by Nigel Jones
On 7 March came the news that Brooke had been hoping for: his dissertation had won favour at Cambridge, and he had at last been elected a Fellow of King’s. His spirits soared instantly, for the Fellowship solved several of his problems: as well as the status, privileges and perks that went with the position, it permitted him to face both his family and his friends in the knowledge that at last he had a solid place in the shifting quicksands of life. He needed no longer feel intellectually inferior to the Keyneses and Stracheys of the world; and the Ranee would have to drop her objections to his proposed overseas tour. Eagerly, Brooke telegraphed his acceptance of the offer to the Provost of King’s, M. R. James. The telegram was handed to James as he was making his stately way into the college’s incomparable chapel. Brooke always liked to make a bit of a splash. In celebration of the news, Eddie hosted a party in his honour at Raymond Buildings, Brooke’s new-found respectability being ample reason to introduce him to a network of friends grander than he had ever met.
Around Eddie’s table sat W. B. Yeats, the Prime Minister’s daughter Miss Violet Asquith and her sister-in-law Cynthia Asquith, the aristocratic wife of Violet’s brother, Herbert ‘Beb’ Asquith. To complete the trinity of distinguished young women there was the wife of Eddie’s boss – Mrs Clementine Churchill. Eddie chose his guests shrewdly. The two poets shared, beside their fondness for flamboyant dress and gesture, a certain snobbery that would make them both come to gaze adoringly at the ornaments of the old aristocracy. As for the women, the two Asquiths were exact contemporaries of Brooke; Mrs Churchill just two years older. Doubtless he dazzled them with a display of the fresh boyish stunt; and the unmarried Violet, in particular, would gradually come to be smitten by him. A distinctly horse-faced creature, Violet made up in brains what she lacked in beauty. Devoted to her father, she would go on to have a distinguished career as one of the last upholders of the classic Liberal tradition in the days of its long terminal decline. No doubt one of the topics of conversation around the table was a long tour of the USA and Canada from which Violet had recently returned. If so, it would have reinforced Brooke’s hardening determination to follow in her footsteps.
Meanwhile he wrote a distinctly grumpy postcard to Noel who had had the temerity to mock his fear that she might be kidnapped: ‘There is never a hint (unfortunately) of kidnapping; people don’t like my looks. Still I hope it may happen one day.’ To this light-hearted teasing Brooke responded: ‘Don’t joke about kidnapping.’ In mid-March he handed over the key to Eddie’s flat to John Middleton Murry who had arrived for an extended stay while Katherine was away, and travelled to Cambridge to formally accept his Fellowship. He knew that his life had finally turned a corner.
John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama, which had won Brooke the coveted Fellowship, is his finest sustained work of literary criticism. The dissertation is a thoughtful, authoritative piece of prose that did much to rescue the dramatist from obscurity and is still cited as an authority in critical works on the playwright. Weighing in at more than 30,000 words, it is an achievement that Brooke was right to feel proud of having produced with so much agonizing labour.
Brooke begins by pinpointing the first decade of the seventeenth century as the golden age of the Elizabethan era that produced the flower of the extraordinary upsurge in drama centring on the phenomenon of Shakespeare. In rebellious mode, he takes several cheeky swipes at the bard, calling his history plays ‘childish’ and his comedies ‘failures’. He reserves his accolades for the great tragedies produced as the new century opened.
After this sweeping introduction, the main meat is reached as Brooke concentrates on Webster himself, the man of whose life we know next to nothing but who none the less produced some of the grimmest, most shocking plays in the history of the English theatre. Brooke defends him against charges of plagiarism, arguing that all writers of worth use notes and ideas drawn from the work of others. In a brilliant piece of literary detection he confidently cites Sir Philip Sidney, Montaigne and Donne as three of the influences on Webster’s plays. ‘The heaping-up of images and phrases helps to confuse and impress the hearer,’ Brooke writes, ‘and gives body to a taste that might otherwise have been too thin to carry. Webster, in fine, belongs to the caddis-worm school of writers, who do not become their complete selves until they are encrusted with a thousand orts and chips and fragments from the world around.’
The boost to his ego provided by the award of the Fellowship is immediately apparent in his letters. He tells Ka: ‘ambition grows and grows in me. It’s inordinate, gigantic … it doesn’t even make me work. I just sit and think ambitious thoughts.’ His success also helped him to free himself of the nagging guilt he still felt about Ka – at least to the extent that he now felt more free to intensify his pursuit of Cathleen, whom he began to bombard with streams of slushy, hyperbolic and self-consciously ‘romantic’ letters. His first effort is to impress her with his new importance as a don, beginning his letter with quotations from the lesbian poetess Sappho in Greek, followed by a snatch of German, and adding: ‘that’s for you. Just to teach you a befitting humility in the presence of the learned.’ In Cambridge, he says, he had his first dinner in Hall on the dais with his fellow-dons: ‘I dined solemnly with very old white-haired men at one end of a vast dimly-lit hall, and afterwards drank port somnolently in the common room, with the College silver and seventeenth-century portraits and a sixteenth-century fireplace and fifteenth-century ideas. The perfect don, I.’
After putting Cathleen firmly in her place, he turned on the oleaginous charm with the ease of a past master: ‘If you don’t know that you’re the most beautiful thing in the world, either you’re an imbecile, or else, something’s wrong with your mirror.’ Then he returned to his unhealthy fetish about kidnapping, with the twist that this time the abductor is to be himself:
It is very likely that one day I shall kidnap you into a motor as you’re leaving the theatre, whirl you off to some very distant village on a high cliff over the sea, and immure you there in a cottage, feeding you on cream and beer and ambrosia and chops, but never permitting you to use up your transient and divine self in that bloody London. No one will know whither you’ve vanished. And I shall surround the cottage with a ring of cows; so you will not be able to escape. I shall wait upon you: and in the intervals look at you.
This fantasy – like a precursor of John Fowles’s sinister novel The Collector – is almost too perfectly revealing and symbolic of Brooke’s interior world. It is all there: his wish to dominate and imprison women; his inability to accept them as free, independent or equal beings; and his dread of the corruption of the city, and especially Cathleen’s own profession – doubtless the Ranee had once told him that actresses were little better than whores – is pathetic in its manifestness. He has clearly cast Cathleen in the role of the Sleeping Beauty, with a touch of Snow White in the domestic arrangements, which in themselves – ‘a ring of cows’, cream, beer, ambrosia and chops – are the Georgian dream in miniature. His fear of change, decay and ageing is also apparent. He wishes to preserve Cathleen like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty: flawless – but lifeless too.
With Brooke, it never rained but it poured, and he now let loose a veritable Niagara of syrup:
I adore you. I was in a stupor all yesterday; partly because of my tiredness, and partly because of your face … Why do you look like that? Have you any idea what you look like? I didn’t know that human beings could look like that. It is as beyond beauty as beauty is beyond ugliness. I’d say you were beautiful if the word wasn’t a million times too feeble. Hell! But it’s very amazing. It makes me nearly imbecile when I’m talking to you – I apologise for my imbecility: it’s your fault. You shouldn’t look like that. It really makes life very much worth while. My God! I adore you.
The bombardment became relentless – at one point in March Cathleen received four letters in as many days; but she refused to take his effusions entirely seriously:
I am infinitely thankful
that you exist. Your eyes are quite well set in, and very lovely. They change a great deal, from the beauty of softness to the beauty of light; so that I don’t even know what colour they are (I do, in a way): but they’re always lovely. It was well thought that ripple in the middle. If you had had a straight unindividual nose, you might merely have been a goddess. You’re something so far more wonderful and beautiful. The lines of your cheek and jaw – the Greeks may have dreamt of that, I think. They tried to get something of that effect in stone, once or twice – poor bunglers!
And so on. One wonders whether Cathleen noticed that his praise was almost entirely confined to her physical assets – there was very little about her mind, her spirit or her intellect.
But the effect on his own spirits was undeniable. From the depths of gloom in which he had languished for more than a year he was soaring up into the light. Time would prove that this buoyancy was as easily deflated as a punctured balloon – the wounds he had suffered and inflicted on himself simply ran too deep. But for now, the spring weather and Cathleen seemed to have shot bolts of energy into his jaded soul:
I want to walk a thousand miles, and write a thousand plays, and sing a thousand poems, and drink a thousand pots of beer, and kiss a thousand girls, and – oh a million things: I daren’t enumerate them all, for fear this white paper’ld blush. I wish I could get you from the theatre for a week, and we’d tramp over England together and wake the old place up. By God, it makes one’s heart sing that such a person as you should exist in the world.
Cathleen told him, in a sensible understatement, that he got drunk on his own words. Stung, Brooke tried to cover his annoyance with joshing, patronizing bluster:
It is a thing no lady should say to a gentleman. I daresay Irish girls are very badly brought up. I had a good mind to reply with a lot of dirty insults in German … Damn it, one must be allowed to comment on the facts of existence. I merely, offhandedly throw out a few facts: ‘This book is red.’ ‘It is raining.’ ‘That tree is tall’. ‘Consols are at 73.5/8.’ ‘There is no God.’ ‘Cathleen is incredibly, inordinately, devastatingly, immortally, calamitously, hearteningly, adorably, beautiful.’
When they met, the puffing, steaming, sighing lover became, if Cathleen’s artless memoirs are accurate, a sweet and innocent boy. Roaming out of London, they would walk the Chiltern hills together; sometimes stopping at a favourite pub, the Pink and Lily, which Brooke had once visited with Jacques Raverat. Brooke had quipped:
Never came there to the Pink
Two men such as we, I think.
Jacques capped it with:
Never came to the Lily
Two men quite so richly silly.
According to Cathleen, their romance was innocent and non-sexual: ‘we sort of lay down on a bank and held hands … he never kissed me or anything like that; just held hands and we felt our souls communing in the air, and we both turned round to each other and said Donne’s “Exstasie” – this is it; we had a kind of excitement in the mere … feeling we had, and we could often come back, you know, from a day in the country … quite drunk with each other.’
Brooke and Cathleen also had urban assignations – he even faced his fears of her profession when they met for tea backstage at the Haymarket Theatre: ‘Isn’t that too romantic! I’ve never been into an actress’s dressing-room in my life before … I’m terrified.’ But, true to form, he was not about to put all his sexual eggs into one basket, even a repository as attractive as Cathleen. Simultaneously with his London liaisons with her, he was also secretly seeing his old flame, Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, who was living with a family in Swanley in Kent but came up to London for trysts with Brooke. Information about what took place at these meetings is scanty – at the end of February, a note to James Strachey, who was attempting to revive their friendship, turns down a meeting on the grounds that ‘I’m unfortunately dining with Fräulein So & So’ – probably a reference to Elisabeth rather than Cathleen. Brooke was again angling for full sexual possession of the Flemish woman, telling her that she had more physical passion than anyone he had ever known – and throughout the spring he pressed her to go to bed with him. The old pattern was repeating itself, as it had at Rugby with Sadler, Denham and Lascelles, and more recently with Noel, Bryn and Ka: Brooke was engaged in the simultaneous pursuit of multiple partners, in this case one woman to satisfy his ethereal, romantic side, the other his more earthy cravings. Predictably, his refusal to completely commit himself to either resulted in frustration and confusion.
Meanwhile he had the distractions of his busy social life in London to take his mind off his emotional imbroglio. He, Eddie and Denis Browne, to whom Eddie had taken a shine, saw the legendary ballerina Pavlova dance at Covent Garden, watched Forbes Robinson play Hamlet at Drury Lane and attended a fashionable soirée with one of Eddie’s aristocratic friends, Lady Plymouth. Brooke conveys the flavour of his hectic life in a letter to Walter de la Mare: ‘I shall be lunching at Treviglio’s at 1.30–3.00 … & dining at the Pall Mall Haymarket at 6.45 … If you don’t come up for lunch, drink coffee with me. Or come to tea at Gallina’s, opposite the Royalty Theatre.’ As Middleton Murry was still in residence at Raymond Buildings, Brooke’s London base was temporarily 5 Thurloe Square, South Kensington, the apartment of the artist Albert Rothenstein, whom he had met at Cambridge when Rothenstein had painted the scenery for the Marlowe Dramatic Society’s productions.
His increasing celebrity had drawn the attention of fashionable photographers. Never averse to publicity, Brooke succumbed to one: the American Sherril Schell, whose images came to represent the face of the poet for posterity. Schell took a dozen exposures when Brooke visited him at his studio in Pimlico. Between poses, they discussed Brooke’s enthusiasm for the Ballet Russe and Hullo Ragtime. The American found his subject eager to learn all he could about the USA, for Brooke had at last decided to take the plunge and follow Frances’s advice to travel there. He was wearing one of his favoured blue shirts and a floppy silk tie of the same colour. Schell noted his myopic tendency to stop and focus on something, screwing up his small, deep-set eyes. His complexion, the photographer recalled, was tanned and ruddy rather than the delicate peaches-and-cream colouring he had been led to expect. The famously tousled hair was ‘golden brown with sprinklings of red’.
The twelfth shot that Schell took became the most famous and derided of them all. At Brooke’s own suggestion, he threw off his shirt, so that his torso, which, the photographer said, ‘looked like Hermes’, was pictured in profile with bare shoulders – a pose that his Cambridge friends derisively dubbed ‘Your favourite actress’ when the picture became a prized Brookian icon. (The original print is now in the National Portrait Gallery.) Even the loyal Jacques, writing to the equally devoted Geoffrey Keynes, described the pose as ‘obscene’. Nonetheless, the picture eventually became the basis for Brooke’s chiselled memorial tablet in the chapel at Rugby.
Writing to Cathleen a few days afterwards, Brooke gave his own verdict on the photograph: ‘Very shadowy and ethereal and poetic … Eddie says it’s very good. I think it’s rather silly.’ But, if this is so, the question it begs is: why had he suggested the pose? This letter to Cathleen was written from Clouds, the grand country residence of the aristocratic Tory politician George Wyndham, one of the privileged coterie of Edwardian social and political leaders known as ‘the Souls’. Brooke had been invited down with Eddie as a weekend guest – another indication of the grand social circles into which his mentor was firmly guiding him.
One more such sign was the birthday dinner for Violet Asquith held at Downing Street on 15 April. Besides Brooke and Eddie, the guests included Bernard Shaw and his wife, J. M. Barrie, Edmund Gosse, John Masefield, the Cabinet Ministers Augustine Birrell and Lord Haldane, and Violet’s brilliant eldest brother, Raymond. Brooke, aided and abetted by Eddie, had now ascended into the highest stratosphere of the social firmament.
But by May he was ready to leave it all behind. Despite his declared
devotion to Cathleen – ‘You are incomparably the most lovable and lovely and glorious person in the world,’ he wrote to her from Clouds, adding: ‘The champagne was good. The port was very good. But I’m thirsty for you’ – the tug of wanderlust was too great. ‘I’ve got to wander a bit,’ he added vaguely, although assuring her: ‘You chain me to England horribly.’ Beneath his social success and literary lionization he was still gnawed by guilt over Ka. There were other pressures, too, impelling his imminent departure. Eddie was to leave London in May on an extended trip on the Admiralty yacht Enchantress with Churchill and the Asquiths. Brooke had failed to get John Drinkwater to stage Lithuania at the Birmingham Rep. Also, despite intensive lobbying and after a printer disappeared leaving a trail of unpaid bills, the Murrys’ magazine, Rhythm, was about to go under. It was transformed into the Blue Review but the new venture folded after only three issues. In short, Brooke’s career was marking time, and it seemed a propitious moment to seek a new departure.
As if on cue, Naomi Royde Smith, the literary editor of the Westminster Gazette, whose columns Brooke’s poetry had graced since his schooldays, commissioned him to write a series of travel pieces from the USA and Canada for a fee of four guineas per article, plus travel expenses. It was a timely offer, too generous to be passed up, and Brooke booked his passage for New York on the liner SS Cedric sailing from Liverpool on 22 May. His final weeks in England flashed by in a flurry of farewells.
Ka, too, was on the move. She had left Berlin and was in Poland, on her way to Russia. Stricken anew by first-hand reports of her fragile emotional state from Dudley Ward, who was visiting London, Brooke wrote to her: ‘There are moments when I’m overwhelmed by the horror of your incapacity, and the pain’s so great, that I want to tell the people that do care for you, that if anything goes wrong with you while I’m away I’ll kill them (and you) when I come back … oh, I can’t go on.’
