by Nigel Jones
His encounter with the Marchesa Capponi may have given him more objectivity about Cathleen, for, in an unusually frank and bad-tempered letter to Eddie on 6 September, he wrote:
My general position, you know, is queer. I’ve had enough and too much of love. I’ve come to the conclusion that marriage is the best cure for love. If I married, perhaps I could settle down, be at peace, and work. It’s the only chance. Therefore, marry soon. Anybody. Cathleen’s character is very good, and I’m very fond of her. Why not her? – On the other hand, she’s an actress. Oh, hell, she does mix with a rotten crowd. I hope to God she won’t get spoilt. She’s very simple – I hope I don’t shock you, writing so coldly. I’m fierier, near her, I assure you …
In a guilty afterthought, he added, in parentheses: ‘This is the sort of letter that doesn’t look well in a biography.’ Which is why it was excluded from Christopher Hassall’s official study.
From Vancouver, Brooke crossed back into the USA by water to Seattle, where he caught a train to San Francisco. He was undecided on what to do: his homesickness was increasing; the six articles he had been contracted to write for the Westminster Gazette were written, and no more money would be forthcoming from that quarter. On the other hand, there was no pressing reason – apart from Cathleen – for him to return home. A $250 loan from Loines would fund further travel, so he decided to let fate decide. He spun a coin – and fate decreed that he travel on.
He booked a passage on the SS Sierra, which would sail on 7 October, bound for Honolulu. Meanwhile he was the guest of Loines’s friend, Professor Chauncey Wells, of the University of California at San Francisco. He arrived in the middle of a heatwave – 21 September was the hottest recorded day since 1871 – and suffered accordingly. But Professor Wells was a charming and generous host, and Brooke began to relax. He gave a reading from Georgian Poetry at Stanford University, and, proudly reporting this to Eddie, added approvingly:
California is nice, and the Californians a friendly bunch. There’s a sort of goldenness about ’Frisco and the neighbourhood. It hangs in the air, and about the people. Everyone is very cheery and cordial and simple. They are rather a nation apart … from the rest of the United States. Much more like the English. As everywhere in this extraordinary country I am welcomed with open arms when I say I know Masefield and Goldie!
He outlined his itinerary for Eddie: ‘I leave for Honolulu on Tuesday. Then Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti, and a resting place at the bottom of the Pacific, all among the gay fish and lovely submarine flowers … you may figure me in the centre of a Gauguin picture, nakedly riding a squat horse into white surf.’
To the Marchesa Capponi he bemoaned the loss in British Columbia of a notebook containing ‘2 months notes on my travels, and unfinished sonnets … yessir isn’t it too bloody. I’ve been prostrated by grief ever since.’ His spirits lifted as soon as he had taken leave of his new friends and boarded the boat. Ahead lay the supreme sensual experience of his life.
23
* * *
Heaven on Earth
* * *
The year that Brooke spent out of England from June 1913 was by far the most productive, and probably among the happiest, of his life. Creatively, it is akin to Keats’s ‘marvellous year’, which produced the odes, Endymion and his greatest sonnets. Brooke’s four months in America and Canada had quite unexpectedly given birth, without painful labour, to a body of prose that is fresh and witty even today. His pieces for the Westminster Gazette were collected and published posthumously as Letters from America with a lachrymose and lengthy introduction by Henry James – the last piece of prose that ‘the Master’ wrote. Reading them today makes one regret the superb travel writer that the world lost in Brooke.
Perceptive, energetic, alive with colour, joy and reflections both wise and funny, they are still a pleasure. Brooke is acute in his observation of the tidal wave of commercialism that was gathering over the country, like some great cloud bank about to spew drenchingly forth. Business, with its handmaiden advertising, he pinpointed as America’s new religion; although even he might have been taken aback by the proportions the worship of hype would attain by the century’s end. He was perceptive, too, in recognizing another curse of the coming decades: the almost insuperable problem of racial harmony, even among superficially similar white peoples of European origin.
Writing of the English and French communities in Quebec, for example, he remarked: ‘Inter-marriage is very rare. They do not meet socially; only on business, and that not very often. In the same city these two communities dwell side by side with different traditions, different languages, different ideals without sympathy or comprehension.’ Although the racial divide had not, thus far, produced violence, Brooke likened it to a split personality, afflicted by ‘debility and spiritual paralysis’. His own attitude to race was complex – in the essay ‘Some Niggers’ he jeered at the reflex racism of the traditionally missionary-minded whites he was travelling with in the South Seas and praised the looks of a young fellow-passenger who told him he was part Danish, part Chinese and part Hawaiian. But on the same voyage he was poisonous in his letters home about the Jewish politician Rufus Isaacs, who, despite his implication in the insider-dealing Marconi scandal, had been appointed Lord Chief Justice after serving as Attorney-General in Asquith’s Liberal government. Brooke threatened to resign from the National Liberal Club in disgust. Apart from his anti-Semitism – which did not prevent him from having friendly relations with individual Jews he encountered, nor indeed from enjoying more-than-friendly relations with the Asquiths, who had ennobled Isaacs – Brooke was ‘liberal’ if patronizing in his attitude to other races, admiring the Polynesian culture he was about to fervently embrace, and enjoying the most physically satisfying sexual relationship of his life with a Polynesian woman.
His first brush with Pacific culture came on the first night out, when he sat on the deck under a moon and stars that looked both clear and close, and listened to the melancholy singing of a group of Hawaiians, accompanied by mandolins. As the Sierra steamed south, Brooke started to compose the sequence of poems that represent the peak of his poetic achievement. Simple, heartfelt, showing a carefully wrought mastery of form, they are yet another facet of his miraculous year that must have made him glad he had belatedly heeded Frances Cornford’s advice to go west and heal himself in a culture far from home. The first such poem came to him as he gazed up at the moonlit Pacific skies from the ship’s deck:
CLOUDS
Down the blue night the unending columns press
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon’s hidden loveliness.
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.
They say that the Dead die not, but remain
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
And men, coming and going on the earth.
A second sonnet composed on the voyage turned on a lecture he had heard at King’s about that very Edwardian sport of ghost-hunting. In contrast to the ethereal ‘Clouds’, in which the dead are imagined as majestic spirits, far removed from earthly concerns, ‘Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)’ conceives the departed as active sprites turning and running down ‘by-ways of the air’. The poem, which seems to suggest a weakening in his previously staunch atheism, seems to look forward to a post-earthly existence in which souls will feel without hands, hear without ears, ‘And see, no longer blinded by our eyes’.
The third sonnet that Brooke started to map out on board ship was the most directly person
al. It was, as he candidly confessed to Cathleen, directly inspired by a memory of Noel (although he neglected to name her directly):
I told you I was in love with a girl for three or four years, and then she got tired of it … Once, towards the grey end of that – I’d sort of put my love away, numbed it, for I saw things were going ill. But I was desolate and rather hungry. And one day – we were staying in the same house – we’d arranged to get up very early, and go out and pick mushrooms together in the summer dew, for breakfast (oh youth! youth!)-I crept along, having woken and being unable to sleep another hour, to her room some little while before dawn. She was sleeping. I knelt down by her and kissed her forehead to wake her, and put my head on her hand; and she woke, and felt fond of me I suppose, and pulled my head against her heart and held me a minute. And I thought I had found heaven. And all my love woke worse than ever. But she didn’t mean anything, you know. Only she felt fond of me. But it made the breaking about nine hundred times harder; we both paid a lot for it, I most.
The sonnet this recollection inspired, ‘A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence)’, is simple, but touching and finely crafted:
Somewhile before the dawn I rose, and stept
Softly along the dim way to your room,
And found you sleeping in the quiet gloom,
And holiness about you as you slept.
I knelt there; till your waking fingers crept
About my head, and held it. I had rest
Unhoped this side of Heaven, beneath your breast.
I knelt a long time, still; nor even wept.
It was great wrong you did me; and for gain
Of that poor moment’s kindliness, and ease,
And sleepy mother-comfort!
Child, you know
How easily love leaps out to dreams like these,
Who has seen them true. And love that’s wakened so
Takes all too long to sleep again.
Despite the sagging in the centre, the weakness of ‘nor even wept’ and the petulant whine of ‘It was great wrong you did me’, the peace of the beginning in the hushed and sleeping house is brilliantly and economically conveyed, and the line ‘love leaps out to dreams like these’ displays real flair. It was a love poem not quite devoid of sentimentality, but touching and poignant for all that.
The same letter to Cathleen that contained the rough beginnings of this Noel poem – ‘(Clumsy! Clumsy!),’ Brooke scolded himself – also contained a Byronic epigram about love: ‘For men catch fire quicker than women, though they may not burn so long. Lady, is it not true?’ But he ended with a characteristic note of caution and control: men and women were like children, he said – especially women: ‘My heart and my belief were so deadened, before I found you … You give me great riches … I pray you, love good and keep away from the evil things of the world, for my sake and for your sake and for our sake.’
The Sierra docked at Honolulu on 15 October. Brooke elected to stay at the Moana hotel on Waikiki beach, some five miles out of town. He was impressed by the luscious tropical vegetation – giant ferns, hibiscus and coconut trees – and while sitting in a wicker chair in front of the hotel he started yet another sonnet that harked back to Lulworth and Ka:
WAIKIKI
Warm perfumes like a breath from vine and tree
Drift down the darkness. Plangent, hidden from eyes,
Somewhere an eukaleli thrills and cries
And stabs with pain the night’s brown savagery;
And dark scents whisper; and dim waves creep to me,
Gleam like a woman’s hair, stretch out, and rise;
And new stars burn into the ancient skies,
Over the murmurous soft Hawaiian sea.
And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again,
And still remember, a tale I have heard, or known,
An empty tale, of idleness and pain,
Of two that loved—or did not love—and one
Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly,
A long while since, and by some other sea.
There are echoes here of his first serious poem, ‘Seaside’, written back in 1908, and also, surely, the susurration evoking the ebb and flow of tidal waters, that lies behind Matthew Arnold’s great elegiac masterpiece ‘Dover Beach’. The poem suggests that a new Brooke is emerging, chrysalis-like from the bitter husk that had encased him for so long. He had written several poems earlier in the year that share a common note of savage cynicism; suggesting that he was done with love and through with women. One of these ended:
Oh, it’s not going to happen again, old girl
It’s not going to happen again.
Even more bitterly, ‘Love’ concluded:
love grows
colder,
Grows false and dull, that was sweet lies at most.
Astonishment is no more in hand or shoulder,
But darkens, and dies out from kiss to kiss.
All this is love; and all love is but this.
‘The Chilterns’, too, which begins with a happy marching gait, concludes with cheery cynicism:
And I shall find some girl perhaps,
And a better one than you,
With eyes as wise, but kindlier,
And lips as soft, but true.
And I daresay she will do.
Now he appeared to have sloughed off this brooding bitterness and could recollect even his unhappiest memories in some degree of tranquillity. In this spirit he sent Cathleen another sonnet:
ONE DAY
To-day I have been happy. All the day
I held the memory of you, and wove
Its laughter with the dancing light o’ the spray,
And sowed the sky with tiny clouds of love,
And sent you following the white waves of sea,
And crowned your head with fancies, nothing worth,
Stray buds from that old dust of misery,
Being glad with a new foolish quiet mirth.
So lightly I played with those dark memories,
Just as a child, beneath the summer skies,
Plays hour by hour with a strange shining stone,
For which (he knows not) towns were fire of old,
And love has been betrayed, and murder done,
And great kings turned to a little bitter mould.
In the same letter he compiled a litany for Cathleen’s sake of all the things he was missing: ‘The Chilterns, Hampton Court, Hullo Ragtime, Raymond Buildings’. As ever, restless and unhappy alone, Brooke took a trip to the small island of Kanai, for whose owner he had acquired an introductory letter in San Francisco. During the visit he rode out on horseback to see a 200-foot waterfall, getting himself badly sunburned. He was back at Waikiki by 20 October, and a week later boarded another ship, the SS Ventura, which would carry him to Samoa, an island redolent with recent memories of another wandering writer – Robert Louis Stevenson.
On the last day of October the Ventura crossed the Equator and Brooke suffered the usual indignity of being thrown into a canvas bath. Two days later she docked at Pango in Samoa and he transferred to a local ferry that took him to Apia, the island’s capital. In Samoa he acquired his first real taste of Pacific life, which pleased him more than the already commercialized Hawaii. He painted the scene for Cathleen:
After dinner six girls and six men came on board and performed a siva-siva on deck, before the astonished eyes of the American and Australian passengers. A siva-siva, my dear, is a dance. But not what you (poor stepper of hideous American stuff) or I or M. Nijinsky mean by dancing … both girls and men were naked to the waist, and glistening with coco-nut palm oil. The dancing was on a background of high nasal wailing – which seemed to be telling a story – hand-clapping, and convulsive rhythmic movements of the body … It was all very thrilling and tropical and savage. I felt ancient strange raucous jungle cries awakening within me … The dancers vanished, after half an hour, precipitately into the darkness.
Without Brooke, the
Ventura sailed on, bearing a precious packet of poems destined for Wilfrid Gibson and the first issue of the new magazine which came to bear the name New Numbers. From his new lodgings on Samoa he wrote to Eddie Marsh:
I live in a Samoan house, (the coolest in the world) with a man and his wife, nine children, ranging from a proud beauty of 18 to a round object of 1 year, a dog, a cat, a proud hysterical hen, and a gaudy scarlet and green parrot … I am becoming indistinguishable from R.L.S. both in thinness, in literary style, and in disassociation from England. God have mercy on my soul! I have crossed the Equator, and so am a Man at last.
He paid his respects to the island’s presiding literary spirit, making the arduous journey to the lonely summit where Stevenson is buried under his own epitaph:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie.
A blurred surviving photograph from Brooke’s camera shows him being carried across a stream on the shoulders of a strapping Samoan, clad in a white shirt and trousers and a tropical hat. He looks very happy – and he was. The charm of the South Seas was beginning to seduce his susceptible nature:
Oh, Eddie, it’s all true about the South Seas! I get a little tired of it at moments, because I am just too old for Romance, and my soul is seared. But there it is: there it wonderfully is: heaven on earth, the ideal life, little work, dancing, singing and eating, naked people of incredible loveliness, perfect manners, and immense kindliness, a divine tropical climate, and intoxicating beauty of scenery.
