by Nigel Jones
By the end of March he felt more than ready to leave Rugby. He was not better – if anything, he was more disconsolate than when he arrived – but the tension of deceiving the Ranee under her own roof was too much. His nervous tension had gone; the elastic had snapped under the strain, and he was tired, listless, apathetic and tearful. The only bright spots on a grey horizon were a meeting with Noel and the other Oliviers at Limpsfield Chart, and Ka’s promise that she would accompany him back to Germany. But the wind was changing in their relationship, and despite the almost automatic declarations of love and ‘ferocious tempestuous oceans of lust’, it was beginning to blow against Ka.
When he was capable of thinking, it was towards Noel that his thoughts once more turned, and he did not hesitate to tell Ka so. Angered by news that she had rushed to Henry Lamb’s bedside after he had been injured in a fall from a horse, he wailed: ‘Everything’s gone from me, love for Noel, writing, everything – is swept away. I’m going to see Noel … I’m sick with a sort of fear … She … you don’t know what she stands for – stood for to me – Do you I wonder understand about love, Ka?’ And again: ‘You have brought me, roughly enough, to see that women are lower, below men.’
In this lamentable condition, he escaped from Rugby at last, helped by his long-suffering rescuers, Jacques and Gwen Raverat: ‘I can’t sleep,’ he had written to them, begging for aid: ‘I’m leaving this Hell. I’ve got to defer the deluge a month or two yet. I’m going – I don’t know where – with J. Strachey for the weekend … I’m entirely depraved and extremely unpleasant – but can I sleep in your Studio?’ Before arriving at the Raverats’ studio flat in Barons Court, west London, Brooke had planned tea with Noel and Bryn Olivier, but at the last minute Noel cried off – she was an increasingly sought-after star in her new college life and may have been scared to face Brooke in his stricken condition. Dinner with Ka the same evening hardly seemed like compensation.
Brooke was feeling friendless – he was eager to gather allies who would see the world through the black and twisted prism he had placed over it. In this situation he knew he could rely only on a tiny handful of his oldest and closest confidants. ‘I can’t bear that I should go about knowing some things alone,’ Ka was informed. ‘Jacques and Gwen and Justin – I feel I must tell them the horror, the filthy, filthy truth. It’s unbearable, suffering alone …’ Sure enough, when Ka left the Barons Court flat after they had dined à quatre on 28 March, Brooke unburdened himself of an edited version of his travails with Ka, leaving out the sex and painting himself in as favourable light as possible. The next morning, soothed by the Raverats’ support, he left for a long weekend with James Strachey.
James had enticed Brooke south on the excuse of looking for a suitable site for an Easter reading party – Brooke now had a superstitious fear of Lulworth: ‘Dorsetshire barred,’ he told James firmly. Even as Brooke now was, James still hero-worshipped his old friend. On the spur of the moment they made for the Mermaid Inn (then called the Mermaid Club), in the quaint and ancient Sussex town of Rye. The Mermaid belonged to the family of a friend of James’s, the future writer Richard Aldington, and its half-timbered walls and cobbled yard provided a cosy setting for a sorely needed restorative break. It was not to be: as though picking at a tempting scab, Brooke continued to bombard Ka with letters, mailing no fewer than five in the three days they were in Rye and sending another to Noel for good measure.
His first letter to Ka was laced with sexual longing: describing their fellow-guests at the Mermaid, he wrote:
There are two newly-married couples. The husbands have both retired, just now (9.0) How it brings the old days back, eh … Have they got Irrigators? Are they using Oatine? The dears! … I feel mentally better for being beastly to you … I’m loving you extraordinarily … Oh my God, I want you tonight. Your nakedness and beauty – your mouth and breasts and cunt. – Shall I turn in a frenzy and rape James in the night? I’d burn you like a flame if I could get hold of you.
That same evening Ka was again dining at the Raverats’ home. Jacques refused to see her, in solidarity with Brooke; but Gwen was working on her susceptible friend on Brooke’s behalf, and joining his crusade against ‘these Stracheys’. ‘They are parasites, you know,’ she told Ka. ‘I for one am a clean Christian and they disgust me.’ Ka was bluntly informed that she had lost her fine instincts and forgotten God. She was ‘arrogant’ in thinking that she could manage her own life, since she didn’t have the sense to govern her own instincts. Brooke, the Raverats insisted, lived only to marry Ka and make an honest woman of her – a travesty of the truth, for Brooke, in fact, was turning away from the whole idea.
Beneath the angry rhetoric, Gwen was worried that a single Ka was a sexual threat to her own marriage – there was no telling that she and Jacques would not resume their old liaison if she was not quickly tied down in matrimony. Largely ignorant of the extent of Brooke’s psychosis, and the fact that he and Ka had already slept together, the Raverats based their prescription for their friends’ future happiness mainly on false premises. Jacques believed that Ka had rejected Brooke’s true love in favour of her lust for Lamb, a relationship that was ‘neither convincing nor inevitable’. The simple obvious answer was marriage to Brooke.
Under the weight of these forceful arguments, Ka began to weaken. She started to believe the couple when they told her that Brooke loved her and she him. Marriage to Brooke would also satisfy her strong sexual hunger, they insisted. As if to confirm their argument, Henry Lamb was predictably beginning to tire of Ka’s dumb love – just as Lytton had foretold. However, it was all happening too late – despite his lustful letters from Rye, Brooke, too, was tiring of Ka, and deeply resented the agony she had put him through and the fact that she had submitted to him sexually out of pity rather than love. Now that Ka was beginning to fall deeply for him, he was ready to bolt.
Brooke and James enjoyed their bracing days on Romney Marsh. They made a courtesy call on Henry James, whose country residence, Lamb House, was just up the street from the Mermaid – ‘the Master’ was not in – and walked to the nearby picturesque village of Winchelsea. But then Brooke, having made arrangements to see both Ka and Noel on Monday – April Fool’s Day – left Rye by train en route to Limpsfield Chart. His letter to Noel had a touch of the old tenderness: ‘There is no doubt that you’re the finest person in the world.’ By contrast, when Ka, worn out by the nagging of the Raverats, called off their rendezvous in London, Brooke’s response was a fierce burst of anger: ‘Are you wanting to make me wild before I see Noel, lest I should be too nice to her? Or do you want to get rid of me by killing me – can’t you do it quicker easier ways? … Gwen Jacques and a thousand more yourself me decency love honour good fineness cleanness truth –: you’d sacrifice them on your lust – and such lust – I’m frantic …’ His incoherent fear and rage were prompted by his belief that Ka was deliberately avoiding him in order to remain in London and hang about Henry Lamb’s haunts.
He remained with the Oliviers for four peaceful days. His regrets that he had alienated Noel’s love in favour of a Ka whom he now perceived as unworthy of him were beginning to trouble him sorely. He now had another grievance to add to his heavy charge sheet against Ka: she had forced him to renounce his pure love for Noel, in return for a mess of pottage – or lust – from Ka. ‘She [Noel] is amazing,’ Ka was told. ‘I didn’t know such people existed. I go sick and blind to think she may be a woman’ – that is, in Brooke’s jaundiced eyes, a weak and feeble creature subject to the temptations of the flesh that Ka had already succumbed to.
Arriving at Ka’s country home at Woking on Thursday 4 April, Brooke received a rude shock. Ka told him that she suspected their night at Starnberg had made her pregnant. The irrigator she had inexpertly used to protect herself against such an eventuality had evidently failed. The news stopped Brooke in his tracks. He did not know how to respond, but realized that it was best not to pester her with his wearying complaints and needs. ‘I’
m going to leave Ka alone,’ he told Jacques the following day. ‘I found her … pretty bad. To rest, as far as she will, is the best thing for her.’ He said he was ready, at any rate, to do the decent thing by Ka, and marry her within a month.
The news was not altogether a bolt from the blue – in mid-March, barely a month after their night of passion, Ka’s period was late, and Brooke was ruefully regretting ‘mismanaging the machine’ (the irrigator) and setting off Ka’s ‘well-known fecundity’. Now he was in the fix he had most feared – there was no question of an abortion or an illegitimate child for a woman of Ka’s refined social class. Brooke, whether he liked it or not, would have to face up to his responsibilities, get married, settle down to some dullish academic post and play the dutiful, ageing bourgeois paterfamilias he had so frequently derided. The magic of youth would be gone in a puff of smoke. But there was one alternative, and it seems that Brooke did briefly consider it – suicide.
His options were closing in, and it is perhaps not surprising that, like some wounded animal, he should head for a familiar lair in a deep forest to hide from a suddenly threatening world. He travelled down to the New Forest, back to the remote woodland cottage of ‘Beech Shade’ near the hamlet of Bank, where he had secretly visited Noel in the first flush of his love for her, exactly three years ago. Now he was a very different man, in a sadly changed situation. But his first words from the place were addressed to Noel on Saturday 6 April:
Mrs Primmer is well. The trees are there. The black hut stands. Also the holly-bush – And the room. Oh! Dearest Noel, you were good. It’s incredible – I didn’t know there were such things as you in the world. You … gave me immense strength compared to the weakness I’ve been in … it’s madness to kill oneself when you’re in the world. So I’m vacillating again … I do worship you so. I found Ka pretty bad. We had rather a rough time.
He hinted at the impasse in which he found himself seemingly trapped: ‘I’m going through with all this business: & I don’t know where I shall come out.’ James was his companion in his solitude – mooching round making fatuous statements about the trees – and Mrs Primmer, his former landlady, fed him the fattening foods he had got used to. Not surprisingly, he told Ka that he wanted to stay there for ever. His mood grew nostalgic and wistful; a letter to Hugh Dalton, who had written to commiserate with Brooke for failing to win his Fellowship, recalled happy memories:
Friend of my laughing careless youth, where are those golden hours now? Where now the shrill mirth of our burgeoning intellects? and by what doubtful and deleterious ways have I come down to this place of shadows and eyeless pain? In truth, I have been for some months in Hell. I have been very ill. I am very ill. In all probability I shall be very ill. It is thought by those who know me best (viz. myself) that I shall die. Nor do I greatly want to live.
Life had lost its savour for him, Brooke explained, his mind was ‘worn and flabby’ and he was just a tenth of the man he used to be. Physically, however, he had swelled: ‘I am now enormously fat. Boys laugh at me in the street. But that is partly, also, on account of my manner. For I am more than a little gone in my head, since my collapse.’ Brooke concluded with one of his vain, self-dramatizing promises: ‘I go back to Germany soon. They are a slow race and will not know I am stupid. I shall never appear in England again. I shall never write poetry or limpid prose again.’
It is significant and typical that Brooke should now be appropriating the very real agony of his breakdown as a badge to add to his persona – he flaunts it to his friends in a mocking way. He is, as before, putting on a performance – but now, like a worn-out actor, he is merely going through the motions. This is demonstrated in another letter he wrote from Bank, to the poet James Elroy Flecker, an acquaintance and something of a rival from Cambridge days, now working with the consular service in Beirut and vainly seeking a cure for the tuberculosis that was to kill him. Describing what he called, with dramatic capitals, ‘The Crash’, Brooke relates his melodrama: ‘Nine days I lay without sleep or food. Monsters of the darkest Hell nibbled my soul. They nibbled it away and therein that noblest part of it which men name the intellect. I am sodden and soft and dead, a don but less learned, a dotard but less energetic … I drift from place to place and eat enormously and sleep. I am utterly degraded and shall never climb from this morass.’
Brooke touched the bottom of his emotional swamp in the New Forest after James’s departure. Desperate, he called on his Rugby friend Hugh Russell-Smith, and then apparently scoured the shops of Lyndhurst and Brockenhurst in search of a gun with which to shoot himself. Always terrified of being left alone, he had never felt more desperate or terrified. Since he had resolved to leave Ka in peace and Noel was unavailable, he had fallen back on Bryn Olivier and invited her down to Bank. Fresh from a rock-climbing holiday in north Wales with Bill and Eva Hubback and her future fiancé Hugh Popham, she answered his call, and joined him on 11 April.
It is something of a mystery why Bryn and Brooke had never got close before now, for in many ways they seem like an ideally matched couple. Both were exceptionally good-looking and the much sought-after stars of their respective social circles; both feared being valued by their brilliant friends for their looks rather than their intellects; and both mistrusted love and strong emotions. But now that Brooke had run through his other options, Bryn suddenly seemed like an attractive alternative to the complications of Noel and Ka. At the very least he was grateful for her solicitous concern and cheering company.
Months later, looking back at the four days they spent together at Bank, he told her:
Then there was Bank, Bryn. For three whole months I’d been infinitely wretched and ill, wretcheder than I’d thought possible. And then for a few days it all dropped completely away, and – oh! how lovely Bank was! – I suppose I should never be able to make you see what beauty is to me,– physical beauty –, just even the seeing of it, in spite of all the hungers that come – Bank passed & was good & is a lovely memory to you & me. A funny world!
Much though he may have wanted to possess Bryn under the greenwood trees of that idyllic spot, Brooke was held back by the thoughts of the hot water his passion had got him into over the past year. And fond though she was of Brooke, Bryn was too self-possessed and careful – and too much in solidarity with her sister Noel – to allow him an opening. Besides, her thoughts were beginning to turn towards marriage, and Brooke, unstable and inconstant, would surely not provide the solid rock she needed.
So they returned to London on 14 April en route to more rest and recuperation for Brooke with the Oliviers at Limpsfield Chart. They dallied in town that Sunday to take tea with Virginia Stephen, who maliciously reported the visit in a letter to Ka. Brooke, she said, was ‘slightly Byronic’ while Bryn, she cattily commented, ‘has a glass eye – one can imagine her wiping it bright in the morning with a duster’. In a note dashed off to James from the National Liberal Club, Brooke begged his friend for £7 to fund his upcoming German jaunt – he had cleaned himself out with a cheque for £6 to Mrs Primmer, he moaned. But Bryn, he said, ‘was infinitely sympathetic’.
More of that sympathy was doled out in buckets by both Bryn and Noel at their home. Brooke basked in their solicitude, but his peace of mind was broken again by a letter from Ka. Understandably peeved by his neglect of her while she was coming to terms with her probable pregnancy, she told him that she wished to back out of their agreed ‘second honeymoon’ in Germany. The letter sparked yet another explosion in its recipient:
I wonder why you want me to kill you now rather than later. Isn’t it rather insolent of you, when I’ve rather resolutely gone away to get well for Germany, to make the beginnings of my success an excuse for trying to shirk Germany? … ‘Not the right and only thing’ ‘not absolutely free’ … ‘it may bring the most awful misery’ are your funny little reservations and irrelevancies … My dear, you don’t seem to recognize where we are. I suppose its because you have had no pain worth calling pain. You twixt sentim
entality and weakness … Oh Child, it won’t do. You must realise that we’re en route. You can’t back out because you’re tired or a little bruised.
Brooke’s irritatingly patronizing habit of addressing women as ‘Child’ in his letters becomes ubiquitous from this point on: bizarre, too, is the irony of his upbraiding Ka for her weakness and inconstancy at sticking to an agreed course, when these are precisely the faults that he too will soon exhibit.
He flounced up to London ready to confront Ka; but she was nowhere to be found. One of his letters had missed her at Woking, the other had arrived in London but had been impounded by her sister Hester. By chance, she saw him on top of a bus in Trafalgar Square, and managed to track him down at the nearby National Liberal Club. They went out into the square for one of those tearful sessions at which Brooke was becoming a past master, with Ka leaning on the pediment of one of Sir Edwin Landseer’s sculpted lions while her weeping subsided. Brooke succeeded in convincing her to accompany him to Berlin after all – not a difficult task, since her pulling out had been a manoeuvre to whet his interest in her, which seemed to be waning.
Now it was Brooke who came under pressure to abort the trip. The siren voices of the Oliviers pleaded in unison for him to stay in England. Noel told James, who had begun to pay court to her along with a myriad of other suitors, that she feared Brooke would return a fat, loud-voiced Prussian; while Bryn wrote him a note saying it was his duty as an English poet to stay where he was. The combined pressure did result in Brooke putting off his departure for one day and going instead to a show by Harry Lauder, but after returning to his club slightly drunk he wrote a mawkish letter to Bryn explaining why he felt he had to go.
