by Nigel Jones
Harking back to their Swiss holidays, the hikers there and then solemnly pledged, at Brooke’s urging, to make just such a new start in middle age. They made a pact to meet at breakfast time on 1 May 1933 at Basle station and vanish from their ordered lives, ‘fishing for tunnies off Sicily or exploring Constantinople or roaring with laughter in some Spanish inn’. Jacques was asked to join the pact, as were Godwin Baynes (presumably at Bryn’s insistence), Ka Cox and a few more of Brooke’s closest devotees.
This was a key moment in Brooke’s life – the point at which his whimsical Pater Pan fantasies, however briefly, became explicit and real – at least for him. The idea of a fame and spirit that can outsoar even death is a recurring Romantic notion, from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird/No hungry generations tread thee down’) to a popular refusal to credit the deaths of contemporary popular heroes like Elvis and Jim Morrison. But Brooke seems to have taken the idea in all seriousness: ‘The great essential thing is the Organised Chance of Living Again,’ he assured Jacques. It would be far better than the future he imagined for himself as ‘a greying literary hack, mumbling along in some London suburb … middle aged … tied with more and more ties, busier and busier, fussier and fussier … the world will fade to us, fade, grow tasteless, habitual, dull’.
No practical considerations intruded as Brooke’s vision ascended into the stratosphere. What would become of the chosen few’s children, partners, homes, jobs and friends? How would they live, where would the money come from? Such mundane considerations were airily swept aside:
We’ll be children seventy years, instead of seven. We’ll live Romance not talk of it. We’ll show the grey, unbelieving age, we’ll teach the whole damn World, that there’s a better Heaven than the pale serene Anglican windless harmonium-buzzing Eternity of the Christians, a Heaven in Time, now and for ever, ending for each, staying for all, a Heaven of Laughter and Bodies and Flowers and Love and People and Sun and Wind, in the only place we know or care for, ON EARTH.
So attractive is Brooke’s rhetoric that the ironies of what really awaited, a lifetime later in May 1933, are almost too depressing to enumerate: Brooke and Jacques and Bill Hubback would be dead; Margery hopelessly insane; Bryn terminally ill; and Ka, too, within five years of her own premature demise. As for the world they would escape to: Hitler would just have come to power; Sicily would be ruled by Mussolini and Spain teetering on the edge of civil war. Hardly the earthly paradise Brooke had promised. Mercifully all this was hidden by the veil of the future from the carefree young people at Portishead. Only in one sense was Brooke to be right, in his concluding prophecy to Jacques: ‘I am NOT going to be a resident fellow of King’s, nor a lecturer in Leeds, I am going to be a Bloody POET.’
9
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The Old School
* * *
Brooke, by now the undisputed leader of a distinct and growing social set, returned to hold court at his Grantchester kingdom for a constant cast of friends, acolytes and casual visitors. The atmosphere of his first season in the village is captured on camera at a breakfast he gave for a group of his intimates in the garden of the Orchard, waited on by an anxious Mrs Stevenson.
The 12 disciples present at this feast – the Biblical parallel is inescapable – included Brooke’s rock-like Peter, Dudley Ward; his first follower, Geoffrey Keynes; Bill Hubback, Archie Campbell, Jacques Raverat and a trio of handmaidens – Bryn Olivier, Ethel Pye and Dorothy Osmaston. Another female follower, Gwen Darwin, destined to marry Raverat after he failed to capture Ka, gives a glimpse of Brooke in his new surroundings in an unpublished fragment of an autobiographical novel: ‘We used to loll wearily in armchairs and talk of Art and Suicide and the Sex Problem. We used to discuss the ridiculous superstitions about God and Religion; the absurd prejudices of patriotism and decency; the grotesque encumbrances called parents. We were very old and we knew about everything.’
According to Gwen, parents were a subject that, unsurprisingly, much possessed Brooke: ‘You kiss them sometimes, and send for them when you’re ill, because they are useful and they like it; and you give them mild books to read, just strong enough to make them think they’re a little shocked, but not much, so they can think they’re keeping up with the times. Oh you ought to be very kind to them, make little jokes for them, and keep them awake in the evening, if possible. But never, never let them be intimate and confidential, because they can’t understand, and it only makes them miserable … Why, they’d die if they knew what we were really like.’
Despairingly, Brooke added: ‘Calmness and firmness are no good with my mother – she’s so much calmer and firmer than you are yourself.’ This passage, with its mix of flipness, cynicism and open admission of duplicity is so richly representative of Brooke that it can stand as a statement of his familial philosophy in a nutshell.
Gwen, one of the most loyal of Brooke’s friends, who stood by him during the paranoid dark night of the soul that followed the worst crisis of his life in 1912, described him at the Orchard in familiarly glowing terms:
Perhaps the most obvious thing about him was his beauty … there was something in his appearance that is impossible to forget. It was no good laughing at him, calling him pink and white, or chubby, saying his eyes were too small or his legs too short, there was a nobility about the carriage of his head and the shape of it, a radiance in his fair hair and shining face, a sweetness and a secrecy in his deepset eyes, a straight strength in his limbs, which remained for ever in the minds of those who once had seen him, which penetrated and coloured every thought of him.
To be the recipient of so much dumb worship, to be so inordinately praised for one’s surface appearance – hair, face, eyes and limbs – which were anyway outside one’s own control, and to be overlooked for the achievements of the mind – would have galled a far nobler nature than Brooke ever claimed to possess. Small wonder then, that his head was turned to vanity and self-absorption. His genes and his friends laid burdens on his shoulders that were impossible to shake off.
Brooke at Grantchester was more than ever the hub of his circle now that it was beginning to break up, with several members settling in London. James Strachey was working as secretary to his uncle, St Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator in the Strand; Jacques had moved to Chelsea to study printing; Gwen was about to start studying art at the Slade; Ka, too, was increasingly to be found at her flat in Westminster; while Geoffrey Keynes had begun his distinguished career in medicine as a student at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. For all of them Brooke remained a magnetic attraction, drawing them back to Cambridge, where they had first come into his orbit.
But beneath the golden façade, ominous portents of the future already lurked – one such was Brooke’s ever-precarious health. His delicate constitution was too fragile to sustain the demands his exuberant spirit made upon it. Particularly at times of stress or great exertion, a collapse threatened. It seems that he had no reserves to fight off the infections that often laid him low. In the aftermath of the excitements of Clevedon, for example, he told Dudley Ward:
I’ll tell you … why this morning I’m in the worst temper I’ve ever been in. (Lord! I’ve had a scene with Mother! She crept out of the room, at the end – which was brought on by my choking with rage, and being therefore unable to continue.) It began 16 days ago: when you and I and admirable people were charging ridiculously down a far hill in the dark. You with the gay childish abandon, which is indeed your most lovable characteristic, ran up behind me and kicked my left ankle with your heavy boot, laughing the while with high hysterical delight. The hole you made was poisoned by a sock, and, they say, inflamed by tennis: and changed into a sore that grew wider and deeper with incredible rapidity. When I got home the doctor examined it. And I have been on a sofa with my left leg in bandages ever since. The wound slowly diminishes. But if I ‘go about on it’ before it’s well, the elderly, shifty fraud who is my doctor, says it will turn to an absc
ess and eat the bone of my leg. Then I shall be a bit of a fool at wooing dryads …
In his enforced idleness at Rugby, Brooke was obliged not only to endure the torment of his mother’s domineering ways – ‘my meagre mother’s nightly anti-Olivier lectures’, as he described them to Dudley – but also Margery’s hectoring letter warning him to stay clear of Noel. Brooke’s reaction to this ‘great, fierce, blazing sermon’ was itself extreme: ‘that made me hate her’. But it also induced a state of angst about his future prospects with Noel: ‘All the same, I was torn by mistrust of myself, fear, perplexity, and despair, all that night. I didn’t get to sleep till 6; having gone to bed at II. The next night saw me awake at 3 a.m. thinking. My dear, I’ve had an awful time. I don’t know what to do …’ This confession of confusion and insomnia curiously presages Brooke’s breakdown in 1912. It is another indication of the instability of his health and mental balance. Margery’s warning also awakened his slumbering paranoia, and he subsequently told Geoffrey Keynes that he chiefly blamed her for the ultimate failure of his relationship with Noel.
Meanwhile he was continuing to publish his poetry: the influential English Review printed four poems; and he still wrote and reviewed regularly for the Cambridge Review. Now that he was something of a living legend at the university, Hugh Dalton wrote a profile of him in the Cambridge magazine Granta. Among the insights that Dalton vouchsafed his readers was:
On his day he is still an irresistible tennis player, preferring to play barefooted and to pick up the balls with his toes … He is sometimes credited with having started a new fashion in dress, the chief features of which are the absence of collars and headgear and the continual wearing of slippers. He will tell you that he did not really begin to live till he went out of college at the end of his third year and took up his residence at the Orchard, Grantchester.
Brooke himself suggested the final fictitious paragraph: ‘It is said that he lives the rustic life, broken by occasional visits to Cambridge; that he keeps poultry and a cow, plays simple tunes on a pan pipe, bathes every evening at sunset, and takes all his meals in a rose garden.’
One nugget among all this dross was true – Brooke did indeed have long, prehensile toes, and performed a party piece for the artist Stanley Spencer – another protégé of Eddie Marsh – by executing a skilled drawing of a house with a pencil clasped between his toes.
On his return to Grantchester at the end of September, Brooke received a letter from Lytton Strachey – who was holidaying with James in Sweden – asking about the possibility of renting rooms in the neighbouring Old Vicarage. Their falling-out at the Apostles’ meeting apparently forgotten, Brooke replied cordially with a detailed description of his own future home and its owners, Mr and Mrs Neeve:
The Neaves [sic] are ‘working people’ who have ‘taken the house and want lodgers’ … Mr Neave is a refined creature, with an accent above his class, who sits out near the beehives with a handkerchief over his head and reads ‘advanced newspapers’ … The garden is the great glory. There is a soft lawn with a sundial, and tangled, antique flowers abundantly; and a sham ruin, quite in a corner; built fifty years ago …
Brooke went on to allege that the Old Vicarage’s garden was haunted by the ghosts of its former clerical residents: ‘with faint lights and odd noises. We of the village hate passing.’ This fancy resurfaced years later when he came to write one of his two most celebrated poems, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’:
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe; …
Undeterred by the threat of the supernatural, Lytton visited Grantchester to spy out the land, staying for one night with Brooke at the Orchard. Brooke was amused by Lytton’s curious ways, observing his habit of sitting with his back to a bookshelf then, without looking around, extending a languid arm, extracting a volume, perusing it, replacing it and extracting another by the same blind method. Lytton – a creature who loved his comforts – thought better of taking the ramshackle Vicarage and decamped to the safety of Cambridge. He was succeeded as guest at the Orchard by another old-maidish man of letters – E. M. Forster – up to read a paper to the Apostles.
When the Michaelmas term began, Brooke succeeded Dalton as President of the Cambridge Fabians. He threw himself into organizing their campaign for reform of the Poor Law on the lines advocated by the Webbs, who visited in October to address a meeting organized by Brooke. Secretly, he was scathing about the competence of his treasurer, Ka Cox, who had been assigned the tedious chore of researching possible objections to the Webbs’ plans in order to brief Brooke with speakers’ notes at his meeting. Not content with castigating Ka – ‘a fool’, he told Dalton – for failing to pay out of her own pocket for hiring the Assembly Rooms for their meeting, Brooke also criticized the unladylike language of her lecture notes.
Alongside his usual hectic activity, he was still recruiting friends for ‘the Scheme’, as he termed the 1933 Basle reunion. Noel Olivier received her invitation:
Integrally, it’s a device for getting out of Middle Age by secretly vanishing and starting afresh. Now, all sensible people to themselves have desired to do this, I expect. But they’ve never arranged it. The thing is to get some impetus powerful enough to jerk the man of 45 out of his world into a new one … Therefore a prearranged and much thought of date and place is essential. Secrecy, as a general rule, is also necessary, and the general feeling of starting afresh. That is the kernel of the thing.
Alfred Brooke had gone up to King’s this term. The two brothers were no longer particularly close, but Alfred, like his elder sibling, soon became the toast of homosexual Cambridge – James Strachey described him to Maynard Keynes as ‘pink and white, almost buggerable’. Brooke himself seems to have had few illusions about his brother’s sexuality, reporting to James that Alfred was ‘debauched and lascivious’. Hugh Dalton was among Alfred’s many male admirers.
It was after one of the regular Saturday afternoon meetings of the Apostles at Trinity, on 29 October 1909, that Brooke’s only fully documented homosexual encounter took place – documented, needless to say, by himself. Alongside his pursuit of Noel, Brooke continued with homosexual dalliances, although, since he shrouded these activities in his habitual secrecy, details are hard to come by. It is known that he met his old Rugby flame Charles Lascelles, at a London theatre, and rumour in Cambridge linked him with a number of gay contemporaries at the university, including Gerald Shove, and James Strachey’s lover George Mallory. But the only concrete evidence we have for physical homosexual lovemaking comes from Brooke’s own hand, in a confessional letter to James written at the height of his own nervous breakdown in July 1912, and in the aftermath of the sudden death of his partner that autumn night, another of his old Rugby loves, Denham Russell-Smith. For its time, it is an extraordinarily explicit document.
After describing his feelings for Denham at Rugby, Brooke recalls:
He was lustful, immoral, affectionate, & delightful … But I was never in the slightest degree in love with him.
In the early autumn of 1909, then, I was glad to get him to come & stay with me, at the Orchard. I came back late that Saturday night. Nothing was formulated in my mind. I found him asleep in front of the fire, at 1.45. I took him up to his bed – he was very like a child when he was sleepy – and lay down on it. We hugged, & my fingers wandered a little. His skin was always very smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my own room: & lay in bed thinking – my head full of tiredness & my mouth of the taste of tea and whales [Apostolic jargon for the sardines that were habitually served at their gatherings].
I decided, almost quite consciously, I would put the thing through next night. You see, I didn’t at all know how he would take it. But I wanted to have some fun, & still more to see what it was like, and to do away with the shame (as I w
as taught it was) of being a virgin. At length, I thought, I shall know something of all that James & Norton & Maynard & Lytton know & hold over me. Of course, I said nothing. Next evening, we talked long in front of the sitting room fire. My head was on his knees, after a bit. We discussed Sodomy. He said he, finally, thought it was wrong … We got undressed there, as it was warm. Flesh is exciting, in firelight. You must remember that openly we were nothing to each other – less even than in 1906. About what one is with Bunny (who so resembles Denham). Oh, quite distant! Again we went up to his room. He got into bed. I sat on it & talked. Then I lay on it. Then we put out the light & talked in the dark. I complained of the cold: & so got under the eiderdown. My brain was, I remember, almost all through, absolutely calm & indifferent, observing progress & mapping out the next step. Of course, I had planned the general scheme beforehand.
I was still cold. He wasn’t. ‘Of course not, you’re in bed!’ ‘Well then, you get right in, too’. I made him ask me – oh! without difficulty! I got right in. Our arms were round each other. ‘An adventure!’ I kept thinking: and was horribly detached.
We stirred and pressed. The tides seemed to wax … At the right moment I, as planned, said ‘Come into my room, it’s better there …’ I suppose he knew what I meant. Anyhow he followed me. In that larger bed it was cold; we clung together. Intentions became plain; but still nothing was said. I broke away a second, as the dance began, to slip my pyjamas. His was the woman’s part throughout. I had to make him take his off – do it for him. Then it was purely body to body – my first, you know!
