by Mike Read
His looks were beginning to create a stir:
A purple and terrific scandal has arisen around me … it began by Dean catching me one day and informing me that ‘a gentleman’ in another house had been trying to buy a photo of me … I secretly made enquiries and found it was one I knew of old – one with the form of a Greek God, the face of Hyacinthus, the mouth of Antinous, eyes like a sunset, a smile like dawn … it appears that the madman worships me at a pale distance…
Towards the end of March, Rupert, Hugh Russell-Smith and another schoolfriend developed an eye condition called opthalmia, which put paid to reading and writing for a couple of weeks. To save the strain on their eyes, they were read to, being treated to a new book by Hilaire Belloc. Geoffrey Keynes remembers it as being Hills and the Sea; as that particular book was not published until October of that year it is more likely that the book was Esto Perpetua. Brooke was disappointed in it – ‘it is not Belloc. I still miss that grave and fantastic irresponsibility; it is a clever book which might have been written by any of several men; I wanted one that only one could have written.’ Rupert’s eyes had still not healed enough for him to accompany his cousin Erica to see the play Hippolytus, so he resorted to developing the flirtation with his admirer at Rugby. ‘How much I am in earnest – or how much he is – I can’t really say. But it is spring.’ The relationship appeared to be carried out solely by letter.
I usually address him as Hyacinth, Apollo or Antinous, and end with a quotation from Swinburne or Catullus. I bring in odorous and jewelled phrases ‘The Greek gods lived that you might be likened to them: the world was created that you might be made of gold and ivory’ … it is all rather sweet and rather unusual; and he really looks very nice.
Notwithstanding this schoolboy nonsense, Brooke also had a very masculine side, throwing himself enthusiastically into the discipline of the school cadet corps, where he rose swiftly to colour sergeant before being promoted to second lieutenant.
During the April school break, the Brookes repaired to Venice for a short holiday, following which Rupert went to spend a few days with his older brother Richard, who was now working for a firm in Southsea, Hampshire.
On May 1906 Rupert wrote from School Field to Geoffrey Keynes, who had left Rugby the previous year:
The Summer Term has dawned. It is my last and I weep. The same fantastic things happen, there is that strange throng of young beings, unconscious of all their youth and wonder. Another spring dies odorously in summer … but I am quite happy. To be here is wonderful and suffices. I live in a mist of golden dreams. Afterwards life will come, cold and terrible. At present I am a child.
His overwhelming sadness at the realisation that these were his final days as a pupil al School Field came pouring out in words, powerfully demonstrating his feelings in the closing lines of a letter to Keynes dated 22 June: ‘That gay witch, the summer, who charmed me three weeks ago! I have looked into her face and seen behind the rouge and the smile, the old, mocking visage of a harlot.’
During the height of his final golden summer at School Field Rupert was moved to write a poem that was eventually published as ‘English Minnesong’ in the Westminster Gazette on 16 February 1907 and later as ‘The Beginning’ in Poems 1911.
The Beginning
Some day I shall rise and leave my friends
And seek you again through the world’s far ends,
You whom I found so fair,
(Touch of your hands and smell of your hair!),
My only God in the days that were.
My eager feet will find you again,
Though the ugly years and the mark of pain
Have changed you wholly; for I shall know
(How could I forget having loved you so?),
In the sad half-light of evening,
The face that was all my sunrising.
So then at the ends of the earth I’ll stand
And hold you fiercely by either hand,
And seeing your age and ashen hair
I’ll curse the thing that once you were,
Because it is changed and pale and old
(Lips that were scarlet, hair that was gold!),
And I loved you before you were old and wise,
When the flame of youth was strong in your eyes,
– And my heart is sick with memories.
Rupert was never again to find the security afforded him by Rugby School, except perhaps many years later as an officer in the Royal Naval Battalion, when once again he belonged to a unit of young men with whom he had a unique bond and sense of purpose. Brooke was moulded by the school made great by its former headmaster Thomas Arnold. Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who had been a pupil there some years before Brooke, noted: ‘The mark by which you may know them is, their genial and hearty freshness and youthfulness of character.’ So enamoured was Hughes of Arnold’s ‘New Jerusalem’ that in 1880 he founded the township of Rugby in Morgan County, Tennessee.
Two months before he was to go up to King’s College, Cambridge, Rupert was drawn back to the Russell-Smith household in the New Forest. His obvious enjoyment of staying at Watersgreen House was displayed in a thank-you letter to Mrs Russell-Smith in August 1906:
Dear Mrs Russell-Smith
I can truthfully say that I never enjoyed a visit more in my life (with the possible exception of one to my aunt when I was nine, and discovered there for the first time Browning’s poems). I never was in a home where everyone was so affectionate to one another and the world at large. It made me very envious. I now understand the secret of Hugh and Denham’s unfailing cheerfulness during the term – a constant enigma. I was vastly sorry to go; I should like to have stayed five months. As it was, I was almost sociable for ten days – a rare thing for me. Many thanks for tolerating me so long. I shall soon write to one of the boys. I loved it all – even the excessive physical exercise in a way – and especially one of the hammocks – the one further from the house. Please give my love to it – a delightful hammock!
In October, with his new life at Cambridge about to begin, Rupert was again at Bournemouth, from where he wrote to Geoffrey Keynes, ‘I have been in this quiet place of invalids and gentlemanly sunsets for about a hundred years, ever since yesterday week.’ St John Lucas was also treated to vivid descriptions from Brooke’s over-imaginative scribblings during the same visit:
Your eyeless letter found me in this strange place, which is full of moaning pines and impressionist but quite gentlemanly sunsets. With other decrepit and grey-haired invalids I drift wanly along the cliffs … Meanwhile I linger here and read Sordello and Baudelaire alternately and the weather is very fine … I am very busy with an enormous romance of which I have written five chapters. It is really a mediaeval paraphrase of the Marble Sphinx.
It is clear that Brooke was apprehensive about leaving Rugby for Cambridge, covering his fears with an assumed equanimity: ‘I have seen everything there is to see and my eyes are tired.’
Chapter 2
King’s Herald
BEFORE OCTOBER 1906 was out, Brooke was living away from home for the first time as an undergraduate of King’s College, at Cambridge University. The King’s College of St Nicholas in Cambridge was established by Henry VI in 1440, the monarch giving thanks ‘to the honour of Almighty God, in whose hand are the hearts of Kings; of the most blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary Mother of Christ, and also of the glorious Confessor and Bishop Nicholas, Patron of my intended college, on whose festival we first saw the light’. In imitation of William Wykeham (founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford), the King immediately closely connected his college with the King’s College of Blessed Mary of Eton beside Windsor. The King’s Chapel is a breathtakingly unique piece of architecture, surrounded by later work from eminent architects such as William Wilkins, Sir Gilbert Scott and Sir George Boldy. Until 1857, just half a century too early for Rupert, King’s College students had the right to claim degrees without examination. He bec
ame one of some fifty freshmen to join the 100 or so established King’s men, and was allotted Room 14 (actually two rooms) at the top of staircase A, in Fellows’ Buildings, almost in the far corner of the front court – rooms that had been occupied by the artist Aubrey Beardsley some seventeen years before. Rupert had once written to his cousin Erica, while still at school, suggesting that she acquired and absorb ‘one third of Swinburne, all Oscar Wilde, and the drawings of Beardsley’.
Brooke had won a scholarship to King’s, where his uncle Alan Brooke was Dean of the college, as his father had done before him. As with Rupert’s schooldays under his father, no favours were asked for, nor expected, except that an arrangement was reached that he would call on his uncle for tea on Saturday afternoons. At an initial, more formal meeting with the Dean he met and became friendly with Hugh Dalton, later to become Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Clement Attlee in the mid-1940s. Discovering that they had much in common, Brooke and Dalton, the son of a canon of Windsor, agreed to form a society where they could discuss such mutual interests as poetry, politics and any other subjects that took their fancy, deciding on the name ‘Carbonari’ (the charcoal burners) after the nineteenth-century Italian revolutionaries.
Brooke also fraternised with old Rugbeians who had gone up to Cambridge, Hugh Russell-Smith, Geoffrey Keynes and Andrew Gow, and found (as he had in St John Lucas at Rugby) another literary mentor, in the 42-year-old university librarian Charles Sayle, known as ‘Aunt Snayle’. Brooke was later to write in his diary on 22 February 1908: ‘I do not know in what language to moderate my appreciation of this great man … great in his ideals, great in his imagination, great in his charm.’
Other Cambridge men with whom Rupert became close friends were Justin Brooke, who had come up to Emmanuel in 1904 and was a leading light in the university’s dramatic circle, and Jacques Raverat, a Frenchman from Prunoy who had arrived at Cambridge from university at the Sorbonne, Paris, having previously been at Bedales School with Justin. Raverat had this to say of Rupert:
[T]he forehead was very high and very pure, the chin and lips admirably moulded; the eyes were small, grey-blue and already veiled, mysterious and secret. His hair was too long, the colour of tarnished gold and parted in the middle; it kept falling in his face and he threw it back with a movement of his head.
During his first year at King’s, Rupert took time to glance over his shoulder at the past: ‘I have been happier at Rugby than I can find words to say. As I looked back at five years I seemed to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious and I could not and cannot hope for, as even quite imagine, such happiness elsewhere.’ The man later to become another literary mentor, Edward Marsh, a high-ranking civil servant and former Cambridge graduate who was to fly the flag for Brooke’s poetry and would bring him together with many other leading poets, was to say of Brooke’s time at School Field, ‘He loved the house and garden, especially his own particular long grass-path, where he used to walk up and down reading.’ Brooke showed misgivings about leaving Rugby for King’s: ‘I shall live in Cambridge very silently, in a dark corner of a great room … I shall never speak, but I shall read all day and night – philosophy or science – nothing beautiful any more.’
Once at Cambridge, he soon began to orchestrate a suitable image. To Keynes he confided:
I shall be rather witty and rather clever and I shall spend my time pretending to admire what I think is humorous or impressive in me to admire. Even more than yourself I attempt to be ‘all things to all men’, rather cultured among the cultured, faintly athletic among athletes, a little blasphemous among blasphemers, slightly insincere to myself.
Although Rupert made no great claims to be an actor, his looks and charisma drew him to the attention of the university dramatic societies. Via Justin Brooke, and fourth-year King’s man A. E. Scholfield, Rupert landed the non-speaking role of the Herald in The Eumenides, which was being produced by the Greek play committee. It was in this production that he first made an impression on Eddie Marsh, who was in the audience. Following his triumph in The Eumenides, Brooke became a college pin-up. Winston Churchill’s cousin Sir Shane Leslie later wrote in an article for Tatler about him:
[H]e suffered unusually from love-hysteria due in turn to several maidens who could be called advanced rather than advancing … Cambridge ladies were already reasonably advanced, chiefly because of the unchivalrous rags that broke out among the undergraduates at any sign of giving them degrees after they had endured the toil of examinations! The type of ladies whom advanced on clever men were just as clever themselves, and as advanced religiously. These seemed to fall about Brooke or rather he fell about their feet.
This side of him was shielded from his mother, to whom he wrote from King’s of other matters: ‘I am going to see the South Africans, if they play, tomorrow. As it has been raining for a week they will probably have a wet ball and be handicapped considerably, but I suppose we shan’t beat them. I have an atrocious but cheap seat right behind the goal-posts.’ This was the Springboks’ first ever visit to the British Isles, rugby having been introduced there just thirty years earlier. He also informed her about his new neighbour Oscar Browning, the historian and fellow of King’s already in his seventieth year, who had rooms just opposite Rupert’s: ‘I went to lunch with the “OB” on Sunday. He was rather quaint to watch but I did not much like him. He was so very egotistical, and a little dull.’ If James Strachey had similar views, they didn’t appear to deter him from being sexually submissive to Browning, who would have sexual intercourse with him, accompanied by a string quartet of elderly ladies, secreted behind a curtain!
In January 1907, Rupert was ill in bed at Rugby with a bout of influenza which had hit the family; his mother and elder brother Richard were also down with it. He described his ailments in letters to Geoffrey Keynes and Erica Cotterill, writing to the latter enclosing a new poem that he had just written: ‘To make up for all this bosh, I shall copy out for you the wonderfullest sonnet of the century. But if you show it to respectable people they’ll kill you.’ Some four and a half years after his original handwritten verses were secretly read by Erica, they were published in Poems 1911 as ‘The Vision of Archangels’ and would sit on the bookshelves of the ‘respectable people’ he once feared might blanche at them.
The Vision of Archangels
Slowly up silent peaks, the white edge of the world,
Trod four archangels, clear against the unheeding sky,
Bearing, with quiet even steps, and great wings furled,
A little dingy coffin; where a child must lie,
It was so tiny. (Yet you fancied, God could never
Have bidden a child turn from the spring and the sunlight,
And shut him in that lonely shell, to drop for ever
Into the emptiness and silence, into the night…)
They then from the sheer summit cast, and watch it fall,
Through unknown glooms, that frail black coffin – and therein
God’s little pitiful Body lying, worn and thin,
And curled up like some crumpled, lonely flower-petal –
Till it was no more visible; then turned again
With sorrowful quiet faces downward to the plain.
On Sunday 13 January, Richard died of pneumonia, with his father Parker Brooke by his side. The family was devastated and Rupert was feeling ‘terribly despondent and sad … there is an instinct to hide in sorrow, and at Cambridge where I know nowhere properly I can be alone’. He also felt that his father was ‘tired and broken by it’. He offered to stay at School Field for a while, but his parents felt they could cope. Rupert went back to Cambridge and very gradually life began to return to normal.
As Brooke became increasingly involved with student life, he began to contribute poems and reviews to the Cambridge Review, as well as playing Stingo in the Amateur Dramatic Club’s (ADC) production of Oliver Goldsmith’s sentimental comed
y, She Stoops to Conquer. His first poem to be printed while at King’s was ‘The Call’, in February 1907.
The Call
Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called me.
I broke the Night’s primeval bars,
I dared the old abysmal curse,
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!
The eternal silences were broken;
Hell became Heaven as I passed –
What shall I give you as a token,
A sign that we have met, at last?
I’ll break and forge the stars anew,
Shatter the heavens with a song;
Immortal in my love for you,
Because I love you, very strong.
Your mouth shall mock the old and wise,
Your laugh shall fill the world with flame,
I’ll write upon the shrinking skies
The scarlet splendour of your name.
Till Heaven cracks, and Hell thereunder
Dies in her ultimate mad fire,
And darkness falls, with scornful thunder,