by Nigel Jones
Discreet as ever, Dudley approached this delicate mission with great caution, using second and third parties as his agents. He waited until the Ranee died in 1930 before broaching the matter with contacts who knew or lived in Tahiti. Via Viscount Hastings, a sometime Tahitian landowner, an approach was made to the film producer Norman Hall, who had got to know the islands while making Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton. Hall was able to confirm that Taatamata was still alive (she had erroneously been reported to have fallen victim to the epidemic of Spanish flu that swept the island in 1918). Hall apparently also discovered that Taatamata had indeed borne Brooke a child, a daughter named Arlice Raputo, who spent her life in the islands and is said to have died, childless, in or about 1990. Taatamata, who was last reported alive in the early 1930s, apparently ended her days in Moorea.
Whispers of scandal followed Brooke even in death. In 1947 Maurice Browne, who worshipped his friend’s memory and staged an unsuccessful production of Lithuania at his Little Theater in Chicago in 1915 after Brooke died, wrote to Eddie to complain of rumours circulating in the USA that the cause of Brooke’s death had been syphilis of homosexual origin. A cautious Eddie, not wishing to be drawn into such gossip, passed the letter on to the staunchly heterosexual Geoffrey Keynes, who by then had long usurped his position as Brooke’s literary executor. Keynes quashed the suggestion, as he did any idea that Brooke was not a straight-batting heterosexual all his life.
Eddie continued to act as a patron of the arts and artists until he was bombed out of Raymond Buildings in the Second World War. The main occupation of his days after he retired from the civil service was as copy-editor, unpaid, to the copious writings of his old master, Winston Churchill. At tense moments of the war they would exchange letters arguing about the placing of commas. Eddie Marsh died in 1953.
Justin Brooke, the mentor of Brooke’s entry to the world of the theatre, also succumbed to nervous trouble, broke with his wealthy tea-producing family, but struck out on his own, made a successful second marriage and became a prosperous and socially minded fruit farmer in East Anglia at the height of the agricultural depression in the 1930s. A keen attender at Bedales reunions and camps into his seventies, he preserved, in his unintellectual way, the optimism and youthful zest of the Neo-Pagans for longer than anyone. A cheerful libertine, he said of Ward’s and Keynes’s fears that Brooke would be publicly perceived as the same if his letters were published in full: ‘So he was!’ Despite his incapacity for close and deep friendship, he is one of the most attractive of the figures in Brooke’s charmed circle.
Frances and Francis Cornford were able to do what Brooke had asked several of his friends to – name a son after him. Their boy, Rupert John Cornford, disappointed them in several ways – not least by never using the first of his forenames. In his own way as brilliant a Cambridge star as Brooke had been, John Cornford espoused communism and poetry, and was the first Briton to die in the Spanish Civil War, aged 21. His heartbroken mother, who died in 1960, continued the family’s close links with Cambridge. Of all her copious poetry, the only lines remembered today, apart from the epigram on Brooke that she so vehemently rejected, are:
O fat white woman whom nobody loves
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves …
Missing so much and so much?
Jacques Raverat, like Brooke, succumbed prematurely to disease – in his case the undiagnosed multiple sclerosis that had threatened his delicate balance since his early Cambridge days. The cause of his ailment was only discovered when he tried to enlist for both Britain and his native France in the war. After the diagnosis, his collapse was rapid, and a year after Brooke’s death he was in a wheelchair. Despite this adversity he fathered two children by Gwen, continued to paint and corresponded feverishly, notably with André Gide and Virginia Woolf. With the latter he effected a reconciliation between the Neo-Pagan and Bloomsbury spirits before his death on 7 March 1925. His widow contrasted his end unfavourably with Brooke’s: ‘Jacques wouldn’t have gone and died like Rupert,’ Gwen wrote of his long and savage struggle against his malady. ‘And yet, somehow life has seemed duller since Rupert died.’ Gwen came back to Cambridge from France after Jacques died, and resumed her successful career as a woodcut artist. She published a best-selling family memoir of the Darwins and dons in Cambridge, Period Piece, in 1952, and died by her own hand five years later, aged 72. In a letter to Virginia she wrote an epitaph for the Neo-Pagans:
… anyhow, it’s all over long ago; it died in 1914 I should think – though it was sick before – Neo-Pagans, where are they? Here’s Jacques and me very old in Vence, and Ka so pathetic and lost in Cornwall; and do the Oliviers exist or not? Frances I believe carries on the tradition in the fields of Cambridge – at least as far as neo-paganism can be combined with evangelical Christianity … and all the others are dead, or have quarrelled or gone mad or are making a lot of money in business. It doesn’t seem to have been a really successful religion, although it was very good fun while it lasted.
Of Brooke’s oldest friends, one, Geoffrey Keynes, married yet another Darwin, Margaret, and fulfilled his destiny as a successful surgeon, pioneering radical surgery for breast cancer, and working for the Army’s medical services in both world wars. He was knighted for his work. Never as brilliant nor as unconventional as his elder brother Maynard, Geoffrey was nevertheless an honourable, decent man, who died full of years and honours, the patriarch of an impressive family dynasty, as late as 1982. His habitual honesty deserted him in only one particular: when it came to telling the truth about Brooke, whom he idolized to his dying day. ‘Rupert was quite the most wonderful person I have ever known,’ he told a biographer of Brooke’s circle, Paul Delany, towards the end of his long life. Geoffrey so wished to believe in his own mental portrait of Brooke, so bound him up with his own golden youth, that he was prepared to suppress the truth about him; and as long as he lived he was in an excellent position to do so.
Keynes could never conceal his furious jealousy that it was Eddie Marsh – compared with himself, a relative newcomer in Brooke’s life – who had been clearly named by Brooke in his ‘will’ as his literary executor. Indeed, by the time he came to write his own autobiography, The Gates of Memory, in his mid-nineties, his memory had tricked him into charging Eddie with ‘taking it upon himself to become his friend’s executor, who had ‘appropriated’ Brooke’s literary archive. Keynes made no secret of the fact that he despised both Eddie, who, he said, ‘lived in a sexual no-man’s land’ and his memoir: ‘a … trifle, totally inadequate as a portrait of its subject … [a] pretty sketch [which] should never have been printed’. When named in the Ranee’s will, contrary to Brooke’s last wishes, as literary executor in Eddie’s stead, Keynes made fast tracks round to Eddie and collected Brooke’s papers, which, after 15 years of intermittent warfare with the Ranee, he was only too glad to yield up to him.
From this time on, Brooke’s ‘repper’ was safe in the hands of a man who, together with his joint trustee, Dudley Ward, would allow no critic, nor criticism, to breathe upon the pristine mirror portrait of Brooke that they had created and now lovingly burnished. Keynes edited a carefully ‘weeded’ edition of Brooke’s huge correspondence in 1968. Brooke’s posthumous reputation suffered denigration mainly because he was unfairly identified with the five untypical sonnets he had written on the very verge of death. Well-meant attempts to honour his memory appeared merely to add to the false and misleading cult of piety tinged with homoeroticism that gathered around his head like a cloud of gnats.
In March 1919 a marble plaque was unveiled on the wall – just in the spot where he had once predicted he would appear – of Rugby chapel. The plaque was based on the bare-shouldered photographic portrait by Sherril Schell that had been christened ‘Your favourite actress’ by irreverent Cambridge wits. The eulogy was spoken by General Sir Ian Hamilton, and Walter de la Mare delivered a lecture that was turned into the first slim book about Brooke: Rupert Brooke and th
e Intellectual Imagination. Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’, carved by Eric Gill, was affixed under the plaque. Another stone cutting of the poem was placed at the foot of the elaborate marble tomb that Mrs Brooke caused to be placed over his original grave after the war, a sarcophagus so heavy and out of keeping that it seemed as though the Ranee was making absolutely sure that Brooke would not escape her in death, as he had so frequently done in life.
In April 1925, ten years after his death, yet another one of the war sonnets was inscribed on the memorial to the Royal Naval Division in Horse Guards Parade. The unveiling was performed by Churchill, who spoke warmly once again of the poet and the poetry. Ironically, the memorial was swept away in the Second World War, when it was cleared to make way for the building of Churchill’s underground bunker, the Cabinet war rooms. The final indignity heaped upon Brooke’s corpse was the unveiling of a grotesque memorial in Skyros, the village capital of the island where he died. Allegedly modelled upon a Belgian male prostitute by its sculptor, the tall bronze nude bore little resemblance to Brooke. When Geoffrey Keynes visited the place in 1949 to lay a wreath, he was met by a demonstration by local boys protesting at the domination of Greece by British and American imperialism and bearing placards reading: ‘Rupert Brooke died for Liberty’.
Today Skyros is home to an Anglo-Greek holistic holiday centre where courses are offered in esoteric subjects like shamanism, ‘how to love yourself’ and creative writing. The centre’s brochures call Skyros ‘the island of Achilles – and of Rupert Brooke’. Course students visit Brooke’s grave by taxi. In the sixties, when it was more remote, the present Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, visited the place – and nearly died of thirst trying to locate it. When he got there, he was intrigued to see a long line of ants emerging from a crack in the tomb: ‘There,’ I thought, ‘goes the last of Rupert Brooke.’ Ironically, considering the cause for which Brooke died, tension between Greece and Turkey has made access to the grave easier: Trebuki Bay, where he died on board the Duguay-Trouin, is now a front-line Greek naval base, and a new road to it passes by the tomb. Brooke’s name is revered in Greece in the same breath as that of Byron – another good-looking, romantically confused, sexually ambivalent, Midlands boy. Both died of disease while fighting the Turks in Greece.
In October 1930, the year before the absurd monument in Skyros went up, the Ranee died in Rugby and was buried alongside her husband and eldest son Dick in Clifton Road cemetery. The original wooden cross from Skyros was also brought home to the family plot. Keynes found himself presiding over continued steady sales of Brooke’s poetry, which, by the 1980s, had sold a million copies. Slowly and methodically, Keynes began to collect Brooke’s letters for projected future publication. Meanwhile the first biographers, as Brooke had predicted, were beginning to gather. As they did so, some of his prose was posthumously published. His Letters from America reveal a promising travel writer whose prose can suddenly shine like a raindrop on the edge of a leaf. His essay John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama crucially influenced the young poet T. S. Eliot, who wrote the lines celebrating the Jacobean’s ‘possession by death’ after reading Brooke’s work.
After short tributes by De la Mare and Edward Thomas, the first person to go into print in hard covers about Brooke was another American, Maurice Browne. His brief account of Brooke’s stay in Chicago on his return from the South Seas, Recollections of Rupert Brooke, published in 1927, only just steered clear of sentimentality but nevertheless offered up some glimpses of a living man. Yet another American, Arthur Stringer, was the first to complete a fully-fledged life of the poet, Red Wine of Youth, published in New York in 1948. Horrified that such a ‘sub-literate’ production might pass down as a picture of Brooke accepted by posterity, Keynes and Ward commissioned the poet and opera librettist Christopher Hassall to write an official biography. Ward had already vetoed Keynes’s bowdlerized edition of Brooke’s letters, on the grounds that the 700-page manuscript, even in its neutered state, was too revealing of the real Brooke’s embarrassing lapses from the plaster saint image. But both Keynes and he agreed that Hassall would be a safe choice as a biographer, if only because Hassall’s previous book, a huge 1955 biography of Eddie Marsh, had, through all its 700 pages, managed to steer resolutely clear of such ticklish topics as its subject’s homosexuality.
Hassall, after years of labour, produced another opus of more than 500 pages, which nevertheless managed to leave out all the salient facts of Brooke’s life, while faithfully following him almost day by day and even hour by hour. If ever there was a case of not seeing the wood for the trees, then Hassall’s biography is it. Hassall, also, like Keynes, an honest and honourable man, was hobbled by the need to please the Trustees – the hero-worshipping Keynes and the neurotically suspicious and over-loyal Ward. In addition, he did not have the advantage of access to Brooke’s letters to Noel and Bryn. His self-censorship did the rest. So while the Lulworth breakdown is reported in vague terms, the full picture is denied us: reading Hassall is like watching a film through a thick gauze bandage: shapes and shadows and intriguing sounds flash through, but the real meaning is lost. None the less between the lines of what did get printed, hints were there in plenty of richer seams for a bolder biographer to mine.
A few years later, after Hassall had died prematurely of a heart attack in 1964, just before his magnum opus was published, a young and bold writer took up the challenge. Michael Hastings, a playwright of the Angry Young Man generation, initially interested in writing a documentary play about Brooke, produced instead The Handsomest Young Man in England, utilizing, for the first time, the wealth of photographs of the Neo-Pagans at play that had been left behind. Published in 1968, when another sort of youthful rebellion was shaking the world, Hastings’s book is perceptive, fair and sympathetic to Brooke and his friends, but damning and devastating in his critique of their delusions. With all the confidence of youth, Hastings, who enjoyed the confidence of a septuagenarian Noel – he wooed the old lady with trips to the theatre – lambasted what was left of the legend; performing a necessary demolition job on both the remnants of the golden-boy myth and the excessive anti-Brooke reaction that had damned his work to the limbo of the great unread in the eyes of serious critics. Hastings explained exactly why the Brooke myth had arisen, pointing out how perfectly the poet embodied a pastoral dream of innocence and youth, and a premodernist England of teas and camps and cricket that lay just over the horizon of living memory, and seemed yearningly attractive to a crowded country of new towns, cars, radios, TVs and sodium lights, where executive estates were rapidly eating up the fields where Brooke and his friends had romped, and toxic pollutants were poisoning the rivers where they once leapt into cleanness. Finally, Hastings dared to hint that the reluctance of the handful of Brooke’s surviving old friends – Keynes, Frances Cornford, Cathleen Nesbitt and Noel Olivier – to speak to outsiders or expose the full truth about Brooke’s confusions, complexes and cruelties had much to do with their fears of destroying a myth upon which their own lives rested.
The year before Hastings’s book appeared, perhaps the closest friend of all – James Strachey – died. James had enjoyed one of the most interesting and varied lives of all Brooke’s friends; and one of the most self-fulfilled. Resigning from the Spectator because of what Brooke called in his last, insulting letter his ‘damned silly, eunuch, and slightly dangerous’ pacifist ideas, he spent the Great War doing relief work for the Quakers. After a brief post-war stint as a drama critic, James married Alix Sergeant-Florence in 1920, and the newly-weds went off to Vienna to be analysed by Sigmund Freud. It was the beginning of a lifetime’s vocation: he and Alix became leading Freudian analysts themselves, and were the first translators of Freud’s work into English. James’s interest in drama matured into a consuming passion for music and opera, and he became a founder member of Glyndebourne. Behind the scenes he also continued to express his views of Brooke, remarking on the occasion of Hassall’s biography: ‘Rupert wasn’t nearly as n
ice as people now imagine; but he was a great deal cleverer.’ Michael Holroyd, in his massive life of James Strachey’s brother Lytton, gives an unforgettable portrait of the ageing James and Alix, living alone near the Thames at Marlow, weighed down with a monstrous mountain of Bloomsbury papers, and living frugally off bread and cheese and wine diluted with water until only the faintest Brookian blush of red was left in the glass. James died in 1967, just after learning he had been awarded a prize by the Society of Authors for his immense labours in translating Freud.
By the eighties, only Cathleen Nesbitt and Geoffrey Keynes were still alive of Brooke’s friends. Cathleen, who married once – unhappily, after her romance with Brooke – had continued, despite all his injunctions, to appear on stage until the end of her long life, in 1980. The ruins of her breathtaking beauty can still be viewed in the 1972 film The French Connection – and she, like all the others, never forgot Brooke. Also in 1980 John Lehmann, a writer and editor who had first heard of Brooke while an office boy at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, published Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend, an elegantly written short biography that at last had the courage to engage with Brooke and the reality of his life with a fair degree of frankness, while still remaining deeply sympathetic to the poet. Starting from the central crisis at Lulworth, which he rightly saw as the watershed in Brooke’s life between the carefree innocence of youth and the complexity and compromises of maturity, which he struggled towards but never reached, Lehmann, homosexual himself, stressed Brooke’s insecurity over his sexuality, and, like Hastings, endeavoured to rescue the good from the bad in his poetry.
