Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Ten centuries of lust.

  So I, from paint, stone, tale and rhyme,

  Stuffed love’s infinity,

  And sucked all lovers of all time

  To rarefy ecstasy.

  Helen’s the hair shuts out from me

  Verona’s livid skies;

  Gypsy the lips I press; and see

  Two Antonys in your eyes.

  The unheard invisible lovely dead

  Lie with us in this place,

  And ghostly hands above my head

  Close face to straining face;

  […]

  Woven from their tomb and one with it,

  The night wherein we press;

  Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit

  Your flaming nakedness …

  This mysterious poem – opaque yet oddly memorable – marks a real departure in Brooke’s verse. It is almost entirely shorn of the archaisms and plain silliness that marked his juvenilia, and is also refreshingly clear of his bitter little spurts of bile. For all that, its central image – that of drinking the dust of long-decayed lovers and thus re-creating their extinct passions – is grotesquely original. It is also marked by peculiar little personal touches: ‘Helen’s hair’ is probably a recent memory of Bryn’s gold-powdered locks when she played the doomed Queen in Dr Faustus; and ‘Verona’s livid skies’ is a prophetic reference to the Italian city where Brooke and Ka would meet at the height of his crisis in 1912. As for ‘Your flaming nakedness’, this could be the fire-lit charms of Denham Russell-Smith’s body, as seen by a lustful Brooke one year before, or a frustrated lover’s vision of Noel bathing naked at Edenbridge or Grantchester. The private imagery of embracing Egyptian mummies was a long-held fantasy of Brooke’s: he was to confide to Hugh Popham – again during the crisis year of 1912 – that he envied Hugh’s newly acquired post at the British Museum, as he had often dreamed of sneaking into the place at dead of night to embrace a female mummy; although he had heard that most had died of syphilis, he said sourly, he hoped to find a clean one.

  Just before leaving Ye Olde George Hotel at Chatteris, Brooke sent a copy of the poem to Noel, who had been ominously silent since receiving his raving letter of denunciation on her way to Prunoy. ‘This is a very rough unfinished copy of the gift you don’t write to me, – even ten words to say you exist … Farewell. Imagine, most unapproachable, a little figure stumping across the illimitable fens, occasionally bowing to the sun because it reminds him of you. Yours (what’s good in him) your equal-inferior and lover Rupert.’

  Noel replied in conciliatory vein: his ‘awful’ letter had, she confessed understandably, ‘quite bewildered’ her. She had resigned herself to the end of their affair after ‘mourning you for 3 days and nights’ and had ‘started off with fresh and independent plans for life.’ Noel admitted that her ‘Purity’ left her in a ‘very unresponsive mood’ to Brooke’s passionate outbursts; but he should let her rest: ‘I shall get better – or worse – soon.’ Tantalizingly, she concluded:

  Dont write again about me, I am disgusted with myself – as a worm – at present; & anything which doesnt abuse & hate me seems unharmonious. If this is just the effect of being nearly 18, write to me about yourself, who are 23 (-4-5?.) & pull me out of it … Jaques [sic] also thinks Bryn is trustworthy & splendid. She is someone worth admiring; I dont think I can rely on anyone as I can on her. from Noel who is horrid.

  The long-anticipated letter from Noel only served to agonize Brooke anew. Installed again at the Orchard in mid-November, he subjected her to a further emotional battering – despite knowing that his passionate incoherence only confused and disturbed her:

  Oh, Noel, I don’t understand, I don’t understand a bit. At least, I don’t think I do. I can only guess – a million things. Oh, letters are hateful: writing is no use. It leaves everything dim. If one can see people and talk … If I could only talk to you, & ask you things. Two sensible people can say anything, – anything in the world – to each other. Forgive me for writing – for you asked me to ‘let you rest’. It’s filthy to bother you; yet it’s right. For I don’t understand – it may be my fault, or your’s [sic], or letter writing’s.’

  After pages more of this emotional incontinence, a distressed Brooke concluded:

  This is damnably confused. Shall I ‘sum up’, as people do in papers on abstract subjects.

  (1) I’m sorry to be disgusting and a nuisance.

  (2) I don’t think your letter hateful; but

  (3) When you can, and even sooner than you like, I wish you’d write and tell me at least some of these things, –

  (a) What in God’s name I did or wrote:

  (b) What the devil you mean:

  (c) What the bloody hell is going to happen –

  (4) Writing is awful: I wish I could see your face, and talk, to you.

  – Oh, I won’t ‘classify’ with ‘unsuggestive’ words, damn you! about instincts. I’ll be as intelligent as I know how, & as well-meaning. I know you are you. But tell me what there is, more clearly, won’t you? Ever Rupert.

  Oh! Write! Write! Write! Noel!

  Two things stand out clearly from this agonized morass: Brooke is as obsessive about Noel as ever; and neither is mature or ready enough to conduct a reasonable relationship, either by post or in person. Their feelings are too changeable, contradictory and infected by the frustration of being unable to meet except in clandestine circumstances. Perhaps it was best, as Brooke did, to let his poetry speak more clearly for him:

  THE LIFE BEYOND

  He wakes, who never thought to wake again,

  Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes

  Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain

  Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;

  And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise

  Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,

  Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,

  Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;

  An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck

  Of moveless horror; an Immortal One

  Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly

  Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse’s neck.

  I thought when love for you died, I should die.

  It’s dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.

  Significantly, he did not send this sonnet directly to Noel, but, in childish petulance, sent it to Jacques at Prunoy, knowing he would show it to her. Predictably, the 17-year-old was uncomprehending: ‘I didn’t understand … I must have lost all the sense I ever had & I took it that you had gone on to better things.’ But somehow, the two star-crossed lovers patched things up, and Brooke sent another sonnet in lyrical, rather than bitter mood:

  THE HILL

  Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

  Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

  You said, ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass;

  Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,

  When we are old, are old …’ ‘And when we die

  All’s over that is ours; and life burns on

  Through other lovers, other lips,’ said I,

  ‘Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!’

  ‘We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.

  Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!’ we said;

  ‘We shall go down with unreluctant tread

  Rose-crowned into the darkness!’ … Proud we were,

  And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.

  —And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

  Brooke was deprecating about the poem – which has become, along with the 1914 war sonnets, and ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, his most anthologized piece: ‘I have had two proofs of a bloody poem (8 months old) sent me,’ he told Noel in December. ‘Here’s the other. Ugh! … don’t go reading anything into it except itself. I’ve never seen you “cry & turn away”!’ Noel r
esponded appropriately: ‘I liked the old mummy poem better than this “we flung us” one.’

  ‘The Hill’ is a very different sonnet from its sister piece, ‘The Life Beyond’, with its ‘shocking’ Brookian images of decay and death: ‘A fly/Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse’s neck’. It could almost have been written as a hymn to the Neo-Pagan lifestyle, with its breezy, overblown rhetoric: ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass;/Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still’ and its undertone of regret at the passing of youth: ‘–And then you suddenly cried, and turned away’.

  Taken together, however, the two sonnets are an undeniable demonstration of Brooke’s ever surer grasp of his techniques and his characteristic themes. Both, together with ‘Mummia’, betray the influence of the metaphysical poets and dramatists he was reading – Donne and Webster in particular. His confusion and frustration with Noel had, by some sort of inner alchemy, fused to produce real poetry, and he had reason to face the New Year with new-found confidence.

  11

  * * *

  Munich

  * * *

  ‘On or about December 1910,’ Brooke’s friend Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) was to write, ‘human nature changed.’ She was probably thinking of the modernist era in art and literature, rung in by the likes of Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound – whose early poetry Brooke had favourably noticed in the Cambridge Review – and the Post-Impressionist exhibition organized in November of that year by Roger Fry, which introduced a bewildered London public to the sort of art that was already old hat in the rest of Europe.

  But it was not only in the uplands of culture that new forces were astir that momentous autumn. It seems indeed that a new century was being born – ten years late, but this was England – in a climate of social and political upheaval. The death of King Edward VII in May had been a storm signal. His son and successor, George V, a bluff naval officer of severely limited mental horizons, was an unlikely figurehead for the changes that were unstoppably under way.

  The old King’s death had come in the midst of a constitutional crisis, caused by the overwhelmingly Tory House of Lords’ point-blank refusal to pass into law a reforming budget proposed by David Lloyd George, the Liberals’ radical Welsh Chancellor. The budget aimed to introduce rudimentary pensions and social insurance, to be financed by taxes which would fall heavily on the upper classes represented in the Lords. It was unprecedented for the upper house to refuse to pass a finance bill, and throughout a long summer, while Brooke and his friends frolicked by rivers, the crisis simmered on. Finally the King was constrained to promise his Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, to create enough Liberal Lords to swamp the inbuilt Tory majority in the Lords should the Liberals win another general election on the issue of peers versus the people.

  The election of December 1910 was fought out against an ominous backdrop that boded ill for the future peace and social cohesion of the country: among the bills that fell when Parliament dissolved was a measure giving women the right to vote. The leaders of the Suffragette campaign, who had been restrained and ladylike in their tactics so long as they could see themselves winning their battle by legal means, immediately switched to militancy. On 18 November determined followers of Emmeline Pankhurst, of the Women’s Social and Political Union, rushed the House of Commons, battled with the police and were arrested en masse. To English gentlemen, it was a terrifying portent of what their hitherto docile womenfolk were capable of.

  That same month England was racked by industrial strife: there were mass lockouts in the Lancashire cotton mills; lockouts in the shipyards of the north-east; and, most serious of all, a bitter strike in the coalfields of south Wales, which caused the Home Secretary Winston Churchill to send in troops to confront the starving miners of Tonypandy.

  (Churchill’s penchant for reaching for the trigger was shown again a year later, in December 1911, when he raced to Sidney Street, Stepney, where a group of anarchists from the Baltic, suspected of killing three policemen, were surrounded and shooting. Churchill called in the Scots Guards and personally supervised the subsequent siege, which ended with the anarchists dying amid the blazing ruins of their den. Newsreel cameras caught Brooke’s patron, Eddie Marsh, in a bowler hat, nervously peering around a corner behind his chief as the bullets sang.)

  The events of the end of 1910 were in Brooke’s mind as he threw himself into a vigorous spate of intellectual work. He was wary of political commitment, and there were surfacing competing tugs on his loyalties: his Fabianism and his commitment to Poor Law reform, as well as the radical Liberal traditions of his family, should have placed him firmly on the Left and on the side of those agitating for change. On the other hand, he was steeped in gentility and the almost instinctive customs and traditions of upper-class, rural, collegiate England, and he was moving into increasingly grand circles in the upper reaches of the ruling caste. He knew nothing of the urban working class, and seems to have patronizingly despised what he did know. As for the rising voices of strident feminism, they simply terrified him.

  His immediate concern was his academic future: he had received an offer of an English lectureship at Newcastle University; but his instinct was to refuse and try for a Fellowship at King’s. To confirm his resolve he visited another of his elderly homosexual Cambridge admirers, A. C. Benson, one of a trinity of distinguished brothers who were all successful writers, in his rooms at Magdalene College on 9 November 1910.

  Benson had first noticed Brooke when the young freshman presented ‘a pretty picture’ as the Herald in Eumenides. Meeting him again now, the elderly don, whose main claim to fame was as the author of the lyrics of that quintessential Edwardian Imperial hymn ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, noted that for all his fame and popularity, Brooke remained the fresh and unspoiled boy, neither egotistical nor self-regarding, and seemingly ‘easily pleased’ and happy for their talk to ‘wander where it would’. Benson noted his guest’s physical attributes in loving detail:

  He was far more striking in appearance than exactly handsome in outline. His eyes were small and deeply set. It was the colouring of face and hair which gave special character to his look. The hair rose very thickly from his forehead, and fell in rather stiff arched locks on either side – he grew it full and over-long, it was of a beautiful dark auburn tint inclining to red, but with an underlying golden gleam in it. His complexion was richly coloured, as though the blood were plentiful and near the surface; his face much tanned, with the tinge of sun-ripened fruit. He was strongly built, but inclined to be sturdy, and even clumsy, rather than graceful or lithe; his feet and hands were somewhat large and set stiffly on their joints; the latter had no expressiveness or grace and his feet were roughly proportioned and homely. Nor did he sit or move with any suppleness, but laughed, rather huddled, in his chair; while though his glance and regard were frank and friendly, his voice was far from beautiful, monotonous in tone, husky and somewhat hampered in the throat.

  For all his literary felicity, it almost seems as though Benson is describing a rather large and overripe melon perched atop a recalcitrant block of timber.

  Apparently reassured as to his future academic prospects at Cambridge, Brooke departed to prepare a lengthy paper he was due to deliver a month later as his valedictory address at the end of his year as President of the university’s Fabian Society. He chose as his subject ‘Democracy and the Arts’. The paper shows a seriousness and profundity of thought that would have amazed Brooke’s more frivolous companions. The germ of his ideas originated in his violent antipathy to a lecture he had heard the previous year at the Fabian summer school. The lecturer was the drama critic and translator William Archer, to whom Brooke seems to have taken a strong dislike. (He described him as ‘whiskers and no brains’, and when asked what he thought of Archer’s latest book, replied: ‘Well, it weighs two pounds and thirteen ounces.’)

  Archer’s thesis was that a fully functioning democracy would be death to the arts, which required a moneyed and leisured class
of the idle rich both for patronage and appreciation. In setting out to rebut this, Brooke began by giving his own definition of democracy: ‘The ordering of the national life according to the national will.’ He scorned William Morris’s vision of the worker of the future composing poetry while he laboured at his loom: ‘Much of his own was. That may be why a lot of it is so dull.’

  The artist and poet are answering a priest-like vocation, Brooke averred, and he poured contempt on the idea of the arts as an improving leisure activity that could be fitted in as part of the daily round: ‘It is a thing we can’t allow … the Civil Service poets, the stockbroker who does water-colours in the evenings, the music-master who has the holidays to compose in …’ His vision of the place of the arts in society is unashamedly élitist and romantic, but also muddle-headed: for what else was Eddie Marsh but a civil servant with a spare-time interest in poetry? Gauguin – whose path to the South Seas Brooke would one day follow – was ‘a stockbroker who painted’ and Gustav Holst, the contemporary composer whose music now stands as a monument to Edwardian England, a ‘music-master who had the holidays to compose in’. Brooke would have none of it. For him, art was ‘an individual or unique affair’ or it was nothing.

  Rightly despising the notion of community art – ‘you can’t voice the soul of the Community any more than you can blow its nose’ – Brooke was far-seeing in pointing out that modern society was swiftly extinguishing the old system of patronage and that the position of the artist was in mortal danger: ‘Only the most fanatical and the most immediately popular survive – by no means the best types.’ But surely it was not beyond the wit of man to devise an alternative?