by Nigel Jones
His reaction, too, was the same as at Lulworth: Ka must be his; this time he did not propose marriage, only a more radical measure would fit the gravity of the case: she must sleep with him, then and there. At last Ka acquiesced. Her motives can only be guessed at – concern for Brooke’s renewed agony must have been one factor; so too was her own state of what Brooke had referred to as her ‘extraordinarily randy state of virginity’. In any event it was this night, 17–18 February, that Brooke finally lost his heterosexual virginity. A month after the momentous night, Brooke, writing to Ka, recalled the encounter in lyrical terms: ‘I remember the softness of your body: and your breasts and your thighs and your cunt. I remember you all naked lying to receive me; wonderful in beauty. I remember the agony and joy of it all: that pleasure’s like a sea that drowns you wave by wave …’
But Ka’s ‘betrayal’ had etched a deeper mark on his tender mind than the pleasure gained by possessing her could confer. Ka did not yet know it, but by yielding to his entreaties and emotional blackmail, she had tolled the death-knell for their relationship before it had really begun. Brooke would never forgive her for loving another man, but paradoxically he would not forgive her either for giving herself to him. Deep within his disordered brain, the logic went: ‘Ka has given herself to me; therefore she will give herself to another – to any other; therefore she is a whore, a loose feeble-minded woman; therefore I cannot marry her or even have her as my mistress.’ The working-out of this process was to take many more months of pain, and to leave searing and lasting scars on both the protagonists. Indeed, it can be argued that neither ever fully recovered.
Meanwhile Ka had the reality of Brooke’s renewed collapse to cope with – news of her desire for Lamb, plus the shock of sexual intercourse, had unmanned him quite. By the time they returned to Munich, and dropped in on his former landlady, the artist Clara Ewald, Brooke was in a sad state. The painter was shocked at his condition, compared to the carefree youth she had known a year before – the boyish Brooke caught in her portrait of that time. Now she beheld a pale and sagging figure, like a straw doll with the stuffing knocked out. Ka plied him with pills and potions at regular intervals, but when he rallied it was only to cover her with abuse and raging imprecations about her ‘betrayal’.
Ka decided that it was profitless for them to remain in Munich. After their disastrous ‘honeymoon’ she was exhausted: three weeks in the company of a man who was half sick and fractious child and half raging lunatic had drained even her deep wells of sympathy and compassion. James Strachey was in the awkward, but to him delicious, position of being the confidant of both parties: both wrote to him giving their sides of the unfolding story. Ka confided that she was bringing Brooke home because she was at the end of her tether; she had to feed and care for him like a baby, although he retained an adult’s capacity to wound and disturb. Once the decision to return had been made, Ka made the necessary travel arrangements with her usual efficiency and they left Munich on 21 February, arriving at Victoria the following day.
Brooke calmed down somewhat during the journey, having extracted a promise from Ka that she would return with him to Germany – to stay with Dudley Ward in Berlin sometime in the spring, when they would have another shot at living together as ‘Herr und Frau Brooke’ far from the prying eyes of their family and friends. In the meantime Brooke would return to Rugby for more rest and recuperation under the watchful care of the Ranee. Once he had parted from Ka, he began to feel a sense of guilt over his behaviour towards her. Writing to James the same evening, he asked: ‘You’ve heard Ka brought me back? Have you seen her? Will you? I was so unpleasant on the journey that she became infinitely tired. Now Hester [Ka’s sister] cries all day. I suppose we shall slay that immense woman (K.) before the end of it.’
Brooke confessed himself ‘restless’, and, cooped up as he was with the baleful Ranee, the need for his friends – even an equivocal companion like James – instantly reasserted itself. He asked James to come up to Rugby – ‘With luck you might hit one of my chirpy periods’ – but continued to forswear his old haunts: ‘I’m not ever coming to London. England is inevedibly [sic] beastly … I loathe England & being in it.’ Other friends who made the trek to Rugby to console Brooke were Geoffrey Keynes and Eddie Marsh. Both James and Keynes were cautioned to stick to Brooke’s cover story concealing the truth of Ka from the Ranee. James was told: ‘Will you kindly be Discreet in this house? I’ll prepare a list [of lies]. The most notable recent point is that Ka’s existence in Germany & voyage home with me is not known. O yes, & also you rang me up at 4.15 this afternoon.’ (In fact the call had come from Ka.) Geoffrey was told: ‘Mention nothing connected with my life, no names, nothing, for the Lord’s sake. Relations between me and the Ranee are very peculiar. And one must be very cautious.’
Geoffrey, as an Old Rugbeian of conventional mien and manners, was already a favourite of Mrs Brooke. By contrast, she took an instant dislike to Eddie Marsh, perhaps sensing the homosexual interest that lay at the root of his regard for Brooke. This prejudice was to play an important part in the years following her son’s death when she flouted his last written wishes and made Keynes his literary executor rather than Marsh, whose memoir of Brooke she vigorously obstructed and delayed.
Marsh had been dying to pay court to Brooke ever since the publication of his Poems the previous year. He had written a flattering, almost fawning, fan letter: ‘I had always in trembling hope reposed that I should like the poems, but at my wildest I never looked forward to such magnificence … You have brought back into English poetry the rapturous beautiful grotesque of the 17th century …’ He followed this up with a laudatory notice in the Poetry Review, although privately deploring, in a misogynistic way, Brooke’s reference to a woman’s sexual smell in ‘Lust’: ‘There are some things too disgusting to write about, especially in one’s own language.’ Brooke, mystified, stoutly and rightly defended himself: ‘The “smell” business I don’t really understand … People do smell other people, as well as see and feel them. I do, and I’m not disgusted to think so.’ Marsh also had his misgivings about ‘A Channel Passage’, although he manfully mastered his objection: ‘so clever and amusing that in spite of a prejudice in favour of poetry that I can read at meals I can’t wish it away’.
While Brooke had been descending into what he told Eddie had been ‘a foodless and sleepless hell’ after Lulworth, Eddie, too, had his own preoccupations. Following a government reshuffle after its summer victory over the Tory Lords, Winston Churchill had been moved from the Home Office to become First Lord of the Admiralty, with the task of dealing with the growing naval threat from Germany. Eddie had moved with him, and was now deeply entrenched in the political establishment. He was becoming too influential a contact for Brooke to neglect and, once back at Rugby, Brooke wrote a long letter of appreciation for his patron’s efforts to promote his career as a poet: ‘Your letter and review gave me immense and slightly pink-cheeked pleasure. It is absurdly kind of you …’ and so on. This flattery laid on with a trowel re-cemented Brooke in his mentor’s affections, and from now on they would become increasingly inseparable.
James came twice to Rugby. Despite, or because of, his own knowledge of the intricacies of his friend’s involvement with Ka, he still tended his old flame for Brooke, which made the visits somewhat tricky occasions, as Brooke told Ka: ‘It’s nice having him here; although one’s skating riskily, at times. Arguments on fucking … And there’s James still in collapse because I said Madge, the second parlour-maid, was so natty.’ On his second visit James was acting as chaperone to Ka herself, who made a good impression on the Ranee. The complications were obvious, but Brooke appears to have relished them, telling Ka: ‘You, I, she [Brooke’s mother], James: what a tangle of cross-motives & dissimulations it’ll be! We’ll want our clear heads. But it’ll be fun.’ His customary delight in intrigue and deception had clearly survived his mental collapse – although maintaining the fiction that he and Ka were ‘ju
st good friends’ took some doing. It was at this time that his blush, ‘as red as this blotting paper’, nearly betrayed his real feelings to his mother. But the Ranee apparently remained convinced that the homely, unglamorous Ka was no siren for her son, and the intrigues continued, unabated, under her very nose.
But the accumulated strains were once more conspiring to undermine Brooke’s fragile psyche as he brooded on the past and those who had wronged him. When Ka, in her honest way, informed him that she had once again bumped into Henry Lamb at a party, he exploded: ‘I wish to God you’ld cut the man’s throat … See very little of the man, for God’s sake. And don’t be more of a bloody fool than Nature made you.’ His terror of Ka’s infidelity – which, in his mind, had been proved by her willingly giving herself to him in Germany – prevented him from thinking clearly or naming the nameless things and dangers she was encountering in London. His defence was to attempt to persuade her that she, like him, was a nervous wreck, and should cocoon herself in a protective swathe of cotton wool from promiscuity and all temptation. Like some Old Testament prophet, he laid down his commandments:
Ka, you’ve once given yourself to me: and that means more than you think. It means so very importantly that you’re not your own mistress. And that, far more truly and dangerously than if I had you under lock and key – and with my ‘physical superiority’. It means that you’re not as free to do anything as you were. It means that you mayn’t hurt yourself, because it hurts me, like Hell. It means you mayn’t make mistakes, because I pay. It means you mayn’t foolishly and unthinkingly get tired and ill and miserable: because you make me tired and ill and miserable.
He couldn’t have stated in plainer terms what fears were plaguing him: without any engagement, he now regarded Ka as his private property, to be disposed of at his whim. Like for some fabled Oriental potentate, she was the chief ornament in his harem and was to be regarded as his prisoner just as surely as if he were her physical jailer. The mask of the progressive Fabian was well and truly cast aside in favour of the face of the stern Victorian patriarch.
Although he bombarded Ka throughout March, the month he remained in Rugby, with a deluge of letters as relentless as those from Cannes throughout January, their tone was very different. Sometimes, it is true, he was the sighing lover of old, but only when he remembered that he was supposed to be so. More often, the tone was that of the jealous, crabby complainant, alone against a world of enemies, and twisted with bitterness and a desire to wreak revenge on his foes.
One such target was Lytton Strachey, who was emerging more and more clearly through the red mists of Brooke’s rage, as the villain who had masterminded the Lulworth débâcle: ‘I’m glad Lytton has been having a bad time,’ he told Ka, to whom the elder Strachey had been confiding his agonies over his unrequited love for Henry Lamb: ‘next time you have one of your benignant lunches with him you can make it clear that I loathe him – if there’s any chance of that giving him any pain.’
The corrosive emotions of hatred and revenge were beginning to replace any pretence of love towards Ka – he included her in his torrents of black bile at the whole pack of those who had witnessed his downfall at Lulworth, telling her bitterly:
If I can still, at moments, hate you for having, in pitiful sight of a flirtation, invited that creature [Lamb] to Lulworth, and then left the rest of us to go out [on] walks and out for meals with him; how do you think I hate Lytton, who hadn’t even your excuse of ignorance and helplessness, for having worked to get the man down there, and having seen the whole thing being engineered from the beginning – and obligingly acquiesced in it as one of the creature’s whims? You told me – in the first flush of your young romance – of the whole picture – Lytton ‘hovering’ (your word) with a fond paternal anxiousness in the background, eyeing the two young loves at their sport:– it was the filthiest filthiest part of the most unbearably sickening disgusting blinding nightmare – and then one shrieks with the unceasing pain that it was true.
Being unable to strike directly at Lytton, Brooke had to content himself with the first of an increasingly wild series of assaults on the (at first) uncomplaining James, which plainly reveal his galloping hysteria. ‘God damn you,’ ran one Rugby postcard to the younger Strachey. ‘God damn everyone. God burn roast castrate bugger & tear the bowels out of everyone … You’d better give it up; wash your bloody hands. I’m not sane.’
Brooke was not the only member of the Neo-Pagan/Bloomsbury axis to have been undergoing a mental breakdown early in 1912. Virginia Stephen, soon to marry Leonard Woolf, had suffered one of the first of her increasingly devastating collapses. Hearing reports of this from James and Ka, Brooke wrote on 9 March from the midst of his own torment, to commiserate:
Virginia dear, I’m told – in the third-hand muffled manner I get my news from the Real World – that you’ve been, or are, unwell. It’s not true? Let me implore you not to have as I’ve been having, a nervous breakdown. It’s too unpleasant – but you’re one of the few people who, of old, know what it’s like … I feel drawn to you, in this robust hard world. What tormented and crucified figures we literary people are! God! How I hate the healthy, unimaginative hard shelled dilettanti, like James and Ka. It was a pity you couldn’t come to the House party long, long ago at Lulworth – not that you’d have enjoyed it: it was too horrible. But you might have made all the difference. I fell into an abyss there …
It is notable how swiftly Brooke slides from a show of sympathy for his fellow-sufferer to a preening self-concern. Although Virginia wouldn’t have enjoyed Lulworth, her presence might have saved him. As if to demonstrate the shallowness of his concern, he goes on to give Virginia – whose terror of sexual relations, possibly stemming from childhood abuse, he must have known about – a detailed account of a Rugby choirboy being gang-raped during a recent all-male church service in the town. From the callousness of his description – ‘he has been in bed ever since with a rupture … He may live’ – it is clear that his desire is not merely to shock, as of old, but to hurt and disgust. A new strand of sadism had wound itself into the complex fibres of Brooke’s character.
The persistent note of sheer nastiness and utter lunacy is the dominant theme of his letters. Looking back in anger rather than regret at Lulworth, he minutely analysed what he considered Lamb’s motives had been in targeting Ka. Lamb was, Brooke admitted:
Someone more capable of getting hold of women than me, slightly experienced in bringing them to heel, who didn’t fool about with ideas of trust or ‘fair treatment’ … You’d met the creature at some party. I have your account: ‘very unpleasant’ you wrote ‘but fascinating’. ‘Fascinating’!!! I dimly wondered … and passed on … The swine, one gathers, was looking around. He was tiring of his other women, or they of him. Perhaps he thought there’d be a cheaper and pleasanter way of combining fucking with an income than Ottoline. And his ‘friends’ had come to the conclusion he might be settled with somebody for a bit. He cast dimly around. Virgins are easy game. Marjorie Strachey, I understand, was the first woman he met. What was her answer? Ka was the second: an obviously finer object for lust, and more controllable. He marked you down.
With this partial, but not wholly inaccurate account, Brooke relishes his revenge and rubs Ka’s nose in her own dirt: ‘The creature slimed down to Lulworth; knowing about women, knowing he could possibly get you if he got a few hours alone with you (his knowledge turned out to be justified). I was ill. Influenza (or poison in the house) frustrated me that Sunday. I was in the depths, leaning utterly on you. Oh my God! how kind and wonderful you were then; the one thing in the world I had.’ The mixture of self-pity and malice makes this and many similar passages wearisome and hard to swallow. And there are occasions when Brooke appears to have taken leave of his senses entirely. For example, a bizarre note to James Strachey at this time proposes that he, of all people, should join Brooke in kidnapping Bryn Olivier, taking her to Brighton’s Metropole Hotel and ‘going shares’ with her
sexual favours.
Ever since Lulworth Brooke had been incommunicado with the woman who had meant the most to him before he was swept away by his craze for Ka: Noel Olivier. In mid-March he somewhat sheepishly resumed contact with a letter calmly reviewing the tumult of the past three months; it began: ‘Dearest Noel, I’ve treated you badly. Illness pain madness & the horrors must excuse me.’ He gives a familiar account of his breakdown, touching on the months and years of strain that lead to his arrival at Lulworth ‘half mad and ill’. He glosses over the Ka–Lamb–Brooke triangle and launches straight into a description of his nervous paralysis: ‘I couldn’t eat or sleep or do anything but torture myself.’
He claims, however, to be on the mend: ‘I’ve got much better – My weight, which had gone down stones & stones, is now immense. I am very fat. I’m not clear yet, though. I’ve not begun to work at all. I shall go abroad again, sometime … and start working. At present my mind seems still dead. I don’t see that I shall ever be able to write things again …’ He seems half-hearted about resuming any sort of relations with his former ‘fiancée’: ‘Perhaps you won’t want to see me. You may be hating me by now.’
Noel, by now well used to Brooke’s wails of woe, replied sympathetically enough: ‘Mon pauvre Rupert!’ and so on, but she was guarded and equivocal, having been burned more than once, about reentering Brooke’s flickering fires: ‘it must all depend so on our feelings, & I dont know what either of us will feel when (when?) next we talk.’ By this time Brooke had learned that he would not win his Fellowship at King’s that year – the vacant place had gone to a scientist, Hamilton Hartridge. The blow was expected, and Brooke was given a heavy hint that if he applied again in the coming year, his chances would be much greater. He took the news, preoccupied as he was by his personal woes, with equanimity.
