by Nigel Jones
The reality of their relationship that autumn comes out retrospectively in a letter written by Brooke the following year, when, driven half-mad by jealousy and regret over missed opportunities, he raves:
And then we had those nights – I had such lust for your fine body, far more (you never understood) than for Noel. I had passion for you, – and, as you know, other things, other ways of love, (I knew you –, Ka, – so deeply) as well. I was foolish and wicked, indeed. First, that I didn’t chuck everything turn wholly to you, marry you, if you would … Then, I was a fool … I’d baby ideas about ‘honour’ ‘giving’ you a fair chance’ ‘not being underhand’ men(!) and women(!) being equal’ … I wanted you to fuck. You wouldn’t, ‘didn’t like preventives’. And I respected you! … felt guilty and angry with myself when lust made me treat you ‘unfairly!’ I was getting ill and stupid … I was an object for pity – even love; not of course, lust. You gave me strength, comfort, rest – for a bit. I threw all my affairs – all the mess Noel and I had made – onto you.
What seems to have fuelled Brooke’s rage later was not simple sexual frustration – by finding him his discreet rooms, he thought Ka was signalling her willingness to embark on a full physical affair, rather than just again showing her natural kindness, There seems also to have been a lingering suspicion that Ka was not aroused by him sexually – despite a sort of sentimental ‘love’. Nothing is more irritating to the potentially ardent lover than the thought that his beloved thinks of him as a ‘sweet boy’, but looks elsewhere for sexual satisfaction. His nights with Ka seem to have been confined to heavy petting – with all its excitements and frustrations – and fretting arguments about sex and the constraints of the Neo-Pagan ‘code’ – that there should be intimacy between the sexes, but no copulation without marriage – and their bizarre belief that sexual intercourse was less a bodily act than a semi-mystical rite of passage that ushered participants from youth to adulthood.
At weekends Brooke found it necessary to escape back to Grantchester from the pressure of London. His letters to Ka from there sometimes contained droll accounts of domestic crises:
‘Do you smell soot? I’ve been the last half hour with my arms up a chimney. The beam in the kitchen chimney caught fire. ‘These old houses!’ we kept panting. It was so difficult to get at, being also in part the chimney piece … an ever so cheerful and able British working-man and I attacked the house with buckets and a pickaxe … I was masterful at the always slightly wrong minute – but gave very decisive directions for the rest of the day.
Sometimes so dog-tired that he could barely lift his head, Brooke could nevertheless not resist another chance to stroll in the limelight – this time in the walk-on, non-singing part of a Nubian slave in a performance of The Magic Flute at London’s New Theatre on 1 and 2 December. While waiting to go on stage he read about Webster in the Green Room. He had landed the part at the invitation of Clive Carey, a Cambridge acquaintance from whom he was receiving (abortive) singing lessons. One wonders why he bothered with such distractions at this turning point in his life.
On 4 December Poems by Rupert Brooke was published by Sidgwick & Jackson, in an edition of 500 copies. Brooke was too preoccupied by his work on Webster, then in its final stages, to show much exhilaration or even interest in the event. He told Sybil Pye dismissively that he would produce much better poetry in the next year or two when he was no longer bogged down with his academic tasks. He was not to know that the volume was the only collection of his poetry that would appear in his lifetime. Still less, that it would be one of the century’s smash hits in terms of popular sales – it sold 100,000 copies by the beginning of the thirties, and made small fortunes for the Ranee and Brooke’s literary heirs. For the moment, its impact was modest: it covered its £10 printing costs, and by the turn of the year had recorded a profit of £3.
Those reviewers who noticed the book were generally kind. Dealing with Brooke along with a clutch of other books of verse, as Brooke had predicted to Frances Cornford, the Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous critic praised his ‘boyish’ qualities, but deplored the ‘disgusting sonnet on love and sea-sickness’, which ‘ought never to have been printed’. However, the TLS admitted: ‘We are tempted to like him for writing it. Most people pass through some such strange nausea as this on their stormy way from romance to reality.’ The ultra-conservative Morning Post also highlighted ‘A Channel Passage’. Noting Brooke’s apparent dread of ‘writing prettily’, the critic demanded: ‘What possible excuse is there for a sonnet describing a rough Channel crossing with gusto worthy of a medical dictionary?’
John Buchan’s notice in the Spectator praised Brooke’s ‘strenuous originality’, while the English Review, in a piece devoted exclusively to the poet, called ‘A Channel Passage’ ‘a satiric masterpiece’. The weekly New Age perceptively picked up on the lack of experience informing his love lyrics, which it called ‘frigid and unreal’. The Nation, which, like the English Review, had previously printed poems by Brooke, referred to the recently composed ‘Dining-Room Tea’ as showing a ‘triumphant transformation of the commonplace into the unique’. The Westminster Gazette, Brooke’s own house organ, which had been printing his poems and where he had been winning poetry competitions with monotonous regularity since his schooldays, predictably praised the book, but, like most of the others, jibbed at ‘A Channel Passage’: ‘For obvious reasons it cannot be quoted here.’ The Observer also noted and deplored Brooke’s tendency to being ‘nasty – as in his continual insistence on the physical unpleasantness of old age’. The review concluded favourably, however: ‘it is enormously to his credit that he had managed to stagger free of convention’. The Liberal Daily News saw that Brooke’s ‘ugly’ poems were merely ‘an inverted reverence for beauty’, while another sympathetic organ, the Cambridge Review, said his comparison of love and nausea ‘ruined a promising book’.
Only one of Brooke’s friends, Edward Thomas, reviewed his poems professionally. His article in the Liberal Daily Chronicle said: ‘He is full of revolt, contempt, self-contempt, and yet arrogance too … Copies should be brought by everyone over forty who has never been under forty. It will be a revelation. Also if they live yet a little longer they may see Mr Rupert Brooke a poet. He will not be a little one.’ Brooke’s most hostile notice appeared in another Liberal newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, which accused him of ‘a dislocation of the mind’. The paper was not to know that its gibe was about to become literally true.
It was not only the worries over Webster that were distracting and depressing Brooke as 1911 ended. Exhausted and nervous as he was, his delicate condition was not helped by rumours that had reached his ears that Ka was being seen around town in the disreputable company of that dangerously bohemian young painter Henry Lamb.
15
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Lulworth and the Ka Crisis
* * *
Events in December 1911, the beginning of the supreme crisis in Brooke’s life, began to rush up on him with frightening speed: first there was the appearance of his poems, to which, agitatedly absorbed in Webster as he was, he gave very little thought. Suddenly the Christmas season was upon him, and with it a slew of questions: where would he spend the festive season, and with whom? And what would he do in the New Year? Finally, and most disturbingly, why was Ka so suddenly quiet and removed? He had asked her to help him round up some suitable friends to see in the new year at Lulworth once again, in what he hoped would be a repetition of the close and quiet time they had enjoyed there with Jacques, Justin and Gwen the year before. He was feeling distinctly sickly, and was wanting the company of the old familiar faces; certainly he was in no mood for new friends, still less for uncomfortable emotional shocks and surprises.
To add to his doubts over Ka and Henry Lamb, he was also undergoing agonies of jealousy over Noel. At the Clifford’s Bridge camp he had noticed that she had received a letter from an admirer and friend of hers at Bedales, the Hungarian aristocrat Ferenc B
ékássy. The letter left no room for doubt about the young man’s feelings for Noel: ‘Wherever I am and whatever I do, from writing poetry to flirting on various occasions – I always begin thinking about you. And really, there is no one else I care to be with so much … there is no one else I can talk with.’ Almost certainly it was the sight of this letter that caused Brooke to flounce off in a storm of jealousy and spend a tearful night alone on a hill. But, in accordance with his normal pattern of behaviour, the knowledge that he had a rival in the field served to rekindle the dying embers of his passion for Noel; and throughout the autumn he bombarded her with letters that – while not as long as in former days – were equally emphatic in their declarations of love.
The refurbishing of his affair with Noel was made easier since she was closer to hand, having begun to study medicine at University College London. His letters hint gently at the hurt he had suffered at her hands in Devon:
So Camp’s faded from you, has it, ‘except the smell and the scenery’? What do you mean when you say those things stay with you longer than anything else? I’m jealous again! Do they? There are a few things that stay longer. I’ll not let you forget some things till you die – But anyhow, I rather vaguely protest, can’t I be allowed to be part of the scenery? I so often was. And if I don’t smell, I can, you know. I can buy stuff in a bottle and always sprinkle it on me, I mean. Anything, you see, not to be outdone by a rival.
Fired up by jealousy, he blames their geographical separation and mutual ‘Incomprehension’ for the recent froideur in their relations, but now:
I’ll give you the whole world, I love you so … To think of you is Heaven. Noel, whom I love, who is so beautiful and wonderful. I think of you eating omelette on the ground. I think of you once against a sky line: and sitting at Becky Falls: and bathing: and picking dewberries: walking: and on the hill that Sunday morning. And that night that was wonderfullest of all … You are so beautiful and wonderful that I daren’t write to you: And kinder than God. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice – you. A million worlds and ages are smaller than that time. I daren’t write. I could only repeat words. Beautiful, beautiful. They’re silly. – I love you – There are no words. Goodnight Noel. Rupert.
After all her evasions, Noel was, ironically enough, probably more receptive to Brooke at this time than ever before – just at the moment when his affections were beginning to be engaged elsewhere. She accepted his invitation to hear a Wagner opera, during which he reminded her: ‘You are lovely as the sunrise – and we have very few more years left to live.’ With unaccustomed warmth, she responded: ‘I get worse & worse & you more & more splendid. We must try again, another way. It cant go on – my being so filthy & you so fine – I cant bear the contrast, for one thing …’ She proposed to recast their engagement to rule out physical demonstrations of love, and confine themselves to ‘talking … Or something even stricter – something hard & restraining; awfully good for me! what about you?’
But such chastity was not good at all for an already severely deprived Brooke, with the comforting charms of Ka so near at hand. He responded: ‘I will pledge myself to no ordinance. For even though I only wanted to talk for the first three weeks: I might suddenly want to bite your fingers on the fourth. They’re very nice. One can’t bind oneself to want or not to want. By December I may not want to see you at all. Tra! la! Or the strain may be so great I shan’t be able to bear it.’
Despite more meetings, teas and theatre visits in London that autumn, some carried on under the very nose of Ka, both at Fitzroy Square (‘It’s the dirtiest place in London, and the uncomfortablest’) and his Charlotte Street bolt-hole that Ka had found, something intervened between them to thwart, yet again, their intimacy. The ‘something’ probably took place in November, since at the end of October he was still writing to her like a man possessed: ‘There are things I’ve given you I can’t get back again … I can’t ever be separate from you. I can hurt you and be cruel and devilish and mean and tear you and destroy you and infect and poison you. But I’ll never be free again … Nor you from me … (Oh, if you die before I’ve done loving you I shall go mad.)’
However, a month later things had drastically changed: ‘I don’t suppose that at any moment of your life any one’s wanted to hurt you so much as I have for the past week.’ By some hideous mischance, Brooke had happened to visit Ferenc Békássy, the 18-year-old ex-Bedalian who had fallen for Noel at school, and whose love-letter to her had thrown him into a frenzy in Devon. Békássy had gone up to Cambridge as a King’s freshman that October. From curiosity, Brooke had visited him in his rooms for breakfast in late November, and to his utter horror, had seen a letter to the young Hungarian from Noel which by no means discouraged his hopes of winning her love.
Instantly he fired off what she called a ‘little snappy post card’ of protest to Noel, and at their next meeting perplexed her with his boorish, jealous petulance, eliciting the response:
Rupert! This is awful! You mustn’t go on like this, angry & wakeful & not working … your miserable-looking self … You mustn’t be so dotty & queer. If you’re grey & stern on Sunday I shall be affraid [sic] – and it’s that fear (if anything) which makes me hate you; its when I feel that you are going to say horrors, & that you are thinking them, & that I can only shudder or squeak …
But she ended reassuringly: ‘I’m not bringing Bekassy on Sunday. Love from Noel.’
Although Brooke recanted of his ill temper by return of post – ‘Noel dear, I’m sorry. I’m all twisted and tired … I’m sorry. I’m a devil to treat you so. Oh, I’ve so little faith …’ – the breach between them which had seemed to be healing was rapidly widening again to chasm-like proportions. Innocently, Noel was not to know that he was already exhibiting the symptoms – irrationality and insomnia – of the total breakdown that was about to tear his life apart.
On 15 December, with the Christmas holidays looming, the troubled lovers met at the Moulin d’Or restaurant in London and afterwards walked along the Embankment, wrapped in strained conversation about their future. Brooke, described by an anxious Noel a few days before as looking ‘sad & worried enough to make me weep’, declared that until Noel was prepared to make more of a commitment to the relationship, it could not continue. On this sad note they parted.
With her usual sensible attitude, Noel wrote to him on 20 December suggesting that his feelings were exaggerated, ‘gloomy & continually irritated because, for about two months you have been working so hard & London is so awful & the last week you nearly killed yourself’. She pleaded for another chance before any irrevocable decisions were made. Brooke replied with his feelings clearly confused. He veered, he said, between wanting to go away for a year and having another shot at rebuilding their relations: ‘It seemed incredibly stupid and wicked that we should mess it between us: or lose anything. Oh Noel, Noel, who’s wrong and a fool – you? or I? or both?’ Between the lines, Noel was asking for more freedom from his ‘gnawing jealousies’ – something that the increasingly frenzied Brooke would not, could not, grant. Almost beside himself with jealousy, exhaustion and confused fears for the future, he packed his papers at Grantchester and set off to see his mother. Ahead lay Lulworth – and the worst horrors yet.
In a poem roughed out before he left Grantchester, Brooke described the divided state of his soul:
All night I went between a dream and a dream
As one walking between two fires.
He thought he had left one fire behind, with the breach with Noel – but the warmth of Ka that he hopefully turned towards was to prove altogether too hot to handle.
From Grantchester he went via London – where he spent a last night at Charlotte Street with its piquant recent memories of the woman he was about to meet so explosively – to join the Ranee, who was staying at the Beachy Head Hotel on the cliffs west of Eastbourne. It was at the hotel that he put the finishing touches to his dissertation. He was in a state of depression, telling Sybil Py
e that it was only the art of the Ballet Russe – which he had continued to haunt through the autumn – that could redeem civilization. Then it was back to Rugby for Christmas.
With all his distractions, Brooke apparently failed to notice until it was too late that Ka had far exceeded her brief in extending invitations for the Lulworth party. She had visited him at Beachy Head and had informed him that she had merrily issued invitations to a far wider circle than Brooke had envisaged. By the time he wrote to Lytton Strachey from Rugby on 19 December, the cast of characters who would witness the drama of his life was almost complete. ‘There’s going to be a reading-party in dear old Lulworth. In January: … Ka and I. And perhaps his Lordship [Gerald Shove] and possibly Virginia. Will you come? Everybody will be writing plays. I suppose it will be dreadfully Apostolic …’ Brooke had already issued a similar invitation to Maynard Keynes, and asked him to invite his lover Duncan Grant. As an extra inducement to the great economist, he assured him that there would be ‘no Oliviers’ – between them, Ka and Brooke had vetoed the troubling Neo-Pagan sisters.
But Ka had covertly been active: not only had she invited Lytton; she had also intrigued for him to ask Henry Lamb to join the group. She was plain about her motives, telling Justin Brooke that she wanted to flirt with the ‘unpleasant but fascinating’ painter, as she candidly but cruelly described Lamb to Brooke. Lytton was not averse to the idea: for he was already deeply in love and lust with Lamb himself. Having lost Duncan Grant to Keynes, Lytton had transferred his attentions to Lamb, and had recently returned from a visit to him in Brittany.
