Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  I was still a little frightened of his, at any too sudden step, bolting; and he, I suppose, was shy. We kissed very little, as far as I can remember, face to face. And I only rarely handled his penis. Mine he touched once with his fingers; and that made me shiver so much I think he was frightened. But, with alternate stirrings, and still pressures, we mounted. My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to & fro over each other, in the excitement. Quite calm things, I remember, were passing through my brain. ‘The Elizabethan joke “The Dance of the Sheets” has, then, something in it.’ ‘I hope his erection is all right’ … and so on. I thought of him entirely in the third person. At length the waves grew more terrific: my control of the situation was over; I treated him with the utmost violence, to which he more quietly, but incessantly, responded. Half under him & half over, I came off. I think he came off at the same time, but of that I have never been sure. A silent moment: & then he slipped away to his room, carrying his pyjamas. We wished each other ‘Good-night’. It was between 4 & 5 in the morning. I lit a candle after he had gone. There was a dreadful mess on the bed. I wiped it as clear as I could, & left the place exposed in the air, to dry. I sat on the lower part of the bed, a blanket round me, & stared at the wall, & thought. I thought of innumerable things, that this was all; that the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge seemed a very tiny affair, after all; that I hoped Denham, for whom I felt great tenderness, was sleeping. My thoughts went backward and forward. I unexcitedly reviewed my whole life, & indeed the whole universe. I was tired, and rather pleased with myself, and a little bleak. About six it was grayly daylight; I blew the candle out & slept till 8. At 8 Denham had to bicycle in to breakfast with Mr Benians, before catching his train. I bicycled with him, and turned off at the corner of –, is it Grange Road?–. We said scarcely anything to each other. I felt sad at the thought he was perhaps hurt and angry, & wouldn’t ever want to see me again. – He did, of course, & was exactly as ever. Only we never referred to it. But that night I looked with some awe at the room – fifty yards to the West from the bed I’m writing in – in which I Began; in which I ‘copulated with’ Denham; and I felt a curious private tie with Denham himself.

  So you’ll understand it was – not with a shock, for I’m far too dead for that, but with a sort of dreary wonder and dizzy discomfort – that I heard Mr Benians inform me, after we’d greeted, that Denham died at one o’clock on Wednesday morning, – just twenty four hours ago now. Rupert.

  This confession is remarkable for both its honesty – what might be called its blow-by-blow account of the proceedings – and its tender innocence. For once we do not get a sense of Brooke preening and prancing before an invisible audience. Though he was still full of self-regard, frankness, for once, does shine through – perhaps prompted by the surprise of Denham’s death, which came about, by morbid irony, through blood poisoning – the same condition that would one day kill Brooke.

  Meanwhile Brooke’s less clandestine social whirl continued. Gwen Darwin organized a group of seven of her close friends to attend the Slade’s annual fancy-dress ball, all attired as the winds and leaves of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Brooke took a childlike delight in the occasion, getting his diaphanous Comus costume out of mothballs for the event, and suggesting that James Strachey, as ever the butt of his jokes, attend as ‘a dead twig’.

  Brooke carefully maintained his contact with the influential Eddie Marsh; sympathizing with Eddie’s chief, Winston Churchill, who, as Home Secretary, was the chief target of the Suffragettes’ militant campaign. ‘I hope you’ve evaded the Suffragettes so far,’ wrote Brooke, adding with a typical touch of whimsy: ‘What do you do when they fling vitriol at you? Is an umbrella any use?’

  In the Christmas holidays Brooke journeyed to the by now traditional Swiss winter-sports holiday, this year at the Schweizerhof Hotel, Lenzerheide, from where he reported to Noel on Christmas Eve, enclosing a copy of W. E. Henley’s poems as a festive gift: ‘It is hot. We sit about all day and bathe in the skating rink before breakfast … I send a book you know because tomorrow is your and Jesus’ birthday.’ Romantically, the holiday ended with a long ride by sledge as they raced the dawn to reach the railway station. Passing through Basle, the intended site of the 1933 reunion, Brooke, Jacques and Dudley signed a postcard to Ka: ‘We passed through Basle this morning while you slept. Ha, Ha!’

  They returned via Paris. During the journey Brooke had eaten some honey, which, bizarrely given his association with the health-giving nectar, made him feel extremely ill; so much so that he blacked out while admiring the pictures in the Louvre. He dragged himself back to Rugby and was instantly put to bed with suspected typhoid. In his self-dramatizing mode he described himself subsisting on a diet of tapioca with ‘throat and stomach … raw where that accursed stuff touched them. The skin peels off like bad paper from a rotten wall.’

  Entering the convalescent stage, Brooke rallied and summoned the energy to complete a sonnet that he had roughed out while enduring a turbulent Channel crossing on his way to Switzerland. The finished piece, ‘A Channel Passage’, became one of his most successful and rightly admired exercises in the corner of light verse that he made so much his own: that of the disgusted, fastidious, yet self-mocking sufferer of Weltschmerz:

  The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick

  My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew

  I must think hard of something, or be sick;

  And could think hard of only one thing—you!

  You, you alone could hold my fancy ever!

  And with your memories come, sharp pain, and dole.

  Now there’s a choice–heartache or tortured liver!

  A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul!

  Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,

  Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.

  Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,

  The slobs and slobber of a last year’s woe.

  And still the sick ship rolls. ’Tis hard, I tell ye,

  To choose ‘twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.

  Despite the ‘’twixt’ and ‘’Tis’, this sounds an authentically realistic and contemporary note. A sonnet on vomit was a new departure in English poetry, and the poem disgusted Brooke’s future publisher, Frank Sidgwick, enough for him to plead that it be kept out of Brooke’s first collection, published in 1911. To his credit, Brooke refused to bow to Sidgwick’s queasy attempt at censorship. The identity of the lover to whom the poem is addressed is unclear, but from internal references – ‘last year’s woe’ – it is most probably Noel.

  A crisis was about to engulf the Brooke family that would put such bouts of passing nausea in their true perspective. Hardly had Brooke recovered from his sickness than his father fell ill, complaining of failing eyesight and raging headaches. Parker Brooke asked his son to stay away from Cambridge for the coming term and help him run School Field House. Writing to excuse himself from Fabian duties, Brooke told Ka Cox: ‘“Duty to one’s family” Ka, that you sometimes and so solemnly mention! That is what is dragging me from the place where I am happier than anywhere (no, not Cambridge – Grantchester!).’ He hastily rearranged his hectic schedule: Hugh Dalton, who was visiting Rugby with Maynard Keynes to speak in the current general-election campaign, agreed to take on Brooke’s campaign in favour of the Minority Report on the Poor Law; and Brooke backed out of the Marlowe Dramatic Society’s coming production of Richard II.

  Frances Cornford was planning to cast Brooke in a Yeats play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, but he told her he would have to decline the offer:

  There are other things I’m very sick to miss, the Marlowe play … seeing you all – the whole life of it, in fact. Also I fear I may have confused the Fabians rather by not coming up. I’m a general nuisance. Oh! and I’m so sad and fierce and miserable not to be in
my garden and little house at Grantchester all this term. I love being there so much – more than any other place I’ve ever lived in. I love the place and especially the solitude so much. I’d thought of being there when the spring was coming, every day this winter, and dreamt of seeing all the little brown and green things.

  Frances had recently married Francis Cornford, and was busy building a new house, Conduit Head, on the outskirts of Cambridge, furnishing it with wedding presents, among them an Augustus John drawing given jointly by Brooke and Ka. At the same time she was having her first book of poems privately published. In some envy Brooke wrote back, fantasizing that he too would bring out a simultaneous volume of verse:

  But they will review us together. The Daily Chronicle, or some such, that reviews verse in lumps, will review thirty-four minor poets in one day, ending with Thoughts in Verse on Many Occasions by a person of Great Sensibility

  By F. Cornford

  Dead Pansy Leaves: & other flowerets

  By R. Brooke

  … and it will say ‘Mr Cornford has some pretty thoughts; but Miss Brooke is always intolerable.’ (They always guess the sex wrong). And then I will refuse to call on you. Or another paper will say ‘Major Cornford and the Widow Brooke are both bad: but Major Cornford is the worst.’ And then you will cut me in the street …

  Beneath the banter, Brooke was deeply worried about his father’s worsening condition. Parker Brooke was now suffering from lapses in memory, and the family doctor suspected a blood clot on the brain. On 18 January Mr and Mrs Brooke travelled to London to consult a specialist. Brooke gloomily wrote to James Strachey: ‘It is supposed the specialist will say he has a clot on the brain. Then he will go mad by degrees and die. Meanwhile we shall all live together in a hut on no money a year, which is all there is. Alfred is sombre, because he thinks he won’t be allowed to continue a brilliant political career at Cambridge.’ (Alfred was speaking in the Liberal cause in the Rugby general-election campaign.)

  ‘It is pitiful to see father groping about, or sitting for four hours in gloom,’ Brooke went on. ‘And it is more pitiful to see mother, who is in agony.’ He added, puzzlingly:

  But I am not fond of them. But I rather nervously await the afternoon, with their return. Will it be neuralgia, after all? Or really a clot? Or blindness? What will one do with an old, blind man, who is not interested in anything at all, on £600 a year? Shall I make a good preparatory-school master? Will it throw me back to the old orthodox ways of paederasty … What does one do in a household of fools and a Tragedy? And why is Pain so terrible, more terrible than ever when you only see it in others.

  After this howl of genuine anguish, torn from him by anxiety out of control, Brooke reasserted his control: ‘But breathe no word. If it’s kept dark, the school goes on paying us.’

  That same evening, on his parents’ return, Brooke wrote again to James with an update. He reported that the London doctors had been ‘vague … but not cheering’ and he feared that the family would be thrown out of School Field House by Easter. But after the gloom and the middle-class terror of destitution, the cocky, self-centred Brooke reared up again: ‘The Fabians, the M.D.S. [Marlowe Dramatic Society], the … what a man of affairs I am! I suppose, in this place, I shall write several masterpieces by April.’ Two days later he seemed to be going out of his way to cultivate his hard-man image to James. Next to an ink blot on his paper he wrote ‘not a tear’ and added: ‘My way of disregarding people’s emotions seems to me superior to going all squashy about them. Being immensely egotistic, I am as delighted to see other people suffer, when I am suffering, as any of your common selfish sentimentalists. I can’t really agree that it’s a high emotion. But I am most proud if it really gives me a claim to have “a heart”.’

  The same cold-heartedness extended to his family in their hour of need – he wrote about his mother breaking down and praying for his father’s quick death and the servants creeping about ‘sniffling’. In truth, such a robust response to tragedy was more of a pose than Brooke liked to let on. For all his contempt, he was deeply affected by his parents’ suffering, and donned the iron mask of derision as a defence against his own emotions being rubbed too raw to endure.

  The suspense of waiting for what seemed an inevitably grim outcome was broken on 23 January by a brief cross-country trip to Grantchester to pick up mail and books at the Orchard. While he was there the blow finally fell: a telegram came from Rugby telling him his father had had a stroke. Brooke rushed back, and the family took it in turns to mount a vigil by the dying man’s bedside. Remorselessly, Brooke described the scene to Dudley Ward: ‘Father has had a stroke. He is unconscious. We sit with him by turns. It is terrible. His face is twisted half out of recognition, and he lies gurgling and choking and fighting for life.’ A few hours later, on 24 January, Parker Brooke died. He was 59. Brooke was sparing when telling his friends about it. ‘All the details are too horrible,’ James was told; ‘smell and so forth – And I’ve not seen people dying before.’ To Jacques he wrote simply: ‘Death’s horrible … But death’s kind.’

  On cue, Brooke went down with influenza after the freezing funeral in the bleak Clifton Road municipal cemetery. He was suddenly overwhelmed with responsibility as the head of the family. Not the least of these, with a new term about to begin, was his father’s academic duties. Brooke stepped into the dead man’s shoes, and took over the running of School Field House on his own until April, giving his mother the chance to find a new home.

  The day of the funeral, the 53 boys of the House returned and Brooke, still stricken by flu, was plunged into his duties. On 10 February he told James: ‘You know I’ve got the responsibility of the souls brains & bodies of fifty boys of riotous character. One has yellow hair. I take prayers every night. Hymns only on Sundays.’ James could not resist the temptation of seeing Brooke amid his young charges, and got himself invited to Rugby at the end of February. In advance Brooke gave him a brief lecture about school etiquette; banning the unruly James from prayers, while allowing him to talk about religion and politics but ‘Scarcely anything about Sodomy’.

  He went on: ‘When you enter 108 – no, 106, for Turner is away this term – curious & hostile eyes will be turned on you. Can you bear it? Our surroundings will be very shy & silent, so you will have to talk. They all love me. They are very ugly: though God knows if you will think them beautiful or not.’

  Once the immediate shock of his father’s death had worn off, Brooke settled into the school routine – so recently experienced from the other side of the green-baize door – with apparent equanimity and even enjoyment. His carefree, self-mocking tone was soon back in use in the various accounts of his new life with which his friends were regaled: ‘The boys are delightful; and I find I am an admirable schoolmaster. I have a bluff, Christian tone that is wholly pedagogic … But a certain incisive incredulity in my voice when I mention the word God is, I hope, slowly dropping the poison of the truth into their young souls.’ As he supervised ‘prep’ he told Geoffrey Keynes: ‘The inky babes are splashing each other. I must rise and cuff them … My love to Cambridge.’ Ka Cox was given a synopsis of Rugby life that reads like a parody of Billy Bunter, and intentionally so: ‘Lots happening. Gibson is still in the Sanatorium with swollen glands. Bacon mi. has got his Gym XX. House mile on Saturday and Confirmation on Tuesday. No other news.’

  As ‘John Rump’ had indicated, Brooke’s view of public-school masters was tinged with a knowing, satiric inside view of the homoeroticism preached – and sometimes practised by so many of them. His tongue-in-cheek leading of prayers betrayed a subversive attitude to another invariable accompaniment of the Arnoldian world view – and he managed to avoid the duty of preparing the boys for Confirmation.

  In late March he told James Strachey: ‘I caned a boy on Tuesday. It is an extraordinary sensation. He had broken his furniture to small pieces with a coal-hammer. But I had no consciously sexual emotions. I cried a little after he had gone.’ At the same ti
me he penned some doggerel verse to Dudley Ward containing the line: ‘Nor buggering Bishop went to taste his boy.’ The poem concluded with some unflattering views of his charges:

  They are upper-class. They do not know the Light.

  They stink. They are no good. And yet … in spite

  Of the thousand devils that freeze their narrowing views

  (Christ, and gentility, and self-abuse)

  They are young, direct, and animal. In their eyes

  Spite of the dirt, stodge, wrapping, flits and flies

  A certain dim nobility … So I love

  (Partly because to live it, once, I found

  All glory, and … there are … spots of holy ground

  —Oh, mildly holy—about the place!) each line

  Of the fine limbs and faces; love, in fine,

  (O unisexualist!) with half a heart,

  Some fifty boys, together, and apart,

  Half-serious and half-sentimentally …

  The return to Rugby had awakened Brooke’s slumbering but ever-dormant homosexual side. In an honest piece of self-analysis at this time, Brooke estimated that his nature was one-quarter homosexual, and usually aroused by good-looking boys and youths (he referred to the yellow-haired lad in his House as ‘My embryo’ – the Apostolic term for an attractive young recruit) and half heterosexual. (Where the remaining quarter lay went unstated – but maths was never Brooke’s strong point.)

  In the meantime he remained acutely and embarrassedly aware that he was acting, playing a role that was expected of one of his class and paternity: ‘When you see the pale men who teach you sliding wearily & alone round Bedales, pity them,’ he wrote to Noel Olivier on 20 March, a Sunday, in a rare moment of free time: