Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Reluctantly tearing himself away from this demi-Eden to keep to his planned itinerary, he returned to Pango in mid-November and boarded the SS Torfua for Fiji. He knew that the letters he was writing would not reach England before Christmas, and nostalgically imagined what he was missing: a chilly dampness in the air, and the theatres glaring in the Strand, and crowds of white faces … I can’t help thinking of you trotting through crisp snow to a country church, holly decorated, with little robins pecking crumbs all around, and the church-bells playing our brother Tennyson’s [a reference to the fact that Tennyson, like Eddie, had been an Apostle] In Memoriam brightly through the clear air.

  By contrast, Brooke asked Eddie to picture himself: ‘in a loin-cloth, brown and wild, in the fair chocolate arms of a Tahitian beauty, reclining beneath a bread-fruit tree, on white sand, with the breakers roaring against the reefs a mile out, and strange brilliant fish darting through the pellucid hyaline of the sun-saturated sea’. This, or something very like it – even down to the Tahitian beauty – was what Brooke was sailing towards. For once his lushest fantasies were in harmony with reality, and he lay back to let the warm winds and waters of this paradise ‘wash the mind of foolishness’, as he was to put it in one of his best Pacific poems.

  There was more than a touch of the condescending imperialist in Brooke’s attitude to the islanders whose hospitality he was greedily gulping down:

  And Eddie, it’s all true about, for instance, coco-nuts. You tramp through a strange vast dripping tropical forest for hours, listening to weird liquid hootings from birds and demons in the branches above. Then you feel thirsty. So you send your boy – or call a native – up a great perpendicular palm. He runs up with utter ease and grace, cuts off a couple of vast nuts and comes down and makes holes in them. And they’re chock-full of the best drink in the world. Romance! Romance! I walked 15 miles through mud and up and down mountains, and swam three rivers, to get this boat. But if ever you miss me, suddenly, one day, from Lecture Room B in King’s, or from the Moulin d’Or at lunch, you’ll know that I’ve got sick for the full moon on these little thatched roofs, and the palms against the morning, and the Samoan boys and girls diving thirty feet into a green sea or a deep mountain pool under a waterfall – and that I’ve gone back.

  Brooke had fallen hook, line and sinker for the tourist’s picture-postcard view of the South Seas: the dusky maidens decked in flowers, the languid lagoons, the larder growing on trees. There is not much mention in his letters home of endemic poverty and disease – much of it brought to the islands by the colonial powers that had conquered and ruled them. The unconscious, patronizing attitude to the native peoples is less surprising – it was the common coin of the times. It must be remembered, however, that a tourist is exactly what Brooke was, for his wildly enthusiastic babble about the seductions of Samoa is based on a fortnight’s stay – the length of the average package holiday of today. He saw the surface glories, and it must be admitted that they were enticing; and that his prose reports of them, shorn of his customary self-absorption in his own emotional state, make glittering, exciting reading. And so he rambled on.

  On 19 November he made landfall in Fiji. He came close to some pointed social observation in a letter to Dudley Ward, in which, hoping to please his Germanophile friend, he praised Berlin’s administration of its section of the Samoan islands for broadly letting the natives get on with their own lives, in contrast to the interfering French and the proselytizing Americans. He mentioned, too, how the plantations were worked by indentured Chinese coolie labour since the Samoan, sensibly, ‘can, and will, live without working. He puts an hibiscus in his hair, twines a gaudy loin cloth round him, takes a few bananas and a coco-nut, and goes off bathing with the girls, singing as he goes. That is the end of life. Tra, la!’ He summed up with an epigram: ‘The South Seas are heaven, but I no angel.’

  Fiji he found overcivilized, with its ‘two banks, several churches, dental surgeons, a large gaol, auctioneers, bookmakers, two newspapers’. To the critic Edmund Gosse he wrote:

  Perplexing country! At home everything is so simple … there is only the choice between writing a good sonnet and making a million pounds. Who could hesitate? But here the choice is between writing a sonnet and climbing a straight hundred-foot coco-nut palm, or diving forty feet from a rock into pellucid blue-green water. Which is the better, there? One’s European literary soul begins to be haunted by strange doubts and shaken with fundamental fantastic misgivings. I think I shall return home … One keeps realizing, however unwillingly, responsibility. I noticed in myself and in the other white people in Samoa, a trait I have remarked in schoolmasters … You know that sort of slightly irritated tolerance, a lack of irresponsibility, that marks the pedagogue? One feels that one’s a White Man – ludicrously. I kept thinking I was in the Sixth Form at Rugby again. These dear good people, with their laughter and friendliness, and crowns of flowers – one feels one must protect them.

  But it wasn’t protection the Fijians demanded from Brooke – only a demonstration of his drawing skills with his long, prehensile toes that had so impressed Stanley Spencer. Having satisfied their curiosity, he left for a smaller island, Kandarva, sleeping on the deck of a cutter. On the island he was put up by the local chief, and dined on yam and turtle. He was even invited to play the island version of cricket – a more boisterous game than he was used to, with free fights replacing runs. After five days he returned to the capital, Suva, and fired off another ecstatic letter, this time to Denis Browne: ‘Denis! … it is mere heaven. One passes from Paradise to Paradise … Life is one long picnic … These people are nearer to earth and the joy of things than we snivelling city-dwellers.’ This letter suggested that he had become a real, rather than just a ‘neo’, pagan. He had lost, he claimed, all knowledge of art and literature, and much else that the world thought civilized, gaining in return a rich red-brown skin, a knowledge of how to mix tropical fruit cocktails, an ability to talk with all classes and conditions of man and an expanding repertoire of dirty jokes. ‘Am I richer or poorer? I don’t know.’ Ironically, it would be Browne who would bury Brooke in another island paradise within 15 months.

  But in the midst of all this richness, he was suffering from nostalgia for England. He told Jacques Raverat: ‘I wander, seeking peace … several times I’ve nearly found it: once, lately, in a Samoan village. But I had to come away from there in a hurry … and forgot to pack it. But I’ll have it yet. Fragments I have found, on various hills, or by certain seas … Oh, I shall return. The South seas are Paradise, but I prefer England.’ He was looking forward, or so he claimed, to returning to a home, marriage and work, and conversation with his friends. In a passage which, with hindsight, reeks of horrible poignancy, given our knowledge of the future fates of both he and Jacques, who was already stricken with sclerosis, Brooke looked forward to a future in which ‘I will have friends round me continually, all the days of my life, and in whatever lands I may be. So we shall laugh and eat and sing and go great journeys in boats and on foot and write plays and perform them and pass innumerable laws taking money from the rich … Won’t 1914 be fun?’

  He plunged into Fijian life – and death. At the beginning of December he accompanied the body of a Fijian princess to a neighbouring island for her funeral festivities after she died of pneumonia. A postcard to Cathleen reported the event – ‘Tonight I travelled 70 miles in an auxiliary cutter with the corpse of a Princess’ – and asked rhetorically: ‘Have you ever done that?’ Returning to Suva, he crossed the island accompanied by two faithful boys ‘to carry my bag and rug and guide me’. During the course of the expedition, he told Cathleen, the ‘boys’, who were about Brooke’s own age, became ‘my sworn and eternal friends’.

  One of them, Ambele … was six foot high, very broad and more perfectly made than any man or statue I have ever seen. His grin stretched from ear to ear. And he could carry me across rivers (when I was tired of swimming them, for we crossed vast rivers every mile or t
wo) for a hundred yards or so, as I should carry a box of matches. I think of bringing him back with me as a servant and bodyguard to England. He loved me because though I was far weaker than he, I was far braver. The Fijians are rather cowards. And on precipices I am peculiarly reckless. The boys saved me from rolling off to perdition about thirty times – and respected me for it – though thinking me insane. Would you marry me if I turned up with two vast cannibal servants black-skinned and perpetually laughing, all of us attired only in loin-cloths and red flowers in our hair? I think I should be irresistible.

  Brooke continued this condescension towards the islanders in a long letter to Violet Asquith. With this new and influential correspondent came a return of his desire to shock those whom he thought a touch prim and proper:

  It’s twenty years since they’ve eaten anybody, in this part of Fiji, and far more since they’ve done what I particularly and unreasonably detest – fastened the victim down, cut pieces off him one by one, and cooked and eaten them before his eyes. To witness one’s own transubstantiation into naked black man, that seems the last indignity. Consideration of the thoughts that pour through the mind of the ever-diminishing remnant of a man, as it sees its last limbs cooking, moves me deeply. I have been meditating a sonnet, as I sit here, surrounded by dusky faces and gleaming eyes: ‘Dear, they have poached the eyes you loved so well …’ I don’t know how it would go on. The fourth line would have to be ‘And all my turbulent lips are maitre-d’hotel …’

  Quite taken up by the fantasy, he continued:

  The limbs that erstwhile charmed your sight,

  Are now a savage’s delight;

  The ear that heard your whispered vow

  Is one of many entrees now;

  Broiled are the arms in which you clung

  And devilled is the angelic tongue; …

  And oh! my anguish as I see

  A Black man gnaw your favourite knee!

  Of the two eyes that were your ruin,

  One now observes the other stewing,

  My lips (the inconstancy of man!)

  Are yours no more. The legs that ran each

  dewy morn their love to wake,

  Are now a steak, are now a steak! …

  Beneath the gorgeous colour and exotic smells and sounds, Brooke dimly perceived the eventual fate of his new friends:

  They are a dying race. We gradually fill their lands with plantations and Indian coolies. The Hawaiians … have almost altogether gone, and their arts and music with them, and their islands are a replica of America. A cheerful thought, that all these places are to become indistinguishable from Denver and Birmingham and Stuttgart, and the people in dress and behaviour precisely like Herr Schmidt and Mr Robinson and Hiram O. Guggenheim … it’s impossible to describe how far nearer the Kingdom of Heaven – or the Garden of Eden – these good naked laughing people are than oneself or one’s friends. But I forgot. You are an anti-socialist, and I mustn’t say a word against our modern industrial system. I beg your pardon … I suppose you’re rushing from lunch party to lunch party, and dance to dance, and opera to political platform. Won’t you come and learn how to make a hibiscus wreath for your hair, and sail a canoe, and swim two minutes under water catching turtles, and dive forty feet into a waterfall, and climb a coco-nut palm? It’s more worth while.

  During the expedition Brooke cut his foot, and returned to Suva limping and with the wound turning septic. On 14 December he left Fiji on board a ship ironically called Niagara. The crossing to New Zealand was laboured, and he arrived in Auckland too late to catch the connecting ferry that sailed to his next scheduled port of call, Tahiti. He gave voice to his annoyance in a letter to Cathleen from the Grand Hotel: ‘Why precisely I’m here I don’t know. I seem to have missed a boat somewhere; and I can’t get on to Tahiti till the beginning of January: Damn. And I hear that a man got to Tahiti two months ahead of me, and found – and carried off – some Gauguin paintings on glass. Damn! Damn! Damn!’

  This reference is bizarre: there is no record of any Gauguins on glass being discovered by any visitor to Tahiti until 1917, two years after Brooke’s death, when ‘a man’ did indeed find and purchase just such an artefact. Still more strange, the man in question was another star-struck English writer in pursuit of Gauguin’s ideal of the simple, sensual life among the islands: W. Somerset Maugham. The writer, who had first come across Gauguin’s work in Paris and developed an obsession with the artist, was mulling over the roman-à-clef which became The Moon and Sixpence, and travelled to Tahiti in search of Gauguin ‘colour’. He got more than he bargained for, when, on a brief visit to the son of a man who had known the painter well, he saw the children of the house busily scraping paint from the glass panels of a rickety door. They had already ‘cleaned’ two of the panels and were just starting on the final one when interrupted by Maugham. On inspection, the panel proved to be one of the fabled ‘lost Gauguins’ that the painter had left scattered around the island: this one depicted Eve holding an apple. For the less than princely sum of $200 – the cost of a new door – Maugham persuaded his host to part with it, and so acquired an original Gauguin which hung in his writing room for the rest of his life, before he sold it in 1962 for $117,000.

  When Brooke visited Tahiti it was only ten years since Gauguin’s lonely, poverty-stricken death from syphilis; and he must have hoped that he could emulate him by living a passionate island idyll, and, if not actually stumble on a pot of gold in the shape of a lost masterpiece, at least imbibe some of the artist’s questing, uncompromising spirit. Before following that dream, he had to kick his heels in Auckland over Christmas. He was not best pleased, describing New Zealand as ‘a sort of Fabian England, very upper middle class and gentle and happy (after Canada), no poor and the government owning hotels and running charabancs. All the women smile and dress very badly, and nobody drinks.’ He visited the capital, Wellington, to consult a specialist about his poisoned foot, and caught up with English newspapers at the Wellington Club, where, for the first time, he saw his own Westminster Gazette articles in print, and jealously read adulatory notices for Cathleen’s appearance in a new play, Quality Street. Guilty as ever over the pleasures of the flesh, he told the actress: ‘New Zealand turns out to be in the midst of summer … I eat strawberries, large garden strawberries, every day; and it’s the middle of December! It feels curiously unnatural, perverse, like some frightful vice out of Havelock Ellis. I blush and eat secretively.’

  Less selfishly, he wrote indignantly to his mother about the bitter strike of Dublin transport workers, led by the fiery Labour leader Jim Larkin, asking her to send two guineas in his name to the strike fund. ‘I feel wild about Dublin,’ he wrote. ‘Of course the poor are always right against the rich … When The Times begins saying that the employers are in the wrong, they must be very unpardonably so and rotten indeed.’ But the practical effects of state socialism around him puzzled him, as he told the Ranee:

  The queer thing is … that they’ve got all the things in the Liberal or mild Fabian programme: – eight hour day (and less), bigger old age pensions, access to the land, minimum wage, insurance etc. etc. and yet it’s not Paradise. The same troubles exist in much the same form (except that there’s not much bad poverty). Cost of living is rising quicker than wages. There are the same troubles between unions and employers, and between rich and poor. I suppose there’ll be no peace anywhere till the rich are curbed altogether.

  The sleeping socialist in Brooke still stirred occasionally in its slumber. His rage against the rich – as witness his friendship with Eddie Marsh and the Asquiths – often did not survive his meeting flesh-and-blood members of the detested class. One such fleeting friendship was formed with Harold Ashworth, a Lancashire businessman, albeit of firm Fabian principles, whom he encountered on the ship that finally took him to Tahiti on 7 January. The meeting lingered on in Ashworth’s memory, and after Brooke’s death he wrote to the Ranee:

  many a time I would invoke his aid when my r
ather aggressive Radicalism brought the ‘Smoke-room’ men at me en masse. I never met so entirely likeable a chap, and when I could ‘get him going’ about his wanderings, or provoke him into discussions about literature, I was one walking ear! … I almost wept to know I could never again see that golden head and kindly smile – ‘Young Apollo’ I used to dub him in my mind, whilst the fresh wind tossed his hair, and his boyish eyes lit up with pleasure at some of my anecdotes of strange people and places … Your son was not merely a genius; what is perhaps more important, he had a charm that was literally like sunshine. To say that his manner is perfect is putting it quite inadequately … His memory is blessed by hundreds like me who were so fortunate as to meet him and were the better for that happy adventure.

  Although Ashworth sounds like the most gushing of admirers, Brooke evidently performed his fresh, boyish act – even to this tedious enforced companion – with ease and aplomb.

  Another, and possibly more congenial shipboard companion was the famous contralto Clara Butt. Dwarfed by the statuesque singer, Brooke reported to another formidable female – his mother – in some awe: ‘She’s over six foot high and must weigh sixteen stone and has a bass voice like a man’s.’

  In Tahiti, he installed himself in early February in Mataia, some 30 miles from the capital, Papeete. He described his new dwelling for the Ranee: ‘It is the coolest place I’ve struck in the South Seas … with a large veranda, the sea just in front, and the hills behind … there’s a little wooden pier out into the sea … with a dive into deep water. PS They call me “Purpure” here – it means “fair” in Tahitian – because I have fair hair.’