Forever England

by Mike Read

  Brooke’s enthusiasm for Rhythm was still very evident in a letter to E. J. Dent in February 1913, in which he tried (successfully) to enlist him as a music critic for the magazine: ‘Rhythm, which is being reorganised on a fuller basis, but equally advanced, is having occasional articles on music – not so much reviews of concerts, as enlightenment on modern or ancient good things … They don’t pay! But they’re doing good work – if you’re again in London we might talk.’ His friend from Rugby and Cambridge, Denis Browne, was the music critic for both Rhythm and the Blue Review, as well as the New Statesman. To Gwen Raverat, unconvinced about contributing, despite being a close friend, he wrote: ‘it’s by people who do good work and are under thirty-five. It shows there are such, and that they’re different from and better than the Yellow Book or the Pre-Raphaelites or any other body.’

  Murry and Katherine Mansfield left Runcton in November 1912 for Chancery Lane. Later they rented the Gables at Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire, with John commuting to London and often staying in Brooke’s old room at Eddie Marsh’s; Rupert eventually relinquished his keys to Murry in March. Brooke would write to Marsh on 10 March 1913, ‘I grow Maudlin … I gave up my keys to Jack Tiger with a curse of jealousy.’

  After a spell with Dudley and Anne Marie Ward in Berlin, he was back in Rugby for Christmas, from where he confessed to Eddie Marsh that his eyes were full of sleep and his heart was full of Cathleen Nesbitt.

  Chapter 10

  From the Old World to the New World

  ON NEW YEAR’S eve 1912, Brooke and Marsh went to the London Hippodrome to see Hullo, Rag-Time! before seeing the New Year in on the steps of St Paul’s. The following day Rupert took a train to the Lizard, this time staying with Francis and Frances Cornford, who were in lodgings there. It proved to be a very productive eleven days for the young poet, as he wrote two articles on H. J. C. Grierson’s new edition of Donne’s poems published by the Clarendon Press, declaring that Donne was ‘the one English love poet … who was not afraid to acknowledge that he was composed of body, soul, and mind’. A great lover and champion of the Elizabethan metaphysical poet, he enthused that he was ‘by far the greatest of our love poets. ‘It would seem that while fired up, Brooke also put the finishing touches to his play Lithuania, and was also writing ‘Funeral of Youth’ amid the noise of the Cornford household – Frances recalled that he beavered away quietly ‘while people chatted and banged about the room’.

  The Funeral of Youth: Threnody

  The day that Youth had died,

  There came to his grave-side,

  In decent mourning, from the country’s ends,

  Those scatter’d friends

  Who had liv’d the boon companions of his prime,

  And laugh’d with him and sung with him and wasted,

  In feast and wine and many-crown’d carouse,

  The days and nights and dawnings of the time

  When Youth kept open house,

  Nor left untasted

  Aught of his high emprise and ventures dear,

  No quest of his unshar’d -

  All these, with loitering feet and sad head bar’d,

  Follow’d their old friend’s bier.

  Folly went first,

  With muffled bells and coxcomb still revers’d;

  And after trod the bearers, hat in hand –

  Laughter, most hoarse, and Captain Pride with tann’d

  And martial face all grim, and fussy Joy,

  Who had to catch a train, and Lust, poor, snivelling boy;

  These bore the dear departed.

  Behind them, broken-hearted,

  Came Grief, so noisy a widow, that all said,

  ‘Had he but wed

  Her elder sister Sorrow, in her stead!’

  And by her, trying to soothe her all the time,

  The fatherless children, Colour, Tune, and Rhyme

  (The sweet lad Rhyme), ran all-uncomprehending.

  Then, at the way’s sad ending,

  Round the raw grave they stay’d. Old Wisdom read,

  In mumbling tone, the Service for the Dead.

  There stood Romance,

  The furrowing tears had mark’d her rouged cheek;

  Poor old Conceit, his wonder unassuag’d;

  Dead Innocency’s daughter, Ignorance;

  And shabby, ill’-dress’d Generosity;

  And Argument, too full of woe to speak;

  Passion, grown portly, something middle-aged;

  And Friendship – not a minute older, she;

  Impatience, ever taking out his watch;

  Faith, who was deaf, and had to lean, to catch

  Old Wisdom’s endless drone.

  Beauty was there,

  Pale in her black; dry-ey’d; she stood alone.

  Poor maz’d Imagination; Fancy wild;

  Ardour, the sunlight on his greying hair;

  Contentment, who had known Youth as a child

  And never seen him since. And Spring came too,

  Dancing over the tombs, and brought him flowers –

  She did not stay for long.

  And Truth, and Grace, and all the merry crew,

  The laughing Winds and Rivers, and lithe Hours;

  And Hope, the dewy-ey’d; and sorrowing Song; –

  Yes, with much woe and mourning general,

  At dead Youth’s funeral,

  Even these were met once more together, all,

  Who erst the fair and living Youth did know;

  All, except only Love. Love had died long ago.

  It is a fair supposition that ‘Funeral of Youth’ looked for its inspiration to an ode written in 1763 by the Cambridge-born Poet Laureate William Whitehead. Written for the double celebration of the end of the Seven Years War and the birth of George IV, it was composed in the spirit of a patriotic poet who loved England. It is easy to see its influence on Brooke:

  … Soft-smiling PEACE, whom Venus bore

  When, tutor’d by th’ enchanting lore

  Of Maia’s blooming Son,

  She sooth’d the synod of the Gods,

  Drove Discord from the blest abodes,

  And Jove resum’d his throne.

  Th’ attendant Graces gird her round,

  And sportive Ease, with locks unbound,

  And every Muse, to leisure born,

  And Plenty, with her twisted horn,

  While changeful Commerce spreads his loosen’d sails,

  Blow as ye list, ye winds, the reign of PEACE prevails!

  And lo, to grace that milder reign,

  And add fresh lustre to the year,

  Sweet Innocence adorns the train,

  In form, and features, Albion’s heir!

  During his stay with the Cornfords at the Lizard, Brooke wrote to Jacques Raverat: ‘Cornwall’s so nice, 300 miles from anywhere’, and to Ka, who still carried a torch for Rupert, ‘Love is being at a person’s mercy. And it’s a black look-out when the person’s an irresponsible modern female virgin. There’s no more to say.’ The Lizard clearly proved inspirational for Brooke, as he confessed in a letter from there to Geoffrey Keynes: ‘I have written nothing for months, till I came here.’ Just over seven years before his visit to the Lizard, Marconi had transmitted the first-ever transatlantic radio message from the peninsula to Newfoundland – three dots, signifying the letter ‘S’. Those three dots were to begin a new era in communication that was to revolutionise the entire world. A world Brooke would never see.

  On 8 January 1913, Marsh attended the opening of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop just off Theobald’s Road in London. The poet Henry Newbolt made an opening speech and Robert Frost, the American poet, was also present. Later that month he was to enjoy Brooke’s first public reading there, although he felt that he tried to be a latter-day John Donne. At the opening Harold Monro introduced Marsh to W. H. Davies, the one-legged Welsh ‘tramp’ poet, who subsequently invited Marsh and Brooke to tea at the house where he boarded, in the then dormitory town of
Sevenoaks, in Kent. His landlady was Wordsworth’s niece. Davies’s genuine fondness for children and his penchant for giving them sweets for halfpennies, aroused so much suspicion among the Sevenoaks parents that he was later forced to move.

  Having admired the work of sculptor Eric Gill at the London Grafton Galleries the previous November, Brooke and Eddie Marsh went to visit him at Sopers, his home at Ditchling in Sussex, just before he moved from the village to Hopkins Crank, at Ditchling Common. Rupert had previously written to Geoffrey Keynes, ‘I’m trying to buy a Gill. He’s done an extraordinary good cast for a bronze – a Madonna. If he can only sell one cast he has to charge me an immense sum, which I can’t pay. If more it gets cheaper. He can sell six at £8 or £10 each. If you’re wanting a Gill, now’s your chance!’ Rupert did buy one, as a gift for Ka, although after their departure Gill referred to Brooke and Marsh as ‘aesthetical beggars’, presumably as the statue was desired more for its aesthetic beauty than its religious meaning.

  During the last week of January and the first week of February 1913, Rupert was staying with Jacques and Gwen Raverat at Manor Farm, Croyden, in Cambridgeshire. He had his play Lithuania with him, meaning to copy it out but not finding the energy. He sent a letter to Ka from Manor Farm in which he jokingly refers to his host and hostess: ‘I’ve been fairly comfortable with these people. I’ve even given them a few hints on sensible living – for they’re apt to be too fidgety, and when Jacques’ nerves are too bad for painting, he thinks it sensible to dig in the garden all day!’ Jacques’ nervous disorder, which flared up periodically for years, was eventually diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. Despite his condition, the Raverats also received Geoffrey Keynes and Justin Brooke during Rupert’s visit there. Gwen was fast becoming an acknowledged wood engraver, and both of them were accomplished artists. While staying with the Raverats, Rupert wrote to Eddie Marsh asking him to try to include Cathleen Nesbitt in a theatre party he was organising, before adding the self-deprecating comment, ‘But no doubt it’s quite impossible – I suppose she dines with millionaires every night – I can see a thousand insuperable difficulties – it was scarcely worth mentioning it.’ Cathleen turned out to be far more down-to-earth and approachable than Rupert imagined.

  Croyden at the time rather confusingly had several alternative spellings, including Croyden, Crawden and Croydon (the current spelling). In the past it had also been Croydon am Clapton and Croydon cum Clapton; the lost village of Clapton now lies beneath the fields above Croydon. The name is said to originate from Craw Dene, ‘the valley of crows’. With the upper reaches of the Cam meandering below it, the village lies on the south slope of a low range of clay-covered chalk hills, about 15 miles south-west of Cambridge, overlooking southern Cambridgeshire and north Hertfordshire.

  The 380 acres of Manor Farm were worked by Maurice Gribble in the Raverats’ day, with the Gape Estate owning the whole. Jacques and Gwen Raverat had part of the farm converted into a studio by local builder W. King, who had the misfortune to walk in one day while Jacques was painting a picture of Gwen, posing in the nude. It must have created an impression, as the story is still told, along with yarns of the local peasants’ revolt under the mythical Captain Swing, a would-be Ned Ludd, when they rioted against the new steam threshing machines by wrecking them, setting fire to hayricks and attacking stock. Manor Farm was worked by the Willinks after the First World War until the mid-1940s and from 1949 to 1990 by the Horsfords.

  On 7 February, Dudley and Anne Marie Ward had a baby boy, Peter, so in a more buoyant mood Rupert headed off to Raymond Buildings to stay with Eddie, be thrown into the social whirl and hopefully to engineer a meeting with his favourite actress, Cathleen Nesbitt. To Noel he painted a gay picture:

  [Y]ou, poor brown mouse, can’t in the dizziest heights of murian imagination, picture the life of glitter and gaiety I lead. A young man about town, Noel (I’ve had my hair cut remarkably short), dinners, boxes at the opera, literary lunch-parties, theatre supper-parties (the Carlton on Saturday next) – I know several actresses.

  By February, he was on first-name terms with Cathleen. The first time she had seen Brooke she confessed to being immensely ‘taken by these looks’, but was later attracted more by his ‘vitality and his sense of fun and his fantastic enjoyment of life – rather sort of laughing at himself ’. They went for outings to Kew Gardens and Hampton Court, Cathleen later recalling their blossoming romance with affection:

  I remember at the beginning – when we began to discover we’d been in love – and, as we’d both been in love with somebody else quite recently, we were both a little wary of whether this was real, and he wrote a little poem … he sent it to me on a postcard.

  There’s Wisdom in Women

  ‘Oh love is fair, and love is rare,’ my dear one she said,

  ‘But love goes lightly over.’ I bowed her foolish head,

  And kissed her hair and laughed at her. Such a child was she;

  So new to love, so true to love, and she spoke so bitterly.

  But there’s wisdom in women, of more than they have known,

  And thoughts go blowing through them, are wiser than their own,

  Or how should my dear one, being ignorant and young,

  Have cried on love so bitterly, with so true a tongue?

  At Raymond Buildings Rupert entertained W. B. Yeats, Duncan Grant, Geoffrey Keynes, Denis Browne, Wilfred Gibson and Edward Thomas and read Lithuania aloud. John Masefield felt that he should place it on a music-hall bill, as it was only half an hour in duration and couldn’t be billed as an evening’s entertainment by itself, encouraging Rupert with a rather noncommittal, ‘I hope that it will be produced and you will go on writing plays.’

  When news reached Rupert at Gray’s Inn that he had been elected a fellow of King’s, Eddie hosted a supper party in Rupert’s honour, where his protégé met Lady Cynthia Asquith, Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine and the Prime Minister’s daughter Violet Asquith, with whom he was to strike up a strong friendship. He thought her very witty; she in turn brought out the humour in him. The following month the two began a communication that was to gather momentum slowly. In March she sent a note inviting him to her birthday dinner at 10 Downing Street. Other guests included George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, Edmund Gosse and J. M. Barrie. A fortnight later she accompanied Brooke and Marsh to the Hippodrome to see Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

  His fellowship eased the tension between Rupert and his mother as she felt he had at last achieved something worthwhile. His literary efforts were now centred on trying to find a home for his play. The Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, thought the theme hackneyed, and novelist and critic Gilbert Cannan gave it the thumbs down, although John Drinkwater guardedly admitted that it showed promise.

  Rupert decided to heed the advice of Frances Cornford and other friends, that he should go abroad for a while, to clear his head and sort himself out; and so, having placated a mother riddled with condemnation for the scheme, he planned a journey abroad. Rupert had a sitting for photographs to be taken, but the session proved unsatisfactory, with the result that a second was set up with an American photographer based in Pimlico Square, Victoria, London. Sherril Schell was enthusiastic about photographing Brooke, who discussed the Russian Ballet, the London show Hullo, Rag-Time! and asked questions about America, while Schell noted that Rupert had narrowly escaped being snub-nosed, that this hair was a golden-brown with sprinklings of red and that he had a well-shaped face that wore a spasmodic wistful expression. The twelfth and final shot, Schell admitted, was ‘a pose that he himself suggested, his face in profile showing his bare neck and shoulders. For this he stripped to the waist, revealing a torso that recalled the young Heroes.’ The photograph became widely known among his friends at Cambridge as ‘your favourite actress’.

  He wrote of the sitting to Cathleen while staying as a house guest of Conservative politician George Wyndham at Clouds, his house in East Knoyle, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, the village in which Sir Ch
ristopher Wren was born. The imposing residence, with its fine commanding views to Salisbury Plain and across to Somerset and Dorset, had played host to several literary giants on 16 October 1910 when Henry James, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc attended Percy Wyndham’s golden wedding. George Wyndham, his son, succeeded him as ‘lord of the manor’ in 1911. At the time of Brooke’s weekend visit in April 1913, the estate boasted 3,000 sheep, nine full-time shepherds, an army of servants, a team of laundresses and stable workers and ten gardeners under Mr Brown, who supplemented the food supply for guests from the 3-acre kitchen garden. Brooke was clearly taken with George Wyndham’s secretary, as he mentions her later that summer, in a letter to Eddie Marsh from Ottawa: ‘The face (though not the name) of George Wyndham’s secretary dwells in my mind, tenderly guarded.’ Having spent some time in Germany, he would undoubtedly have talked to Fräulein Schneider (‘Bun’) during his stay, the godmother to Wyndham’s niece Cynthia Asquith, whom he had met since the celebration party in Marsh’s rooms and at a party given by Violet Asquith. Wyndham and Brooke discussed among other subjects, literature and poetry. One of George’s sisters, Pamela Tennant, was a regular writer of poetry and prose, several of her poems having been published in a volume called Windlestraw, which contained verses written in 1908, ‘Flowers and Weeds: a Garden Sequence’.

  One wonders if this could have been an inspiration for ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. Her poem begins, ‘Lilies and Pansies, and the Pink that grows / In grey-leaved clusters by the garden’s edge…’ and later refers to ‘… Poppies, hectic in their pride.’