The Great Lover

by Jill Dawson

  All that he was to me was gathered into that look I cast, but I don’t know if he saw it, or knew. I turned towards the hives, and directed a few puffs from the smoker I was holding towards the crown board to warn the startled bees of my arrival. I put my face a little closer to the hive, and a few bees circled round my head, making a dark looping shape of a lasso in the air. ‘I’m back,’ I whispered to them. ‘Stop your naughtiness and set to work–here’s sensible Nellie. I’m back!’

  Underneath I was thinking, So that’s it, Nell, be done with him. He was trouble from the start. Be glad of all you have. Your lovely son. Your lovely Tommy. And soon I was calm, and no tears threatened, as I turned my full attention to the bees. The mischievous ones flew off. I looked for the queen in the hive, reminding myself, as Father taught me, keep the sun over your shoulder and watch for her running to the darkest side. It’s a curious thing that the queen is the one who will always head for darkness. Every good bee-keeper knows that.

  To Dudley Ward (envelope marked: If I die to be sent to Dudley Ward, etc.) Sent from Lemnos, during the Gallipoli advance, March 1915:

  My dear Dudley,

  You’ll already have done a few jobs for me. Here are some more. My private papers and letters I’m leaving to my mother, and when she dies, to Ka.

  But I want you now–I’ve told my mother–to go through my letters (they’re mostly together, but some scattered) and destroy all those from (a) Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. These are signed E.v.R: and in a hand-writing you’ll pick out easily once you’ve seen it. They’ll begin in the beginning of 1909 or 1910, my first visit to Munich, and be rather rare except in one or two bunches.

  (b) Lady Eileen Wellesley: also in a hand-writing you’ll recognise quickly and generally signed Eileen. They date from last July on. If other people, Ka for instance, agitate to have letters destroyed, why, you’re the person to do it. I don’t much care what goes.

  Indeed why keep anything? Well, I might turn out to be eminent and biographiable. If so let them know the poor truths. Rather pathetic this. It’s odd, being dead. I’m afraid it’ll finish off the Ranee. What else is there? Eddie will be my literary executor. So you’ll have to confer with him.

  Be good to Ka.

  Give Jacques and Gwen my love.

  Try to inform Taata of my death. Mlle Taata, Hotel Tiare, Papeete, Tahiti. It might find her. Give her my love.

  My style is rather like St Paul’s. You’ll have to give the Ranee a hand about me: because she knows so little about great parts of my life. There are figures might want books or something of mine. Noel and her sisters, Justin, Geoffrey, Hugh Russell-Smith. How could she distinguish among them? Their names make me pleasantly melancholy.

  But the realization of failure makes me unpleasantly melancholy. Enough.

  Good luck and all love to you and Anne.

  Call a boy after me.

  Rupert

  ‘The Great Lover’ by Rupert Brooke

  I have been so great a lover: filled my days

  So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,

  The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,

  Desire illimitable and still content,

  And all dear names men choose, to cheat despair,

  For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear

  Our hearts at random down the dark of life.

  Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife

  Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,

  My night shall be remembered for a star

  That outshone all the suns of all men’s days.

  Shall I not crown them with immortal praise

  Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me

  High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see

  The inenarrable godhead of delight?

  Love is a flame;–we have beaconed the world’s night.

  A city:–and we have built it, these and I.

  An emperor:–we have taught the world to die.

  So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence,

  And the high cause of Love’s magnificence,

  And to keep loyalties young, I’ll write those names

  Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames,

  And set them as a banner, that men may know,

  To dare the generations, burn, and blow

  Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming…

  These I have loved:

  White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

  Ringed with blue lines; and feathery fairy dust;

  Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light, the strong crust

  Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

  Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

  And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

  And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,

  Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;

  Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon

  Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss

  Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is

  Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen

  Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;

  The benison of hot water; furs to touch;

  The good smell of old clothes; and other such–

  The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

  Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers

  About dead leaves and last year’s ferns…

  Dear names,

  And thousand others throng to me! Royal flames;

  Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring;

  Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;

  Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain,

  Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;

  Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam

  That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;

  And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold

  Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould,

  Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;

  And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;

  And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;–

  All these have been my loves. And these shall pass,

  Whatever passes not, in the great hour,

  Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power

  To hold them with me through the gate of Death.

  They’ll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath,

  Break the high bond we made, and sell Love’s trust

  And sacramented covenant to the dust.

  –Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,

  And give what’s left of love again, and make

  New friends, now strangers…

  But the best I’ve known,

  Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown

  About the winds of the world, and fades from brains

  Of living men, and dies,

  Nothing remains.

  O dear my loves, O faithless, once again

  This one last gift I give: that after men

  Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed

  Praise you, ‘All these were lovely’ say, ‘He loved.’

  Mataiea, 1914

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  First Words

  About the book

  The First Tiny Throb: How a Novel Begins

  This Side of Paradise

  Read on

  The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

  Tiare Tahiti

  The Soldier

  About the author

  First Words

  I CAN’T REMEMBER the first book I ever read, but I can remember the first words: ice cream. My sister taught me to read before I went to school. What I remember, and think has influenced me most in my writing, was the physical pleasure a particular word could suggest, the powerful feelings reading it aroused.
I wonder now if it was a kind of synesthesia, but I suppose it was also logical. The words ice cream are particularly delicious—to say, to read, to write, to think about.

  I wanted to be a writer from the age of nine, but I would never have told my parents. That would have been showing off, something that was ferociously crushed in our family. Being gifted at something, or excelling, was drawing attention to yourself and greeted with palpable contempt. Perhaps this is a British thing, or to do with the surprise my parents felt—disliking as they did the discussion of feminism or politics or religion or literature or philosophy or, well, anything at all really—on producing a child who wanted to discuss these things, who went around expressing herself all over the place. I still feel a trace of shame about being a novelist, not least because I enjoy it so much. How did I become a writer, in such a family? I have a stubborn streak.

  “How did I become a writer, in such a family? I have a stubborn streak.”

  It’s really all I’ve ever done. I’ve never had another “proper” job. I had a ten-year apprenticeship after graduation where I lived in squats and subsidized housing in London, writing poetry, winning a few prizes, having a child, being very poor, and becoming dispirited. Then suddenly, in my early thirties, I ended a relationship, studied for an MFA in creative writing, bought my first house, and published my first novel. I met my husband six months later.

  By the time I started this, my sixth novel, I had quite a few friends who were writers; a couple of them were renowned biographers. I read a lot of biography, and I’ve always been fascinated with it as a form. So I felt some trepidation on beginning The Great Lover. I challenged myself with the questions about Rupert Brooke that my fictional character Nell is asked in the book: What did his living voice sound like? What did he smell like? How did it feel to wrap one’s arms around him? And lastly, Was he a good man?

  These are subjective, emotive, relative questions that it seems to me that fiction—especially fiction written in the first person, which never claims to be objective but only human—is well placed to answer. In Orlando, Virginia Woolf writes, “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.” That idea went into The Great Lover, spoken by Taatamata, who claims we have as many selves as there are clams on a beach.

  “Do you change facts, if they don’t suit the plot?” I was asked, at a book event, on a panel discussion. The other novelist on the panel, writing her own family’s story, agreed at once that she did, if it might improve the storyline. Briefly I felt like a fraud. Surely hers, I thought, is the proper reply for a novelist. Isn’t it our job to fictionalize, to make things up? But then I understood my own compulsion better. For me, it’s not making up, entirely, but a belief in fiction or the logic of imagination as a means of discovery.

  I think of it as applying fiction to facts like a poultice, to draw something out…. My novels based on true stories probably evolved because of the decade of psychoanalysis I underwent in my twenties, and my beginnings as a poet. I wanted psychological truths, not representational social realism.

  I like to explore characters through their dreams, or rather the dreams I make up for them. Anaïs Nin, in her essay on the poetic novel, says: “What the psychoanalysts stress, the relation between dream and our conscious acts, is what poets already know. The poets walk this bridge with ease, from conscious to unconscious, physical reality to psychological reality.”

  When I have a “fact” about a character I’m writing about, I want to investigate it the way a therapist might. Tell me about your mother, I might ask Rupert Brooke. Tell me about this fact that she lost a child, a one-year-old daughter, before you were born. Then I will go over this detail: the accounts, the references by other biographers, the letters, possible references in his poetry, the phrases Brooke used to describe this one small “fact.” It’s as if I have my client (Brooke) on the couch and can get him to tell me something over and over until the truth—or, I admit, what feels like the truth to me—emerges, in certain words, the perfect words, which briefly feel not to be mine but coming directly from somewhere else.

  “When I have a ‘fact’ about a character I’m writing about, I want to investigate it the way a therapist might.”

  About the book

  The First Tiny Throb

  How a Novel Begins

  IT WAS SEVERAL SUMMERS AGO. A sultry day in Grantchester, Cambridge, England. I fancied iced lemonade in the lovely Orchard café, where you take your drink and sit in a deck chair under branches drooping with apples and daydream.

  I picked up a leaflet about the famous writers who had once visited the Orchard or lodged there and found a photo of the young poet Rupert Brooke. Twenty-two at the time, he was described by W. B. Yeats as “the handsomest young man in England.” Did I find him handsome? He had a beautiful jawline, yes, and a broad brow, yes, and a floppy Hugh Grant quality to his fringe. But it was the gaze that hooked me. Direct. Staring down a hundred years and challenging me. Okay then. Write about me, if you dare.

  I think I’ve always been a sucker for a sexy, brilliant, impossible man.

  I didn’t know much about him. I knew the poem about Grantchester, “The Old Vicarage” (which is next door to the Orchard café and now home to author Jeffrey Archer and his wife, Mary), and I knew the lines: “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England….” I’d heard that Brooke and his friends loved swimming naked in nearby Byron’s Pool and that he had a trick of emerging from the icy water with a “steaming erection.” His letters revealed a playful sense of humor, a subversive wit, a passion for nature, and a paranoid, jealous, and unhappy side, too.

  “But wasn’t he gay?” people asked whenever I mentioned Brooke’s various girlfriends and his love affair with Phyllis Gardner. It seems that his relationships with women have been forgotten next to the more salacious details of his relationships with men. I read a startlingly modern-sounding account, written by Rupert, of his first sexual experience with a man, which had taken place in his little bedroom in Orchard cottage.

  Intrigued, I got myself an invitation to the Orchard cottage to be shown into that same bedroom. My heart was beating like a schoolgirl’s as I took the steps to Rupert’s floor of the house. Of course the furniture wasn’t original, but the door, window frames, floorboards, and fireplace were. The owner of the cottage (a huge Brooke fan) went downstairs, saying mysteriously that he would fetch “something you might like to see.” I was relieved to be left alone. I sat on the bed, staring at the wooden boards, and thinking, Rupert Brooke’s bare sole stepped over that, a hundred years ago.

  My mobile phone went off, and I jumped. “I’m in Rupert Brooke’s bedroom!” I whispered.

  The owner appeared with the treasured object, presenting it with a flourish. Precious documents in libraries are usually brought out with strict instructions not to touch. Here I was being handed Rupert Brooke’s pocket diary from the time he lived at the Orchard, 1909. Buff-colored. Small enough to pop in his shirt pocket. Right next to his heart.

  I held it in my palm, and wondered.

  “I was being handed Rupert Brooke’s pocket diary from the time he lived at the Orchard, 1909…. I held it in my palm, and wondered.”

  This Side of Paradise

  WHAT DO PEOPLE KNOW of the poet Rupert Brooke?

  That he was part of a circle that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, the painter Augustus John, and James and Lytton Strachey? That he died young, on his way to Gallipoli, and was thereafter taken up as a national icon, the golden boy poet of the First World War? Or possibly only that he wrote the lines: “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England….”

  That he fell deliriously in love with the South Seas and with a young Tahitian woman, Taatamata, is not well known. (Brooke is an inconsistent speller, and her name is sometimes Tat
a-maata, sometimes just Taata). That he possibly had a child with her—a girl called Arlice Rapoto, who lived until she was ninety and died only a few years ago—is a fact that, when I tried pursuing it in Tahiti, was greeted with surprise and silence. It was the DJ Mike Read who first raised this possibility in his book about Brooke, Forever England, and who unearthed a photo of Arlice, which, though grainy, does bear some resemblance to Brooke.

  In 1913, the young poet was twenty-six, restless, and horny. He’d had a recent nervous breakdown, brought about partly through overwork but mainly by the rupture in his finely wrought love life. He had been balancing two, probably more, relationships for several years, and now one of them—with the motherly, safe one, the one he thought he could rely on, Katharine Cox—has abruptly ended. So he did what countless young men from similar backgrounds—Rugby School, Cambridge University—have done. He spent a year traveling by boat to North America and the South Seas. It produced the best writing of his life.

  Plenty is known of Brooke’s predecessor in the French Polynesian islands, the painter Paul Gauguin, whose lonely death from syphilis happened ten years before Brooke arrived. Colonial attitudes toward the sexuality of Tahitian women—renowned for their sexy, bare-breasted dancing—did not escape Rupert Brooke. In a travel article, he mocks the mix of Puritan disapproval and slavering lust. For him, the battle between his mind and body was easily won. He writes: “The intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute.”