by Nigel Jones
Although resolutely heterosexual, Lamb enjoyed teasing Lytton, and delighted in their banter – particularly about Lamb’s ever-ready penis, which they referred to as ‘the Obelisk’. He was the son of a mathematics professor at Manchester University. His brother Walter, a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, was an acquaintance of Brooke, and his sister Dorothy was a teacher at Bedales. Lamb had begun to study medicine, and had almost qualified as a doctor when, in 1905, he suddenly broke from his family’s scientific bent and became an artist. In 1907 he married a fellow-Mancunian art student, Nina Forrest, who was always known as Euphemia. They immediately eloped to Paris, where Lamb got to know Augustus John and Duncan Grant. John had a strong influence on Lamb, who adopted the older artist’s persona, dressing in arty clothes – corduroy jackets and floppy neckties – and sporting a scrubby beard. Lamb also followed the master in matters of the flesh, becoming a recklessly dedicated womanizer. His wife promptly left him, although they formally remained married until his second marriage to Lady Pansy Pakenham some 20 years later.
Lamb returned to England, and by the end of 1910 had taken the redoubtable socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell as one of his many mistresses – much to the mortification of Lytton, who was already smitten by the wild bohemian. Lamb undoubtedly exercised a Svengali-like hypnosis over many women with his strongly masculine appeal – he had none of the mild effeminacy of Brooke, and his good looks were more straightforwardly sexy. He traded on his reputation as a heartless philanderer, causing Virginia Stephen to write of his ‘evil goat’s eyes’. By the end of 1911 his liaison with Lady Ottoline was running out of steam – she was a decade older than he, and was beginning her affair with Bertrand Russell. For his part, Lamb was wearying of her domineering possessiveness, which included providing him with a studio near her own house at Garsington, outside Oxford. But his relationship with Ottoline and the hard bohemian years with John’s ménage had left him with a taste for the company of the well-off and the good things of life.
When he met Ka in the autumn of 1911, she looked like a heaven-sent opportunity to the worldly man on the make: wealthy, indulgent to her friends, vaguely bohemian, and above all sexually susceptible yet naive. He decided to move in fast, and did not hesitate when her invitation to join the Lulworth party reached him via Lytton.
This was the situation that faced Brooke when he arrived at Lulworth on 28 December. Almost all the odds were stacked against him: the personnel of the party was decidedly Bloomsbury rather than Neo-Pagan, with a trio of Stracheys (Marjorie, Lytton and James); Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant. The only paid-up Neo-Pagans there were Ka and Justin Brooke. Two newcomers both posed a deadly threat to Brooke’s peace of mind. First, there was the young Ferenc Békássy, his rival for Noel’s affections. At King’s Békássy had been taken up by the predatory Keynes, who was already angling for the youthful Hungarian to become the youngest-ever Apostle – a manoeuvre which bore fruit a month later.
Much more disturbing to Brooke, however, was the shattering news that Lamb was to join the party. It will be recalled that James Strachey had held him up to Brooke as a skilled practitioner of coitus interruptus, and Brooke must have seen him from the outset as a potent sexual threat – a ruthless philanderer whose experience and sexual expertise were sure to outshine his own. For once Brooke faced being eclipsed by a darker star than he.
No sooner had Brooke arrived in the familiar surroundings of Churchfield House, the lodgings where the main participants were staying, than he took to his bed, ostensibly with flu aggravated by exhaustion. His friends noticed that he was silent and withdrawn, but they were growing used to his ‘moods’ and did not seem unduly concerned. The exact sequence of events that triggered Brooke’s dormant neuroses into an emotional explosion is still the subject of rumour, but the general outlines are clear.
On Saturday 30 December Lytton received a telegram from Lamb, who had been visiting the Augustus John clan at nearby Parkstone. Lamb announced his imminent arrival at the local railway station at Wool, and Lytton obediently trotted off in a horse and carriage to meet him and bring him back to the Cove Cottage Inn. By all accounts, Ka was almost delirious at the prospect of the arrival of her new conquest. She was an outdoors woman, and loved Lulworth, as Gwen recalled of her exactly one year before: ‘She pulled on great boots and laughed in the wind … I remember her, standing on the very edge of the cliff, her crimson skirt whirling in the wind, her head tied up in a blue handkerchief, and the gulls screaming below.’ This year it would be Brooke doing the screaming.
Almost as soon as he arrived, Henry either carried off or was snapped up by Ka, and the pair disappeared for a long walk along the seashore. It is possible that they had sex there and then, but more probably confined themselves to mild petting. At any rate the effects on Ka were deeply stirring. Early the following day, Sunday 31 December, taking her courage in both hands, she braved Brooke’s wrath and went to his room to tell all. She was falling deeply in love with Lamb, she confessed; and when a distraught Brooke demanded to know why, she advanced the lame reasons that he was older than them (by three years) and shared the same Christian name as her late and beloved father.
The effect of the news on Brooke was immediate and devastating: desperately he pleaded, even demanded, that Ka drop this mad infatuation with the man he would always henceforth refuse to name, merely calling him, with hatred and contempt, ‘the creature’. (Jeeringly, Lamb would return the compliment, referring to Brooke as ‘the cauliflower’ – apparently a dig at his rural enthusiasms.) Forgetting in an instant his three-year romance with Noel and all its extravagant promises, Brooke abjectly begged Ka to marry him. Shocked that this proposal should be so obviously born of panic rather than passion, Ka curtly refused; and she also turned down flat Brooke’s next demand – that she should never see Lamb again. She had every intention of doing so, she said defiantly; indeed she wanted to marry him when he was free.
Lamb himself had other ideas. He was ready for a flirtation, and if possible an affair, with Ka, but her sudden enthusiasm for him and for marriage thoroughly alarmed him. As soon as the weekend was over, he lost no time in slipping back to London, leaving Lytton as his agent in place at Lulworth to report the continuing reverberations of the explosion he had unleashed. Lytton, too, was worried by the evident consequences his malicious little games had had: pulling the emotional strings of his friends was meat and drink to him in his role as puppeteer-in-chief to the young literati. But this time the game had clearly got out of hand. Swiftly he used all his charm and guile to dissuade Ka from following Lamb to London, advising her instead to take up the role of nurse to Brooke, who was clearly in agonizing need of her ministrations.
Brooke, too, lost little time in following his rival’s retreating footsteps and beating a path away from Lulworth, which, from a cosy cocoon of quietude, had become an amphitheatre of agony. On New Year’s Day 1912, a Monday, Brooke accompanied James, who was taking a train to London. The two friends walked east along the top of the Purbeck hills, oblivious to the spectacular coastal scenery as Brooke agonized aloud over the weekend’s events. When they reached the gap in the hills that enfolds the charming village of Corfe Castle, James caught the London train, leaving Brooke to push on, alone, along the ridge to Studland, the village set amid sand dunes where his old friends Gwen and Jacques Raverat were on a painting holiday.
Here Brooke repeated his tale of woe – a chronicle made the more poignant for Gwen and Jacques by their own recent eternal-triangle entanglement with Ka. Presumably on their advice, since they saw Ka and Brooke as natural partners, he returned to Lulworth in a desperate bid to patch things up with Ka, by now the only female left in the party, which, following more comings and goings, consisted of four homosexual Apostles – Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Gerald Shove and Harry Norton – and the increasingly incapacitated Brooke. Lytton’s letters to Lamb told of the unfolding drama. On 4 January he wrote:
Ka came and talked to me yesterday, between
tea and dinner. It was rather a difficult conversation, but she was very nice and very sensible. It seemed to me clear that she was what is called ‘in love’ with you – not with extreme violence so far, but quite distinctly. She is longing to marry you. She thinks you may agree, but fears, with great conscientiousness, that it might not be good for you. I felt at moments, while she was with me – so good and pink and agreeable – that there was more hope in that scheme than I’d thought before. But the more I consider, the more doubtful it grows. I can’t believe that you’re a well-assorted couple – can you? If she was really your wife, with a home and children, it would mean a great change in your way of living, a lessening of independence – among other things a much dimmer relationship with Ottoline. This might be worth while – probably would be – if she was an eminent creature, who’ld give you a great deal; but I don’t think she is that. There seems no touch of inspiration in her; it’s as if she was made somehow or other on rather a small scale (didn’t you say that?). I feel it’s unkind to write this about Ka, and it’s too definite, but I must try and say what I think … Henry, I almost believe the best thing she could do now would be to marry Rupert straight off. He is much nicer than I had thought him. Last night he was there and was really charming – especially with her. Afflictions seem to have chastened him, and I did feel – it was evident … they seemed to fit together so naturally – even the Garden-City-ishness.
‘The Garden City’ is Lytton’s superior way of describing Brooke and Ka’s shared Fabianism – a reference to the current socialist experiment in bringing high-minded, teetotal vegetarianism to suburbia in the form of the Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn in Hertfordshire. More importantly, the letter clears Lytton of Brooke’s subsequent charge that introducing Lamb into their charmed circle at Lulworth was all a vile homosexualist plot to destroy the pure relationship between Ka and Brooke. For a long time Brooke refused to believe the simple truth: that it was Ka’s own work, and that Lytton had merely been a convenient tool, a tethered goat to tempt down the tiger – or in this case, the Lamb.
The following day, 5 January, Lytton sounded a note of alarm:
The situation, though, seems to be getting slightly grim … Rupert is besieging her – I gather with tears and desperation – and sinking down in the intervals pale and shattered. I wish I could recommend her to console him … As for Rupert – it’s like something in a play. But you know his niceness is now certain – poor thing! I never saw anyone so different from you – in caractère. ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ I sometimes want to murmur to him. But I fear the jest would not be well received.
Lytton was right. A distraught Brooke was going from bad to worse. But if the puppet-master had seen some of his strings untied, he at once attempted to refasten them. By the following day, January 6, he was advising Lamb to drop Ka and allow Brooke to possess the field:
If you’re not going to marry her, I think you ought to reflect a good deal before letting her become your mistress. I’ve now seen her fairly often and on an intimate footing, and I can hardly believe that she’s suited to the post. I don’t see what either of you could really get out of it except the pleasures of the obelisk. With you even these would very likely not last long, while with her they’ld probably become more and more of a necessity, and also be mixed up with all sorts of romantic desires which I don’t think you’ld ever satisfy. If this is true it would be worth while making an effort to put things on a merely affectionate basis, wouldn’t it? I think there’s quite a chance that … everything might blow over, and that she might even sink into Rupert’s arms. Can you manage this?
Lytton need not have worried. The cold-hearted and cynical Lamb was well capable of extracting himself from a situation in which his fishy emotions were not engaged. He cruelly asked Lytton to play Cupid between Ka and Brooke – and even offered to preside over their nuptials in a nearby Garden City. As for Lytton’s motivation, it seems clear that he had briefly considered making Ka, with her recent experience of such triangular matches, the third point in a love triangle with Lamb – exactly the formula he later achieved with Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge. Often attracted to heterosexual men, he saw that a sure way of keeping close to Lamb was to exert influence over the woman in his life. But on closer inspection, he decided that Ka was not intellectually or imaginatively fit for the post, and thought instead it would be more suitable to yoke her to a man without either bodily or intellectual attractions for him – Brooke.
On the same day as Lytton’s last letter to Lamb, Brooke wrote from Lulworth to Noel. His tone is entirely different from his previous effusions – terse, anxious, with none of the playful silliness or ardent exaggerations of the past:
I have been ill and feeling very tired: and as the days go by I get worse. Also, I can’t get my plans settled even for the nearest future, and I don’t know what I shall be feeling in even two or three days. It isn’t your ‘fault’ this time! In addition to all the other horrors, there’s now a horrible business between me & Ka, – we’re hurting each other, clumsily, as one does. I’m worn out by it … I’m very sorry I’ve been such a nuisance, – to you & everybody. Please forget me entirely till I’m decent & well again if ever I am. Be – be Noel: which means such good & greatness. Good bye.
Seriously alarmed by Brooke’s state, his friends at Lulworth – who would soon, owing to his deluded state, be rapidly turned into enemies – sent for Gwen and Jacques Raverat from Studland. They collected him and conveyed him to London, where an urgent appointment was made with a Harley Street doctor specializing in ‘nerves’ – Dr Maurice Craig. Two months afterwards, when Brooke had regained some sort of precarious temporary equilibrium, he recalled his condition at Lulworth as he slid down the slope towards actual insanity: ‘a week or so in the most horrible kind of Hell; without sleeping or eating – doing nothing but suffering the most violent mental tortures. It was purely mental; but it reacted on my body to such an extent that after the week I could barely walk.’
In this sad state he was taken to Dr Craig’s consulting rooms. The doctor was something of a specialist, too, in counselling Britain’s afflicted intellectuals – he was to be consulted by Leonard Woolf about Virginia’s increasingly serious psychotic episodes. In the dawn of modern psychiatric medicine, the weapons at Craig’s disposal to treat Brooke’s condition were rudimentary: he diagnosed ‘severe mental breakdown’ – which was blindingly obvious to everyone – and added for good measure the extraneous information that his patient was ‘hypersensitive and introspective’ – again a deduction of almost Holmesian perspicacity. He prescribed complete physical rest, an absence of all mental work or intellectual effort, and a bizarre diet of milk, stout and a disgusting-sounding concoction described by Brooke to Hugh Dalton as ‘compressed bullocks’ blood!’
The regime was known as ‘stuffing’ and lasted for up to two months. The rationale was elementary: depressed people got thin and neglected to eat (Brooke had lost a stone over the previous month or so), and therefore the way to restore them to bodily health and mental vigour was to insist they ate as much as possible, as often as possible, and took little or no exercise. Brooke described it thus: ‘My nerve specialist’s treatment is successful and in a way pleasant, “aber etwas langweilig” [‘but somewhat boring’]. I have to eat as much as I can get down, with all sorts of extra patent foods and pills, milk and stout. I have to have breakfast in bed about 10 every day, go to bed early, never take any exercise, walk never more than two miles, and do no kind of brain-work.’
Where then could Brooke go to achieve the peace and careful supervision he needed? The answer was obvious: the Ranee was on the French Riviera on a long winter vacation. Informed of her son’s condition, she summoned him to join her – an idea that had been in the air anyway, before Lulworth. He just had the time to squeeze in a brief visit to Noel at Limpsfield Chart, and then the Raverats put him on the boat train to Paris at Victoria. Ka, too, the ostensible cause of his collapse,
was there. Using some emotional blackmail, he had managed to extract a promise from her to meet him in Munich at an unspecified time – but soon. As the train moved out, he clung to that hope – for the moment it was all he had to cling to. He was descending through the dark.
16
* * *
Madness
* * *
No one can say with certainty whether Brooke, in the months that followed Lulworth, actually crossed the thin line that divides the sane from the insane. His condition was too changeable, shifting, to be defined as insanity by any modern yardstick. There were times when he appeared well and seemed to be functioning normally. But there were other times when his behaviour was irrational, delusional, crazy – in a word, insane. It was not all waste. During this period, along with his raving, foaming denunciations of those who he believed had foully betrayed him, he wrote letters of passionate, poetic intensity – indeed, some of the most moving and eloquent love-letters in the language. If they were tinged with madness – as he himself believed – who are we to deny it?
The seemingly trivial incident that had touched off this psychotic episode cannot be considered in isolation. Brooke had suffered reverses in love before – indeed, his run-in with Noel over Ferenc Békássy could have been even more damaging than his quarrel with Ka over Lamb, given his long devotion to the youngest Olivier. The factors that made the Ka imbroglio act as a catalyst to push him over the edge were his fear that Lamb was a more potent and attractive proposition than he, who had been used to so much adulation for so long; and the uneasy suspicion, growing towards a manic certainty, that the whole business was some nefarious plot that had been carefully laid by Lytton and his Apostolic and Bloomsbury friends, in order to trap him and expose him as a fool. In this scenario Ka was not a forceful and independent woman with her own plans and hopes for her amatory and marital future, but at best a poor naive tool, or at worst a criminal whore who had dirtied his deepest love.
