by Mike Read
Sonnet Reversed
Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights
Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.
Ah, the delirious works of honeymoon!
Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures,
Settled at Balham at the end of June.
Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures,
And in Antofagastas. Still he went
Cityward daily; still she did abide
At home. And both were really quite content
With work and social pleasures. Then they died.
They left three children (besides George, who drank);
The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell,
William, the head-clerk in the County Bank,
And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.
Despite the seemingly one-sided relationship with Noel, Brooke was a frequent visitor to The Champions, where Bryn, Daphne and Margery all enjoyed his company. Prone to more than a little exaggeration on occasion, Rupert wrote to Ka Cox:
I’m staying – I don’t know how long, at The Champions. ’Til Wednesday afternoon or Thursday dawn … Limpsfield. It is very unpleasant. The atmosphere at Priest Hill [the home of the Oliviers’ neighbours, the Pyes], and The Champions is too damned domestic. I love the people and cough the atmosphere.
Although he would later write to Noel, ‘Limpsfield made me incredibly better. Could you let it get round to your mother how nice I found it?’ Rupert later went through a period where he felt drawn to the sensuality and beauty of Noel’s sister Bryn, but nothing ever came of it and it seemed to be a fleeting fancy. Margery became temporarily obsessed with Rupert, which was attributed to her mental instability and her assumptions that many of the males she met were in love with her.
Rupert went to Europe for three months, writing to various friends, ‘I shall be in Germany at peace’, ‘I shall be in Germany for ever’ and, ‘It is a thousand years since I have seen you and it will be more before I can see you again, for in three days I go to Germany, and from there I shall wander south and east and no one will hear of me more.’ During January, February and March. Rupert resided in Munich, where he learned German, watched Ibsen plays and saw one of the first performances of Strauss’s new opera, Der Rosenkavalier. Through an introduction from the publisher Dent, he stayed for some while with the painter Frau Ewald, through whom he was thrust into the social and artistic circles of the city. There was a part of Brooke, though, that couldn’t shake off England completely, which diminished his ability to enjoy Munich to the full. Despite having been away for some while, he was still much talked about in Cambridge and London, one friend declaring to James Strachey, ‘I’m not surprised people don’t fall in love with Rupert, he’s so beautiful that he’s scarcely human.’ By the end of this period, he had produced an excellent new poem, which he explained to Eddie Marsh. ‘I spent two months over a poem that describes the feelings of a fish, in the metre of “L’Allegro”. It was meant to be a lyric, but has turned into a work of twenty lines with a moral end.’ He copied the original onto two separate postcards, which he sent to Ka; this was the version published later, containing several changes.
The Fish
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o’ the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.
Those silent waters weave for him
A fluctuant mutable world and dim,
Where wavering masses bulge and gape
Mysterious, and shape to shape
Dies momently through whorl and hollow,
And form and line and solid follow
Solid and line and form to dream
Fantastic down the eternal stream;
An obscure world, a shifting world,
Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,
Or serpentine, or driving arrows,
Or serene slidings, or March narrows.
There slipping wave and shore are one,
And weed and mud. No ray of sun,
But glow to flow fades down the deep
(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);
Shaken translucency illumes
The hyaline of drifting glooms;
The strange soft-handed depth subdues
Drowned colour there, but black to hues,
As death to living, decomposes –
Red darkness of the heart of roses,
Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,
And gold that lies behind the eyes,
The unknown unnameable sightless white
That is the essential flame of night,
Lustreless purple, hooded green,
The myriad hues that lie between
Darkness and darkness!…
And all’s one,
Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,
The world he rests in, world he knows,
Perpetual curving. Only – grows
An eddy in that ordered falling,
A knowledge from the gloom, a calling
Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud –
The dark fire leaps along his blood;
Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
The intricate impulse works its will;
His woven world drops back; and he,
Sans providence, sans memory,
Unconscious and directly driven,
Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.
O world of lips, O world of laughter,
Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,
Of lights in the clear night, of cries
That drift along the wave and rise
Thin to the glittering stars above,
You know the hands, the eyes of love!
The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,
The infinite distance, and the singing
Blown by the wind, a flame of sound,
The gleam, the flowers, and vast around
The horizon, and the heights above –
You know the sigh, the song of love!
But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare;
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.
Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run,
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.
After Munich he moved south to Vienna, before continuing to Florence to meet up with his godfather and Rugby schoolmaster, Robert Whitelaw, who had journeyed south with Rupert’s younger brother Alfred. From there Brooke wrote to Eddie Marsh, ‘I am thirsting for Grantchester. I am no longer to be at the Orchard, but next door at the Old Vicarage, with a wonderful garden.’ And a letter to Gwen Darwin also showed an element of homesickness: ‘Oh my God! I do long for England!’
Although Noel and Rupert were technically engaged, there now seemed to be a gulf between them preventing any real relationship from developing. Rupert had been in Munich mingling with painters, psychologists and poets, while Noel was mending underclothes with Miss Middlemore or making dresses and blouses under the watchful eye of Miss Rice. While she attended school dancing classes, and practised Irish jigs and Morris dancing, Rupert was revelling at the ‘Bacchus-Fest’ and having a romantic dalliance with Elizabeth Van Rysselbergh, the daughter of a neo-impressionist painter. But on 10 February 1911, Noel’s last lette
r to Rupert before leaving Bedales shows that she had grown to understand him more and, although putting a disclaimer on any jealousy on her part, following his other flirtations, and writing about him in the third person, she does open up more about her feelings. Doubtless her refusal to become involved in a physical relationship, or even display interest in that direction, coupled with Brooke’s own sexual frustration, led to his affair with Elizabeth in Munich. She wrote:
[H]e is very beautiful, everyone who sees him loves him … I fell in love with him as I had fallen in love with other people before, only this time it seemed final – as it had, indeed, every time – I got excited when people talked of him and spent every day waiting and expecting to see him and felt wondrous proud when he talked to me or took any notice.
So what happened? Rupert and Noel both approached the relationship from angles alien to the other; they did not always communicate with ease; and Noel never really opened up until later in life – by which time Rupert was dead, and she declared that she knew then she would ‘never marry for love!’. Her school, Bedales, continues to thrive; many eminent citizens and household names emanating from the establishment founded by the still spiritually present J. H. Badley, 300 feet above the Rother Valley, where Noel Olivier received those tortuous love letters from Rupert.
By May he was back at Grantchester and settled in at the Old Vicarage, seeking solace in the tranquil atmosphere, and trying to sort out his emotions. In June he gave vent to his feelings in a letter to Ka. ‘How many people can one love? How many people should one love? What is love? If I love at 6 p.m. do I therefore love at 7?’ During May and June, Rupert was writing regularly from the Old Vicarage to both Noel and Ka. To Noel: ‘Oh it is the only place, here. It’s such a nice breezy first glorious morning and I’m having a hurried breakfast, half dressed in the garden, and writing to you. What cocoa! What a garden! What a you!’ And to Ka: ‘You must come this weekend. Then we’ll talk: and laugh … Come! and talk! And love me – a little.’ He also sent her his list of
the best things in the world – a sketchy list: and, of course generalities have an unfair advantage –
(1) Lust
(2) Love
(3) Keats
(4) go
(4 ½) Weather
(5) Truth
(5 ½) guts
(6) Marrons glacés
(7) Ka…
(29) Rupert
During the third week of July, Rupert visited Oxford to see Noel, who was staying off the Banbury road, in north Oxford, at 2 Rawlinson Road, a large bulky house that Noel considered ugly. As inconsistent as Rupert in her own way, now the warm side of her feelings for him shone through in the invitation, which, uniquely, began, ‘Rupert, darling!’ and continued, ‘so please, if you come, be stern with me, because I should hate to find myself drifting into a relationship that I can not maintain with you.’ And of Ka she says, ‘Oh it would have been so much better, if you had married her ages ago!’ While staying at Rawlinson Road, Rupert rose early, bathed in the Cherwell and worked in the Bodleian Library.
July saw the usual stream of visitors to the Old Vicarage, including Eddie Marsh, to whom Rupert wrote an exaggerated account of his primitive lifestyle of simple food, bathing, reading, talking and sleeping. The ‘simple’ lifestyle, though, did include beginning his dissertation and seeing in the Russian Ballet at Covent Garden performing Scheherazade.
During the summer of 1911, Virginia Stephen came to the Old Vicarage to spend five days with Rupert, and to revise her novel, begun in 1907 as Melymbrosia, and eventually published in 1915 as The Voyage Out. In between playing host to Virginia – the anticipation of her visiting having, by his own admission, made him a little nervous – he worked on his thesis and collection of poems.
Gwen Darwin captured the magic of the Grantchester era and even at the time wept for their impending and inevitable adulthood.
I wish one of us would write a ‘Ballade des beaux jours à Grantchester’. I can’t bear to think of all these young, beautiful people getting old and tired and stiff in the joints. I don’t believe there is anything compensating in age and experience – we are at our very best and most livingest now – from now on the edge will go off our longings and the fierceness of our feelings and we shall no more swim in the Cam … and we shan’t mind much. I am still drunk with the feeling of Thursday afternoon. Do you know how one stops and sees them all sitting round – Rupert and Geoffrey and Jacques and Bryn and Noel – all so young and strong and keen and full of thought and desire, and one knows it will all be gone in twenty years and there will be nothing left. They will all be old and tired and perhaps resigned … If one of those afternoons could be written down, just as it was exactly, it would be a poem – but I suppose a thoroughly lived poem can’t be written, only a partially lived one. Oh it is intolerable, this waste of beauty – it’s all there and nobody sees it but us and we can’t express it. We are none of us great enough to express a thing so simple and so large as last Thursday afternoon. I don’t believe in getting old.
In less than a year Rupert would capture those feelings in what would become one of the most endearing and enduring poems of the twentieth century.
As they, Brooke and Ka Cox, became closer, Brooke would often visit her home, Hook Hill Cottage just outside Woking in Surrey, with its panoramic vista of the North Downs to the Hog’s Back and Stag Hill – the latter to become the site for Guildford Cathedral. Although a cottage in name, it was a sizeable dwelling, built in 1910 by Horace Field, who was responsible for erecting several of the neighbouring houses; Field himself lived next door at South Hill. Ka’s father Henry Fisher-Cox, a wealthy stockbroker and a member of the Fabian Society, lived at Hook Hill House, which had been built in 1723 as a public house by the men working on the ladies’ prison at Knaphill; the Yew Tree that had given the inn its name still stands to this day. Following Ka’s mother’s early death her father remarried, and he and her stepmother Edith and Ka and her two sisters Margaret and Hester lived there, until he too died suddenly in 1905 when Ka was just eighteen, leaving her a financially independent young woman when she went up to Cambridge, with her own home on the lower slopes of the old family house.
Brooke increasingly turned to Ka in his troubled moments or when he needed a comforting shoulder, and by the second half of 1910, Ka having been supplanted in Jacques Raverat’s affections by Gwen Darwin, Rupert began to see the emotionally devastated woman in a new light. The platonic relationship began very gradually to develop into something more romantic in Rupert’s mind, as her mature manner gave the volatile young poet a certain security and warmth – virtues that had been lacking in Noel. He wrote to Ka at Woking:
Oh! Why do you invite responsibilities? Are you a Cushion, or a Floor? Ignoble thought! But why does your face invite one to load weariness upon you? Why does your body appeal for an extra load of responsibilities? Why do your legs demand that one should plunge business affairs on them? Won’t you manage my committees? Will you take my soul over entire for me? Won’t you write my poems? … Ka, what can I give you? The world? A slight matter.
He also went down to Woking in person to ask her to join an imminent summer camp in Devon, having already persuaded Virginia Stephen. Being worn down a little by Noel’s continual rejections, he began to lean more towards Ka, with her down-to-earth, straight-forward manner. His confidence, though, in her feelings towards him would be shattered by the events at Lulworth Cove at the tail-end of 1911 and the New Year of 1912.
The Chaplain at King’s had put a young Swedish student, Estrid Linder, in touch with Brooke, suggesting that he help her with the colloquial English she needed for her translation of Swedish plays. The assistance turned out to be reciprocal, as she was to introduce him to, and help translate, the plays of Strindberg, which he came to adore.
Another positive meeting during the summer was with the publisher Frank Sidgwick, who was sufficiently impressed with Rupert’s poems to agree to publication. The deal was to be
15 per cent for the publisher, with the author bearing the printing costs, which would amount to a little under £10, for 500 copies. Brooke’s mother, rather decently, footed the bill, but there would be a small difference of opinion between Sidgwick and Brooke over some of the contents. As Rupert pointed out to Ka, he drove himself hard to achieve the desired result: ‘I’ve been working for ten days alone at this beastly poetry. Working at poetry isn’t like reading hard. It doesn’t just tire and exhaust you. The only effect is that your nerves and your brain go … I had reached the lowest depths possible to man.’
At the end of August 1911 Rupert and several of his friends, including Justin Brooke, Oscar Eckhardt, James Strachey, Geoffrey and Maynard Keynes, Maitland Radford, Daphne, Bryn and Noel Olivier, Gerald Shove and others set up camp in a meadow at Clifford Bridge, Devon, on the banks of the River Teign. Ka Cox and Virginia Stephen joined them later. In fact, they turned up to find no welcoming party, as the others had gone to Crediton, leaving them only mouldy fruit pie for supper. One of the party, Paul Montague (known as Pauly), a zoologist and accomplished musician, had suggested they all go over to his parents at Crediton some 10 miles to the north-east for afternoon tea, and the whole crowd of them descended on the residence of Colonel and Mrs Montague.
The Montagues’ home, Penton (formerly Panton or Painton), a Georgian stucco house with superb south-eastern views over the town, had its origins in a dwelling owned by John Burrington in 1685, the property becoming the area’s first Bluecoat School from 1804 to 1854. In 1860, Penton was rebuilt and enlarged by the Reverend George Porter, the property including parcels of land with the intriguing names of Three Cornered Close, Lame John’s Field, Barn Close and Shooting Close. In 1878, Pauly Montague’s grandfather Arthur purchased the estate, which passed to his son Leopold in 1887. A Justice of the Peace, Leopold rose to the rank of colonel; he also wrote plays which were performed in the double drawing-room, one end serving as a stage, and was a revered writer of Victorian farce. Colonel Montague was not at home when the Clifford Bridge campers arrived at Penton, but Mrs Montague received them and provided them with tea in the dining-room. It was this occasion that inspired Rupert Brooke to write ‘Dining-Room Tea’ – one of his finest poems – where he, the observer, encapsulated a moment in time through the eyes of the writer. While the others are talking, laughing and eating, he takes a literary photograph, freezing a fleeting, but ultimately blissful, moment in his life – withdrawing to an objective plane before returning to the reality and normality of the situation. At the centrepiece of the poem were his feelings for Noel Olivier, and the security of a circle of friends who he loved, captured in a cameo that, ideally, he would have liked to have preserved for ever: