by Mike Read
– I have read as much.
And theirs no longer joy nor smart,
Changing or ending, night or day;
But mouth to mouth, and heart on heart,
– So lovers say.
Cathleen understood Rupert’s reasons for his decision to travel to America, even with no specific time limit attached. But safe in the knowledge that all was on an even keel with her, he seemed more concerned about leaving Noel to her other suitors. He worried that she might submit herself to one of them during his time abroad.
Edward Thomas received a letter excusing Rupert from not coming down to see him before he went: ‘I could leave the muses of England in your keeping – I do that anyhow.’ He went to take his leave from the Ranee, with whom he discussed the merits of poets Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater and Wilfred Gibson. Denis Browne, his musician friend from Cambridge, and long-time chum Geoffrey Keynes received a few lines of farewell. A day or so before departing, he dined with Noel at Treviglio’s in London’s Soho.
His trip was to be subsidised by the Westminster Gazette, the periodical’s literary editor Naomi Royde Smith having suggested that he should be paid four guineas an article for his impressions of the United States and Canada. Just two days before sailing he was officially engaged as a correspondent for the newspaper.
Two weeks before Brooke’s departure, Eddie Marsh hosted a farewell supper at Raymond Buildings, the guests including Violet Asquith, Cathleen Nesbitt, Wilfred Gibson and Gilbert Cannan. Marsh gave Rupert a full set of Jane Austen novels as a parting gift the following day. Eddie was also journeying abroad on 9 May, aboard the Enchantress, in the company of the Prime Minister, Mrs Asquith, Violet Asquith and the Churchills. There was another ‘last supper’ on the evening before he was due to sail. A gathering in London’s Regent Street under Gambrinus, between 10 p.m. and midnight, saw the likes of Wilfred Gibson, Geoffrey Keynes and John Middleton Murry in attendance. Murry wrote to his wife Katherine Mansfield about the evening; ‘I’m going to supper with Rupert tonight because he’s going off to America in the morning; it’s all very silly but a free meal is fascinating.’
Although Eddie Marsh was a generous benefactor of the Georgian Poets, who, of course, included Brooke, those he did not publish in the book rebelled. Murry certainly did: ‘They are spreading a miasma of sickening falsity. Page after page of the Georgian book is not merely bad poetry – that would be a relief – but sham naive, sham everything.’
Despite Murry’s criticism Georgian Poets ran for many years. None of the poets involved, or Marsh himself, would have dreamt that the next edition would carry an ‘In Memoriam’ to Brooke.
Chapter 11
Ships – Ocean-Going, Laureate and Friend
ON 22 MAY, the train carrying Rupert pulled out of London’s Euston station with its stunning, now long-demolished booking hall. At Liverpool docks he boarded the SS Cedric, where he gave a local ragamuffin named William sixpence to wave him goodbye. Ensconced in Cabin 50, selected because that was his phone number at Rugby, he set off on a voyage that was to be of an indeterminable length and produce far more than a series of articles. Angry that he had left all his letters of introduction at Thurloe Square, he had time to dwell upon the conversation he had had the previous day with Denis Browne about the possibility of collaborating on a musical show the following year. He set out to explore the ship and study his fellow passengers.
On board, he wrote a long rambling missive to Cathleen, which included a reference to Ka:
O child, it’s hard work cutting off from people one’s been intimate with. (I told you I’d been with a girl I loved – and you’ll not ever tell anyone about it, child: for it’s not wholly my secret.) I’ve got, I feel, to stop even writing to her, for her sake, to give her a chance to get free…
He mentioned the presence on board of the Liverpudlian poet Richard le Gallienne – a topic he also raised in a letter written from the SS Cedric to Eddie Marsh:
One of my fellow passengers is Richard le Gallienne. Oh Eddie, he is a nasty man. He mouches about with grizzled hair and a bleary eye: and Mrs le G., an ex-Golden Girl, follows him with a rug. And Miss le G. plays deck-tennis with the American girls. He eyes me suspiciously – he scents a rival, I think. We’ve not spoken yet. His shoulders are bent. His mouth is ugly and small and mean. His eyes are glazed. His manner is furtive … Is it to that we come … I think I will drown myself at thirty … I do not care for the fate of a poet … I have started a ballade, in imitation of Villon: but it may not be printed…
Brooke and le Gallienne weren’t acquainted, but were undoubtedly aware of each other’s presence and would almost certainly have met on the journey. His disparaging comments about le Gallienne to Marsh didn’t touch on the ever-present urn containing the ashes of his great love and first wife Mildred, which le Gallienne took with him everywhere. Brooke’s keen eye would not have failed to notice this bizarre behaviour by the Liverpool poet; and it was clearly the inspiration for what could be construed as Rupert’s cruellest piece of satire. But was it a deliberate attempt at satire? The poem certainly reads as if Brooke were writing with genuine compassion, but his reference to ‘a ballade, an imitation of Villon’ is a possible clue to the style of poem that was really in Brooke’s mind. The fifteenth-century French poet was not only famous for his satiric humour, but also gifted in the field of lyrical pathos. It seems that ‘For Mildred’s Urn’ was one of a batch of poems that Rupert was to mislay while travelling through Canada, and has remained unpublished until now.
For Mildred’s Urn
Precious the box that Mary brake
Of spikenard for her Master’s sake,
But ah! It held nought half so dear
As the sweet dust that whitens here.
The greater wonder who shall say,
To make so white a soul of day
From clay, to win a face so fair.
Those strange real eyes, that sunlit hair
A ripple o’er her witty brain –
Or turn all back to dust again.
Who knows but in some happy hour
The God, whose strange alchemic power
Wrought her of dust, again may turn
To woman, this immortal urn;
May take this dust and breathe thereon,
And give me back my little one.
On docking he checked into New York’s Broadway Central Hotel, and, feeling sorry for himself, was overwhelmed by feelings of loneliness and homesickness:
It’s a beastly hotel: and I’m in a beastly room over a cobbled street where there’s the Hell of a noise; and I’ve been tramping this damned city all day, and riding its cars (when they weren’t too full); and it’s hot; and I’m very tired and cross; and my pyjamas haven’t come; and my letters of introduction, which I left behind en masse, haven’t come; and nothing’s come; and I don’t know a soul in New York; and I’m very tired; and I don’t like the food; and I don’t like the people’s faces; and I don’t like the newspapers; and I haven’t a friend in the world; and nobody loves me; and I’m going to be extraordinarily miserable these six months; and I want to die…
Subsequently, though, he began to perk up a little and to look to his task of committing his observations to paper and arranging them into digestible parcels for the Westminster Gazette. His second article began: ‘In fine things America excels modern England – fish, architecture, jokes, drinks and children’s clothes.’ He also noticed that ‘the American by race walks better than we; more freely, with a taking swing, and almost with grace. How much of this is due to living in a democracy, and how much to wearing no braces, it is very difficult to determine.’ Another interesting observation was the scope of educational facilities, much broader than the British system, not academically, but in terms of opportunity.
As a child, he [the American] gets education, then evening-classes, continuation-schools, gymnasia, military training, swimming-baths, orchestra, facilities for the study of anything under the
sun, from palaeography to Cherokee, libraries, holiday-camps, hospitals, ever-present medical attendance…
During much of his time in New York, he was looked after by Russell H. Loines, a New York lawyer, through an introduction from his former tutor Lowes Dickinson. Loines showed Brooke the sights and took him canoeing in the rapids on the Delaware river. Loines made many young Englishmen welcome at his house on Staten Island. Rupert took time out to write to Ka: ‘[Y]ou must get clear of me, cease to love me, love and marry somebody – and somebody worthy of you.’
To Cathleen his tone was decidedly warmer and more descriptive: ‘The little white wisps of mist are creeping and curling along the face of the great wide river.’
Back in work mode, Brooke also captured the noise and bustle of the city. ‘Theatres and “movies” are aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the elevated train clangs and curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their obscure challenges to one another, “I should worry!” or “She’s some daisy!” or “Goodnight nurse!”.’ He wrote to Marsh on different topics, including the candidates in the running for the Poet Laureateship following the death of Alfred Austin: ‘All the papers have immense articles, with pictures of Masefield and Noyes. They mention everybody except me and Wilfred. Even Will Davies…’
From New York he travelled to Boston, where a middle-aged lady told him, ‘What is wrong with America is this democracy. They ought to take the votes away from these people, who don’t know how to use them, and give them only to us, the educated.’
After Boston he attended the Harvard–Yale baseball match across the river in Cambridge, where he witnessed cheerleaders raising the crowd to new heights. At Harvard he noted a march by graduates from the class of 1912 stretching back to the veterans of the 1850s: ‘It seems to bring the passage of time very presently and vividly to the mind. To see, with such emphatic regularity, one’s coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after summer!’ At Harvard one octogenarian asked Rupert, ‘So you come from Rugby, tell me, do you know that curious creature Matthew Arnold?’ Brooke noted, ‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that even in Rugby, we had forgiven that brilliant youth his iconoclastic tendencies some time since, and that, as a matter of fact, he had died when I was eight months old.’
But it was time to put the United States behind him.
My American friends were full of kindly scorn when I announced that I was going to Canada. ‘A country without soul’ they cried and pressed books upon me to befriend me through the Philistine bleakness … I was taken in a motor car some 20 miles or more over the execrable roads round here, to a lovely little lake in the hills, north-west of Ottawa. We went to little French villages and fields at first and then through rocky tangled woods of birch and poplar, rich with milk-weed and blue cornflowers, and the aromatic thimbleberry blossom and that romantic light, purple-red flowers which is called fireweed, because it is the first vegetation to spring up in the prairie after a fire has passed over and so might be adapted as the emblematic flower of a sense of humour.
Brooke took leave of Harvard and headed north to Canada on the Montreal Express, from where he wrote to Eddie Marsh:
[N]ow I’m shut up in my upper half of the sleeping-berth, I’m empty but a little easier. Beneath me sleeps – oh, a mattress and a plank between us – a fat old lady. Every other berth in the car is shared between married people, so it is – naturally – the prevalent opinion that the fat woman is my wife.
Marsh’s mischievous reply included a newspaper cutting stuck on to the letter: ‘BROOKE – On 9 July, at Ashford Hill, Newbury the wife of R. C. Brooke, of a daughter’, adding, ‘Evidently the fat lady seen in the train has nipped over to England and is foisting her bastard on you – so beware.’
The American and Canadian magazines were still full of talk of an imminent appointment of a Poet Laureate. In a letter to Marsh, Brooke wrote: ‘Laureateship is discussed ardently and continually. They think le Gallienne is in the running otherwise they’re fairly sane. Except that everybody here thinks Noyes a big poet; bigger than Yeats or Bridges for instance … why not Bridges? … Kipling’d be fine too…’
Masefield, however, seemed to be quite candid about his chances: ‘I haven’t got a ghost of a chance, and never had. I can’t possibly be in the six most likely names. As far as one can see, the appointment lies between the following: Robert Bridges, Edmund Gosse, Henry Newbolt, Austin Dobson, Thomas Hardy and Sir Quiller Couch.’ Masefield would become Laureate, but not for another seventeen years after the death of the man who would be named as Laureate, Robert Bridges.
The younger poets were able to make their voices heard in several literary organs including John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm, which became the Blue Review in the spring of 1913. The magazine also encompassed articles on other aspects of the arts as well as featuring literary contributions from such writers and poets as Lascelles Abercrombie, Gilbert Cannan, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, W. H. Davies and Brooke. Vol. 1 no. 3, which was eventually published in July 1913, contained two of Brooke’s poems, ‘Love’ and ‘The Busy Heart’.
The Busy Heart
Now that we’ve done our best and worst, and parted,
I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
I’ll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;
And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;
And the young heavens, forgetful after rain;
And evening hush, broken by homing wings;
And Song’s nobility, and Wisdom holy,
That live, we dead. I would think of a thousand things,
Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,
One after one, like tasting a sweet food.
I have need to busy my heart with quietude.
Of all the contributors to that edition, Rupert seemed most impressed with the work of Katherine Mansfield: ‘She can write, damn her.’ The Blue Review collapsed after that particular edition, with Murry moving to Paris in an attempt to escape his creditors. His problems had begun when the publisher of Rhythm absconded in October 1912 leaving a printing debt of £400. Murry would be made bankrupt in February 1914, and another outlet for Brooke’s poems was sealed off.
Occasional bursts of homesickness saw Brooke making up ‘minor painful songs’:
Would God were eating plover’s eggs
And drinking dry champagne
With the Bernard Shaws, Mr and Mrs Masefield
Lady Horner, Neil Primrose, Raleigh, The Right
Honourable Augustine Birrell, Eddie, six or
Seven Asquiths, and Felicity Tree, in Downing Street again.
In Canada, Brooke visited Quebec, from where he sailed up the St Lawrence Seaway, 18 miles across at the point where his boat turned up the Saguenay, which flows beneath massive cliffs of black granite, to Chicotimi.
In Montreal, he noted how the British sector was dominated by the Scots; and after its ‘strain and lightness’ considered Ottawa a relief. ‘The streets of Ottawa are very quiet, and shaded with trees. The houses are mostly of that cool, homely, wooden kind. With verandahs, on which, or on the steps, the whole family may sit in the evening and observe the passers-by.’
In Ottawa, he stayed with the poet Duncan Campbell Scott and his family. He wrote to Wilfred Gibson about Scott, ‘Poor devil, he’s so lonely and dried there: no one to talk to. They had a child – daughter – who died in 1908 or so. And it knocked them out … Their house is queerily desolate, it rather went to my heart.’ Scott had been an introduction from John Masefield.
During Brooke’s Canadian travels, Wilfred Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie had come up with a bright publishing idea for publishing their poems from the Gallows, the Abercrombies’ house in Dymock, Gloucestershire. Gibson wrote to Rupert about it in a l
etter that caught up with him on the banks of Lake Ontario. Rupert passed the exciting information on to his mother in a letter from the King Edward Hotel, Toronto, dated 21 July 1913.
Gibson has been staying with Abercrombie and has got a great idea that he, Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and I should combine our publics and publish from the Abercrombies (Mrs A. does the work) a volume four times a year. A. has done it with some of his own stuff, and finds he makes most money that way. The other three seem to be keen on the idea. Rather a score for me, as my ‘public’ is smaller than any of theirs! But it’s a secret at present.
The working title was to be ‘Gallows Garlands’.
The first of the literary circle that was to become known as the ‘Dymock Poets’ to move to the area ‘did a Dymoke’ (a phrase meaning to have extricated oneself from a tricky situation or accomplished a difficult task) was Lascelles Abercrombie. Abercrombie had successfully liberated himself from being a trainee quantity surveyor to enter the world of literature on a full-time basis, as a reviewer for various newspapers in Manchester and Liverpool. In 1910 he came temporarily to Much Marcle, Herefordshire, where his married sister had settled, before moving to the Gallows, a pair of cottages on Lord Beauchamp’s estate, just to the south-east of Much Marcle, at Ryton. His writing flourished and he published ‘Emblems of Love’, ‘The Sale of St Thomas’ and ‘Ryton Firs’:
… From Marcle Way
From Dymock, Kimpley, Newent, Bromesbarrow,
Redmarley, all the meadowland daffodils seem
Running in gold tides to Ryton Firs…
Wilfed Gibson moved to the area in 1913, taking the Old Nailshop at Greenway Cross, the former house of the Sadlers, the local nail-makers, having initially stayed close by with the Abercrombies. Some three years older than Lascelles, Gibson turned thirty-five in 1913 and Abercrombie thirty-two. The former’s reputation was rapidly growing via his volume of verses Daily Bread, by then in its third edition, and The Stonefolds. Gibson, like Abercrombie, was also moved by the beauty of this remote part of England, as he expressed in poems such as ‘In the Meadow’, ‘The Elm’ and ‘Trees’.