by Nigel Jones
Brooke’s rigidly moralistic principles rebelled at the thought that a homosexual like Lytton could take an interest in, and be adept at, influencing the love lives of heterosexuals. For him, homosexuality had its place – with his own history he could hardly deny it – but that place was to be strictly confined to the public-school dormitory or Oxbridge common rooms. It had to be cloaked in the secrecy that he had learned at his mother’s knee. It is significant that he turned his rage, not on the obvious object – Henry Lamb – but on Lytton, who became the villain of the piece in his own disordered mind. Gradually this paranoia spread out like an evil stain until it touched not only Lytton, but his circle of friends, and beyond them whole strata of imaginary foes: feminists, Jews, pacifists, homosexuals – a world of enemies who were working to break down the world of purity, youth, freshness and frank honesty that Brooke imagined he embodied. Even after the acute phase of his paranoia had passed, these delusions remained, and in many ways he never recovered from that single disastrous weekend in Lulworth; certainly, when he emerged from the dark tunnel of his madness, he was not the same man who had gone into it.
Gwen and Jacques had been so worried by Brooke’s evident unfitness to travel alone, that they arranged for one of the only people he knew in Paris – none other than his recent flame, Elisabeth van Rysselberghe – to meet his train and look after him before putting him on a connecting train to the Riviera. Given Brooke and Elisabeth’s complex feelings for each other and their troubled sexual history, Elisabeth seems an odd choice of nurse to counsel the lovelorn and deeply disturbed man, but she rose to the occasion with disinterested devotion.
Late on the night of 9 January, Brooke’s train pulled into the Gare du Nord, where he was met by Elisabeth, who took him to her parents’ apartment in Rue Laugier. She put him to bed, and while he slept, she changed his money, reserved a seat on a Nice-bound train and wired the Ranee with the time of his arrival. Awaking after eight hours, he flipped through a book by André Gide, a travelling gift from Jacques – with no premonition that the solicitous woman whose hospitality he was enjoying would one day bear a child to the unconventional novelist.
He then gave way to his overriding obsession and started the first of many letters he would write over the next weeks and months to Ka: ‘I want so to turn altogether to you and forget everything but you, and lose myself in you, and give and take everything – for a time. Afterwards – doesn’t matter. But I’m so wanting that security of Heaven. I’ll make myself so fine for you. And I’ll find and multiply all the many splendours in you.’ This passage presages many of the themes he would harp on continually in his correspondence with Ka. He openly needs her ‘Heavenly’ security; he has to ‘make himself fine’ for her – like a repentant drunk reforming, or an athlete preparing for some gruelling marathon; and he will be the one to discover Ka’s ‘splendours’ – implying, perhaps, that she is incapable of doing so alone – it is to Brooke that the shining task belongs – whereas her role, presumably, is to be the passive vessel that receives his poured-out love.
As he looked ahead to his long journey south, only her vision would console him: ‘If the carriage is hot and horrible tonight, I shall think of your eyes and hands and mouth and body and voice, and sleep instantly and happily’. Like a baby, one is tempted to silently add. But again, he returns to his insistent theme: this ‘love’ is to the greater glory of Brooke rather than its ostensible recipient. In by now familiar terms he tells her: ‘I’ll give you things you never dreamt of and you’ll make me the wonderfullest person in the world … I love you so. I kiss your lips.’
Dimly realizing that Ka might be wondering exactly what his relations were with the woman who was caring for him – for jealousy can cut both ways – Brooke added reassuringly: ‘I find myself so unmoved and kindly with her [Elisabeth]. Don’t mind my being here for a day. I’m not loving Elisabeth.’ The helpful Elisabeth conveyed him to the station and put him on the train for Nice that same night. He found himself sharing a carriage with a duchess and her maid, and the French painter Pierre Bonnard. An anxious Ranee, accompanied by Alfred, met him at the station and took him along the coast to Cannes, a balmy and genteel resort much frequented by well-heeled English visitors.
His mother had reserved a room with a balcony overlooking the sea at the Grand Hôtel du Pavillon, and Brooke lost no time in describing the view in another letter to Ka: ‘Outside there are large numbers of tropical palms, a fountain, laden orange trees and roses. There’s an opal sea and jagged hills with amazing sunsets behind.’ The Ranee took charge of her son’s care in typical no-nonsense fashion, but found the time to try to sell copies of his Poems to other English guests ‘and bawling English with incredible success to crumbling foreigners’. As an awed Brooke reported: ‘She has also entirely subdued eight solitary and separate maiden ladies in this hotel.’
Forbidden to read more than two hours a day, he passed his time in playing Patience and attempting to execute watercolours – and in writing an unceasing stream of letters to Ka:
I find myself – what is this degradation? – wanting you at each moment … I’ve such a longing to get out of myself, my tight and dirty self – to put it all out in the sun, the fat sun. And it’s so hard to tell the truth, to give oneself wholly away, even to you. So one wants to chatter and pour everything out … and then perhaps the truth may slip out with it … I’ve never told anyone anything, hardly. ‘Secretive’.
So the confession was torn out of him – in stark contrast to his simple, open-hearted image, as he well knew, the real Brooke was a covert creature of guile and malice – terrified of giving his secret self away to another. In his extremity he was driven to admit the truth of the repressions that were seething out of the depths of his mind, and to make a fumbling bid to reach and own up to the woman he had chosen, however unwillingly, for the dual role of passionate lover and comforting mother.
He wills himself to put some sort of restraint on his verbal outpouring – ‘I will be continent’ – and concentrate on getting well, but his best resolves are always at the mercy of his turbulent emotions: ‘Sometimes as I lie and pant like an overfed puppy, thoughts of you and Munich and – I don’t know what, storm so irresistibly in; and I can’t help feeling such amazing energy and life in all my limbs and mind, that I’m racked to be up and off to meet you at the Hauptbahnhof.’ Besides the symptoms of paranoid delusion, Brooke was displaying classic signs of manic depression. His ravings were also shot through with shafts of beautiful poetry: ‘You go burning through every vein and inch of me, till I’m all Ka; and my brain’s suddenly bursting with ideas and lines and flames, and my body’s all for you. “Sh-sh”. I hold myself in, and wait, and grow fatter. But I’m certainer than ever that I’m, possibly, opening new Heavens, like a boy sliding open the door into a big room; trembling between wonder and certainty.’
His self-analysis continued with the realization that he had fallen between the two stools of his desire: Ka and Noel, and possibly lost them both: ‘I know now how beastly I was both to you and to Noel; and that one must choose, being human – one thing at a time. I couldn’t give to either of two such people what I ought, which is “all”. Now I’ve got a sort of peace, I think; because I shall be able.’
Every now and then, Brooke would come up for air from the depths in which he was drowning, and convince himself that he was swimming back to sanity and safety: ‘I’m more sane, a little, about the world. Oh, far from sane: but better. I’m convinced that sanity is the most important thing there is. I’m so hampered and spoilt because there are things I dare not face, and depths I daren’t look into.’ The terror of lurking madness is a constant leitmotif – Brooke was plunging through the abyss of which Gerard Manley Hopkins had written:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed …
Hold them cheap may he who ne’er hung there.
It was Ka’s so obviously solid sanity that was one
of her main attractions for him. Afraid of being whirled away by the demons that beset him, Brooke clung to her voluminous skirts: ‘By God, you’re sane, with your splendid strength and beauty. But I’ve been half-mad, alone. Oh, it’s all mixed up with this chastity, and everything’s a whirl, and still I’m mad and tiny and frightened.’ Recalling the agonies of Jacques Raverat, torn between Ka and Gwen, Brooke compared their cases and, naturally, emerged, in his own mind, as the winner: ‘Jacques, being Jacques, went mad for half a year. I, being tougher and slower, defied chastity a bit longer, and then, naturally, would take it worse … It’ll be a curious comment on civilization or women or something if I do go [mad].’ It is a curious comment on Brooke’s overweening egotism, that he should appear to think that the world’s concerns revolved around his own emotional turbulence.
Like a rider on a switchback railway, he plunged and soared between highs and lows, sunny optimism and blackest despair: ‘But I’m clambering to sane light. You’ve given me such sanity already – sometimes when you didn’t know it. But you will give me more. I’ll be able to do everything and look at everything if you’ll give me that strength. Oh, give it me Ka!’
He fondly fantasized about Ka going on her humdrum rounds at home – attending a safe play in Oxford, and looking after her somewhat dependent sisters. In reality, while doing her best to humour him in her letters, Ka was continuing to pursue Henry Lamb. Unknown to Brooke, she had dinner with the painter while he was making his farewell visit to Noel at Limpsfield Chart, and she continued to haunt him all across artistic London, when Brooke happily imagined her looking forward to their reunion in Munich.
However, Ka, was a creature of her word, and on Monday 15 January, the same day that Brooke, leaning on his brother’s arm, was allowed to take his first tottering steps outside the hotel, Ka was seen off by Justin Brooke at Victoria on her way to Germany. The mere knowledge that she was out of ‘the creature’s’ way seems to have cheered Rupert, and his letters become quite chatty – telling her, with his usual bossy didacticism precisely what shows she should visit in Munich, and even patronizingly giving her a run-down on the correct way to board a Bavarian tram: ‘It’s so important. The gate lifts. You might have an accident.’ In all this, Ka is treated like an incompetent, dim child, while Brooke is the wise father. The exact opposite of their real roles.
With their meeting in Munich now becoming a real prospect rather than a remote possibility, his thoughts began to focus on her sexual charms, and the chance that she would ‘give herself to him and relieve him of his burdensome heterosexual virginity, which was, at the age of 24, becoming such an embarrassment that it had played no small part in driving him mad. One letter dwelt on a memory of her in a low-cut dress: ‘I looked at the firm and lovely place where your deep breasts divided and grew out of the chest and went down under your dress … and I was suddenly very giddy, and physically hit with the glimpse of a new sort of beauty that I’d not quite known of.’ When Ka pointed out that up to the recent past he had given little idea of the physical passion for her he now professed so strongly, he replied in woolly confusion:
It’s funny, I still think, your idea that one doesn’t – or that I didn’t – love you physically, very strongly. When I felt last year, my whole conduct was wronging you, it wasn’t, you know, that! It was that it’d come over me that I perhaps only loved you physically and very much as a friend, – that I’d still to “only connect” lust and an immense comradeship. But I didn’t imagine I hadn’t those, you know! It’s possibly true that mere prettiness and champagne stir the penis most. But physical passion includes the penis but is more, it’s hands and thighs and mouth that are shaken by it as well. And that’s stirred by different things: strong beauty and passion and – undefined things.
In his case, the proverb that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ was magnified tenfold: ‘Loving you implies a geometrical progression … One gets worse and worse. You grow on one, so. It’s a pervading, irresistible thing, “Ka”.’ A memory of Mrs Neeve and her insect powder at the Old Vicarage provided an image for his love: ‘It’s like having black-beetles in the house. “I’ve got Ka in the body … My dear, I’ve tried everything … Put down carbolic. My dear, Yes! …” So, I tell you, I get frightened. Where’s it to stop? Am I to plunge deeper and deeper, for ever? Damn you! And it’s so nice too – sometimes nice even if you don’t care and won’t have anything to do with me (save pity). That’s queer. I’m happy; but also I’m frightened, Ka.’
The disturbing thing about this passage – and many similar ones could be cited – is the ease with which Brooke skips and slides between praising Ka and – literally – damning her. And then, a paragraph later, he is covering her with treacly praise once again, picking out a stray sentence from one of Ka’s letters describing a meeting with Virginia Stephen: ‘Who’d have thought that you had a prose-style that was a superior combination of the Old Testament and poor Mr Wilde. “Virginia was more fantastic than an army of apes and peacocks.” What an image! What a mind! God! I wish I could write like that!’
He imagines himself to be in telepathic contact with her: ‘On Friday night I think you were being tired, somehow. I had the horrors, then; so I think may be something was happening to you. Were you … But I had the horrors. And again, curiously, this afternoon …’ In this watchful, controlling mode, he even accompanied her in imagination as she crossed the Channel and ‘crashed through Germany’. But unease was growing again. He left this letter open, and following a return of night terrors took it up again:
Damn! A Bad Night. It followed on Depression yesterday. For five hours yesterday I was convinced that it was all something right inside the head, and that I was either going to have a stroke, or else going slowly mad. It may be true: and one’s so damnably helpless. Any other illness, one can suddenly shut one’s teeth and one’s hands and throw it off. One can say ‘I’m not going to be ill any more’ and one isn’t. But madness – means that it isn’t up to ‘one’ to say anything. And yesterday (and part of today) I felt a cloud in my head and about me that seemed to mean it too certainly.
The recent memory of his father’s death from a cerebral haemorrhage led to fears that he would go the same way. In a letter to James Strachey he repeats: ‘I imagine … I shall get a stroke this summer.’ But now there was also the all-too-present terror of his living parent to contend with. The Ranee was blissfully ignorant of the exact cause of her son’s breakdown – she put it down to his overwork on his Webster dissertation. But his continual letter-writing, and the answers he received, could not be completely concealed and she began to sniff a rat – or rather a woman. With her ingrained anti-Olivier prejudice, she darkly suspected Bryn of impeding Brooke’s recovery.
Following his normal course of conduct in the inquisitive presence of his mother, Brooke adopted several stratagems to avoid revealing the truth. He was not so ill that he did not relish the old pleasures of secrecy and deception when it came to dealing with his mother’s nosiness. Pretending he was more well than he was, he even submitted to attending a classical concert at the Cannes Casino: ‘It’s part of a long scheme to hoodwink the Ranee.’ The idea was to soften up Mrs Brooke sufficiently for her to give him permission (and money) to accomplish his planned mission to Munich – under the guise of visiting his Rugby friend Hugh Russell-Smith, who happened to be there. Meanwhile, Ka’s ‘kind cold letters’, alternately dashing and raising his hopes, kept him in an agony of uncertainty.
Depressed by one of Ka’s missives from Munich, in which, rather than offering him the unconditional support and adoration he craved, she quoted Frances Cornford’s ‘Young Apollo’ verse about him as if to remind him of the Brooke he once had been, but no longer was, or wished to be, he responded with whining self-pity:
I’m still mad and scary … Oh, Ka, I wanted to come so strong and clean and sane and well to Munich and to pay back a bit by helping you … I could. But I’m not getting better … And I don’t want to come
ill and foolish and beastly as I was, to weaken and worry you and sponge on your strength. And yet I can’t keep always away and let everything drift by and get worse and worse, for not seeing you. What shall I do? I think the sight and presence of you might put me right again in a day or two. It’s so ghastly lying here, struggling and thinking, fruitlessly, while these grey days go by …
Despite his insistence that he had no wish to sponge on Ka’s strength, he incessantly harped on his obsession that she, and only she, could save him from madness or death: ‘I’ve no faith and no strength. If only you were with me an hour, I’d get both; if you were with me a day, I’d be well again; a year, and I’d be the most wonderful person in the world …’ He looked back in sadness at the carefree Brooke that Ka and Gwen had known in those already distant Cambridge days:
Gwen once thought me ‘sane’ did she? I’ve always enjoyed that healthy, serene, Apollo-golden-haired, business. But, my dear, our relationship’s based a bit deeper! My face – do what you like with it. But you, and only you in the world, understand my horrible nature. It’s so importantly my humiliation and my – safety, joy, what is it called? I may be, and shall be, perhaps, sane and everything else one day. But, the dirty abyss I am now – I’ve let you see. Don’t pretend you don’t know me, fool.
