by Nigel Jones
All the old obsessions – the pathetic threats to ‘kill’ all and sundry; the crazed need for Ka and Noel to be ‘looked after’ in his absence – were rumbling away beneath the superficial veneer of Brooke’s social success. The past was still too close and pressing for him to escape. Although he could not marry Ka, he told Frances that, ‘because of the great evil she did me’, he still felt a resentment of her as well as an overwhelming weight of responsibility for her present plight. In some senses his journey was an attempt to escape that burden, just as his departure to the wars in the east two years later would be a bid to evade the facts of growing up and growing old. ‘I don’t really feel going off to be nearly as “hellish” as you imagine,’ he told Frances. ‘I’ve really got quite callous in my feelings by now. I’m not excited by travelling. But I’ve the feeling of shaking the dust of a pretty dirty period of my life off my feet. And that makes up for any tear there may be.’
There were tears aplenty from Eddie when Brooke departed. As a farewell gift Eddie presented him with a complete edition of Jane Austen. Brooke took solemn farewells of his other friends. Edward Thomas was told: ‘I leave the muses of England in your keeping … feed the brutes.’ On 21 May, Brooke’s last evening in England, Geoffrey Keynes, Gibson and Murry were among those who dined with him in a restaurant off Regent Street. The next morning two old friends from his youth, Denis Browne and St John Lucas Lucas, saw him off on the Liverpool train from Euston. At the port he found himself entirely alone and tipped a boy hanging about the quayside sixpence to wave him goodbye. The lad, named William, obliged. Brooke’s last sight of England for more than a year was William’s off-white handkerchief fluttering in farewell. A wave of mixed emotions: loneliness, guilt, nostalgia, hope – and perhaps a touch of fear – almost swamped him.
22
* * *
A New World
* * *
No sooner was Brooke on board the ship than he realized that in the rush of departure he had left behind the 67 letters of introduction to prominent people in the USA and Canada that he had assiduously gathered from friends and friends of friends in England. He wrote to Denis Browne asking him to forward them to his Broadway hotel, and then he used a good portion of the pad of writing paper Browne had brought him as a leaving present at Euston to write a lengthy screed to Cathleen. Before leaving England he had told her something of his troubled past:
Dear love, I’ve been through evil places and I cling all the more graspingly to the peace and comfort I find more and more in loving you and being with you. It grows as I see love in you for me grow. Love in me grows slowly, and differently from the old ways – I thought the root was gone. But it’s still there. It’s the one thing I’ve got, to love you, and feel love growing, and the strength and peace growing, and to learn to worship you, and to want to protect you, to desire both to possess every atom of your body and soul, and yet to lose myself in your kindliness, like a child.
As if this threat to want to envelop and swallow her whole was not enough, Brooke went on to predict that all would anyway end in tears: ‘It must be that, in the end, it wouldn’t do, and we’d find that I didn’t love you enough, or you me.’ And yet there was a ‘hope and a chance’ that they might win through: ‘We’re so far towards it. The more I know you, the more I love. And the more I know and love, the more I find you have to give me, and I to give you. How can I let this growing glory and hope be broken, and let myself go adrift again? … I want to love and to work. I don’t want to be washed about on these doubtful currents and black waves or drift into some dingy corner of the tide …’
Now that he was himself embarked on a real ‘doubtful current’, he found himself clinging to Cathleen’s memory like a drowning man. To his delight, he found a letter and telegram from his beloved awaiting him in the purser’s office, and wrote to tell her of his gratitude: ‘You can’t think how it cheered me up, this string of communication with you. It felt as if your love was so strong it reached with me all the way. It’s queer. I do feel as if there was a lovely and present guardianship all the time. My darling, you give me so much more than I deserve. But it does make me feel so quiet and secure.’
But a sterner duty awaited – he knew that he owed Ka more than a letter – apology, explanation, contrition, even atonement. He hoped that Cathleen understood: ‘Oh it’s bitter destroying and breaking things two have built together – intimacies and trusts and friendliness,’ he told her. ‘It’s like cutting something out of oneself … O child, its hard work cutting off from people one’s been intimate with. (I told you I’d been with a girl I loved – and you’ll not ever tell anyone about it, child: for its not wholly my secret) I’ve got, I feel, to stop even writing to her, for her sake, to give her a chance to get free …’
But Cathleen and Ka were not the only women on his mind. He used more of Brown’s notepaper to write a revealing letter to Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. It seems that his determination to at last unburden himself had unlocked some long-closed chamber in the deepest recesses of his being; and now that he did not have to face the women in person he could at last afford to be fully, fearlessly frank. ‘I’m in love, in different ways, with two or three people,’ he told Elisabeth candidly.
I always am. You probably know this. I’m not married to anybody, nor likely to be. A year and a bit ago I was violently in love with somebody who treated me badly. The story is a bloody one: and doesn’t matter. Only, it left me for a time rather incapable of loving anybody. As for you, child: I have two feelings about you now, which alternate and mix and make confusion. I like to be with you … But quite apart … from all that, you – move me to passion … The fire in you lights the fire in me – and I’m not wholly responsible. Only, my dear, that’s all there is: those two things. I don’t want to marry you. I’m not in love with you in that way.
There, it was out – in its cold way, it was as near to a real declaration of truth as Brooke ever made to a lover. Unflattering it might have been, but at least he spared Elisabeth the illusion of lies. He concluded by offering to live with her for six months or so, sometime, somewhere. Meanwhile, as with Ka, he advised her to forget her love for him and concentrate on becoming independent. Tearing himself away from what he told himself was his past and his future amorous life, Brooke turned to the contemplation of his shipboard companions, and his first encounter with real Americans. He found their accent amusing, and mocked it: the ‘Says …’ and the ‘Yeps …’ and how he would find ‘Amurrica Vurry different from England’, and when one young man complained of English inequality, he forbore to mention segregated streetcars. He sampled his first American food. ‘Today I ate clam-chowder,’ he reported to Cathleen in wonder. ‘That’s romance, isn’t it? I ordered it quite recklessly. I didn’t know what it was. I only knew that anything called clam-chowder must be strange beyond words … Clam-chowder, my God! What am I coming to?’
One fellow-voyager who ate at Brooke’s table was a theatrical entrepreneur named Klaw, an appropriately named grasper, just back from a trawl through Europe to add to the repertoire of the seven New York theatres he already owned. Another was one of those decadent fin-de-siècle poets Brooke had once so admired: Richard Le Gallienne, who was, he told Eddie, ‘a really nasty man … he eyes me suspiciously – he scents a rival, I think. We’ve not spoken yet. His shoulders are bent. His mouth is ugly and small and mean. His eyes are glazed. His manner is furtive.’ Le Gallienne’s best-known eccentricity – the fact that he carried about with him at all times – despite the presence of a second Mrs Le Gallienne, an urn containing the ashes of his first wife, Mildred – inspired Brooke to write a cruel little satirical squib called ‘For Mildred’s Urn’, which ended:
Who knows, but in some happy hour
The God, whose strange alchemic power
Wrought her of dust, again may turn
To woman, this immortal urn;
May take this dust and breathe thereon,
And give me back my little one
.
Before docking, he found time to write a quick note to Noel, who had dined with him à deux at Treviglio’s, his favourite Soho restaurant, on the eve of his departure, confiding that his old enemy, her eldest sister Margery, was slipping from eccentricity into a mental disturbance that would prove incurable. Callously, Brooke told her how ill he thought she had looked at their dinner: ‘I do not desire you to be ill … a spasm of affection did shoot into my withered heart.’ But he could not resist a few savage taunts, in a childish effort to convince Noel that in letting him go, she had parted with a pearl of great price: ‘Three separate lovely young ladies have fallen in love with me,’ he bragged. ‘I have come to the conclusion that if I’m always so happy out of England, it is absurd ever to return.’ Thus spake the poet who, more than any other, is identified by posterity as the patriotic embodiment of the essence of England, and who, in little more than a year, would pen a clutch of elegies to England as his swansong.
His first impression of America, or at least, of New York, after checking into the ‘beastly’ Broadway Central Hotel, was that he had landed on some alien planet. Life moved fast – the trams zinged along like streaks of fire, the skyscrapers seemed like great piled cliffs; hardly human at all. The faces seemed strangely ageless, without blemish or wrinkle, as if wrought from plastic. He admired the way the loose-limbed bodies moved freely, without a hint of English stiffness. The neon, the boys bawling baseball news, the continual noise and jangling telephones – all seemed strangely exciting, and reeked of a future he would know nothing of.
On 5 June, armed with one of his retrieved letters of introduction, this one from Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, he travelled to Staten Island, to meet one of ‘Goldie’s’ friends, Russell H. Loines, an influential lawyer, who knew the city as well as anyone. Loines, with open-handed generosity, dropped everything to entertain this dazzling young visitor from England. He took him to Wanamakers department store, then whisked him up the River Delaware to shoot rapids in a canoe. Soon the self-pitying misery he had expressed from the anonymity of his hotel room – ‘I don’t know a soul in New York, and I’m very tired, and I don’t like the food; and I don’t like the people’s faces; and I don’t like the newspapers; and I haven’t a friend in the world; and nobody loves me; and I’m going to be extraordinarily miserable these six months; and I want to die …’ – was transformed. From an outdoor camp on the banks of the Delaware he told Cathleen, after paddling five hours in the sun: ‘It was great … we came round a wild turn in the river, and there was a voice singing wonderfully … we saw a little house, high on the bank, with an orchard, and a verandah, and wooden steps down to the great river, and at the top of them was a tall girl, very beautiful, standing like a goddess, with wonderful red hair, her head thrown back, singing, singing …’
Back from this trip, he journeyed to Boston, cradle of the American revolution, which, paradoxically, he found full of ‘a delicious, ancient Toryism’. He paid his respects to the matriarch of the city’s ruling intellectual aristocracy, Amy Lowell, and then dropped in at the offices of the Atlantic Monthly, whose editor, Ellery Sedgwick, was awed by Brooke’s Grecian looks:
A young man more beautiful than he I had never seen. Tall beyond the common, his loose tweeds accentuated his height and the athletic grace of his walk. His complexion was as ruddy as a young David’s. His auburn hair rippled back from the central parting, careless but perfect … man’s beauty is much more rare than woman’s. I went home under the spell of it and at the foot of the stairs cried aloud to my wife, ‘I have seen Shelley plain!’
It was time for English Cambridge to pay respects to its American counterpart. Brooke’s next port of call was Harvard, to witness the university’s baseball match against its traditional Ivy League rival, Yale. Conventionally enough, he compared the game to cricket, finding ‘excitement in the game, but little beauty’. However, he adored the cheer-leaders, finding the rhythmic movements of their co-ordinated ‘ecstasy’ wonderfully American, with its combination of wildness and regulation. He also saw a parade of Old Harvardians tottering past, some of the alumni stretching back to the 1850s, with a poignant gap reflecting the fallen of the 1860s Civil War. He was oddly moved: ‘Nobler … this deliberate viewing of oneself as part of the stream … the flow and transiency became apparent … In five minutes fifty years of America, go past one.’ Asked by one Harvardian alumnus if he knew Matthew Arnold, he couldn’t bring himself to pass on the news that the poet had died when Brooke was all of eight months old. A female acquaintance fiercely denounced democracy: ‘They ought to take the votes away from these people, who don’t know how to use them, and give them only to us, the educated.’ For Brooke, who had always tended to H. G. Wells’s hierarchical view of socialism, such élitism was becoming increasingly sympathetic.
Back in New York he steeled himself for the duty he had been ducking for too long: it was time to put things right with Ka. To gently but firmly detach himself from her clinging tentacles for good and all; for her own sake, as much as his. With a heart heavy with guilt and sadness he picked up his pen. ‘My dear, I’ve been worrying so about writing. And almost every night as I crossed I dreamt about you. And you always seemed in pain,’ he began. The best way of easing that pain was to close the books, settle up and make a clean break with the past and all its hopeless misery. His emotion lent eloquence to his words:
You must get right clear of me, cease to love me, love and marry somebody – and somebody worthy of you. Oh my dear, let’s try to put things right together. It’s so hard to know what to do – one’s so stupid and blind and blundering. What I feel about you is this – I’m not arguing if it’s true, I just state it as it comes to my heart – Ka is more precious than anything. She has marvellous goodness and greatness in her. She has things so lovely it hurts to name them. She is greater and better, potentially, than any woman I know: and more woman. She is very blind, and infinitely easy to lead astray. Her goodness makes her a prey. She needs looking after more than anybody else in the world. She’s a lovely child. And with that in my heart I have to leave you. It’s very difficult. Oh, Ka, you don’t know how difficult it is! So have pity on me. And forgive my breaking out like this.
Even in the midst of tenderness and pity, he was unable to avoid self-absorption. After urging her to fall on her friends for comfort, he at last got round to an admission that he had played some part in the immolation of their relationship:
Dear child, dearest Ka, whom I’ve loved and known, you must get well and happy, and live the great life you can. It’s the only thing I care for. Oh, child, I know I’ve done you great wrong. What could I do? It was so difficult. You had driven me mad. I’m sorry for the wrong. It’s the one thing in the world I’m sorry for: though I’ve done a lot of evil things. I can’t bear it that it is I have hurt you. But you’ll grow, and be the fine Ka. In the end I know you, that you can’t be broken or spoilt. I do know you.
And, knowing her as he does, he has to tell her that this is the end – an end to even written communication – but: ‘In a few years we’ll meet. Till then we can dodge each other. If we meet we’re big enough to manage that. The creatures who watch won’t get much change out of us.’ In the meantime she will hold the place of honour in his heart:
There’s one thing. Do you mind? I want to break the rule and give you a thing. A statuette of a mother and child … a tiny thing … I give it you; because you’ll be the greatest mother in the world. And I’ll not be anything but sad, till I’ve heard you’re happy, and with a child of your own. Let it stand: not for what we did: but for what we learnt. I thought at one time I’d only learnt bad from you: now I know that before and after and over it all I learnt good – all that I have. I’ve got to leave you. But if ever it happens you’re in ultimate need of help – it may – you know I’ll come, at any time and from any place, if you want it. I’m very happy and well, travelling, and in the end I’ll get back and work. Don’t think of me. Please, Ka, be good and hap
py: and stick to and be helped by your friends. That’s the last thing I ask. This is so bad a letter: and I wanted to make everything clear. Do believe. See what I’ve tried to write. Preaching and everything aside, let’s just be Ka and Rupert for a minute: and say good-bye. I’ll be loyal to the things we’ve learnt together: and you be loyal. And life’ll be good. Dear love, good bye. Rupert.
The effort required to write this had been phenomenal. And was not the Gill sculpture that he had bought long before, and secreted with Eddie against just such a moment, just too much an appeasement gift, designed to deflect Ka’s righteous wrath? And what sort of sensitivity, knowing of Ka’s miscarriage of his child, could conceive that a statue of a mother and child would be an appropriate commemoration of their love, so misbegotten? Soon after stumbling out into the teeming New York streets to post this offering, Brooke collapsed under the strain, but was promptly whisked away by Loines, who had taken over Eddie’s accustomed role as mentor, to recuperate on Staten Island. Swiftly recovered, he resumed his literary rounds – introduced to Edward Arlington Robinson, he perceptively hailed him as a poet of genius. But, much to his American friends’ dismay and bemusement, he was determined to leave for Canada: ‘“A country without soul” they cried and pressed books upon me to befriend me through the Philistine bleakness …’
Hardening his heart, he boarded the Montreal Express train on 29 June. As ever when alone, waves of homesickness threatened to overwhelm him. ‘I shan’t be really happy,’ he told Eddie in a long letter penned on the train as it roared north, ‘till I get back to you all.’ A little later he defined who ‘all’ meant:
