Forever England

by Mike Read

  One Day

  Today I have been happy. All the day

  I held the memory of you, and wove

  Its laughter with the dancing light o’ the spray,

  And sowed the sky with tiny clouds of love,

  And sent you following the white waves of sea,

  And crowned your head with fancies, nothing worth,

  Stray buds from that old dust of misery,

  Being glad with a new foolish quiet mirth.

  So lightly I played with those dark memories,

  Just as a child, beneath the summer skies,

  Plays hour by hour with a strange shining stone,

  For which (he knows not) towns were fire of old,

  And love has been betrayed, and murder done,

  And great kings turned to a little bitter mould.

  During his time in the South Seas, the quality and depth of Rupert’s poetry reached a new maturity, while at home his reputation was growing. Wilfred Gibson was a little peeved that he had not been offered ‘Heaven’ for New Numbers, and the English Association wanted to include ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ in an anthology of modern poetry for use in secondary schools. The editor of a new series of Body and Modern Development of Modern Thought was keen for Brooke to contribute, having been impressed by his review of Poems of John Donne. Eddie Marsh suggested he might manage 40,000 words on somebody like the Stockholm playwright Johan August Strindberg, a subject close to Brooke’s heart. There was a splendid review of New Numbers in The Times, which quoted his ‘Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)’.

  Sonnet

  Not with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun,

  We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread

  Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead

  Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run

  Down some close-covered by-way of the air,

  Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,

  Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find

  Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there

  Spend in pure converse our eternal day;

  Think each in each, immediately wise;

  Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say

  What this tumultuous body now denies;

  And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;

  And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.

  New Numbers was being printed by the Crypt House Press at Gloucester and stamped and dispatched by the local postmaster Mr Griffiths with the help of Dymock postmen Charlie Westen and Jack Brooke. The first edition was oversubscribed, to the extent that the project was deemed to be a veritable success, Eddie Marsh writing to Rupert, ‘N. N. is out. It’s very good, the shape, print and appearance quite excellent.’

  As Brooke’s reputation was spreading, via Eddie he had had a direct entree to the right social, literary and political circles; so why did he tread water in Tahiti rather than race home to embrace success and capitalise on it? The answer was Taatamata, and a laissez-faire way of life that appealed to his neo-paganism. From Papeete Rupert was to declare to Marsh: ‘All I want in life is a cottage and the leisure to write supreme poems and plays.’

  Five of Rupert’s South Seas poems would appear in the third volume of New Numbers in July 1914, one of them, ‘Tiare Tahiti’, making reference to Taatamata, whom he called Mamua. Although he affords her only the odd allusion in his letters home, they enjoyed a full physical relationship and she nursed him back to health when he was feverish with coral poisoning. On the face of it, it was a dalliance that suited them both, and he waxed lyrical about her:

  I have been nursed and waited on by a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a Goddess, and the heart of an angel, who is, luckily, devoted to me. She gives her time to ministering me, I mine to probing her queer mind. I think I shall write a book about her – only I fear I’m too fond of her.

  The idyllic life could not continue: he had run out of money and the call of England was too great. Homesickness tore him from the arms of Taatamata, and from the Pacific he wrote:

  Call me home, I pray you, Cathleen. I have been away long enough. I am older than I was. I have left bits of me about – some of my hair in Canada, and one skin in Honolulu, and another in Fiji, and a bit of a third in Tahiti, and half a tooth in Samoa, and bits of my heart all over the place.

  The Tahiti, with Brooke aboard, left in early April. He described his sadness at leaving in a letter to Cathleen, understandably omitting his prolonged and personal farewell to Mamua:

  I was sad at heart to leave Tahiti but I resigned myself to the vessel, and watched the green shores and rocky peaks fade with hardly a pang. I’ve told so many of those that loved me, so often. Oh yes, I’ll come back … next year perhaps: or the year after … I suddenly realised that I’d left behind those lovely places and lovely people perhaps for ever. I reflected that there was surely nothing else like them in this world, and very probably nothing in the next…

  His final South Seas poem was ‘Hauntings’.

  Hauntings

  In the grey tumult of these after-years

  Oft silence falls; the incessant wranglers part;

  And less-than-echoes of remembered tears

  Hush all the loud confusion of the heart;

  And a shade, through the toss’d ranks of mirth and crying

  Hungers, and pains, and each dull passionate mood –

  Quite lost, and all but all forgot, undying,

  Comes back the ecstasy of your quietude.

  So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,

  Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,

  Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men,

  Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible,

  And light on waving grass, he knows not when,

  And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell.

  Still in the Pacific on board the Tahiti, he wrote to Frances Cornford, addressing the contents to her six-month-old daughter Helena: ‘[L]ately, I have been having English thoughts – thoughts certainly of England – and even, faintly, yes, English thoughts – grey, quiet, misty, rather mad, slightly moral, shy and lovely thoughts.’

  On the way back home, Brooke went back to the United States travelling through Arizona to San Francisco, where he already started to yearn for Tahiti – ‘How I hate civilisation and houses and towns and collars’ – and miss Mamua – ‘waiting there to welcome me with wide arms … under the constellation the Southern Cross’.

  Chapter 13

  The ‘Brussels-Before-Waterloo Feeling’

  RUPERT DESCRIBED THE Grand Canyon as ‘very large and very untidy, like my soul. But unlike my soul, it has peace in it’. From the brick-red desert of Arizona, he dispatched several other ‘Grand Canyon’ letters to Jacques Raverat, Mrs Brooke, the Marchesa Capponi and Russell Loines. He described the place to his mother:

  The Canyon itself is gigantic, a mile from the edge where you stand to the river at the bottom. For we’re 7,000 feet, and the river is 2,000 above sea level. The opposite rim of the Canyon is 13 miles away, and one can see up and down it for some 30 miles in each direction…

  He implored Cathleen not to let anybody know the exact date of his return: ‘It’s my fancy to blow in on them unexpected. Just wander into Raymond Buildings, and hear Eddie squeal “Oh my dear! I thought you were in Tahiti”…’

  On 29 April Rupert climbed off the train at Chicago and checked in at the Auditorium Hotel on Michigan Avenue, next door to the Fine Arts building where the Chicago Little Theatre had its premises on the fourth floor. The theatre was the brainchild of Maurice Browne and his wife, the actress Ellen Van Volkenburg. It had opened on 12 November 1912, to produce classical and modern plays, both tragedy and comedy at affordable prices. It was supported by some 400 people, who paid an annual subscription of ten dollars, and by the sale of seats to the public. The theatre was run by thirty-five staff and play
ers, and had for its object ‘the creation of a new plastic and rhythmic drama in America’.

  Rupert went to the theatre to meet Browne and his wife with a letter of introduction from Harold Monro, who was married to Browne’s sister. They got on like a house on fire, Brooke reading his South Seas poems and he also read his play Lithuania, which impressed Browne and Ellen sufficiently for them to stage it the following year. The husband and wife would respectively direct and act it. It would have a three-week run in Chicago after Brooke’s death, without being an overwhelming success. Brooke’s ten days with them was, according to Browne, ‘a riotous blur of all-night talks, club-sandwiches, dawns over Lake Michigan, and innumerable “steins” ’. Rupert gave Ellen several chains of South Seas shells and a copy of Hilaire Belloc’s Four Men, which by then he knew virtually off by heart. They insisted that he read all his South Seas poems, and invited others, including a Davenport attorney Arthur Davison Ficke, who, according to Browne, ‘came, saw and fell’, and Llewellyn Jones, the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post. Ficke would later celebrate the meeting in his 1917 poem ‘Portrait of Rupert Brooke’, published in New York as part of ‘An April Elegy’.

  Portrait of Rupert Brooke

  One night – the last we were to have you –

  High up above the city’s giant roar

  We sat around you on the studio floor –

  Since chairs were lame and stony or too few –

  And as you read, and the low music grew,

  In exquisite tendrils twining the heart’s core,

  All the conjecture we had felt before

  Flashed into torch-flame, and at last we knew.

  And Maurice, who in silence long has hidden

  A voice like yours, became a wreck of joy,

  To inarticulate ecstasies beguiled.

  And you, as from some secret world now hidden

  To make return, stared up, and like a boy

  Blushed suddenly, and looked at us, and smiled.

  Browne noted that:

  Brooke read well – much better of course than the average professional reader or actor reads poetry – quietly and shyly, with little tone-variation, dwelling slightly on significant vowel sounds and emphasising rhyme and rhythm: reading in fact, as a good lyric poet always reads good lyric poetry, taking care of the sound and letting the sense take care of itself.

  According to Browne, Rupert dazzled the people of Chicago in their windy city – ‘every woman who passes – and every other man – stops, turns round, to look at that lithe and radiant figure … his hair longish, wavy the colour of his skin: a sort of bleached gold’. Rupert had more photographs taken in Chicago, this time by Eugene Hutchinson, who had been present at several of Brooke’s readings:

  I found myself confronted by an unbelievably beautiful young man. There was nothing effeminate about that beauty. He was man-size and masculine, from his rough tweeds to his thick-soled English boots. He gave me the impression of being water-loving and well washed. Perhaps this was due to the freshness of his suntanned face and the odd smoothness of his skin, a smoothness you see more in women than in men … He seemed like a Norse myth in modern clothes – yet there was no vanity in the man…

  April saw the second publication of New Numbers, which carried only one of Rupert’s poems, ‘Heaven’, the work that Wilfred Gibson had wanted to include in the first book. A short time later, the Little Review carried a quote from W. B. Yeats that underlined Hutchinson’s observations: he declared Brooke ‘the most beautiful young man in England’.

  Rupert spent a night in Pittsburgh, before moving on to Washington, where he renewed his friendship with the Marchesa Capponi, whose heart he had clearly captured the previous summer in Canada. In the interim period she had visited England, and actually made her way to Rugby, where she called on Brooke’s mother. The Ranee found her charming, and was delighted to hear a complimentary account of her son.

  The newspapers were increasingly reporting the delicate state of relations between some of the European countries. The previous year Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro had argued over Macedonia, the Ottoman Empire having surrendered it after its defeat, on the understanding that it would become the new independent state of Albania. Despite the treaty, there was still unease in Europe. Brooke was able to follow developments in the American press. ‘[President Woodrow] Wilson gets forced more and more into war. The newspapers are wicked. But there’s nothing like the popular excitement a war generally causes. It’ll be a “sort of war” – dragging on and on…’

  By mid-May, Rupert was in Boston, before heading to New York to board the SS Philadelphia, which would sail on 29 May, taking him to Plymouth. He booked on to the same boat as Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg as he felt that their company would make the journey more pleasurable. A telegram from the Marchesa Capponi, which he received on boarding, was an unexpected and pleasant surprise. Ellen wrote several letters from the boat to her parents, containing constant references to ‘Mr Brooke’. Among their fellow passengers were many French, Germans, an Indian chief, thirty members of the University of California Glee Club, a Roman Catholic priest and the printer Ronald Hargreave. Teaming up with the latter, Browne, Ellen and Rupert intrigued many of the other passengers, several of whom took photographs of Brooke as he and his party kept themselves to themselves, playing bridge and having a sonnet-writing competition, in which the lines had predetermined end words. Hargreave, Brooke and Browne allowed themselves between 5 p.m. and 6.15 p.m. on 3 June to compose a sonnet each, to be read then to the others. An unsatisfied Hargreave threw his overboard, but Rupert considered his good enough to later rework it. This is the original.

  The True Beatitude

  They say, when the Great Prompter’s hand shall ring

  Down the Last Curtain upon earth and sea,

  All the Good Mimes will have Eternity

  To praise their Author, worship love and sing,

  Or, to the walls of Heaven wandering,

  Look down on those damned for a fretful d –

  Mock them (all theologians agree

  On this reward for virtue), laugh, and fling

  New sulphur on the sin-incarnadined…

  Ah, Love! Still temporal, and still atmospheric,

  Teleologically unperturbed,

  We share a peace by no divine divined,

  An earthly garden hidden from any cleric,

  Untrodden of God, by no Eternal curbed.

  This was Browne’s contribution:

  Plato was Right

  When Wagner, drunk with music, belched the Ring,

  He had not the excuse the emetic sea;

  Time did not lengthen to eternity,

  Nor drive him, like us wretched men, to sing

  Endless rhymed-endings. (Rupert, wandering,

  Stares seaward; Ronald growls an angry d–

  Both scratch their heads, and hiccough; and I agree:

  Villainous verse, and wine, not fit to fling

  Even to the fishes). He wasn’t incarnadined

  With shipboard claret; he sat by atmospheric

  And philadelphic victuals unperturbed;

  He could walk dry land, and chuckle; he wasn’t divined

  By a fat divine, nor scowled on by a thin cleric…

  And yet he sang. Pegasus should be curbed.

  Brooke and Browne were treated to an experiment of Hargreave’s ‘in projecting scenery, by painting a landscape on glass, putting it in a kodak in place of the film, then setting an electric bulb [at the] back of it and throwing the reflection on a big piece of paper some distance ahead.’

  As they approached England, Ellen recorded, ‘We’re almost in … land was sighted a long time ago, and we can smell new-mown hay! Mr Brooke is leaning over the taff rail, sniffing ecstatically.’

  Rupert was met at the station in London by Cathleen, Eddie Marsh and Denis Browne, before going on to Rugby to see his mother and write to the Marchesa Capponi: ‘I was so
happy all the voyage. We had splendid weather, and there were nice people on board. I thought of you and rejoiced. You give me great quietness and peace … you are very good to me…’

  After Rugby he spent a few days at Manor Farm with the Raverats and their fellow guest, the French writer Andre Gide, a close friend of Oscar Wilde from late 1891 until the latter’s death in 1900. Back in London, Rupert went to the ballet to see Les Papillons and Petrushka with Marsh and the Brownes. Queen Alexandra, George Moore, Arnold Bennett and the Bernard Shaws were also in attendance, Ellen thinking that Shaw ‘looked like a very solemn English clergyman’. After the ballet, they retired to Raymond Buildings, where they were joined by friends of Marsh’s, whom Maurice thought ‘the loveliest people in London’. The party went on till dawn, with Mrs Elgy serving iced coffee and Rupert, usually a resolute non-dancer, performing a South Seas island dance with a flame-haired girl called Jane, on the lawns of Gray’s Inn.

  On another occasion in Marsh’s room Brooke, Gibson, Abercrombie and Monro talked metaphysics long into the night, while being observed by Maurice Browne, also present, who noted, ‘Brooke’s grasp and handling of intellectual abstractions was much more than usual, he was a child in the philosophical hands of Abercrombie, perhaps the most compelling, conversationally of contemporary British metaphysicians.’ With Violet Asquith he visited the Masefields at their new home in south Oxfordshire, Collingdon Farm near Wallingford. Constance Masefield recorded the visit in her diary: ‘The two days were full of charm and friendship and happiness.’ They walked over Collingdon Hill and the Berkshire Downs, with a disbelieving Rupert and Violet laughing at Masefield’s suggestion that the Austro-Serbian conflict might at some point involve Britain. Within a short while he was proved right, and their new home was temporarily requisitioned for the Cavalry.