by Nigel Jones
As this letter sadly shows, once the spell of the islands had worn off, the old, mad Brooke returned, with all his half-baked obsessions and prejudices intact. Addressing the Cornfords’ infant daughter, he begged her: ‘Helena, do not, as you grow older, become a feminist: become, I pray you, a woman.’
He again stayed with the hospitable Professor Wells and his family, who had accumulated a small mountain of mail for him, including a much-dreaded reply from Ka to his farewell letter, and a batch of unwontedly long letters from Noel, to whom he had last written affectionately from the Sierra on his way to Honolulu. Touched by this, Noel responded with several chatty reports on her doings. Wanting to be alone before dealing with his private correspondence, Brooke took the letters with him to his next American port of call, the Grand Canyon. His parting words to Wells were gloomy: ‘We shall never learn to live decently together until it’s too late.’
On 23 April he caught the train for Arizona. He had exactly one year left to live. Later on that ill-omened day, sitting on the rim of the vast canyon, he told the Marchesa Capponi that the canyon was ‘very large and untidy, like my soul. But unlike my soul, it has peace in it.’ He was near the border with Mexico, where the civil war that had followed the recent revolution was grumbling on – he thought briefly of crossing the border to flirt with danger, but turned north instead. There was troubling news, too, from Ulster, where the militant Protestants were threatening war rather than submit to Irish Home Rule. Brooke wrote lightly to Eddie: ‘I do hope you’re going to let the Orangemen slit all the priests’ throats first; and then shoot them. I’ll enlist on either side, any day.’ It was increasingly evident from this ludicrous prattle that Brooke had acquired little wisdom during his sojourn in the islands, but, as he had written in the last line of ‘Tiare Tahiti’: ‘There’s little comfort in the wise.’ To Hilton Young, a Cambridge friend, he wrote: ‘I’m only coming back to put a bullet in [the Ulster Protestant leader] Sir Edward Carson and another in Mr Murphy, who smashed the Dublin strike. Then I shall bid farewell to plutocratic dirty England: and back to the lagoons.’
Cathleen was primed for his return: he told her that he planned to arrive back in London on 15 June, but swore her to secrecy:
It’s very silly. But don’t tell anybody the exact day I’m coming back. It’s my fancy to blow in on them unexpected – just to wander into Raymond Buildings and hear Eddie squeak ‘Oh, my dear, I thought you were in Tahiti!’ It’s awfly silly and romantic, but the thought does give me the keenest and most exquisite pleasure. Don’t give away one of the first poets in England – but there is in him still a very very small portion that’s just a little childish.
He was equally light and silly in his reply to Noel. Apparently cured of his sickly love for her, his letter chit-chatted about such vital subjects as the ‘mat-like’ and ‘mouse-coloured’ hair that had grown over his arms during his time in the islands. He ended, coolly, but revealingly:
Noel, I am sick of immensity, I’ve seen the biggest buildings in the world, & the biggest lake in the world & the biggest volcano in the world & the biggest river in the world & the biggest canyon in the world & the biggest – I forget the rest. They are not interesting, or not for long. I desire small hedges & medium sized people & average intellects & tiny hills & villages and a little peace. I shall come back to England – I intend to live the rest of my life with my mother who is the only person I really like. But I shall take occasional holidays in London or Cambridge; so I may run across you again. Be good. Thank you for writing. With love Rupert.
It was his last letter to her.
On 29 April he arrived in Chicago, and took a room at the Auditorium Hotel in Michigan Avenue. This was next door to the city’s Fine Arts building, which housed the recently opened Little Theater, a brave venture committed to putting on a mixture of classical and modern drama. Brooke’s contact there was the theatre’s founder, Maurice Browne, whose sister was married to Harold Monro who ran the Poetry Bookshop in London. Brooke felt an immediate rapport with Browne and his wife, the actress Ellen van Volkenburg. Browne knew roughly what to expect, having seen a photograph of Brooke during a trip to London the previous year. The image had bowled him over: ‘The beauty of the man – I repeat the abysmal mythopoeic phrase: the beauty of the man – astounded me.’ When Brooke breezed in in the flesh to greet Browne, his wife and his mother-in-law, Browne was not disappointed: ‘Five minutes later the four of us were moving arm in arm down Michigan Avenue to drink beer. My memory of the next ten days is a riotous blur of all-night talks, club sandwiches, dawns over Lake Michigan and innumerable “steins”.’
Brooke seemed particularly charmed by Browne’s wife, and gave her several chains of South Sea shells and a copy of Belloc’s beloved The Four Men. In a fond memoir of Brooke published in 1927, Browne recalled: ‘The three of us would sit up night after night in our studio, talking, singing folk songs, reading poetry, surging across the tiny room like happy, healthy children. On three successive mornings we saw the sun rise.’
One of Brooke’s appreciative audience, summoned by Browne to hear the glamorous visitor read his newly composed poems, was a lawyer, Arthur Davison Ficke, who, according to Browne: ‘Came, saw, and fell.’ This seems to be no more than the truth, judging by an elegy for Brooke that Ficke penned and published after his death. In it, he describes Brooke’s last night in Chicago, when:
High up above the city’s giant roar
We sat around you on the studio floor
And you … like a boy
Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.
Brooke’s winning ways had evidently made the transatlantic transition. If these Chicago nights sound like a hippie’s memoirs, half a century early, it is still possible to be beguiled by their charm – and their all-too-evident innocence.
In contrast to most observers who heard him, Browne piously maintains that Brooke was an excellent reader of poetry: ‘much better of course than the average professional reader or actor … quietly and shyly, with little tone-variation … emphasising rhyme and rhythm: reading, in fact, as a good lyric poet always reads good lyric poetry, taking care of the sound and letting the sense take care of itself’. He draws a vivid portrait of Brooke in full flight: ‘sitting on the floor – his favourite position – with his knees hunched up, his arms around them, and his back against a wardrobe, blushing, with unfeigned pleasure, not embarrassment – when any of us became particularly inarticulate over some special loveliness’.
As ever, Brooke played the modest conqueror, taking the tribute of his awed subjects as his rightful due, but being careful not to make an un-English fuss about it: ‘Rupert Brooke is walking down Michigan Avenue,’ noted Browne, ‘his right hand swinging his hat – some broad-brimmed, high-crowned, ridiculous feather-weight, plaited from South Sea straw, of which he was inordinately vain – his long legs striding carelessly and freely, his eyes fixed straight ahead, utterly unconscious of people and things, for he’s talking, talking, as only he can talk.’
Brooke was a star before his time:
Every woman who passes – and every other man – stops, turns round to look at that lithe and radiant figure. The wind, the dirty Chicago wind, is blowing Chicago dust and Illinois Central cinders through his hair – longish, wavy, the colour of his skin: a sort of bleached gold, both of them, from the sun of his lagoons, where day after day and month after month he had lived in a loin-cloth, spearing fish, writing poetry, making love.
Another American photographer, Eugene Hutchinson, followed his compatriot Sherril Schell in taking a set of pictures of Brooke, and was equally impressed:
I found myself confronted by an unbelievably beautiful young man. There was nothing effeminate about that beauty. He was man-size and masculine, from his rough tweeds to his thick-soled English boots. He gave me the impression of being water-loving and well washed. Perhaps this was due to the freshness of his sun-tanned face and the odd smoothness of his skin, a smoothness you see m
ore in women than in men … he seemed like a Norse myth in modern clothes – yet there was no vanity in the man.
Beneath this noble exterior, all the old rancid obsessions were bubbling and stewing. They came to the surface with a virulence that must have shocked these naive new friends during a discussion, on the empty stage of the Little Theater, of the artistic temperament: was it male or female? Brooke, who had been languidly leaning against a hollow property column, suddenly flared into life: ‘He startled us by the vigour and decision with which he stated that, notwithstanding Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, this mixture of the sexes was all wrong,’ a witness remembered. ‘Male was male and female female, and any intermingling of the two was calamitous. In other words, this Shelley-like youth with his hyper-sensitive face and his girlish smoothness of skin and his emotional blue eyes was trying to tell us that manliness in men was the one hope of the world.’
With this parting shot, Brooke left Chicago, to arrive in Washington DC on 5 May. Here, by prearrangement, he met up again with the Marchesa Capponi, who showed him the sights of the American capital, in between bouts of flirtation that may have amounted to full-blown lovemaking. But he left the Marchesa in no doubt as to the underlying contempt in which he held her sex. After she had left Lake Louise following their encounter the previous year, he claimed, he had been disconsolately mooching around the local hills when he encountered a frightened group of seven young girls from his hotel. They had seen a bear, they told him, and wanted his protection on the dangerous walk back. He refused, allegedly telling them: ‘I want to be alone. There are already too many females in the world. Go. And I hope you meet the bear.’ In a macabre postscript Brooke told the Marchesa that he had not noticed any of the seven back in the hotel that night.
As ever, while in Washington he gravitated to the portals of the powerful. He dined with Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British Ambassador and author of the patriotic hymn ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’. Having quaffed too deeply of the Embassy’s champagne, he returned, slightly tipsy, to his hotel: ‘I got excited … and had to have a bath and dance many obscene dances, in lonely nakedness, up and down my room, to get sober,’ he confessed to Cathleen.
He brought forward the date of his return by a week, in order to travel with the Brownes, who were going to England on the liner Philadelphia, reaching Plymouth on Friday 5 June. Writing to tell the Brownes the news on 16 May, he added: ‘I am infinitely homesick. I have made up a litany of all the places I know on the line between Plymouth and London – and there are many. I shall sing it, rather loudly, all that journey. So perhaps you’d better engage a separate compartment. What bleedin’ fun!’ He had received the results of his photographic session with Eugene Hutchinson, and did not much like what he saw: ‘Is that the mouth that touched Tahitian lips, and drained the topless tankards of Berlin?’ he enquired rhetorically. ‘No, no, I have not changed so much – I return the infamy with a jeer.’
On 18 May he reached Boston – one of his first destinations after arriving in America one year before. He revisited Yale and made a round of farewells, including a stop-over on Staten Island to repay his debt to Russell Loines. He had told Eddie that his long sabbatical had achieved its objective in making him ‘hard, quite hard’. This armour-plating was now used against Cathleen, who, predictably, was annoying him with her professional success. Brooke disguised his disapproval by pretending to disapprove of her choice of plays – a farce was beneath her, he felt. But the truth was, he would not countenance a woman with a life of her own. His petulance came out in a worrying echo of his tones towards Noel: ‘You devil, you devil … you, the one lovely and wise person among all those painted shades … Why did I go away and leave you a year?’ She was, he told Cathleen, at once a goddess and ‘the bloodiest fool that ever plagued mortal poet … Forgive my anxiousness about you. It’s partly because I’m lonely … I have staked very much on you, Cathleen.’ Reading between the lines, it is clear that the root cause of his concern was not Cathleen’s welfare, but his own. Again the green-eyed monster raised its ugly head:
By God, London’s a bad place. I know it. It’s full of lust, and of hard mouths, and empty, empty eyes, and of din and glare … so little of beauty is left clean and standing by this ruinous age, and I have seen so many things crumble … I will not let you fade. If ever you wish to ‘bedim the lovely flame in you’ I will kill you, and myself too, before it can happen. What do I care for you, when there’s Beauty to fight for.
Lest Cathleen be unduly alarmed by his anti-feminist raving, he added, in a rare moment of honest clarity: ‘This is rant.’ But he did not retract a word of it.
He spent his last five days in the New World in the McAlpin Hotel in New York’s Greeley Square. He boarded the Philadelphia, still clutching his flamboyant straw hat. He also held a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece Sons and Lovers that Eddie had sent him for shipboard reading. He found the novel ‘vivid – and hectic’ and pronounced Lawrence ‘a big man’. The voyage home passed merrily enough in the company of the Brownes. Ellen van Volkenburg kept a journal on the journey which records sudden snapshots of Brooke with a face ‘as red as the curtains in the staterooms’ after falling asleep in their deck-chairs, and notes that ‘Mr Brooke eats ice cream with the air of a martyr and the look of a wicked baby’. The journal also records that: ‘Mr Brooke is having sighs and eyes cast at him and even a married woman took a snapshot of him today because he has “such a noble head”. A young girl two tables down from us gazes at him, awestruck, beautifully melancholy. When I told him of her adoration he remarked “How dull”.’
Brooke was used to hero-worship; he had overeaten of the treacle of love, and it had made him sicker than any sea.
Bored by all the attention, he and the Brownes spent most of the time together on the deck:
facing the stern with our backs haughtily turned to the rest of our fellow passengers who wandered past and eyed Mr Brooke with elaborate carelessness. He was in fine form, telling stories of the great and the near great … with just the slightest touch of frosty snobbishness. I grew so interested in watching him that sometimes I forgot to listen. When he finished a story he would set his eyes ahead until the queer little cast came in one of them, run his fingers through his hair with ferocious energy, pause, grasp his nose between his thumb and forefinger, tweak it gently two or three times (you know, that ‘quirky’ way of his), stop, pull his Jaeger blanket high around his head (leaving none of it to protect his legs), and start on some fresh recollection.
On Friday 5 June they made landfall at Plymouth. Their first intimation of England was the strong smell of lush, new-mown Devon hay, wafting out across the sea: ‘Mr Brooke is leaning over the taffrail sniffing ecstatically.’ The news that greeted them in the port was that during their voyage across, another Atlantic liner, the Empress of Ireland, had gone down in the St Lawrence Seaway with severe loss of life. Also sent to the bottom on that same ship, by a strange twist of fate, was a flimsy little letter to Brooke from Taatamata. Even more extraordinarily, it would come to the surface in a year and somehow find its way to Brooke. By then, of course, it was too late for him to react to its contents – which hinted, its meaning garbled by the Tahitian beauty’s emotions and exotic Franglais – that Brooke was to become a father. He had not only left his heart behind in the South Seas, but his genes too.
25
* * *
‘If Armageddon’s On’
* * *
Brooke had clearly thought better of his original plan to arrive in London unannounced: now he made very sure that there would be a welcoming committee to receive him, organized, of course, by the adoring Eddie, to whom he had sent a flurry of telegrams from New York and the ship giving the exact time of his arrival. But then, as now, it seems that English trains could be relied on only for their unreliability and, instead of the scheduled midnight, it was 2.45 a.m. on the morning of 6 June that his train rolled into London. In spite of the hour Eddie, Cathleen and Denis Browne
were on the platform to greet him and take the sun-burned hero, radiant as ever, with his famous hair sun-bleached, back to Eddie’s flat and one of Mrs Elgy’s cold suppers. They talked until dawn, and then Brooke caught another train to pay his filial dues to the Ranee in Rugby.
His days in his native town were mainly taken up by the elaborate planning of a formal welcome-back dinner party which he had left Eddie to organize. Letters and postcards flew between Rugby and London in which Brooke requested that Eddie get hold of as many ‘poets, actresses and lovely people’ as he could. In an afterthought, he also asked for ‘another gentleman’ to balance the artists and actors, whom he said he found ‘tiresome’ as a group. There was another letter, in more flirtatious vein, to the Marchesa Capponi, which strongly suggests that their meeting in Washington had ended up in bed. ‘You gave me great quiet and peace,’ Brooke told the merry widow. ‘You are very good to me.’
On his way to London he dropped in to greet the Raverats, who were still at Manor Farm, outside Cambridge. He found his friends entertaining a most distinguished guest: none other than the French novelist André Gide, whom they had met the previous March in Florence. The apostle of homosexual liberation had immediately fallen under the intellectual influence of his homophobic compatriot Jacques, and an enduring friendship was born. Piquantly, Gide was to play a prominent part in another aspect of Brooke’s life – albeit posthumously – when he fathered a daughter by Elisabeth van Rysselberghe in 1923. Ironically, Brooke himself was still seeing Elisabeth in the weeks after his return to England. She had enrolled at the Royal Horticultural College, and they met for lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand. Much to Elisabeth’s dismay, she found her lover’s ardour had cooled, and she never achieved her ambition of bearing a child by Brooke.
