by Nigel Jones
He was cruelly cold and honest to Jacques in describing the breakdown of relations with Ka: ‘there’s some mud wall between us,’ he reported from their lakeside retreat; ‘my faculty for loving her got cauterized too far … [I am] as certain as I am about anything that I could make her promise to marry me within a month. Only I’m still dead.’ The numbness, he continued in equally honest vein, extended far beyond Ka: ‘I’d not have cared if the whole lot of you’d had your necks broken.’ When Jacques replied by recommending two drastic alternatives Brooke told him: ‘“Marriage or Murder” you say. Well, we’ve tried both, in a way. I don’t at all want either. Though it’s true I don’t want anything else … my love for Ka was pretty well at an end – poisoned, dead – before I discovered she was after all in love with me.’ Now it was too late – Ka did not yet know it, and would for years be unable to accept it, but his love-hate for her had turned into that cold cousin – indifference. The embers of his passion were quite extinguished. ‘I go about with the woman dutifully,’ he told Jacques on 24 May. ‘Love her? – bless you, no: but I don’t love anybody. The bother is I don’t really like her, at all.’ The iron that had entered his soul over the past half-year had rusted right through: ‘There is a feeling of staleness, ugliness, trustlessness about her,’ he told Jacques charmlessly. ‘ … Dirt. I’ve a sort of hunger for cleanliness.’
After parting from Ka, a numb and miserable Brooke trailed back to Berlin and the Wards’ new apartment in Spichernstrasse to eke out a final fortnight before returning to England. On 30 May he reported ruefully to Noel the sad result of his ‘second honeymoon’: ‘I just care about nobody & nothing in the world – least of all Ka … . I feel nothing for Ka except a great pity for her that she’s so weak, and a dull uneasiness because she’s unclean.’ This pathological harping on dirt and uncleanliness was becoming a familiar feature of Brooke’s rebarbative ramblings. A future Freudian like James, or a doctor like Noel, would have needed few further insights to understand the sickly state of his psyche. But he squeezed further pimples of pus in the direction of the man whose generous hospitality he was currently enjoying: ‘For everybody I just feel blank. There’s a man called Dudley – I remember, intellectually, that I like him very much – but actually I don’t care twopence if he drowns in a Gondola in Venice.’ ‘I suppose you don’t understand,’ he added. But Noel understood all too well.
Brooke was eager to hear about Noel’s weekend with Virginia – if only to warn her against the insidious influences of Bloomsbury that he believed had so corrupted Ka. ‘They’re mostly very amusing people as acquaintances, but not worth making one’s friends because they’re treacherous & wicked. So take care …’ If ever there was a case of a pot calling a kettle black, this was it. Malice against Virginia, who was all too capable of holding her own in the vicious gossip stakes, naturally led Brooke on to his chief bête noire, Lytton. Defending James against Noel’s suspicion that he was ‘a worm’, Brooke for once stuck up for his friend: ‘It’s not true.’ But Lytton was another kettle of fish entirely: ‘Lytton is filthy, & for God’s sake don’t touch him … but James is all right.’ Of the rest of Brooke’s diminishing circle of friends he could only recommend wholeheartedly his soul mates the Raverats: ‘They’re good people. I’m finding out how important goodness is: and how dreary mere cleverness.’
When Dudley and Annemarie came back from Venice, he felt more isolated and sorry for himself than ever. ‘I’m writing in bed in the tiny room, scarcely bigger than the bed they allow me here,’ he told Bryn. ‘It’s late … and those two little mice have scuttled off to bed; and I’m on my back writing by a lamp … I feel extraordinarily lonely. And very old …’ Germany had done all it could for him, he added, describing his condition as ‘strong and calm and flat’. His future aim was to ‘settle in some obscure part of England for a bit, and write, and see a few people I love’. Fewer by the day, it might be added – it was high time for Brooke to replenish his dwindling stock of friends. But even as he proclaimed his return to health and sanity, he wavered. He continued to push his luck with Bryn: ‘I feel so full of love and gratitude towards you’, while in the same breath insulting her: ‘You don’t like things being put directly. Never mind. Poor Bryn. You must lump it.’
Balancing his mental books in Berlin, Brooke estimated he had been able to ‘mark time – perhaps go down a bit – in general health and spirits … while something – my character? or mental equilibrium? or what? – was getting straight … So perhaps there is something to be said for the Universe.’ He ended romantically: ‘I blow a kiss to you, wave a pyjamad arm, West and a touch of North – is that right? Perhaps you’re smelling a rain shower out of your window …’
Simultaneously he wrote to Ka proposing to fix a wedding day – an offer that was transparent in its half-heartedness: ‘The end of July? Would that do? It’s madness for me to make up my mind, now: isn’t it.’ Despite the spurt of creativity that had delivered ‘Grantchester’ and Lithuania, Brooke was leaving Germany depressed and dull. ‘Oh God I hope I find rest and peace and kindness in England,’ he told Ka. ‘I feel as if all strength or all good were burnt out of me.’
His old friend Geoffrey Keynes, seeing ‘Grantchester’ in print in Basileon, wrote to congratulate Brooke, who replied: ‘I may be there next week-end – shall we bathe? I haven’t bathed since November. There’s a lot to wash off.’ The future doctor was asked if he had any cure for Brooke’s ‘syphilis of the soul’. If there was a remedy, Brooke mused, it might lie in some ‘herb growing at the bottom of the river just above the pool at Grantchester, and that if I dive and find it and bring it up – it will heal me I have heard so. I do not know. It seems worth trying.’ In fact the herb to cure Brooke’s spiritual sickness would remain out of reach. He would continue diving for it – and emerging empty-handed – for the rest of his life.
An objective assessment of the state of Brooke’s disordered soul on the eve of his return to England was offered to James. Shorn of the need to pose before any of the three women in his life, Brooke told his old friend:
I fell (by May) completely out of love with Ka. I’ve got no emotions worth the name about anybody. I feel an affection for her, in a slight way: mixed with other feelings. I’m ready to flirt with Bryn or anybody else in the world. I DO love Noel in a dim & distant way: I feel a great deal of gratitude to her, with good reason, and a great worship/reverence for her – quite without any ground. I’m going to wait over the summer somewhere in England … & see if I get feelings of any kind and energy back. If I can work up enough love for Ka I suppose I shall marry her. But it seems unlikely enough as I am now. If we don’t marry, she or I’ll go off somewhere. So at least, its at present arranged. But she’s very weak & changeable: no I suppose anything may happen to her: as she’s got no one to look after her. All this is am strengsten [strictly] private.
Refreshing as it is to read a passage from a letter of Brooke’s that is relatively rational and free of hysterical hatred, it is a rare oasis in a desert of spite. He was seriously alarmed by James’s courting of Noel, and in the same letter strove creepily to put him off:
She’s a very ordinary person underneath the pink-brown mist, you know. And she’s just a female: so she may let you down any moment … But I expect, really, she won’t fall in love with anybody for at least two years. After that there’ll come a day when she’ll suddenly feel a sort of collapse & sliding in her womb, & incomprehensible longings. Its when the ova suddenly begin popping out like peas. Then she’ll just be ripe for anybody. But not for you, dear boy. Some rather small & very shiny man, probably syphilitic, & certainly a Jew She’ll crawl up to him, will Noel … and ask him to have her.
This rich compendium of Brooke’s prejudices, combining misogyny and anti-Semitism in a single sentence, is remarkable in its mixture of good and bad prophecy. Noel did indeed make a sudden late and largely loveless marriage – after rejecting many more romantic suitors. Her husband, however, Dr Arthur Rich
ards, was not a Jew but a Welshman, and she did, eventually, enjoy a long-lasting affair with the patient James. Brooke would not live to see any of this.
His frantic jealousy of his friends’ pairing off and sexual happiness was made worse under his very nose by the ‘scuffling’ of the ‘little mice’, as he termed the newly married Dudley and Annemarie. His reaction was to sip some bromide, turn over and go to sleep, he claimed. ‘And when, in the morning, I find a towel in the bathroom bloody that was clean at midnight, I’m not in the least disgusted,’ he added. This was Brooke’s unsubtle attempt to put the fastidious James off the messier aspects of heterosexual life and ‘go entirely back to balls (not mine)’. It was wasted breath: James was a patient philanderer and generally achieved his sexual goals. Brooke was a rare exception to this rule.
Dudley escorted Brooke from Berlin to Cologne on 20 June. There he met James by arrangement. James was reviewing an exhibition of post-Impressionist art for the Spectator. From his hotel, Brooke wrote to Bryn to press his suit more forcefully: ‘You see, Bryn, life’s very short and dull. And one really must take opportunities. – (I write quite without prejudice on this, as being too dead and dull to care about taking opportunities, or anything else –).’ Despite his professed Weltschmerz, Brooke’s message was the old familiar one of Marvell and Herrick. Bryn should gather rosebuds while she may, and stop being a coy mistress:
One doesn’t have time to not be disingenuous. If you had eternity … I suppose you don’t know how blank and dull life can be, and certainly don’t know how much filthiness and horror there is in it, or you’d see the point of taking and acknowledging what decent good there is … My good woman, when one likes people, it isn’t a disembodied spirit, or as a generalisation, or as a means to something, that one likes them – it’s as themselves.
His postscript was a simple shout of joy: ‘Glory! Glory! Glory! I am coming back!’ Noel got the more intimate ‘Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, I’m coming home. I’m coming near you. I’m coming home.’
From Cologne they travelled to the Hook of Holland, en route spending a night in The Hague, from where Brooke wrote to Ka ominously: ‘Please never think of me at all.’ They came home on 25 June. During the journey Brooke eagerly devoured a book James had brought with him – Hilaire Belloc’s account of a walk through rural Sussex, The Four Men. Its lyrical local patriotism deeply impressed Brooke, some lines sinking deep into his subconscious, to resurface again more than two years later in his most famous poem. The book redoubled his determination to return to his sorely missed Grantchester as soon as he could. The place might salve the heartsickness he expressed in a bitter little poem now fermenting in his mind. He called it ‘Travel’:
’Twas when I was in Neu Strelitz
I broke my heart in little bits.
So while I sat in the Müritz train
I glued the bits together again.
But when I got to Amerhold,
I felt the glue would never hold.
And now that I’m home to Barton Hill,
I know once broken is broken still.
19
* * *
Broken Glass
* * *
On the evening that he arrived back in London, Brooke, as ever the indefatigable socialite, went to the theatre with the Cornfords. Frances had become something of a confidante to him during his emotional turmoils – sensible, stable, married and yet intensely interested in the man she had first marked out in his ‘Young Apollo’ Cambridge phase, she was an ideal substitute for the elder sister he had lost at birth. She shared his mother’s bias against the Olivier sisters as heartless flirts; but, rejecting that view, Brooke flew to the defence of Noel, whom, he was more and more convinced, he had lost for ever: ‘Among a hundred horrors I had been so wicked towards Noel, and that filled me with self-hatred and excess of feeling seeking some outlet.’
During the interval at the Court Theatre, Brooke encountered another sympathetic friend – Eddie Marsh – who invited him to stay at his apartment. The following evening, 26 June, Eddie and Brooke attended a London gathering of the Apostles which included E. M. Forster and Lytton. Thus Brooke found himself gazing balefully at the man, who had been thoughtlessly placed opposite him at the dinner table, whom he had cast in the role of demon. Afterwards a handful of Apostles accompanied Eddie and Brooke back to Raymond Buildings, where Brooke alarmed Forster by bursting into tears while on the phone to Bryn. He was still in an extremely shaky state, and realizing this, his fellow-Apostles rallied round to support a Brother in trouble. It was quietly agreed that Brooke should be invited to a succession of house parties and holidays that summer, which provided for him an almost unbroken chain of tactful buttressing.
Unaware of his friends’ underlying plan, Brooke left London for the first of these events – a weekend party on the Thames at Goring, at the family home of Gerald Shove. Here he was surrounded by a sort of Praetorian Guard of gay Apostles, who protected him from the contamination of women and the upset they inevitably caused him. There was Shove himself, and Eddie, and the other guests included a posse of admiring Cambridge dons – ‘Goldie’ Lowes Dickinson, Harry Norton and Jack Sheppard. Their soothing presence did not stop Brooke firing off letters to both Bryn and Noel. He had, of course, already squeezed in fleeting, separate meetings with both sisters – seeing Bryn in Trafalgar Square and escorting Noel to see Jacob Epstein’s controversial memorial sculpture destined for Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Paris.
Now Brooke was attempting to steer both sisters at once – a cracked cabman trying to yoke two fractious fillies to the same coach. He told Noel that she had looked ‘incredibly beautiful’ at Epstein’s studio, and in the same breath invited Bryn out for lunch in London the following Monday. Being briefly dunked back into his homosexual Cambridge past was comforting, he told Noel: ‘I like being here – the smells & feelings of summer bring things back – oh God. England’s so nice.’ But the atmosphere became too cloying and he longed to visit the Oliviers, which, after lunch with Bryn in London, is what he did. The atmosphere at Limpsfield Chart was not all it might have been, partly because of the rare presence of the ‘Guv’nor’, Sir Sydney Olivier, the stern Fabian and paterfamilias who somewhat daunted Brooke. Privately he called Sir Sydney ‘the loony man’ – a description that some might think would have been better applied to himself. However, Olivier was quite prepared to be charmed: like almost everyone else, he had been enchanted by ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which Bryn had read out at the breakfast table after receiving it from Brooke in Germany. Brooke’s problems lay more with Noel and Bryn, who were distinctly unimpressed by his continuing pose as the sick man of Europe. This no longer washed with the two stern sisters – they didn’t mind if Brooke briefly ‘crawled in’ for the comfort he craved, Noel told James cruelly – so long as he soon crawled out again.
Then there was the Ranee to be faced: early in July Brooke journeyed to Rugby to make a dutiful call on his mother, but the atmosphere was inevitably tense – she was tight-lipped in disapproval of his constant gallivanting with his unsuitable friends, and curtailed his allowance for that year as a mark of her displeasure. Dispirited, Brooke left as soon as he decently could, and by 10 July was ensconced at the place he had dreamed of and longed after for so long: the Old Vicarage, Grantchester.
Some aspects of the old place were familiarly welcoming: ‘You see, there is honey still for tea,’ exclaimed Mrs Neeve as she bustled in with his tea-tray. His poem was already a talking point in the village. Other Grantchester constants were less welcome: the interior wildlife had come back in force in his absence, and he found woodlice dropping into his golden locks. ‘Mrs Neeve sprinkles yellow dust on my books and clothes,’ he told Maynard Keynes, ‘ … and says “They’re ’armless, pore things!” But my nerve gives.’
Although back in the bosom of his much-missed home, Brooke was not as consoled for his soul-searing six months as he had hoped – there were too many ghosts around, he told Noel
:
The shock came when, having paced wonderingly through the garden and round my room, recognizing nothing … I mounted to my attic bedroom, & there were the two chairs, the table, the feather-bed, and, alone on the mantel piece largely framed, serene … you! I fairly broke down.’
Later, waiting for his supper, Brooke was startled to see what he took to be the ghost of himself:
‘On the lawn, in the still light of the evening, I saw a figure in a chair, writing, at the little table. He had bare feet. His hair was fair & long & he kept putting his hand through it. What he was writing was not a letter, for there were several sheets, & he wrote on at an even pace – it must be Literature. He was dressed in grey.
It slowly came on me that it was I at the table. I’d probably been here all the year, writing & wandering about. But who, or what had been in London & Lulworth & Cannes & Munich & Rugby & Berlin. Who was it watching myself from the window, then? Was it again I? Who was the chief I? Was there to be a fight? – At that moment the figure looked round …
This moment, like something out of a story by Poe or Maupassant, had a mundane end: the doppelgänger at the table proved not to be Brooke’s own spirit, but Cyril Anthony Neeve, the young son of his landlady, who, Brooke alleged, had ‘always modelled himself on me’. But the experience gave him a jolt – and soon there would be a real ghost to contend with.
Even his favourite element of water could not thoroughly cleanse his spotted spirit. ‘I’ve bathed. It seemed to wash off a good deal. I do no work. And I’m terrified of being alone long. But I rest. I’ve made a vow some when to bathe again in that clean rocky place in Devonshire,’ he told Noel, referring to a shared memory of Dartmoor. ‘It was cleaner than elsewhere in the world, & it is made holy because your naked body has been in it. Perhaps I can get clean, if I bathe there again.’
