Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  The second of August dawned hot and dry – a typical high-summer day of unforgiving heat. Brooke journeyed north from Everleigh with Justin at the wheel of his commodious Opel, the same car that had taken them to summer picnics around Cambridge in days of hope that already seemed a lifetime ago. Justin deposited Brooke at the roadside near Bibury, and then went to pick up Ka at the Swan. On returning he let the two of them wander off into the surrounding woods and fields, and waited. One hour went by, then two. The airless heat lay heavily over the countryside, and it seemed that time stood still. No other car passed along the road, choked with white dust. A solitary farm labourer ambled by, touching his cap to the gentleman sitting patiently in the unfamiliar shiny car. ‘The corn’s gett’n’ ripe,’ he remarked in a broad Gloucestershire burr. After three hours Justin was relieved to spy two familiar figures approaching through the heat haze. Brooke and Ka were leaning against each other in mutual support. They looked pale and said little, but Justin noticed that Ka was holding her pince-nez. The glass was broken.

  They dropped her back at Bibury, and drove on to the nearby town of Witney, where, the last Rugby train having long since departed, they were compelled to spend the night at an inn. That same evening Brooke wrote to the Cornfords to tell them what he had done: ‘I can’t love her, you see. So now all’s at an end. And she’s passed out of my power to help or comfort. I’m so sad for her, and a little terrified, and so damnably powerless …’ It seemed, however, as if Brooke was more concerned about the agony he was going through in inflicting pain on Ka, than about the pain she was feeling:

  Oh Frances, it was Hell. Ka, whom I loved, whom I love so still, is in such hopelessness and agony. My God, it was awful. When one’s seen people in pain like that, one can’t ever forget it … I feel like a criminal ( though I know I’m not). She spoke wildly – one does at first, I know – It was terrible. I’m aching so for her. She was so fine … She’s in such agony. No one can help or comfort her. It tears me so, to think of her.

  Although believing Ka to be beyond help, the next morning Brooke asked Frances to do what she could to comfort her: ‘tell all the truth of how great you think her, and then lies. Pile it on, it doesn’t matter if it’s true – love and praise. It’s the only sort of thing that helps human nature in these bloody moments … Not that anything’ll do much. And it’s impudent of me to write in this way. I’m all exhausted and worn with the pain of it.’ Finishing the letter on the platform at Oxford station, where Justin had dropped him to pick up a Rugby train, Brooke added: ‘It’s incredible that two people should be able to hurt each other so much.’ Then came a bleak postscript: ‘I’m twenty five today.’

  By the time she received the letter, Frances had already seen Ka’s agony for herself. She wrote in her memoirs:

  I remember her leaning her head right back against the wall while tears poured down her fair skin … saying ‘You don’t know how awful it is when one has broken down that wall of separation that one lives in and let another human being come right in, to have to live alone again.’ She pushed out her big hands as if she was trying to push away the wall that had closed round her again.

  For once Ka, the cushion who absorbed all the pounding her friends could offer, had split apart in all her naked vulnerability. She would never get over it.

  In a swift note to James Strachey on that fateful morning of 2 August, Brooke dropped a heavy hint as to his future plans – he implied that he did not want to accompany him to Scotland after all, and added dismissively: ‘Hadn’t you better drop me?’ It was becoming obvious that what he really wanted was nothing less than a clean sweep of his previous existence – a clearing out of all those who reminded him of the pain he had been undergoing for the past seven months. Having got rid of Ka, lost Bryn and probably forfeited Noel’s regard into the bargain, he decided to rid himself of all those who would be less than wholly adoring or sympathetic. A core group of the Neo-Pagans – Justin, the Cornfords, the Raverats and Dudley Ward – would retain a precarious toehold in his affections; but all those who in his view were tainted by contact with the corrupt Bloomsbury clique would have to go. And that included his oldest and closest friend, James. As he explained to Jacques, what he found impossible to tolerate was ‘the subtle degradation of the collective atmosphere of the people in these regions – people I find pleasant and remarkable as individuals’.

  In his eyes, chief among those stained by this taint were his very oldest friends. Lytton, of course, took pride of place among the damned, and, by extension, James, especially when he had the temerity to defend his elder brother. Virginia Stephen, too, was to be cast out – particularly since she had recently become engaged to the Jewish Leonard Woolf; a move that fired into life both Brooke’s latent anti-Semitism and his sexual jealousy: ‘I thought the little man’ld get her,’ he had written to James Strachey on hearing the news in Germany:

  Directly he began saying he was the only man who’d had a woman she knew, and telling tales about prostitutes – oh you should have seen the lovelight dance and dawn in her eyes! That gets ’em. To him that hath shall be given: from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Even that which he hath, James, one by one. Two, two for the lily-white balls: clothed all in hair, oh!

  Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes were also henceforth cast into the outer darkness, and a big question mark hung over Noel Olivier. Brooke watched her with grave suspicion for any sign that she was moving toward Bloomsbury’s fatal orbit.

  Rugby only held him for a day or two – his mother’s cloying company he found increasingly irksome – and his restlessness now took on a manic quality as he rushed from place to place in a distracted search for relief with various hospitable friends and acquaintances. He appeared to be unable to remain anywhere for more than a few days at a stretch, and was uneasily aware that, wherever he fetched up, his presence was a strain. However, his fear of being alone outweighed such social embarrassment. The fact that those he stayed with were mostly married only served to underscore his solitary state. While at Rugby he had taken the opportunity to write to Noel again. He was still concerned about Ka, and, despite having made a definite break, he was again proposing to write to her to ‘clear up points’. Like a dog with a bone he just could not leave well – or ill – alone.

  ‘Ka keeps insisting that we must marry,’ a patient Noel read. ‘But it won’t do. She wavers, at present at one moment she said I must marry somebody soon, – if not her, I must marry you. At another, she wanted me not to see you for some time, so that I might relove her … She’s in a bad way. It half kills me every time I think of her … And the sort of friends she has – James, or Virginia – are useless: mere takers.’

  Shrewdly Brooke noticed that his physical courage had diminished, along with his mental toughness – he noted that on his previous annual visit to the dentist he had endured hours of pain with an equanimity that drew admiration from his tormentor. ‘This year,’ he says of a visit to a dentist in Birmingham he made while staying with his mother, ‘I found myself shivering & wincing before he touched me – it’s bloody having all one’s nerves gone.’ He feared the effect such confessions would have on his already dwindled credit with Noel as a real man: ‘I sometimes wonder if, being so romantic, you despise & dislike me for being whining, despondent, uneasy, glum, silly – miserable, for oh, a year perhaps … I’ll be more competent when I get out of this bog.’ But Noel’s stock of patience was all but used up. On 2 August she had written briskly from her hotel at Kiental in the Bernese Oberland counselling: ‘Rupert you mustn’t die or go mad … Once you can see through this nightmare you’ll see what infinite good is left for you, worth your living to be a hundred for. I’ll leave you alone. It probably wont do me much harm, for you to stop pandering to my flat affection – it should never have counted … You MUST wake up. from Noel.’

  From Rugby he travelled to Cambridge, anxious to have some news of Ka from the Cornfords. Frances, keen to alleviate the plig
ht of both partners in the torturing tug-of-war, suggested that they go abroad separately, to forget each other and erase the pain among unfamiliar sights and sounds. France and Germany were no good, she advised a receptive Brooke. He must get away to the ends of the earth – Australia, perhaps, or how about picking oranges in the healing warmth of California? At any rate he must plunge into some sort of back-breaking physical work which might give his overstretched mental muscles some relief. Brooke pondered this well-meant advice for some months before acting on it; but Ka leapt at the chance, and within a few months was in Germany, before going on to Poland and Russia. Apart from one unfortunate chance encounter, she would not see Brooke for another two years.

  Their physical separation did not stop them torturing each other by mail. Brooke brooded over the harsh words exchanged at their meeting in Bibury and wrote to her bitterly:

  It’s no good. I can’t marry you. You must see. If I married you, I should kill myself in three months. I may, I daresay I shall, anyway. But if I marry you, I’m certain to … You had two ways before you, a dirty one and a clean one; coming to Germany was not even deciding; it was only giving the clean one a chance. You refused to marry me. You refused to forswear filth …

  I felt ashamed because you were better and honester than I (ashamed and yet superior, because you are a woman). Yet it’s not my lack of strength that makes me want not to marry you. It is my strength … When I found that I wasn’t too dead for a sort of love, – but that it wasn’t for you, that you had killed my love for you too dead – it seemed to me useless to prolong waiting any longer.

  However much he dwelled on ‘cleanliness’, it seemed the one thing Brooke found impossible to do with Ka was make a real clean break.

  By 9 August Brooke was at Beckhythe Manor, at Overstrand in Norfolk, the home of the academics Gilbert and Rosalind Murray. From here he wrote again to Ka, floating Frances’s plan for a prolonged exile for them both: ‘I suppose I might as well go. I feel more inclined to kill myself.’ But he was still racked with indecision: ‘At present my mind has about as much chance of deciding about going, or anything, as a river has of deciding where it shall run into the sea.’

  Noel, too, received a letter from Norfolk, with an outline of Frances’s scheme: ‘She’s Ka’s only decent real friend: she’s good, & not being a virgin, she understands things. She wants me to go abroad for a year – to Australia or somewhere, & work manually … I don’t know what to do.’ But one drawback to his absence would be that it would leave Noel in mortal peril from the moral contamination he feared to the point of lunacy: ‘I’m frightened of leaving you in that bloody place London. I’m afraid of evil coming to you. Your friends are a bloody useless & poisonous lot – your friends & mine. I’d rather be where I can help.’ The strange idée fixe that only Brooke, like some latter-day Sir Galahad, could save his damsels from the rampant evil of the city, or to be more specific, of Bloomsbury, had taken firm root in his distressed mind. Dudley Ward was told: ‘I daren’t leave Noel for a year … Females are fools – virgin females. And the ideas about “sex” in all these circles are, as you know, monstrously false.’ Brooke added for good measure that if Noel were seduced it would ‘kill me’.

  Detecting from Noel’s cool tones from the icy slopes of the Swiss Alps that his suit with her was failing fast, Brooke switched from mawkish self-pity to whinging accusation – ‘Noel, you have done me wrong. You owe me something’ – before tipping over into hysteria:

  Oh, child, Noel, what do you want of me? … I can be anything with your desire & demand: & so wastingly nothing without you. Do you want eminence or money? They’re the easiest things in the world. So you want liberty? You should have utter liberty. Are you tired of decency & do you want brutality? I could give it you, as much as you could swallow & more. Or strength? or kindliness? Or, being a woman, is it filth you’re pining for? I assure you, there’s no lack in me.

  As raging jealousy grabbed him by the vitals, Brooke named his demons: ‘Is it that you want, before you retire from modern virginity, to enjoy flirting & having James & Adrian & the rest dangling dolefully round? … You can get all that, married if you wish …’ Admitting his ‘desperation’, he begged Noel to come away with him the following month. He was simultaneously, it almost goes without saying, begging Bryn to go away with him that same month. He promised, futilely, to get himself ‘under control & behave decently’ in the meantime.

  Brooke seems finally to have taken leave of his senses during these desperate days. From Norfolk he returned to Rugby, whence he summoned James for a less-than-regal official dismissal. In a letter that should have warned James of what awaited him he ranted:

  To be a Strachey is to be blind – without a sense – towards good and bad, and clean and dirty; irrelevantly clever about a few things, dangerously infantile about many; to have undescended spiritual testicles; to be a mere bugger; useless as a baby as means; & a little smirched as an end. You have – by heredity & more by environment – a little of the Strachey. Buggery, with its mild irresponsibility & simple problems, still hangs about you. You can’t understand anything being really important – except selfishly – can you? So you’ll not understand the possibility of ‘He that is not with me is against me’ being occasionally true.

  What seems to have really angered Brooke was James’s belated conversion to heterosexuality, with its awful possibility that his friend might successfully seduce Noel while his back was turned. To make matters worse, James had stubbornly defended his brother Lytton against Brooke’s raving assaults:

  It becomes possible to see what was meant by the person who said that seeing you & any member of the Olivier family together made them cold & sick. – It was wrong not to be able to distinguish between you & Lytton: but, if one’s to believe you, not so very wrong. But then I suppose you can’t understand anyone turning cold and sick to see anybody with anybody else – except through jealousy, and that makes hot –; can you? It doesn’t happen in buggery.

  James’s conciliatory response seems to have sparked an even greater paroxysm of fury:

  Listen. Men & women neither ‘copulate’ nor want to ‘copulate’: men have women: women are had by men. Listen. There is between men & women, sometimes, a thing called love: unknown to you. It has its laws & demands. It can be defiled: poisoned: & killed. Listen. It is not equally sensible to talk of your friend Lamb having nearly seduced Ka, & of Ka having nearly seduced your friend Lamb. Listen. Ka wrote to me that if she had done what she once contemplated, & what she was saved from by my love, she would have killed herself long ago.

  There is about Brooke’s whole lunatic performance a stench of sex gone bad. Mad with rage, he detests the homosexuality he once espoused; he considers himself a repository of wisdom on male–female relations; and he still sticks to his delusion that only his unique, disinterested devotion ‘saved’ Ka from a fate worse than death at the hands of Henry Lamb. James, the future Freudian, must have shaken his head with wonder. But, instead of giving his friend up as a hopeless case, he heroically made the tedious journey to Rugby in an attempt to reason with him. It was a mission that was doomed.

  James had hardly set foot across the threshold when Brooke pitched into him with the familiar charges and wild accusations. A Brooke biographer, John Lehmann, who spoke to James at first hand, says that Brooke’s raging became so intemperate that James felt he had to leave at once, retreating with ‘Rupert’s denunciations ringing in his ears’. Like Lytton, Duncan Grant and Virginia, James had to listen to foaming assaults on Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom Brooke had come to hate and fear both as Lamb’s mistress and as the leading patron of Bloomsbury. As such he seemed to regard her as the malevolent spider at the centre of a web of uncleanliness. Some idea of the extremity of his feelings aroused by the extravagant Ottoline is gained from a letter to Ka the following April describing a brief encounter with the redoubtable lady: ‘She stank, filthily. If ever she dared to mention you to me, I’d stop her bloody mouth by
telling her what I thought of her. I only pray I shouldn’t hit her … She’s primarily & centrally filthy, nauseous, degraded. It made me feel dirty for days, having seen her … that slut.’

  On 17 August, following his abortive visit, James wrote to Lytton, who had been regaling him with a tragicomic account of his disastrous Scottish holiday with Henry Lamb:

  I’ve been going through horrors too, and am pretty well wrecked now. It’s all so senseless and unnecessary – but that doesn’t prevent it reducing me to tears. One of the results is that I’m not now going away with Brooke. I don’t mind telling you that it’s now bestimmt [definite] and announced that he’s ‘abandoned’ Ka and ‘loves’ Noel. The explosion with me, however, has had every motive assigned to it, except the obvious one. Oh lord there have been scenes. And the dreadful thing is that he’s clearly slightly cracked and has now cut himself off from everyone.

  Brooke appeared to agree: ‘I’ve cut myself off from James (who I’m fond of),’ he told Jacques, the friend who most nearly shared his anti-Bloomsbury, anti-Semitic paranoia. Still ignorant of the fact that he had become the chief hate-figure in Brooke’s internal drama, Lytton, ironically, was chiefly concerned by the suspicion that his beloved Lamb was following Brooke down the slippery slope to insanity: ‘Henry I suspect is daft,’ he told Ottoline Morrell, who shared his passion for the wayward painter:

  That’s the only explanation I can see for his goings on … oh dear, what a muddle of a world we drag ourselves along in, to be sure! I sit here brooding over the various people – Woolf and Virginia, Duncan and Adrian, Vanessa and Clive [Bell] and Roger [Fry], and James and Rupert and Ka – and the wildest Dostoyevskian novel seems to grow dim and ordinary in comparison.