Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  The effort of composing his prize-winning essay on William III inevitably brought on a collapse in health – which he variously called flu, hay fever or ophthalmia – but was probably nervous exhaustion allied to conjunctivitis, and almost caused him to miss the presentation of the prize at his last Speech Day. He capped this event with his final appearance before Eranos on the last Sunday of his last summer term. His father and Alfred turned up in honour of the event. Brooke’s survey of the current state of English verse covered the waterfront, from the patriots like Henley, Newbolt and Kipling through Yeats and the Celtic revival to his own favourites, Swinburne, Housman and Dowson, who, he concluded, should be read ‘on an evening like this, when the light is fading and the air is cool with late rain, and the roses, with the Summer Term, have almost come to an end’. There must have been scarcely a dry eye in the House.

  Brooke now felt himself poised on a plateau of achievement which could be followed only by a long anticlimax. He was a victim of the syndrome most satisfactorily defined by Cyril Connolly years after Brooke’s death – the ‘theory of arrested development’. Connolly held that: ‘the experience undergone by boys at the great public schools, their triumphs and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual.’ Brooke is a classic case-study in all these attitudes, which were probably at their peak in the year he left Rugby.

  The previous year had seen not only the birth of the deathless Peter Pan but the publication of the ‘Reginald’ stories of Saki (H. H. Munro – another Great War victim) and that early candid picture of public-school life, H. A. Vachell’s The Hill. Whereas Walter Pater professed to believe that to burn continually with a ‘hard, gemlike flame’ was ‘success in life’, Saki commented that ‘to have reached thirty is to have failed in life’. J. M. Barrie told his fellow-writer Arthur Quiller-Couch that ‘the best is past by the time he is three and twenty’. A. E. Housman, the homosexual author of A Shropshire Lad, hymned ‘lads that will die in their glory and never be old’. Brooke was clearly not alone in believing that his best days were done and that life would be all downhill from now on. In retrospect he wrote: ‘I had been happier at Rugby than I can find words to say. As I looked back at those five years I seemed to see almost every hour as golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious; and I could not and cannot hope for or even imagine such happiness elsewhere.’

  Faced with the prospect of leaving home and school simultaneously, Brooke was in a gloomy mood as he watched the school break up two days before his nineteenth birthday. He clutched desperately at the friends who would be going up with him to Cambridge – he persuaded Keynes to accompany him to one final shot at schoolboy glory, the Rugby versus Marlborough match at Lord’s, where his friend witnessed Brooke make two good catches before his wicket fell ingloriously for a duck. Describing himself to Keynes as ‘a pale ghost who has lived and can now only dream’, Brooke escaped the ‘deserted Hell’ of Rugby to join his other close school friend, Hugh Russell-Smith, at Brockenhurst.

  He was happy enough among the lively Russell-Smiths, playing tennis, reading his earliest literary love, Browning, and smooching with Denham in the hammock. True to form, though, he upheld his pose as the melancholy wanderer in a letter to Lucas: ‘The stillness and solitude here frighten me, for there are memories and visions, and one hears other voices whispering in the heart. I should like to be in London, in the crowds and the noise, where one can be silent and alone. Write to me.’ The same nostalgic spirit, the feeling of his life decaying with the waning summer – ‘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,’ as he put it to Keynes – pervades a poem he was writing at the time. ‘The Beginning’ was the first poem that Brooke felt finished and mature enough to include in his only book, Poems (1911). It ends:

  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.

  It was hard, being an ex-hero, a former Head of House, a somebody, no longer ‘to be among 500 people, all young and laughing … seated on the topmost pinnacle of the Temple of Joy’. Facing the prospect of becoming an anonymous nobody, his spirit and ego revolted and he retreated into his favourite fantasy/prophecy – that of early death. Failing yet again to join Lucas in France for the final weeks of pre-Cambridge freedom he lamented: ‘I had dreams of dying quietly in France … my few conscious moments soothed by you reading Baudelaire. But now, alas! I shall expire vulgarly at Bournemouth; and they will bury me on the shore, near the bandstand.’ He echoed the theme to Erica Cotterill: ‘Come and lay a few lilies on my grave soon, it is rather bare.’

  In keeping with this juvenile Weltschmerz he arrived to stay with his maiden aunts at Bournemouth after three days at a summer camp in Kent where working-class and public-school boys mixed and tried to learn from one another. His reading material on the promenade was suitably mournful: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which soon found its way into his writing, as he told Lucas:

  I am busy with an enormous romance of which I have written five chapters. It begins with my famous simile about the moon … [‘The moon was like an enormous yellow scab on the livid flesh of some leper’] One of the chief characters is a dropsical leper whose limbs and features have been absorbed in one vast soft paunch. He looks like a great human slug, and he croaks infamous little songs from a wee round mouth with yellow lips. The others are less respectable.

  If the aunts had caught a glimpse of this – assuming indeed that he even wrote it, since it does not survive – they would doubtless have been even more shocked than they were the previous year by Keynes’s risqué letter. The passage illustrates Brooke’s desire to shock by the use of grotesque imagery, albeit artificial and totally removed from his own cosy existence. His pathetic use of the closing paradox is another wearisome characteristic that palls by overuse, like a constantly reiterated dying fall. His pose of a prematurely aged and cynically moribund observer, worn out before his time, is resolutely maintained to Keynes: ‘With other decrepit and grey-haired invalids I drift wanly along the cliffs … I have seen everything there is to see and my eyes are tired.’

  Then, on 6 October, he writes to the friend of his youth with a sterner summary of his current philosophy, which owes more to Nietzsche, Wells and Shaw than to Baudelaire, Wilde and Dowson:

  tomorrow I return to Rugby for a few gloriously ghastly days. I shall be wonderful there, laughing wonderfully all day, and through the night wonderfully weeping. Then – leaving the people I have hated and loved I shall throw off, too, the Rupert Brooke I have hated and loved for so long and go to a new place and a new individuality … Indeed I have forsworn art and things beautiful; they are but chance manifestations of Life. All art rests on the sexual emotions which are merely the instruments of the Life-force – of Nature – for the propagation of life. That is all we live for, to further Nature’s purpose. Sentiment, poetry, romance, religion are but mists of our own fancies, too weak for the great nature-forces of individuality and sexual emotion. They only obscure the issue.

  One can sense Brooke bracing himself and stiffening the sinews for the ordeal ahead as he assures Keynes, the natural scientist, that humanity’s duty is merely to propagate the species and quietly await its inevitable demise ‘heeding as little as possible the selfish and foolish greed for personal immortality, or
the incomplete love of an individual’. The prospect before us, Brooke admits, may be ‘rather grey’ but is nevertheless ‘quite logical and scientific’. He rounds off his atheist sermon with a quotation from another French Decadent, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: ‘Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will end by coming to your knees … before the darkness!’ On that chilly note, the world-weary young philosopher embarked on the central phase of his comet-like rush across life.

  4

  * * *

  ‘Forward the Day is Breaking’

  * * *

  Brooke arrived at Cambridge in mid-October 1906. One of 50 freshmen starting at King’s, he was assigned Room 14 at the top of Staircase A in Fellows’ Buildings, in the left-hand corner of the college’s front court, with a breathtaking view across to the chapel. Seventeen years before, the rooms had been home to one of his Decadent idols, Aubrey Beardsley. It seems odd that during his first weeks he felt lost and homesick, since he had no shortage of friends and well-wishers around him.

  His uncle Alan, the college Dean, kept a watchful eye on him and had him to tea every Saturday afternoon; and he had brought with him a trio of his closest friends – Geoffrey Keynes, Hugh Russell-Smith and Denis Browne – although, since they were at different colleges, he did not see as much of them as he had at Rugby. The dons who supervised his studies were also sympathetic, although since they were all young confirmed bachelors of homoerotic inclinations they may have had their own reasons for welcoming this handsome newcomer.

  His tutor was John (‘Jack’) Sheppard, who was destined to end his career as Provost of King’s and was described as ‘a man of fascinating personality and an electrifying lecturer’. His lecturer in Classical History was Nathaniel Wedd, a convinced atheist and socialist, while his lecturer in Greek was Walter Headlam, more at home with the thought and speech of ancient Athens than he was in English. Another King’s Fellow was Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the famed author of The Greek View of Life and A Modern Symposium. All three men, to a greater or lesser degree, were inspired by the ideals of ancient Greece, and aimed to re-create the atmosphere of Athens in its heyday, with free and unfettered exchanges between teachers and students, treating their pupils more or less as equals, as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle had done. They were agnostics, if not atheists, in belief; and pagan in spirit. It followed that their moral and political outlook, in a Cambridge tradition, would be radical and rationalist – which well suited Brooke’s own budding ideas.

  It did not take Brooke long to find his first new friends. On the first Sunday of term he was expected to make a courtesy call on the Provost, M. R. James, later famous as the author of the greatest ghost stories in the language. While waiting on the steps of the Provost’s lodge, Brooke met a fellow-freshman who had come along for the same purpose. Hugh Dalton, later to find fame as a leading Labour politician and Chancellor in Clement Attlee’s 1945 government, was the son of the Canon of Windsor, a former tutor to Queen Victoria’s children. Tall, with a foghorn voice and a massive face, Dalton tended to repel people as easily as Brooke attracted them. (The Queen herself was the first of many enemies, describing the toddler as ‘Canon Dalton’s horrid son’.) At this time Dalton shared Brooke’s enthusiasm for Swinburne and Housman, but was more radical politically. Almost immediately they decided to set up a new political discussion society, christening it ‘the Carbonari’ after the secret Italian society that had paved the way for the Risorgimento.

  Despite this sympathetic if overbearing new friend, Brooke was slow to find his feet in the strange new world of Cambridge, with its servants, hierarchies and traditions. He was overwhelmed by the freer atmosphere he breathed, and took refuge in childish petulance. ‘I do not know if it’s the climate or the people: most probably it’s neither, but my cantankerous self,’ he wrote to Erica. ‘But for some reason I find this place absolutely devoid of interest and amusement. I like nobody. They all seem dull, middle-aged, and ugly … In fact, I suppose I’m “growing up”.’

  His pose of finding Cambridge and its citizens ‘ugly’ was to persist, witness ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’:

  For Cambridge people rarely smile,

  Being urban, squat and packed with guile;

  He moped in his rooms, lying on his sofa, his head resting on a green bolster – a gift from his maiden aunts – and reluctantly receiving visitors. To Lucas he complained:

  They talk vivaciously for three minutes and I stare at them with a dumb politeness, and then they go away. My room is a gaunt ‘Yellow Book’ wilderness with a few wicked little pictures scattered here and there. At certain moments I perceive a pleasant kind of peace in the grey ancient walls and green lawns among which I live; a quietude that does not recompense for the things I loved and have left, but at times softens their outlines a little. If only I were a poet I should love such a life very greatly, remembering moments of passion in tranquility; but being first and chiefly only a boy I am restless and unable to read or write.

  Rescue from his isolation was at hand. A third-year student at Emmanuel College, Justin Brooke, although no relation, was struck by the fact that Brooke shared the name of his elder brother and sought the new Kingsman out. Justin invited Brooke to attend a rehearsal for a production of Aeschylus’s Eumenides at the A.D.C. Theatre in Jesus Lane. One autumn afternoon, with nothing better to do, Brooke wandered into the stalls. His striking appearance was noticed, and he was instantly asked to take the part of the Herald, a non-speaking role which merely required him to pretend to blow a trumpet and look suitably beautiful.

  Justin Brooke’s father, Arthur, was a hard-nosed northern businessman who had built his small tea merchant’s business into the Brooke Bond tea empire. He had sent his sons to Bedales, a newly-founded ‘progressive’ boarding school in conscious revolt against Arnold’s public-school ethos. Its founder and headmaster, J. H. Badley, was a Rugbeian who had gone on to Cambridge, where he had absorbed the ethics of anti-Victorian revolt epitomized by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Heterosexual himself, Badley determined to found an unheard-of innovation: a co-educational boarding school. He bought a country house, Bedales, near Haywards Heath in Sussex, and opened its doors in 1893.

  The school atmosphere was a combination of high-minded ethics and plain Spartan living with an emphasis on the great outdoors. Both boys and girls began the day with a douche in a cold tub – a baptism that set the tone for the rest of the curriculum, with its cross-country runs, outdoor camps, swims in rivers and plain vegetarian food. In 1900 the school moved to its present quarters in the Hampshire village of Steep near Petersfield.

  Under Badley’s firm guidance – like many progressive educationalists, ‘the Chief as he was called, was authoritarian – a recognizable Bedalian ‘type’ soon emerged. Staff and pupils dressed in loose-fitting clothes – believed to encourage the ‘airing’ of private parts – sandals and head scarves. Boys and girls were encouraged to associate freely and bathe in the nude together, but physical expression of their sexuality was absolutely banned. The intellectual spirit of the school was vaguely radical, but owed more to William Morris with his back-to-the-land, Arts & Crafts ideals than it did to Karl Marx. Country pursuits, including hiking, nature studies and ploughing, were encouraged, and there were classes for the boys in cooking, needlework and handicrafts. In its rural style Bedales was as far removed from the realities of the twentieth century as Rugby, and its fostering of rational, sexless ‘comradeship’ between the sexes was as psychologically deficient as the most hidebound public school.

  Although in its turning away from the urban and industrial realities of the world Bedales was a reactionary place, its superficial trappings of sexual equality, the free outdoor life and its anti-religious outlook were an attractive package to someone fresh from the confines of Rugby, like Brooke. Justin, who had ended up as Bedales’ head boy, told his new friend all about the place, and introduced him to another former Bedalian, his room-mate and fellow Emmanuel student, the Frenchman
Jacques Raverat. Bedales put more emphasis on the arts than the classics, and Justin had discovered in himself a taste and a talent for drama during his time there. When he went up to Cambridge he continued to devote most of his energy to the stage, often playing female parts, to which his clean-cut, boyish good looks and 22-inch wasp-waist predisposed him. His beauty, like Brooke’s, made him the pin-up of homosexual admirers, but – like Jacques – he remained firmly heterosexual.

  Jacques described his new friend Brooke as having: ‘a childish beauty, undefined and fluid, as if his mother’s milk were still in his cheeks … The 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.’

  Justin, for all his interest in the arts, was an unimaginative soul, with a curiously flat, unemotional personality; but Jacques and Brooke took to each other at once, and spent many hours in feverish talk about poetry, art, sex, life and religion. They found common ground in a mutual disdain for God and ‘the absurd prejudices of patriotism and decency; [and] the grotesque encumbrances called parents’ – an easy set of attitudes to adopt when one’s parents – as Jacques’ were – were wealthy, château-owning members of France’s haute bourgeoisie.