by Nigel Jones
I have a folk-longing to get back from all this Imperial luxury to the simplicity of the little places and quiet folks I knew and loved …
Would God I were eating plover’s eggs,
And drinking dry champagne,
With the Bernard Shaws, Mr and Mrs Masefield, Lady
Horner, Neil Primrose, Raleigh, the Right Honour-able
Augustine Birrell, Eddie, Six or seven Asquiths,
and Felicity Tree,
In Downing Street Again.
‘Little places’ – Downing Street? ‘Quiet folks’ – the grandest in London? One trusts he is being ironic.
Then, as now, the struggle to become England’s Poet Laureate was a matter for popular speculation and faction fighting. The position was vacant after the death of the indifferent poetaster Alfred Austin, and Brooke was eager to give his views on the succession to Eddie. He believed the choice came down to three – either Yeats, Robert Bridges or Alfred Noyes – with Kipling and Masefield as outsiders. Brooke was not to know that the influential Eddie had already advised Asquith to appoint Bridges. Another of his protégés, Masefield, had to wait 17 years until Bridges’ death before succeeding in Buggins’ turn.
Unimpressed by a quick charabanc trip around Montreal, Brooke continued on the same day to Quebec, where he teamed up with a ‘childlike’ American businessman to tour the old city. He was hugely impressed by the St Lawrence, ‘the most glorious river in the world’, and was soon travelling up it through towering cliffs of black granite crowned with lonesome pines, to bathe in its tributary, the Saguenay. By 9 July he was back in Montreal, en route to the Canadian capital, Ottawa. Here he shamelessly exploited his contacts list: staying for more than a week under the roof of Duncan Campbell Scott, like Eddie, a civil servant with a part-time penchant for poetry. Although he found the Canadian, still in mourning for a beloved infant daughter who had died some years before, somewhat melancholy, Brooke enjoyed his hospitality, which included daily lunches at the Ottawa golf club. A set of pictures taken while he was there show a newly respectable Brooke, strangled by a high collar and tie, and looking handsome, but older, in a formal cutaway jacket and buttonhole.
Pursuing his newly acquired taste for cultivating the grand and the powerful, Brooke used a letter from Hugh Dalton’s father, Canon Dalton, to arrange an interview with the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, describing himself in his letter of introduction as ‘an English Socialist … and writer’. He was treated to a lunch à deux with the Prime Minister and afterwards complained of his ‘French sympathies’ and his apparent unwillingness to contribute to an Imperial Naval expansion, but, for all that, he condescendingly pronounced Sir Wilfrid ‘a nice old man’.
Soon he was underway once more, sailing up the St Lawrence and across Lake Ontario towards Toronto, where he arrived on 21 July. His host here was Edmund Morris, a painter friend of Scott’s, and the kingpin of the local Arts and Letters Club, which received Brooke like visiting royalty in this provincial outpost of Empire where rumours of the Georgian poets were hot gossip and to see one in the flesh was a treat indeed. ‘Oh Eddie, one fellow actually possessed my Poems,’ Brooke proudly told his mentor. ‘Awful Triumph. Every now and then one comes up and presses my hand and says “Wal, sir, you cannot know how memorable a day in my life this is.” Then I do my pet boyish-modesty-stunt and go pink all over: and everyone thinks its too delightful. One man said to me “Mr Brooks (my Canadian name), Sir, may I tell you that in my opinion you have Mr Noyes skinned.” That means I’m better than him …’
Brooke’s painful self-consciousness passed unnoticed, though one observer did remark the contrast between his virile masculinity and his pink girlish blushes and habit of distractedly running his hands through his hair.
Letters were reaching him from England. One, from Noel, annoyed him mightily. Playing Brooke at his own game, she flirtatiously mentioned that she was still seeing two suitors – James Strachey and Ferenc Békássy – names that she knew would be like waving a red rag before Brooke. She admitted her share of fault for their undone relationship: ‘I’m even sorry, about a few things. Sorry you got so injured. Sorry I wasn’t nicer. But chiefly sorry, that the world’s so difficult to fit in to. (And too much of a habit to get out of) … I do hope you accept my humiliation and my confession: that the world being what it is, you are right & I am wrong. And the Gods will treat us accordingly. Noel.’
To this he responded in a furious rage: ‘You’re a Devil. By God, you’re a devil. What a bloody letter to write to me!’ Calming somewhat, he noted with reasonable honesty on his progress in the New World:
I was very happy in America, where I made a lot of friends; and occasionally miserable in Canada, where I scarcely know anybody. That’s because I’m getting old and more dependent on human companionship. So once or twice I’ve been homesick. I’m alone you see. I’ve nothing immediate to worry me. I’ve had to cut away from Ka, & the thought of her hurts. But I try to pretend it’s well with her. I’m not in love with you. I’ve no intention of playing le grand indifférent. I’m going to marry very soon and have a lot of children. I’m practically engaged to a girl you don’t know to whom I’m devoted & who is in love with me. And if I don’t marry her, I shall very swiftly marry one of two or three others, & be very happy.
Before posting this packet of sour grapes, he put the letter aside to attend to a more welcome correspondence: he had heard from Wilfrid Gibson, who, inspired by the runaway success of Georgian Poetry, was hatching a scheme with Lascelles Abercrombie to launch an anthology of their own from Gallows Cottage, the house Abercrombie had rented near Dymock, deep in the Gloucestershire countryside. Would Brooke consider joining them? Gibson wrote to ask. At the time, Gibson and Abercrombie were considered the coming names in English poetry, and their reputation had spread as far afield as Canada. Brooke regarded it as a great compliment that they should want to include him in their new venture. ‘It’s … rather a score for me,’ he wrote to the Ranee from Toronto, ‘as my “public” is smaller than any of theirs!’ He replied enthusiastically, promising to send new poems from his travels.
All this time he had been dutifully sending his travel pieces to the Westminster Gazette. After a shaky start he hit his stride reporting a visit to Niagara Falls. He denounced with a shudder of disdain the puny human commercialization surrounding the great wonder of nature – the hotels, shops, sham legends, rifle-galleries – and then, still shuddering, he turned to the touts:
There are touts insinuating, and touts raucous, greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly, take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle; professionals, amateurs, and dilettanti, male and female; touts who would photograph you with a young lady against a faked background of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into cars, char-a-bancs, elevators or tunnels, or deceive you into a carriage and pair, touts who would sell you picture postcards, moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee pees, and crockery; and touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just purely, simply, merely, incessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly – to tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls. He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but they are overpowering …
Brooke was aware that his reaction to the might of the Falls – ‘the real secret of the beauty and terror of the Falls is not their height or width, but the feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the plunge of that vast body of water’ – came perilously close to the conventional awe of the tourist. He was, he admitted to an old Cambridge friend, A. F. Scholfield, ‘horribly impressed’ by Niagara, despite all the sniffiness. Regrettably, he acknowledged, he was:
a Victorian at heart, after all. Please don’t breathe a word of it: I want to keep such shreds of reputation as I have left. Yet it’s true. For I sit and stare at the thing and have the purest Nineteenth century grandiose thoughts, about the Destin
y of Man, the Irresistibility of Fate, the Doom of Nations, the fact that Death awaits us All, and so forth. Wordsworth Redivivus. Oh dear! oh dear!
Resuming his letter to Noel ‘with the spray of Niagara falling lightly upon me’, he told her that, because he was ‘the most conservative person in the world’, he could not get out of the habit of being fond of her: ‘You know how it is, affection – So many years of regarding you as queerly mine, & me as queerly yours, leave a mark.’ Now, he claimed, he would be happy to just be friends, and not plunge back into being ‘desperately in love with you.’ He added, witheringly: ‘I will not go into that Hell again. I’ve tried loving a woman who doesn’t love me, you; and I’ve tried loving a woman who isn’t clean, Ka; & it doesn’t pay. I’m going to find some woman who is clean, & loves me.’
He realized that the letter was turning into a farewell; the last of his long goodbyes, just as his New York cri de coeur to Ka had been a closing of the accounts on that desperately damaging phase of his life. Both, in their way, represented a renunciation, and he could afford to be generous with his emotions. Above all, he was at last ready to rise above his past rancour:
Noel, I will tell you a secret. No one ever knows where he or she is at. It’s really so. In outline, you behaved precisely & boringly like any other girl in the world; as I did like any other boy – Really, child, – I think parts of you, & things you’ve done, wrong. But very slight affairs – you’re just a little too irresponsible. That’s all. The main evil was that we didn’t, after all, love each other, and for that no one is to blame. Or, if anyone, I: for having been very often so very unpleasant; as I now see I was. Even that was inevitable to my age & temper, perhaps. But oh! how unbearable I was! You know, Noel, we were at odds about a good many things; & in almost all of them I’ve come to see that you were right. I don’t know that you had thought much more wisely than my able self. You only had a cleaner mind and a better nature.
Having renounced the longest, and perhaps the deepest of all his relationships, Brooke, as was his custom, pronounced a benediction:
My romantic darling, what do you want? To play Cleopatra? No, no, you’re for better things, you childishist [sic] of children. You’ll love somebody sometime: I’ve little doubt: & find it isn’t whatever horror of delirium you suppose, but just great friendliness & trust & comfort – ordinary things. Nor do I doubt you’ll marry – when I hear of it I’ll have a bad hour or two, & then be too busy with my own love to think about it – & have children (it’s always been my thought what lovely children you would have, most of all if they were mine). These things come round the corner on one.
He ended lightly: ‘Noel, I always thought it was a funny name … not very English. Splendid Noel – silly little child – my friend, my penultimate word to you is, don’t be a fool: my ultimate one, eat Ovaltine. With love Rupert.’ In a postscript scribbled on 28 July he added: ‘I always desire to repeat that tiresome demand that you should invoke my assistance whenever you need it – may it be taken as written at the end of each letter, till I revoke it?’
It was a less fraught farewell than his goodbye to Ka had been, and indeed, they would continue to communicate fitfully. But there was no doubt that he had mentally purged himself of his long and wasting involvement with both women. A fresh start beckoned, and a new frontier.
Appropriately, his next destination was the Canadian wilderness. From Sarnia, in the Great Lakes, he took a steamer across Lakes Huron and Superior. He found the vast expanse of water ‘too big, and too smooth, and too sunny; like an American businessman’. From Port Arthur he travelled by train to Winnipeg, and then trekked into the virgin region around Lake George, where he stayed at a hunting lodge. He was impressed by the vast, untouched wilderness, where human habitation was rare; it seemed like a huge blank page awaiting its Wordsworth to ‘give it a soul’. The space and the silence inspired profound philosophic thoughts: ‘It is possible, at a pinch, to do without gods. But one misses the dead.’
In this empty amphitheatre, surrounded by mountains, forests and lakes, he spent his birthday, the last but one he would know. ‘I never expected to pass my twenty-sixth birthday with a gun and fishing tackle, without any clothes on, by a lake, in a wood infested by bears, in a country where there aren’t ten people within five miles and half of those are Indians.’ He felt close to untamed nature, in a wilder way than he had at any Neo-Pagan camp. One night a trapper brought a huge dead deer by canoe to the lakeside log cabin where he was staying. By the light of a fire the great beast was strung up to a tree to be dismembered and dressed. ‘For two hours we pulled and hauled at this creature …’ he told Cathleen:
Then the trapper got an axe and hacked the beast’s head off: with the great antlers it weighs some hundred pounds … I got cut and scratched and smeared with the creature’s insides. It was a queer sight, lit up by the leaping flames of the fire, which the women fed – the black water by the lake, muddy with trampling at the edge, and smeared with blood, the trapper in the tree, this great carcass hanging at one end of the rope, my friend and an Indian and I pulling our arms out at the other, the head gazing reproachfully at us from the ground, everybody using the most frightful language, and the rather ironical and very dispassionate stars above. Rather savage.
On his birthday itself, he told Cathleen:
Today, O my heart, I am twenty-six years old. And I’ve done so little. I’m very ashamed. By God, I’m going to make things hum, though. But that’s all so far away. I’m lying quite naked on a beach of golden sand, some six miles away from the hunting-lodge, the other man near by, a gun between us in case bears appear, the boat pulled up on the shore, the lake very blue and ripply, and the sun rather strong … we caught two pike on the way out, which lie picturesquely on the bows of the boat.
Gorged with venison, they spared a red deer they saw. ‘I’m glad – I’m no sportsman,’ Brooke confessed. In his child-of-nature mode he picnicked off fried eggs, cold caribou heart, tea and ‘oh! blueberry pie’. He was acquiring a taste for blueberries, for although, as he told Noel, ‘materially they were singularly tasteless’, nevertheless they reminded him of camps gone by. ‘Cooking and eating a meal naked,’ Cathleen learned, ‘is the most solemnly primitive thing one can do.’
The next day he returned to Winnipeg, and left immediately for Edmonton via Regina. Edmonton was a booming frontier town which had sprung up out of the prairie over the past 12 years – mushrooming from a population of 200 at the turn of the century to one of 50,000 at the time of Brooke’s brief visit. He was becoming adept at organizing his own publicity, breezing into the offices of the local newspaper and offering himself as a suitable subject for an interview: ‘I just put a cigar in the corner of my mouth, and undid my coat and put my thumbs under my arm-pits, and spat, and said “Say, kid, this is some town!”’ he told Eddie. The reporter ‘asked me a lot of questions, of which I did not know the answers. So I lied.’ One of the questions inquired about the growing arms and naval race between Britain and Germany: ‘When I come back I shall demand a knighthood from Winston,’ Brooke jested to Eddie. ‘I’ve been delivering immense speeches in favour of his naval policy.’
His next stop was another new frontier town, Calgary, in the Rockies. The further west he moved, the more homesick he became. The new frontier affronted his English sense of age and continuity. ‘You can’t think how sick one’s heart gets for something old,’ he told Eddie in exasperation, adding, with some exaggeration: ‘For weeks I have not seen or touched a town so old as myself. Horrible! Horrible! They gather round me and say “In 1901 Calgary had 139 inhabitants, now it has 75,000” … I reply “My village is also growing. At the time of Julius Caesar it was a bare 300. Domesday Book gives 347 and it is now close on 390.” Which is ill-mannered of me.’
The local paper, the Calgary News Telegram, carried an interview with Brooke with the headline ‘General European War is opinion of Political Writer from Great Britain’. Brooke forecast that the coming conflict wou
ld also become a world war: ‘a struggle in which practically every country will participate’. At a time when the Great War is supposed to have burst upon a complacent world with the shock of a summer thunderclap, his gift for prophecy proved uncannily accurate.
He was nearing the end of his odyssey across the continent. From a train crossing the Rockies near Banff in Alberta he wrote a rare note to James Strachey on 18 August. (On the same train a lady had offered him a packet of peanuts, and supposing him to be still a schoolboy, had worried about him getting back to England in time for the new term.) ‘My dear boy,’ he began, affectionately enough, ‘I wonder how the world is treating you. I sometimes see the old Spectator; & often think of the old days.’ He reported that he was ‘awfully healthy and strong’, adding: ‘But the process you saw dawning has run its atrocious path. Poetry, even, has gone by the bawd. I’m relapsed comfortably onto the mattress of second class. Good. Perhaps my children …’
He spent four days at Chateau Lake Louise, where the main attraction was the young American widow of an Italian aristocrat, the Marchesa Capponi. Romance blossomed, and the couple corresponded affectionately. Whether Brooke graced the Marchesa’s bed is uncertain, but she felt strongly enough about him to drop in on the Ranee during a visit to England while Brooke was still abroad.
He reached the Pacific at Victoria on Vancouver Island, where he was horrified to learn of the death by drowning of Edmund Morris, his recent host at Toronto. It was the second such untimely demise of a friend he had heard of since leaving England. Soon after his arrival, he had read that George Wyndham, whose aristocratic hospitality he had enjoyed at Clouds with Eddie, had collapsed and died during a visit to Paris with his mistress. ‘It seemed abrupt,’ he told Eddie. ‘I wish he hadn’t died.’
