the meeting with Noel.
On his circuitous route to the forest idyll, he enjoyed a picnic in Devon with another group of friends – Geoffrey and Maynard Keynes and Ka Cox. He observed that Geoffrey was paying court to Ka – as was another of his correspondents, Jacques Raverat – but as yet he was too preoccupied with thoughts of Noel to pay much attention to the homely charms that had captivated his old friends. In his absence, Dudley Ward had done his work well, discreetly engineering an invitation to call on the Oliviers at the Bank cottage. Then, having made their smokescreen call on the Russell-Smiths, Brooke and Dudley departed for what Brooke called ‘Arcadee’. Behind them, as they disappeared into the shade of the forest, the friends had deliberately dropped a trail of false addresses, so that the Russell-Smiths believed them to be in Surrey, his aunt at Bournemouth thought Brooke was still in Cornwall, and so on. The result was that between 10 and 13 April Brooke disappeared from the world to pay careful court to the youthful and unwitting object of his affections.
The two friends stumbled on the nest of Newnhamites as if by accident, discovering in residence at Bank not only Margery and Noel but Brynhild as well, along with two Newnham friends of Margery, Evelyn Radford and Dorothy Osmaston, who recorded the visit with her camera. The resulting photos are revealing, showing a handsome and windswept Brooke in Norfolk jacket, flannel trousers and tough boots; a bespectacled and watchful Dudley; a clearly adoring Margery; and Noel herself, in her Bedales smock, shyly averting her eyes from the camera lens.
Margery was a problem, since she had been misled by Brooke’s weekly letters into believing that she, not her youngest sister, was the object of his attention. Brooke had to use all the charm and subterfuge at his command to snatch a few precious moments alone with Noel, but somehow he managed it, as he recounted to Jacques Raverat:
But then, after the Lizard, oh! then came the Best! And none knows of it. For I was lost for four days. I was, for the first time in my life, a free man, and my own master! Oh! the joy of it! Only three know, but you shall … For I went dancing and leaping through the New Forest, with £3 and a satchel full of books, sleeping and eating anywhere, singing to the birds, tumbling about in the flowers, bathing in the rivers, and, in general, behaving naturally. And all in England, at Eastertide! And so I walked and laughed and met many people and made a thousand songs – all very good – and, in the end of the days, came to a woman who was more glorious than the sun and stronger than the sea, and kinder than the earth, who is a flower made out of fire, a star that laughs all day, whose brain is clean and clear like a man’s and her heart is full of courage and kindness and whom I love. I told her that the Earth was crowned with wild flowers and dancing down the violet ways of Spring; that Christ had died and Pan was risen; that her mouth was like sunlight on a gull’s wing. As a matter of fact, I believe I said ‘Hullo! Isn’t it rippin’ weather!’ …
This impassioned compendium of Brookian delights, with its mix of high-coloured exaggeration, childlike exuberance, sheer egotism and its scorpion sting of self-mockery in the tail is typical of Brooke at his lyrical, hyperbolic best – or worst. But his affection for Noel and his delight at escaping – if only momentarily – the restrictive talons of the Ranee shine through. The discovery of love under the greenwood tree in such a historic corner of old England (Gritnam, the clearing of cottages outside Bank where they were staying is mentioned in the Domesday Book) was a revelation for Brooke. He would return to the home cooking of Mrs Primmer, the landlady (a discovery of Ben Keeling and a favourite with the Cambridge Fabians), and from now on was a convinced adherent of the simple life à la Bedales, with its delight in camping, vegetarianism, nude bathing and a free and easy mingling of the sexes. He left Bank a new man. To Jacques he summed up his feelings thus:
From being sad I have travelled far; to the same goal as you, that of laughing, at times – often – for the joy of life … I find all things … admirable. Splendour is everywhere. I have come out of the Night; and out of the Past. There are a great many poems and paintings in the world, and I love them; also there are the sun on the sea, and flowers, and people’s faces. I am intensely happy; and not with that Maeterlinckian happiness that always fears the gods’ jealousy. For I feel certain that happiness is abiding. At least, I have had it, and known. Nothing can take that. So I dwell, smiling. The world is full of tremendous hopes. I am going to be ‘a failure’ in my Tripos. And they all curse me for wasting my career. I smile at them. Never was my conscience so serene. I know more than they.
In this exalted state, Brooke/Pan pranced off on his newly acquired cloven hooves to confront the suspicious Ranee at Sidmouth. An open avowal of his travels in Arcadia was impossible – Mrs Brooke’s gluey grip on the strings manipulating his life, not least the purse-strings, would never be relaxed. The only answer was the long-learned habits of deception, and the practice of them that had by now become second nature.
Mr and Mrs Brooke had taken lodgings on the sea front at Sidmouth, and once Brooke had joined them he dashed off a poem for a Westminster Gazette contest. Brooke’s effort, ‘The Voice’, is infused with the recent memory of his Easter rapture before a more cynical note sets in:
And I knew
And the night and the woods and you
Were one together, and I should find
Soon in the silence the hidden key
Of all that had hurt and puzzled me—
Why you were you, and the night was kind,
And the woods were part of the heart of me …
But the long-awaited beloved does not come up to the poet’s expectations:
And suddenly
There was an uproar in my woods,
The noise of a fool in mock distress,
Crashing and laughing and blindly going,
Of ignorant feet and a swishing dress,
And a voice profaning the solitudes.
The spell was broken, the key denied me,
And at length your flat clear voice beside me
Mouthed cheerful clear flat platitudes.
You came and quacked beside me in the wood.
You said, ‘The view from here is very good!’
You said, ‘It’s nice to be alone a bit!’
And, ‘How the days are drawing out!’ you said.
You said, ‘The sunset’s pretty isn’t it?’
By God! I wish—I wish that you were dead!
The plodding clumsiness of the early verses does nothing to prepare the reader for the petulant savagery of the final lines. But anyone with knowledge of Brooke’s inner turmoil cannot be surprised at his surprise that the real Noel, a shy, diffident, but resolutely down-to-earth teenager, should be a very different creature from the Goddess ‘More glorious than the Sun and stronger than the sea’ of his fevered imaginings. His feelings for Noel, however, were nothing if not changeable: after the hissing hatred about ‘quacking’ and ‘platitudes’, a very different note is sounded in a sonnet he sat down to write as soon as he had sent off ‘The Voice’, which won the Gazette’s competition. The new poem read:
Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire
Of watching you, and swing me suddenly
Into the shade and loneliness and mire
Of the last land! There, waiting patiently,
One day, I think, I’ll feel a cool wind blowing,
See a slow light across the Stygian tide,
And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,
And tremble. And I shall know that you have died,
And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,
Pass, light as ever, through the listless host,
Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam—
Most individual and bewildering ghost! —
And turn and toss your brown delightful head
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
This poem is the first of Brooke’s many love lyrics in which genuine, unforced emotion comes over in a mature way. Its feeling and control show a master’s touch, and he rightly led off with the poem in the first collection of his verse that appeared three years later. The opening line, like the first stroke of a conductor’s baton, leads the reader in, and the light ending, with its image of Noel carelessly and haughtily tossing her hair, is a satisfying adieu.
A few days after being clasped ‘to the bosom of my sad family’, as he put it to Eddie Marsh, Brooke found pressing reasons to return to Cambridge ‘earlier than I thought’. En route he accepted an invitation from Eddie to spend a night at his bachelor chambers at 5 Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. The address was soon to become Brooke’s unofficial London residence. Here, at the top of a stone staircase, in a comfortable apartment lined with books and pictures, where Eddie’s loyal housekeeper, Mrs Elgy, looked after her master and his constant stream of young – and mostly male – visitors, Brooke would find a home more cosy and congenial than the real thing – though he was too astute not to suspect that the real agenda behind his friend’s invitation was a homosexual attraction that was to remain undeclared.
The first night he spent under Eddie’s roof – 23 April 1909 – was six years to the day before his death in the Aegean. Brooke’s time had already begun to run.
8
* * *
Milk and Honey
* * *
Brooke’s sudden infatuation with Noel begs all sorts of questions – about his sexuality, his self-regard and the sexual etiquette of the time. H. G. Wells’s public affair with Amber Reeve, which he fictionalized in 1909 in Ann Veronica, was shocking enough to members of the Fabians to have the writer turfed out of the Society. For all their apparent devotion to sexual equality and their denunciation of Victorian hypocrisy, the young people in Brooke’s set were still hidebound by the morals of their parents’ generation. Why else would Brooke go to such lengths to wrap an innocent chaperoned visit to a group of female friends in such mystery? Although he enjoyed secrecy for its own sake, he remained imbued with his mother’s strait-laced values, and was horrified by any open manifestation of sexuality among his friends outside the bonds of marriage.
Brooke had a healthy libido, and we know that he was happy enough to indulge it in strict privacy or when he was abroad and thought that word of his activities would not get back to the ears of his friends or family at home. His passion for secrecy only partly explains why he was so keen to keep the romance to himself and a select group of friends, for he was seriously concerned that he would not be taken seriously as a lover of women. His actual experience of women was, anyway, very limited at the time he met Noel, and it is significant that he fell for a tomboy who was still in the process of maturing. Throughout his pursuit of Noel he continued to indulge in teasing homosexual badinage with James Strachey, and met up with his former lovers at Rugby, Charlie Lascelles and Denham Russell-Smith. It seems clear that he remained confused and uncertain about his sexual identity until late in his life. The homoerotic element in his make-up was too ingrained to root out, even had he wished to.
For her part, Noel can be forgiven for her cautious response to Brooke’s wooing: shrewdly, she sensed the fickle, restless and unfocused nature of his commitment. Suspicious of his intentions, she held him off, thereby heightening both his sexual frustration and his anger with her as a despised representative of all women. While he enjoyed the chase and the deceptions it entailed, one doubts the seriousness of his pursuit should push have come to shove. His frustration comes through clearly in the closing lines of ‘The Voice’ and it is disturbing that he should have been so ready to commit this early disillusion with her to public print in the Westminster Gazette.
Back in Cambridge, Brooke faced the unwelcome prospect of his Tripos exams. He took his mind off the impending unpleasantness by embarking on a series of bucolic picnics in the countryside in the unseasonably warm weather. The first of these, on 2 May, was undertaken in the wealthy Justin Brooke’s newly acquired Opel car. The two Brookes piled into the commodious vehicle along with Geoffrey Keynes and a quartet of Newnhamites – Ka Cox, Gwen and Margaret Darwin and Dorothy Lamb, sister of Brooke’s future nemesis, Henry Lamb. Justin drove the party out to Overcote on the River Ouse, where they laid out the victuals in a water-meadow. The setting was idyllic: a nightingale sang and crab-apple was in blossom. As they opened their picnic baskets and flung themselves on the damp grass, Brooke was moved to read aloud appropriate verses: Robert Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s Going a-Maying’:
Come let us goe, while we are in our prime
And take the harmlesse and follie of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short: and our dayes run
As fast away as does the summer.
The shortness of ‘summer’s lease’ was a leitmotif in Brooke’s own poetry. He, more than most, had reason to dread growing old. The metaphor of gathering rosebuds while he might was an all too present reality informing his ‘dew-dabbling’, as such pastoral frolics became known. On this occasion the company was even inspired to plait chains from the riverside flowers and crown each other as monarchs of their fragile May. Later that month the s
ame group repeated the picnic, and a barefoot Brooke was caught by a camera wrestling with Donald Robertson, later a professor of Classics at Trinity.
The picnicking continued throughout that enchanted month: one night Brooke, Dalton and a companion even stayed out through the dark reading Swinburne by the light of a bicycle lamp. The poet’s recent death and Christian burial had prompted a snort of anti-religious rage on Brooke’s part. ‘Did you see,’ he wrote to Dalton, ‘that, against his desire the bloody parson mouthed Anglicanisms of blasphemous and untrue meaning and filthy sentimentality over him?’
While the anti-orthodox mood was upon him, Brooke delivered a paper to the Carbonari entitled ‘Endogamy’, a bare-knuckled, full-frontal assault on the institution of marriage, which was, he argued, a futile attempt to relieve inevitable human solitude. He compared matrimony to walkers blundering about in a thick fog howling at each other with indistinct cries. Far better, he gloomily concluded, to resign oneself to loneliness than to be deceived by the illusion of true communication with another human being: ‘It is something to possess your own soul.’
The same mood of disillusion pervades an impressive poem of that year, ‘Menelaus and Helen’, in which Brooke imagines the couple who launched the epic Trojan wars as a result of their conjugal difficulties growing old together, shackled in mundane domesticity:
