Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  On 11 June Brooke returned in triumph to London and his homecoming party, which was preceded by a performance of the ballets Les Papillons and Petrouchka given in the presence of the dowager Queen Alexandra, Shaw, George Moore and other Edwardian luminaries. The late-night supper party that followed at Raymond Buildings almost overwhelmed Mrs Elgy’s legendary catering ability: the guests were a veritable roll-call of Eddie’s far-flung network of the artistic great and good, including the playwright, actor and producer Harley Granville-Barker; the painters Duncan Grant and Mark Gertler; the future politician Duff Cooper; Denis Browne, Maurice Browne and his wife Ellen van Volkenburg; the critic Desmond MacCarthy and his wife Lillah; Basil Dean, who would run ENSA in the Second World War; Cathleen Nesbitt and her former lover Henry Ainley; the novelist Hugh Walpole; and the New Numbers poets Wilfrid Gibson, John Drinkwater and Lascelles Abercrombie. Apart from Cathleen, Lillah MacCarthy and Ellen van Volkenburg, it was an overwhelmingly male gathering. The survivors gathered at dawn under the plane-trees of Gray’s Inn Fields to see Brooke perform a Hawaiian siva-siva dance.

  One friend whom Brooke had neglected to visit during the days following his return was Frances Cornford. The reason was that Ka Cox was staying with her to nurse her through an illness. But he did maintain contact by letter, defending himself from charges of misogyny inspired by his anti-feminist tirade from San Francisco. He did not hate women, Brooke explained; or at least, he did no longer, though there had been a time when he had ‘rather despised them’ for being ‘fourthrate men’. ‘But lately I’ve cheered up,’ he added encouragingly. ‘Noticing what supreme women they make … think of Gwen. Think of Ka (all her glory womanish, and what weakness she had feminist).’

  Despite all the condescending praise, he did all he could to avoid Ka in person, knowing that she still, vestal virgin-like, tended the torch she continued to carry for him. When conscience at last compelled him to a strained meeting in a London teashop, he was full of foreboding: ‘I know you’re very sensible and all that, but I fear the feeling that the friendlier we got the more disturbing it’d be. It would put such a constraint, a bloody constraint on us … Do realize it, and, if you are likely to be upset by me, honestly don’t arrange a meeting. There’s trouble enough in the world.’

  In the event, the awkward occasion passed off peacefully enough, although both parties wrote to the other expressing anxiety after the event. Their relationship, it seems, was one of those that could never end, this side of the grave.

  This distasteful duty out of the way, Brooke resumed his social round, attending the première of Stravinsky’s ballet Le Rossignol on 18 June and deepening his acquaintance with Lascelles Abercrombie, the main moving spirit, together with Gibson, in the New Numbers venture. He was taken by his fellow-poet’s odd looks, described by Maurice Browne as ‘small, dark, shy … with spectacles … greasy-looking hair … and a queer little green hat which tipped up preposterously in front’. Abercrombie, who was to grow close to Brooke in the last months of his life and would write a fervent obituary notice in his memory before learning that he was numbered among his hero’s heirs, hit it off so well with Brooke at this meeting that Brooke gave up his bed at Raymond Buildings for the night – and slept on the sofa instead. He told Ka: ‘I think he’s very remarkable … he laughs very well.’

  Two days later he and Cathleen visited their former haunt in the Chilterns, the Pink and Lily pub. They were joined by Eddie, and two of Brooke’s oldest friends, Dudley Ward and Ben Keeling. Cathleen and the two long-time Fabians had to leave the party early – she to play the title role in a new production, J. M. Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. Afterwards, Brooke told her, he and Eddie ‘walked by those glorious woods to Wendover (you know the Walk from Wendover, my dear) and drank much beer there, and ate, and started back, and slept in the heather, and walked on through arcades of mysterious beechen gloom and picked flowers and told stories and got back to roast beef and more beer and poems. I wish you had been there.’

  Relations between Brooke and the woman he had swooned over so ecstatically the previous year were definitely cooler than before he had left England. And Cathleen was too perceptive not to notice the change. Long after Brooke’s death she recalled that:

  like all artists who have a neurotic strain he would always have needed [another woman]. I knew in the South Seas that he’d had a lovely girl there, and somewhere in Canada I always suspected there was a red-haired girl that he’d had an affair with … [a reference to the Marchesa Capponi]. When he wrote I could sort of read between the lines … I felt if I were married to him … I would probably suffer a great deal, because I thought there was no chance of his ever being a one woman man.

  Late in June Brooke crossed the country on his first ever visit to the remote area on the Gloucestershire–Herefordshire border where the nest of poets who published New Numbers had rented their country cottages. He stayed for two days with Wilfrid Gibson and his wife Geraldine at the Old Nailshop in the hamlet of Greenway near Ledbury. The first two editions of the magazine, containing the best of Brooke’s South Sea poems, had already appeared, and a third was in the production process, with Abercrombie’s wife Catherine in charge of the subscriptions, her husband packing the publication into parcels and ‘Wibson’ himself licking the stamps – a process that gave him a mild dose of glue poisoning. Although his visit was brief, Brooke was delighted by the peaceful pastoral ambience in which his fellow-poets were steeping themselves. He described Abercrombie’s Gallows Cottage to Russell Loines as ‘the most beautiful you can imagine; black-beamed and rose-covered. And a porch where one drinks great mugs of cider and looks at fields of poppies in the corn. A life that makes London a very foolish affair.’

  But despite this disdain for the metropolis, an eager Brooke was back in London by 26 June for a reunion of the Apostles at the Connaught Rooms. This was his last meeting with so many of the figures who had loomed large in his past life before the war intruded to drive a definitive wedge between the Cambridge–Bloomsbury ethos and Brooke’s new, hard-edged views. His death, of course, permanently precluded any chance of subsequently healing the breach. Among the old friends soon to be enemies were several who would adopt a pacifist position in the whirlwind of war that was about to break over Europe: G. E. Moore, Gerald Shove, Harry Norton, James Strachey and Maynard Keynes. Perhaps significantly, it was not one of these, but his tutor at King’s, Jack Sheppard, whom Brooke brought back after the meeting to stay the night at Raymond Buildings.

  The following day Eddie at last engineered a meeting that Brooke had been urging upon him for weeks. He introduced Brooke to the enfant terrible of the English novel, D. H. Lawrence, who, together with his German wife Frieda, lunched with Eddie and Brooke at the Moulin d’Or and then visited an art exhibition in Holland Park. The two writers, with nothing in common save a Midlands birth, unexpectedly hit it off, and were observed in lively conversation punctuated by roars of laughter. The next day, 28 June, was not a significant one in Brooke’s calendar; but during it the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was shot dead in Sarajevo by a young Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. The event passed almost unnoticed, but the slow-burning fuses that it ignited among the allied European powers would blow the old order away before the summer was out.

  Brooke was as yet too busy with his resumed London summer season of socializing to notice the distant rumbles of the gathering storm. There was dinner with the gifted young sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was likewise destined to die in the second year of the coming conflict. There was supper with the detested Lady Ottoline Morrell, soon to be one of the leaders of the pacifist faction. And there was a second poetry reading at Monro’s Poetry Bookshop.

  This event was to be much more successful than Brooke’s sparsely attended session of the year before. Now, with New Numbers circulating, he was becoming a shining star in the poetic, as well as the social firmament. H. K. Sabin, a self-taught poet and printer, who witnes
sed the occasion, describes Brooke as ‘beautiful as an annunciating angel’, seated on the corner of a table, with a leg nonchalantly swinging, as he ‘listened to the admirers who crowded round him’. Half a dozen had heard him in 1913, but this time a full house of up to 70 souls listened in rapt attention as Brooke read from his own poems. A poet named Eric Gillett, who was living above the bookshop at the time, describes Brooke fighting a heavy cold as he prepared for the reading: ‘He came in and gave me his hand and told me he dreaded the thought of having to perform. After he had read a line or two in a low voice an old lady in the front row who carried an ear trumpet exploded “Speak up, young man!”’

  Another witness who was less than enthralled by Brooke’s questionable talent as a public reader was Amy Lowell, whom he had met briefly in Boston. She deplored the ‘atmosphere of overwhelming sentimentality’ in which ‘Mr Rupert Brooke whispered his poems. To himself, it seemed as nobody else could hear him. It was all artificial and precious. One longed to shout, to chuck up one’s hat in the street when one got outside.’ Despite this comparative failure to work his customary magic, Brooke was soon back in the swing of London society. The poetry reading was followed by a theatrical supper party at the Savoy in the company of J. M. Barrie, Granville-Barker and Gerald du Maurier. Eddie’s efforts to promote his treasured protégé knew few bounds.

  A more reluctant and late-flowering literary lion than Brooke – indeed, hardly a lion at all, more of a lamb – was the wealthy young poet Siegfried Sassoon. Despite his diffidence about his own literary talent, Sassoon, who had been at Queen’s College, Cambridge (he was a year older than Brooke) but had never met the shining star of King’s, had taken roost under Eddie’s capacious wings in the hope of promoting his own literary hopes. He too had come to live in Raymond Buildings – though on a different staircase to Eddie, who found the young man’s intense shyness a barrier to giving his career his customary leg-up. But Sassoon’s modesty could not prevent an understandable jealousy of what must have seemed to him the ease of Brooke’s literary and social success. As a result, his attitude towards him, he confessed later, was one of ‘admiring antagonism’. It was with mixed feelings, then, that Sassoon received a message from Eddie on 8 July inviting him to breakfast the next day to meet Brooke. He explained subsequently:

  The unromantic and provocative character of Brooke’s 1911 volume had produced a vividly disturbing effect on my mind. Slow to recognise its abundant graces, I was prevented – by my prejudice against what I designated ‘modern ugliness’ – from perceiving his lovely and never prettified work as it really was … My unagile intellect was confused by his metaphysical cleverness. Interested though I was by the prospect of meeting the much-discussed young poet, I was unprepared to find him more than moderately likeable. Eddie’s adoring enthusiasm had put me somehow on the defensive.

  When they met over bacon and kidneys the following morning, Sassoon – at this time a decided but rather repressed homosexual – could not suppress an involuntary attraction for his fellow-poet, rhapsodizing about his ‘living blue’ eyes, his sunburned complexion and bare feet. Ignoring the presence around the breakfast table of the garrulous poet W. H. Davies and the taciturn painter Paul Nash, the two Cambridge contemporaries made polite literary conversation. Rupert’s natural beauty was enhanced on this occasion by his poetic uniform of open-necked blue shirt, flannel trousers and unbrushed hair, which Sassoon prissily described as ‘just a shade longer than it need have been’.

  When Eddie had left for work at the Admiralty and the other two guests had departed, Brooke and Sassoon found themselves alone. Sassoon takes up the tale:

  We agreed that Davies was an excellent poet and a most likeable man. I then asked him a few clumsy questions about his travels. His replies were reserved and unilluminating. One fragment of our talk which I clearly remember was – as such recoveries often are – wholly to my disadvantage. ‘What were the white people like in the places you stayed at in the tropics?’ I had asked … ‘Some of them,’ he said, were rather like composite characters out of Conrad and Kipling. Hoping it would go down well, I made a disparaging remark about Kipling’s poetry being terribly tub-thumping stuff. ‘But not always, surely,’ he answered; and then let me off easily by adding, ‘I used to think rather the same myself until Eddie made me read “Cities and Thrones and Powers”. There aren’t many better modern poems than that, you know.’

  ‘I was conscious that his even-toned voice was tolerant rather than communicative …’ Sassoon added. ‘He may have been shy, but I am afraid he was also a little bored with me. I could only admit that I had never read it.’ On this stilted and dispiriting note, the only meeting between two of the Great War’s most prominent poets ended.

  In spite of this unfortunate encounter, Sassoon kept the memory of Brooke burning bright. His voice, he remembered after Brooke’s death, had:

  almost meditative deliberation. His movements, too, so restful, so controlled, and so unaffected. But beyond this was my assured perception that I was in the presence of one on whom had been conferred all the invisible attributes of a poet. To this his radiant good looks seemed subsidiary. Here, I might well have thought – had my divinations been expressible – was a being singled out for some transplendent performance, some enshrined achievement …

  When he left, after half an hour’s desultory talk, Sassoon, sensitive and thin-skinned, imagined Brooke heaving a sigh of relief as he shut the front door on him, and got back to ‘being his unimpeded self’.

  The following day, 10 July, Brooke and Eddie dined with Henry James at his London home in Carlyle Mansions, and later received Stanley Spencer, who stayed the night on the sofa at Raymond Buildings. The next day Brooke left for Cambridge, and a meeting with another elderly admirer, A. C. Benson, who described him as ‘more mature’. By 15 July he was back in London, and dining at Downing Street with Eddie and the Asquiths. Denis Browne performed on the piano and a King’s contemporary, Steuart Wilson, sang accompaniments. By 24 July the international implications of the shots at Sarajevo almost a month before were becoming apparent: the previous day Austria had sent Serbia a harsh ultimatum, demanding not only the arrest of all those responsible for the assassination, and the suppression of anti-Austrian agitation, but the entry of Austrian officials into Serbia to supervise the suppression and the investigation of the crime. Not for the last time in the twentieth century, the Serbs rejected this interference in their internal affairs, and the interlocking alliances of Europe found themselves, via the terrible logic of military and diplomatic agreement, shut into a train speeding towards disaster. An agitated Eddie, who was privy to the unfolding catastrophe in the corridors of Whitehall wrote ‘War Clouds’ in large letters across his engagements diary.

  That night, forgetting the tension, he took Brooke out to dine in the grand company of the Duchess of Leeds. Brooke found himself seated between two other aristocratic ladies, Lady Gwendoline Osborne and the young Lady Eileen Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of Wellington and a friend of Violet Asquith, with whom she had attended finishing school in Germany. Brooke and Lady Eileen, a round-faced, heavily built young woman, not dissimilar to Ka Cox in her physical appearance, felt an immediate attraction to each other. The young lady’s aristocratic antecedents were clearly one element in the attraction. Who could resist a woman whose London home, the grand Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner, had been the residence of her famous ancestor, the ‘Iron Duke’, when it had borne the postal address ‘Number One, London’?

  After dinner with the Duchess of Leeds, the company moved on to Hyde Park Gardens, and the home of a most unusual soldier, General Sir Ian Hamilton, who combined literary ability and interest with a keen intelligence, great bravery and military irresolution. By yet another of those quirks of fate that wound through Brooke’s life, this man would become his Commander-in-Chief during his final military expedition within nine months. After watching Hamilton’s daughter, Marjorie, dance, Brooke, Eddie and Denis Browne –
the last soon also to come under Hamilton’s command – escorted Lady Eileen round the corner to her home in a four-wheeled carriage.

  Hypocritically, Brooke was still denouncing the ‘corruption’ of London life in letters to the Raverats: ‘the atmosphere is so bloody nowadays that only the stupid are fairly untouched, the sensitive wither like a bug-befouled leaf … Soho makes me sick.’ It is with a sinking heart that the reader turns to the letters he was now writing to Cathleen: as with those to Noel and Ka, they are full of dire warnings against the corruption of the city and the immorality of the theatre, and dismiss any suggestion that Cathleen can look after herself. In fact, there are all the unmistakable signs that Brooke is tiring of his ‘goddess’ and looking for a way to dump her. When he met Lady Eileen – well-born, sophisticated, sexually experienced – the perfect excuse hove into view.

  After telling Cathleen that she is ‘mad’ to trust the world and the people in it, he added: ‘My dear, if you put cut flowers in red ink for water, the blossom goes red, and men are even more coloured and made by their surroundings than flowers, and women even more than men.’ Attacking her chosen profession, he blurted out: ‘I’d better state, before going further, that as a matter of fact I loathe women acting in public.’