Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Despite the mutinies by the younger Fabians against their elders – on one occasion things got so out of hand that the local police had to be called – Brooke seems to have enjoyed himself at the school. He told Geoffrey Keynes: ‘I’m just back from doing my accursed duty at the Fabian Summer School. It was really rather fun. A thousand different people from different parts of life.’ A new acquaintance at the school who impressed both Brooke and James – who would one day marry her – was Alix Sergeant-Florence, a Slade art student who was about to go up to Cambridge. Brooke reported to Noel: ‘I went to the Fabian Summer School a week for conscience’s sake. I rather loved it all. There was, I discovered, a Bedalian there … one Sergeant-Florence … I thought her rather fine …’ Ka Cox, too, was given a glowing report: ‘You ought to go there once to learn a little about Life, and to teach them – what? Anyhow it’s not so bad as you think … I was acting on my conscience in going there, instead of reading peacefully. And acting on one’s conscience is always rather fun.’

  Brooke’s relations with Ka, hitherto a peripheral concern, were taking a deeper turn. The woman to whom the other Neo-Pagans tended to turn in times of trouble, for her comforting, maternal tenderness, was herself in deep emotional waters. Jacques Raverat, who had long pursued her, had given up the chase and was concentrating on a receptive Gwen Darwin in London. Ka was hurt at the rebuff, and turned to Brooke for solace. Despite the blow, Ka took the news with commendable stoicism, and as ever, put the needs of others before her own bruised pride, even steeling herself to meet her friend and rival for a September visit to the Raverat family’s château at Prunoy in northern Burgundy. As well as Ka and Gwen, Noel and Bryn were of the party, along with Francis and Frances Cornford. All in all, it was a gathering of Brooke’s nearest and dearest female friends, and, fretting away at Rugby, he wanted very much to go too. He asked Ka for her counsel:

  it will be splendid for both parties – and for everyone else – if Brynnoel and France/is love each other. But that sort of joining-up is made easier by an extra person who knows and loves both lots and has a calmer, more intriguing and far-seeing mind than the romantic dreamer Jacques. So that I felt, though they of course would join, Francis’ brooding and Frances’ energy and Brynnoel’s shyness and partly affected stupidity might just possibly make it less complete and happy than it would be under the benign encouragement of one so wise and so competent in both the languages and natures as (I was perfectly confident!) myself …

  It is laughable that Brooke thought himself calmer and less of a romantic dreamer than Jacques, and in the end, some shreds of common sense prevailed. He realized that such a cat’s cradle of emotions would be too much for him to handle, and reluctantly stayed away from Prunoy. He may also have been miffed by the latest put-down from Noel, who, reacting both to his warnings about his own emotional fluidity and to renewed intrigues to engineer a secret encounter in her well-guarded life, told him tartly: ‘I am rather glad it was impossible to carry out those unspeakably horrid plots … If we cant meet without schemes I would rather, by far, not see you for half a year – when you will be “decayed” (I dont know what it means) & I shall have cut my hair, or put it up.’

  Cut to the quick, Brooke was at first repentant: ‘Oh, I loathe myself & I loathe you, that I upset you that day – made you “ill & mad” … I feel more & more flushed & foolish & gobbly & undignified & sinking into the unfathomable mud of your cool disdain …’ Then his pride reasserted itself: ‘No, damn you, I’m right. And you’re a sentimental schoolgirl.’ He then proceeded to let loose a torrent of emotional diarrhoea that must have terrified its young recipient:

  I could find you thinking yourself noble and high-minded and honest & open & self restrained & dignified & in general the ideal of the English public school clergyman (‘playing the game’ eh?), and me mean & hot-faced & undignified & sneaky & scheming & flustered & underhand & rotten & low; and (perhaps) I could leave you realising yourself a sentimental, flighty, priggish, silly, romantic, sloppy, infant and me an ordinary, commonsense, sane, business-like, ardent, middle-aged lover. But I won’t. I won’t argue on that basis. I bow to my fate. I realise that one of the disadvantages, for us common place, level-headed people, of falling in love with flighty, poetical, fantastic, unaccountable dreamers is that we have to fall in with their dear old silly poetry-book-cum-pulpit ideals … and go on without knitting. It is part of the penalty we pay. Perhaps it is worth it. So I’ll always advertise extensively in the Morning Post whenever I’m going to meet you. And we’ll all be healthy.

  Brooke reminded Noel of the true spur to his ‘fever’, by (mis)quoting Marvell:

  But at my back I always hear

  Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

  And yonder all before me lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.

  Brooke was feeling the eternal stresses of a young man in love with a chaste – or anyway immediately unavailable – young woman. Oddly, his raging frustration came out as transference. He invested Noel with some of his worst qualities: silliness, sentimentality, priggishness, being over-romantic, flighty and so on. Not surprisingly, she took fright at this storm of abuse and departed for Prunoy without further word, escorted, oddly enough, by Ka Cox, resplendent in a navy-style blue cloak – leaving Brooke to grind his teeth in impotent fury in Rugby.

  In the grand surroundings of Jacques’ eighteenth-century château, with its castellated towers, huge windows, cavernous fireplaces and 700 acres of wooded grounds, the Neo-Pagans gave full rein to their fantasies of constructing a quasi-religious rite. Jacques reported: ‘We talked a great deal of the urgency of some kind of ritual, mystery, initiation, symbolism and we planned a great litany of the four elements.’ But then English scepticism crept in to curb his Gallic dreams: ‘But I doubt whether it will ever come to anything. As Francis says, we are all much too rational and self-conscious …’

  Back in Rugby, in late September, came cheering news that went some way to compensate Brooke for missing out on these thrilling diversions: he learned that he had won the Harness Prize, and with it a useful £70 to bolster his always tight finances. It was a boost, not only to his wallet but also to his ego, bruised by his disappointing performance in the Tripos. His prize-winning essay is an extreme – in places intemperate – attack on the stultifying influence of the Puritans on the English stage. He reserves his greatest scorn for the alleged hypocrisy of those Puritans who condemned the theatre for immorality.

  But Brooke, for all his condemnation of Puritanism, was himself infected with the virus. Even his admiration for Shakespeare was tinged with disapproval of his vices: ‘This glutton, drunkard, poacher, agnostic, adulterer and sodomite was England’s greatest poet.’ In the same notebook he gave his current opinion of the homosexual Cambridge clique in which he had moved in his early years at the university:

  I like telling the story of Shakespeare’s love affairs. It shocks the Puritans, who want it hushed up. And it shocks the pro-Sodomites who want to continue in a hazy pinkish belief that all great men were Sodomites. The truth is that some great men are sodomites and womanizers, Shakespeare, [Michel] Angelo etc … Pure sodomy is a pretty affectation in the young, but if it is anything more, leads to secondratedness, sentimentality, fluff, gentle dilettante slush …

  Brooke’s farewell to the affections and affectations of his own youth seems to be already underway, although his ‘conversion’ to fully-fledged heterosexuality came within a year of his ‘losing his virginity’ with Denham Russell-Smith.

  He tarried in Rugby to lecture a local women’s group on Shakespeare, and to continue Fabian agitation for Poor Law reform. In the midst of this, he replied to a dispiriting letter from his early socialist mentor Ben Keeling, who had gone out into the real world and was finding it hard to maintain his youthful élan and idealism in the grim surroundings of managing a labour exchange, where he was also attempting to agitate for a socialist transformation of society. Rebuking Keeling for his ‘pessimis
m’, Brooke admitted his own ignorance of the world: ‘I, writing poetry and reading books and living at Grantchester all day, feel rather doubtful and ignorant about “the world” – about England and men.’ He acknowledged that his own innate optimism was ‘a feeling rather than a reasoned belief’; but pessimism, he pointed out, could be equally subjective: ‘caused by reason and experience, or more often by loneliness or soul-measles or indigestion or age or anything else’.

  However, Brooke was clear about his own personal cure for ‘soul-measles’:

  The remedy is mysticism, or Life, I’m not sure which. Do not leap or turn pale at the word Mysticism. I do not mean any religious thing, or any form of belief. I still burn and torture Christians daily … I don’t any more believe the world to be good. Only I do get rid of the despair that it isn’t, and I certainly seem to see additional possibilities of it getting better. It consists in just looking at people and things as themselves – neither as useful, nor moral nor ugly nor anything else but just as being.

  His response is essentially that of a poet:

  What happens is that I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see … I roam about places – yesterday I did it even in Birmingham! – and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet. I can watch a dirty middle-aged tradesman in a railway-carriage for hours, and love every dirty greasy sulky wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his spotted unclean waistcoat. I know their states of mind are bad. But I’m so much occupied with their being there at all that I don’t have time to think of that.

  Brooke’s poetic perception extends from people – whose physical imperfections he is always ready to dwell on at inordinate length – to the things of the world he was to celebrate in his poetry in long, ecstatic lists:

  Half an hour’s roaming about a street or a village or a railway station shows so much beauty that it is impossible to be anything but wild with suppressed exhilaration. And it’s not only beauty, and beautiful things. In a flicker of sunlight on a blank wall, or a reach of muddy pavement, or smoke from an engine at night there’s a sudden significance and importance and inspiration that makes the breath stop with a gulp of certainty and happiness.

  Realizing that these flights might be too much for the essentially political Keeling to take, Brooke pulled up: ‘I wish to God I could express myself … But the upshot of it is that one’s too happy to feel pessimistic; and too much impressed by the immense value and potentialities of everything to believe in pessimism …’

  This letter is the nearest we have to a statement of the philosophical beliefs and feelings that lay behind Brooke’s poetry. For all its naivety, one can’t resist being swept along by the sheer exuberance of his zest for life in its existential mess and absurdity, and share his delight in the transient beauty of the world. The document is also by implication a farewell to his rationalist Fabianism. He no longer hopes, he says, to make a new world:

  It is not a question of either getting to Utopia in the year 2,000, or not. There’ll be so much good then, and so much evil … The whole machinery of life, and the minds of every class and kind of man, change beyond recognition every generation. I don’t know that ‘Progress’ is certain. All I know is that change is. These solid, solemn, provincials, and old maids, and business men, and all the immoveable system of things I see around me will vanish like smoke. All this present overwhelming reality will be as dead and odd and fantastic as crinolines or ‘a dish of tay’. Something will be in its place, inevitably. And what that something will be, depends on me.

  This passionate personal declaration of faith; disillusioned yet still hopeful, shows a maturing Brooke a million miles from the changeable child who writes to the Olivier sisters, so that it is hard to believe they are one and the same person. It is one more facet of the glittering chameleon who both beguiled and bewildered those who encountered him. By the beginning of October, Brooke had returned to the Orchard, from where, in his usual ‘babbling Brooke’ vein, he wrote to Bryn. The letter gives a good glimpse of the breakneck pace of his social life:

  I … am going to stay with Eddie Marsh on Thursday & Friday. On Thursday I’m going to let him take me to some theatre. May I come with you three [Gwen, Ka and Bryn] to the Promenade Concert on Friday, then? … I shall be galloping round picture-galleries, and the Exhibition … The Pyes had a fancy they might be going to have you there the week-end, & me & Dudley & Jacques down for a walk on Sunday. But I guess they’re disillusioned now. I think I shall come here for the week-end. Give my love to Noel. You don’t know how funny it is to me to see you two … I can’t come to Ka on Monday, even if she wants me, – though I am returning to London then. I have to dine with my amazing dining club that evening. But may I really come to Limpsfield on Tuesday or Wednesday ( I don’t mind which?) It’s what I love to do most of all. Shan’t I interfere with your packing? [for Jamaica] It will be splendid. I wag my head in an ecstasy of gratitude. I kiss your finger-tips. I salute you. And I’ll hear about France. I’ve had a funny letter from old Jacques about it – full, too, of moral reflections on me. The old divil! It’s so splendid to be going to see Margery & Daphne again: and so absurd that you should at the same moment be fading, decreasingly shining, away over streaky seas! What a spider God is! Life is glorious (I forget if I told you). You are superb. So am I … your eternally reverent Rupert.

  Brooke’s first visitor in the autumn was Edward Thomas, who took the opportunity to invite him down to his home near Bedales, at a time when he would be unencumbered by his family. He was followed by Dudley Ward, who put up at the Old Vicarage with two German girls, Clothilde von der Planitz, a dancer who was giving a performance in Cambridge, and her elder sister Annemarie, with whom Dudley was falling in love and would marry. The couple were not to know that they would one day live out their married life under the roof of the Old Vicarage.

  Meanwhile Brooke had been having rows with his landlords, Mr and Mrs Stevenson, at the Orchard. Apparently the staid couple objected to the bohemian ways of him and his friends, especially to his habit of wandering round the village barefoot. ‘I’ve had dreadful scenes with the Stevensons,’ Dudley was informed. ‘The village “talked” because of bare feet. So they [Clothilde and Annemarie] must keep their boots on. Otherwise they mayn’t stay. This is true.’ Brooke’s next guest was the far-from-bohemian E. M. Forster, flushed with triumph over the publication of his new novel, Howard’s End, with its injunction, which serves as a slogan for Brooke’s generation: ‘Only connect’.

  Then Brooke was off to enjoy Edward Thomas’s hospitality – and, as usual, to squeeze in a rushed, unsatisfactory meeting with Noel. But he relished his stay in Thomas’s newly built house, with its view over the richly wooded hangers of the Hampshire Downs, a landscape that Thomas would one day make familiar in his own haunting poetry. At that time he was barely scraping a living as a hack reviewer of poetry and a harassed writer of pot-boiling biographies and country books. Poetry was an overriding interest, although he had yet to begin writing his own unique verse. Brooke read his latest poems to the older man, who observed him shrewdly:

  He stretched himself out, drew his fingers through his waved, fair hair, laughed, talked indolently, and admired as much as he was admired. No one that knew him could easily separate him from his poetry … he was tall, broad, and easy in his movements. Either he stooped, or he thrust his head forward unusually much to look at you with his steady blue eyes.

  Thomas, in whom a native Celtic gloom allied with poverty to produce melancholy verging on suicidal depression, noticed an affinity of feeling with Brooke, who, he remarked, ‘ranged between a Shelleyan eagerness and a Shelleyan despair’. No doubt Brooke told Thomas of his travails with Noel, causing the writer to comment that she was the ‘least good-looking of the Oliviers’ – an observation that a callous Brooke lost no time in passing on to Noel.

  Buoyed by his new friend’s advice and criticism, Brook
e returned to Grantchester with renewed determination to revise and polish his recent poems and write the dozen or so more he would need before he could think of offering them to a publisher as his first collection. He did not find it easy to return to poetry after the excitements of the summer just ended, and in early November retreated further – to a hotel at Chatteris in the Fens, some 20 miles from his home. From here he told James Strachey: ‘You’ve probably never tried to write poetry for three weeks and failed. Even if one succeeds it’s wearing.’

  But for once, Brooke was being overly self-critical. The poems he produced in the latter half of 1910 included several that were among the most successful he had written up until that time. These included ‘Mummia’, a recurring fantasy of necrophilia and cannibalism:

  As those of old drank mummia

  To fire their limbs of lead,

  Making dead kings from Africa

  Stand pandar to their bed;

  Drunk on the dead, and medicined

  With spiced imperial dust,

  In a short night they reeled to find