Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Intrigued, Bunny obligingly showed up, and Brooke prevailed on him to organize a five-day cruise on the Norfolk Broads at the end of June, accompanied by Bryn and Noel, Godwin Baynes (now working as Medical Officer of Health for Hampstead) and an older family friend of the Oliviers, a Dr Rogers, to act as chaperone for the young people. Rogers had a wherry, the Reindeer, on which Brooke and Bunny shared a cabin next door to Bryn and Noel, whom they could hear giggling through the thin dividing wall.

  An unsuspecting Bunny little realized his true role in Brooke’s nefarious scheme:

  I was very happy and was aware that for some reason Rupert liked me. That holiday was the time of my closest friendship with him. His immense charm and intelligence had not yet been spoiled by success and by certain idées fixes, which later came to resemble hallucinations. With me, in our midnight cabin talks, he was simple, sincere and intimate, with a certain lazy warmth. It was only later that he was apt to utter warnings about the wickedness of other people.

  Brooke passed his days in writing the essay, Puritanism and the English Drama, which he was entering for the university’s Harness Prize, and in gazing adoringly at Noel and lustfully at Bryn. Flustered by these riches, he managed to leave a guinea razor on the boat when he returned to Grantchester to finish his essay and prepare for his propagandist excursion: ‘So I have a beard and a headache & I work all night on black coffee,’ he told Bryn, who had been dispatched with Dudley to scout for a suitable site for the Neo-Pagan summer camp.

  They found what they were looking for at Buckler’s Hard – an area of sentimental memories of Noel for Brooke. Bryn sent him a postcard showing a view: ‘This place will do … It’s not so full of yachts at present, & there is a splendid landing stage to dive from & hay-fields & two short rows of old red-brick cottages with a wide grass-grown street between.’ The location provided all the suitable conditions for a Neo-Pagan gathering – the peaceful River Beaulieu for swimming and sailing (a lugger had been hired for the occasion), extensive woods and a convenient clearing for pitching the tents. Buckler’s Hard had formerly been one of the main shipbuilding sites in southern England, and three of Nelson’s battleships were constructed there. But the decline of wooden ships had left the place moored in time – an idyllic spot for an important milestone in Brooke’s topsy-turvy emotional life. ‘The place looks perfect,’ Brooke wrote to Bryn. ‘Can we get out of sight among the trees to avoid the gaze of the armoured cruisers?’

  Present at the camp were Noel and Bryn Olivier, Ka Cox, Jacques Raverat, Godwin Baynes, Bunny Garnett and his friend Harold Hobson; Bill Hubback and his fiancée Eva Spielman; Sybil and Ethel Pye and their brother David; and a newcomer to the Neo-Pagan fraternity, A. E. (‘Hugh’) Popham, a Cambridge hearty who was patiently pursuing a long, and ultimately successful, project – the wooing and winning of Bryn Olivier. The group was joined by Brooke and Dudley Ward in time for Brooke’s birthday. Photos of the camp show a cheerful and carefree Brooke, with bare legs, open shirt and tousled hair, writing, reading or merely gazing in adoration, his head on his hands, at a gypsy-scarfed Noel.

  The opportunity he had been angling for for so long came when he found himself alone with Noel gathering firewood. Boldly, he unburdened himself of the nature of his feeling and made a full confession of love, coupled with a proposal of marriage. To his utter delight, Noel answered that she loved him and would indeed marry him – when she was older. Until then, she implored Brooke, who was ready to run back to camp and announce the glad tidings, their unofficial ‘engagement’ – more of a mutual understanding and a promise for the future than a formal betrothal – should remain a strict secret.

  Reluctantly, Brooke agreed to keep the secret; but his bubbling high spirits could not be concealed from the others, and word got round that he and Noel had pledged their troth. It is hard to gauge the exact state of their feelings at this point – Noel was undoubtedly deeply touched by Brooke’s evident devotion; but she remained cautious to the point of clamming up: not only did she distrust extremes of emotion as a sign of instability; she was also wary of Brooke’s sudden and changeable enthusiasms in particular. A witness at the camp, Jacques Raverat, probably gives as good an insight as any:

  She accepted the homage of his devotion with a calm, indifferent, detached air, as if it were something quite natural. No doubt she was flattered by his attentions, for she cannot have failed to see something of his beauty and charm; also, she saw how he was sought out, admired, showered with adulation on every side. But he did not inspire respect in her; she found him too young, too chimerical, too absurd …

  Brooke returned to Grantchester to find that his rooms at the Orchard were occupied by someone else, so he temporarily decamped next door to the Old Vicarage, thus spending his first nights under the roof of his beloved future home. His immediate preoccupation was a rerun of the Marlowe Dramatic Society’s production of Dr Faustus for the benefit of a visiting party of German students. Wisely, knowing of his deficiencies as an actor, he had elected to play a minor role – the Chorus – and had handed over the part of Mephostophilis to a friend, Reginald Pole, a future professional actor. Brooke had been mugging up his part in Hampshire and Dorset, and contemporary photographs show him declaiming it in bare feet to a captive audience of Jacques and Dudley in the garden at Grantchester.

  The production provided an excuse for a full-scale Neo-Pagan gathering: Justin Brooke came up to direct, while Bryn Olivier returned to re-create her much-admired role of Helen, and Noel accompanied her to understudy one of the seven deadly sins – Envy. Other sins were played by Ethel Pye, who, with her sister Sybil, carried a torch for Brooke; and the well-covered Ka Cox was rather cruelly given the part of Gluttony. The title role, as in the previous production, was played by the newly married Francis Cornford. After Brooke moved back to the Orchard, the Olivier and Pye sisters came to occupy the Old Vicarage for the duration of the rehearsals, which took place in Cambridge.

  Brooke would ferry them back to Grantchester along the darkened Cam by canoe. In a nostalgic memoir of these summer days and nights, Sybil Pye recalled him instinctively gliding home along the river: ‘He would know, he said, when we were nearing home, by the sound of a certain poplar-tree that grew there: its leaves rustled faintly even on such a night as this when not a breath seemed stirring.’ In the evenings Brooke entertained his friends with readings from Antony and Cleopatra or Meredith’s Modern Love. It does not take too much imagination to conjure up the picture of the star, under the low beams of the Old Vicarage, among an admiring circle of four young women, all of whom, to some extent admired or desired him. Sybil drew the scene:

  Our sitting room was small and low, with a lamp slung from the ceiling, and a narrow door opening straight on to the dark garden. On quiet nights, when watery sounds and scents drifted up from the river, this room half suggested the cabin of a ship. Brooke sat with his book at a table just below the lamp, the open door and dark sky behind him; and the lamplight falling so directly on his head would vividly mark the outline and proportions of forehead, cheek and chin; so that in trying afterwards to realize just what lent them, apart from all expression, so complete and unusual a dignity, and charm, I find it is to this moment my mind turns.

  By day, they bathed in Byron’s Pool, the women admiring Brooke’s comely form. There is no record of whether he performed one of his regular party pieces before them – jumping into the water and then emerging almost immediately with a full erection. Decorously, the only Brooke performance recorded by Sybil came after a moonlight dip when he hung upside down from a branch of the rustling poplar to dry, the bough bending, and his long locks almost brushing the grass. Surprisingly, Sybil remarks that all this was done with a complete absence of self-consciousness on Brooke’s part – although when she told him the scene reminded her of a Blake woodcut, a smile of self-satisfaction crossed his face. Brooke, she concluded, was at once both man and boy ‘and we seemed [to be] looking at the very gestures of the child he must
have grown from’.

  In fact Brooke was always well aware of the effect his actions had on others, and obliquely boasted of his exhibitionism a few weeks later when asked by Lytton Strachey, absent in Sweden, to regale him with some juicy piece of scandal. Regretfully, Brooke replied that he had none: ‘In my little cottage, and even more in the roamings of late months through the Country, and the Camp, I am so far away from such things. Anyhow my scandal is not your scandal … It wouldn’t stiffen you even at all to hear of what it was the rosiest chatteringest delirium for me to do, – bathing naked by moonlight with the ladies.’

  Although evidently a riveting reader of poetry and prose in private – Sybil mentions another treetop performance when Brooke read to her and Noel from Paradise Lost in the branches of a chestnut – Brooke’s style on stage was far less convincing. Even an uncritical admirer like Sybil admitted:

  Whether an audience irked him, I am not sure, but it is certain that we missed at the performance [of Dr Faustus] … all the charm of those rehearsals of his part, with lovely gestures, which took place in the Vicarage garden … Standing under a briar arch, with bare feet and shirt thrown open, he would appeal with passion to this person, giving chance observers all the joy an official audience was to lack.

  A less besotted observer, Jacques Raverat, was also less than impressed – and believed Noel to be likewise:

  He read [Noel] his poems … and others too – Donne, Milton, Swinburne – in his slow, slightly affected voice; she listened politely but a little bored and often, I think, completely mystified; she would have understood Chinese poems as easily. I still remember seeing [Brooke] when he was painting some piece of scenery, touch the tip of [Noel’s] nose caressingly with his brush, as she came over to watch; she seemed to find this joke much more to her taste than serious readings or conversation. It was, it must be said, more suited to her age. In all she felt for him only a certain affection, tinged with a little disdain. But [Brooke] did not take it too hard. He was completely given over to his adoration of her; bitterness – along with desire – had not yet entered into his heart.

  Jacques paints a picture of Noel at this time which gives us some idea of the hold she had over Brooke:

  She had an admirable head, set on her handsome round neck, brown hair, flat complexion, the face very regular and unexpressive, even a bit hard. But it was lit up as if by the beam of a lighthouse when she turned her large grey eyes to you. One could hardly bear their gaze without feeling a kind of instant dizziness, like an electric shock. They seemed full of all the innocence in the world, and of all the experience also; they seemed to promise infinite happiness and wonderful love for whoever could win her.

  The performance of Dr Faustus went off successfully on 17 August. Afterwards the cast and their friends assembled at the Cornfords’ new home, Conduit Head, for a celebratory house-warming. Brooke, dissatisfied with the plain black scholar’s gown he had worn as the Chorus, changed into his old favourite – the transparent blue costume from Comus. Bryn Olivier was the rival belle of the ball, her beauty set off by gold powder in her hair. After a banquet of bread, cheese and beer, the jolly company set off down Madingley Road for a triumphal torchlight parade. Returning, they cast down the burning torches in a circle around the newly-wed Cornfords and danced in a ring around their hosts. Brooke, wearing a many-pointed crown, was the lord of the dance, as Sybil swooningly observed:

  the fitfullest gleam from the bonfire would catch and run up the tall points of his crown, giving it and his head a sort of ghostly detachment from his body, and marking vividly the peculiar golden quality of his hair. This hair, escaping from under the crown, flapped and leapt as the dance grew wilder: and all the while one was aware of that strange anachronism – the lighted eyes and serious face of a child’s complete absorption, and again the detached watchful intelligence …

  ‘If I were called in to construct a religion …’ wrote Philip Larkin, ‘I would make use of water.’ The Neo-Pagans felt the same impulse, and their camps and rituals were tending to go beyond the frolics of a tight-knit group of friends and towards a mystical nature cult – perhaps as a sort of substitute for the religious orthodoxy of their parents’ generation that most of them had rejected.

  They were not alone in this tendency towards paganism. Germany was currently being swept by a similar cult – the Wandervögel (‘Wandering birds’) movement, in which bands of young people, attired, like Brooke and his friends, in open-necked shirts and shorts, and strumming guitars, made for the forests and mountains, where they would camp out around open fires, sing songs and commune with the spirit of the great outdoors. In their love of diving and bathing and camp-fires, the Neo-Pagans were tapping into the same Zeitgeist – enraptured with an idea of youth and freedom, and a hatred of age and stifling convention. But, as Paul Delany has pointed out in his study of the Neo-Pagans, there was something rotten at the heart of their myth.

  Not only were they rejecting the main forces of the society around them – industrialism, urban life, modernity in all its ugly mediocrity – they also wilfully shut their eyes to the realities of human ageing and responsibility. There was no place for anyone over 30 in their world, and precious little for anyone under 15. That is why marriage, with its promise of children, was felt to be such a threat to Brooke, and why he could never come to terms with it.

  The arcadian, rural England they dreamed of had already passed away, even as they discovered and celebrated it. And they made little attempt to understand the socio-economic basis on which their privileged lifestyle so insecurely rested: their camps, their holidays, their parties and pleasures, all depended on money provided by their despised parents, and labour by the despised underclass. Neo-Paganism was a theory of adolescence that failed to survive the merest brush with reality. For all his eloquently expressed horror of his parents and family life, Brooke – in his Fabian guise – was probably the one Neo-Pagan who came near to understanding the social reality of Edwardian life.

  Meanwhile he returned to the Ranee at Bilton Road in a state of intoxicated ecstasy. The gloomy house – it was the first time, he pointed out, that he had ever lived anywhere as mundane as a house with a number – failed to stifle his effervescence: ‘Life is splendid,’ he told Dudley Ward. ‘I cannot contain myself at meals. They suspect me … I roll about and gurgle inside. Life, Dudley, Life!’ Perhaps it was Dudley’s very orthodox dullness that made him the recipient of such declarations as ‘It is absurd to say the world is dull. It is superb … SUPERB!’ He told an adoring Sybil Pye: ‘Since Monday I have read 11 plays, 3 novels, a book on Stocks and Shares and Principia Ethica [G. E. Moore’s ‘Bible’ of Apostolic ethics, which apparently he had not bothered to consult before] … besides all the current magazines and papers. How gorgeous it is to work! Ha!’

  The double game with Bryn and Noel continued, Brooke seemingly oblivious to the possibility that the sisters might compare notes. Knowing that Bryn was on the point of leaving for an extended trip to Jamaica, he wrote to ‘beg, pitifully, on my knees’ to see her before her departure, fearing that ‘You will probably die there. Or return listless and married and unradiant. And anyhow it’s so very long from now to next summer. And time skips by so, that you’ll be fat & I blind & both old before we know it’. He proposed a joint outing to Hampton Court, or a month tramping across Gloucestershire or emulating the flamboyant Italian poet and lover Gabriele D’Annunzio in going ‘aeroplaning at Brooklands … Will you be anywhere anywhen?’

  Trustingly, Noel still held fast to their understanding made in the New Forest: ‘if I think of it I just gloat & dance & other people dont notice it, except Bryn, who was always a sympathetic person.’ The duplicitous Brooke responded on 6 September, remarking that his memory of their ‘engagement’ 24 days previously was growing hazy: ‘Yet I refuse to disbelieve that something did, somewhere, happen …’ But already he showed signs of wavering; pointing out that they were unlikely to meet before the following spring, he wrote: ‘I m
ay decay beyond recognition by next April: there are seeds of it in me already. I warn you, I am feeble … You see, I am feeble & mean & empty and a fool & a devil & rather a beast. And I feel that with proper treatment something might be made of me. Only, the proper treatment, I suspect, includes more of – you. And without that I, as I say, decay and decompose, – and occasionally dislike myself.’

  Noel could not say that she had not been warned.

  In the first week of September Brooke accompanied James to the annual Fabian summer school in Llanbedr. It was the last such organized socialist event that he would attend. Sleeping arrangements were rudimentary – he shared what he would one day call ‘the rough male kiss of blankets’ and a stable floor with James; the Welsh weather was typically atrocious; and the atmosphere was further dampened by the disapproving presence of Beatrice Webb, who felt, unfairly, that Brooke was only there for the social connections: ‘We have had interesting and useful talks with these young men,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘but the weather, being detestable, must have made the trip appear rather a bad investment for them, and they were inclined to go away rather more critical and supercilious than they came … They won’t come, unless they know who they are going to meet, sums up Rupert Brooke.’

  For his part, Brooke was both more studious and more tolerant than the old dragon gives him credit for. His notes from Llanbedr show him taking a serious and informed interest in the topics under discussion, and he jibbed only when Beatrice Webb tried to organize enormous mountain hikes in the rain. He and Gerald Shove, another participant, formed an ‘Anti-athletic League’ which mutinously refused to walk more than three miles a day. He crossed swords intellectually with the Fabians’ grande dame, as well, as James recalled: ‘There was a remarkable scene in which Rupert and I tried to explain Moore’s ideas to Mrs Webb while she tried to convince us of the efficacy of prayer.’ Beatrice was evidently unimpressed: ‘Why must these young men be so rude? … the egotism of the young university man is colossal. Are they worth bothering about?’ she asked rhetorically.