The Great Lover

by Jill Dawson

  John Frayn Turner, The Life and Selected Works of Rupert Brooke, Breese Books, 1922, contains the version of the obituary from The Times that includes the missing phrase: ‘ruled by high undoubting purpose’.

  Mary Archer, Rupert Brooke and the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, Silent Books, Cambridge, 1989.

  John Lehmann, Rupert Brooke, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.

  Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, with a Memoir by Eddie Marsh, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1926.

  Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: The Cambridge Childhood of Darwin’s Granddaughter, Faber and Faber, 1952. Nell’s ability to slide outside her own consciousness and see herself is taken from Gwen Raverat’s description of the same. Also, descriptions of naked boys swimming in the river in Chapter 1 are hers, and the conversations with Rupert, such as the one about the seventeen-year-old girl painting her face, in Chapter 1. According to Raverat, this conversation took place in 1912. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Chapter 1, Letter beginning: ‘I am in the country in Arcadia; a rustic…’ is to Noel Olivier, reprinted in Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier 1909–1915, edited by Pippa Harris, Bloomsbury, London, 1991. Letters of Rupert Brooke © Estate of the late Rupert Brooke.

  Chapter 1, The sonnet ‘Oh! Death Will Find Me’, written for Noel Olivier, can be found in the Collected Poems.

  Frances Spalding, Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections: A Biography, Harvill Press, London, 2001, was useful for details of the relationship between Gwen Raverat and Rupert, details of Jacques Raverat, Jane Harrison, and Francis and Frances Cornford.

  Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: The New Biography, Vintage, 1977, describes Augustus John and party visiting the Orchard. Nell’s description of the artist in Chapter 1 is taken from Edward Thomas’s: ‘exactly like a pirate: standing over six feet high, wearing the strangest jersey and check suit, and with a long red beard, just like the beard of Rumpelstiltskin’, reported in Holroyd’s book in Chapter 4. Rupert’s letters to Noel (in Song of Love) contain further details. It is here that Rupert repeats the ‘two wives’ rumour. Dorelia was in fact not a wife, and not mother to all the children either. Four were the sons of Augustus John’s wife Ida who had died in 1907. David would have been the eldest boy.

  The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, edited by Norman Mackenzie and Jeanne Mackenzie, abridged by Lynn Knight, with a preface by Hermione Lee, Virago Press, 2000, contains details of H. G. Wells’s affair with Amber Reeves, and Beatrice’s opinion of Rupert Brooke and his friends.

  Chapter 1, Remarks of Rupert’s beginning: ‘Parents…’ are taken from an unpublished, novelised account by Gwen Raverat of conversations between herself, Rupert and others, reported in Hassall’s Rupert Brooke: A Biography. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Rupert’s description of the encounter with Denham Russell-Smith in Chapter 1 starting, ‘He was lustful, immoral, affectionate and delightful…’ and ending, ‘and wouldn’t ever want to see me again’ is in Rupert Brooke’s own words, verbatim, from his own unabridged account in a letter to James Strachey, written in 1912. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke. The letter is reproduced in Nigel Jones’s Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth, Richard Cohen Books, 1999.

  Chapter 2, Letter beginning: ‘January 1910. My dear James…’ is from a letter by Rupert Brooke, although with exclusions and more than one letter merged together, so not verbatim. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke. Included in the collection: Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, edited by Keith Hale, Yale University Press, 1998.

  Chapter 2, Rupert’s description of a dream, ‘I was lying out under a full moon…I expect it all happened, really, some time’ is in Rupert’s own words, from an abridged letter to James Strachey, included in Hale’s Friends and Apostles. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke.

  Chapter 3, ‘How dreadful that the whole world’s a cunt for one’: from a letter to James Strachey, ibid.

  Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Chatto and Windus, 1996, for descriptions of encounters between Rupert Brooke and Virginia Woolf (née Stephen), alongside descriptions of the same occasion by Christopher Hassall.

  Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, Vintage, 1995, for an account of the relationship between Lytton Strachey and Brooke, and Brooke’s breakdown at Lulworth. John Lehmann’s Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, gives a good account of his breakdown.

  Chapter 3, Rupert’s description to Gwen and Jacques of the incident at Holy Trinity in Rugby is in Rupert’s words from an account in a letter to Virginia Woolf, written to her after her nervous breakdown.

  Chapter 3, Letter beginning: ‘The important thing, I want to be quite clear about, is, about women “coming off”,’ are Rupert Brooke’s own words, from a letter to James Strachey. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke.

  Chapter 4, Letter beginning: ‘Pango-Pango, Samoa, November 1913’, is from Rupert to Phyllis Gardner, included in the collection that her sister gave to the British Library.

  Chapter 4, ‘Look at those niggers! Whose are they?’ This and other descriptions, and Rupert’s thoughts on Samoa and Fiji, are from Rupert Brooke, Letters from America, with a preface by Henry James, Echo Library, reprinted 2006.

  Chapter 4, ‘Quite properly, I seem to have given up writing with any enthusiasm. While in the South Seas I found I had stopped thinking, and that was a Good Thing! My senses instead became more authoritative, more demanding, and I trusted them a little more. I do a little work, as I knock about’ are the words of Rupert Brooke, in a letter to Phyllis Gardner.

  Chapter 4, ‘Words are things, after all.’ Brooke’s words, as recounted by Reginald Pole in a fictionalised narrative, included in Michael Hastings’ The Handsomest Young Man in England, Rupert Brooke, Michael Joseph, 1967. Supplementary accounts of this time in Rupert’s life are in Maurice Browne’s Recollections of Rupert Brooke, Alexander Greene, 1927. (Thank you, Geraldine, for the gift of a first edition.)

  Chapter 4, ‘Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes’ is a line from a poem ‘Day That I Have Loved’, written 1905–1908, published in Poems, 1911, Sidgwick and Jackson.

  Chapter 4, Letter beginning: ‘My dear Dudley’ is copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke. Cathleen Nesbitt, A Little Love and Good Company, Faber and Faber, 1975. Letters between Brooke and Nesbitt went on sale at Sotheby’s in 2007 but were not bought.

  I am grateful to the Arts Council of England for a generous grant in support of research for this novel. I’m thankful, too, to Mike Read for meeting with me to share his knowledge of Brooke; also Robin Callan, owner of the Orchard, Grantchester, for allowing me access to Rupert’s old bedroom, to the Orchard and gardens and to Rupert’s diary, and for many hours of wonderful conversations about Rupert Brooke; also Andrew Motion, for his initial enthusiasm for the idea, and to him and Jon Stallworthy, the Trustees of Rupert Brooke, for their support and encouragement. Dr Mary Archer kindly showed me around the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, where she now lives, and was generous with her time and considerable knowledge of Brooke and his life; Lorna Beckett was helpful on questions regarding Phyllis Gardner; I’m also thankful to Karen Smith and all at the Rupert Brooke Society, based at the Orchard in Grantchester, and to Patricia McQuire, the archivist at King’s College, Cambridge. The warmest possible thanks must also go to my editor Carole Welch and my agent Caroline Dawnay; to John Lewis for expertise on beekeeping; to Ruth Tross, Hazel Orme, and all at Sceptre; also to writer friends Louise, Kathryn, Caz and Sally for helpful conversations; and to my beloved Meredith, the greatest lover of all.

  About the Author

  JILL DAWSON is an award-winning poet and the author of five previous novels, including Fred and Edie, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England, with her husband and two sons.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exc
lusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise

  ‘Brooke’s narrative has been skilfully created from his own writings and Dawson’s imagination, and the result is compelling and convincing. Dawson gives us a Brooke who is by turns engaging and infuriating–and, one suspects, much like the real thing. It is a remarkable feat of imaginative empathy, brilliantly counterpointed with Nellie’s half-enchanted, half-aghast but rather more down-to-earth appraisal of “the Great Lover” and his bohemian circle’

  Peter Parker, Sunday Times

  ‘Brooke was a troubled man, confused about his sexuality and worried about his own sanity–and it is this darkness that Jill Dawson brings vividly to life. She has created a psychologically convincing picture of a man who, even in his many flirtatious moments, is teetering on the edge, and a brilliant account of the poet’s nervous breakdown…The Great Lover has many wonderful scenes…But it is remarkable principally for its Rupert Brooke, glorious in all his agony and shame, particularly as he sees his sanity slipping away from him’

  Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph

  ‘This brilliant, complicated man is the centre of Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover, and while she draws extensively on historical records of Brooke and his contemporaries, it is her decisions as a novelist that make this account of his life fascinating as well as faithful’

  Helen Dunmore, The Times

  ‘Nell is a wonderful creation: resilient, intelligent and heart-breakingly innocent, she represents the other, working-class England that often gets overlooked in accounts of “giddy young people sleepwalking towards war”, as Dawson puts it…most of all, her novel digs Brooke out of that corner of a foreign field that is forever cliché’

  Lisa Mullen, Time Out

  ‘Not only engaging and seductive, it is also clever, witty and artfully designed…Dawson is a fine impressionistic writer–outstanding is a kiss which takes place among Nell’s beehives, an erotic, subversive wedding tableau–and this is a novel of scents and savours, of both love and “Lust’s remembered smells”’

  Stephanie Cross, Times Literary Supplement

  ‘To contrast with the flighty Brooke, Dawson invents Nell, a brilliant creation–honest, stubborn and grounded…a seductive book, evocative and well paced, the tale split between Brooke and Nell, the two narrative voices strong, distinctive and consistent…Written about a poet by a poet, The Great Lover in some ways seems to reveal more of what we’d like to think of as the “real” Brooke than various biographers have done to date.’

  Vanessa Curtis, Scotland on Sunday

  ‘To translate this well-known figure into a novel, with all his contradictions, requires capacious knowledge and a gifted imagination. Fiction and fact are here blended with sureness and subtlety’

  Frances Spalding, Independent

  ‘Seamlessly weaving together snippets of Brooke’s letters and poems with her own lively prose, Dawson delivers a story that is both entertaining and evocative…Dawson’s novel transcends the historical facts and truly comes to life. In Brooke, her effortless blending of the known details of his life–his fraught love affairs, travels and development as a poet–with a vivid emotional portrait creates a character of real complexity…More to the point, by endowing him with self-deprecating humour and warmth, Dawson manages to conjure up the legendary charm that seemed to bewitch every woman, and many of the men, Brooke met.’

  Catherine Heaney, Irish Times

  ‘I have read it twice. The first time at speed, for its onrushing vigour and narrative pull; the second, more slowly, allowing proper time to test the sentences, savour the detail of English society in the handful of years preceding the First World War, and most pleasing of all, to enjoy the author’s obvious relish of the novel’s central, teasingly rendered romance between Rupert Brooke and Nellie Golightly…The speed and rhythms of rural life, and the greater sense of the wider world of pre-war turbulence, of suffragettes laying siege to the status quo, and artists’ coteries flouting convention–all this is rendered so unfussily, and in writing polished for clarity, not dazzling effect, that the reading becomes an almost physical pleasure.’

  Tom Adair, Scotsman

  ‘Gloriously, it is love rather than death that preoccupies Jill Dawson in her distinctive and deeply imagined portrait of Brooke…its heroine, and the woman planted exquisitely at its centre, is Nell Golightly, an orphaned bee-keeper’s daughter, who despite being self-avowedly “sensible”, becomes inexorably snared by the beautiful young poet…The narrative, alternating between the voices of Brooke and Nell, charts a mutual fascination blossoming against a backdrop of Fabian politics, bee-keeping, the Suffrage movement, the intrigues of the Bloomsbury set and the poet’s mental collapse…Jill Dawson has created a world of huge pathos; a subtle, evocative anti-fairy-tale of doomed youth by one of Britain’s most subtle and accomplished writers.’

  Liz Jensen, Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  ALSO BY JILL DAWSON

  Watch Me Disappear

  Wild Boy

  Fred & Edie

  Magpie

  Trick of the Light

  Credits

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  Cover photograph by FPG/Getty Images

  Copyright

  This book was originally published in Great Britain in 2009 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette Livre UK company.

  THE GREAT LOVER. Copyright © 2009 by Jill Dawson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST U.S. EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dawson, Jill.

  The great lover: a novel/Jill Dawson.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-06-192436-1

  1. Brooke, Rupert, 1887–1915—Fiction. 2. Poets, English—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6054.A923G74 2010

  823'914—dc22 2009036539

  EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200359-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900

  Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

 

 

 
hare