Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  S: I suppose you know what’s the matter with me. I’m in love with you.

  B: How distressing of you! Will you have a cigarette?

  S: I suppose you don’t believe I have any feelings.

  B: It doesn’t interest me … besides, it annoys me.

  S: I don’t see why it should.

  B: Because it irritates me: I AM irritable … I think I really ought to laugh at you.

  S: I think I’d better go.

  B: I should advise you to go and make yourself a drink.

  The dialogue, if true, bears out the opinion of another Cambridge homosexual admirer of Brooke’s, E. M. Forster, who wrote just after the poet’s death: ‘He was essentially hard; his hatred of slosh went rather too deep and affected the eternal water-springs, and I don’t envy anyone who applied to him for sympathy.’ (His perceptive analysis of Brooke did not prevent Forster from harbouring ‘sloshy’ feelings for him – he is reputed to have treasured a pair of the poet’s underpants – provenance unknown – in his rooms at King’s until he died in 1970.) Brooke’s well-attested anti-sentimentality sits oddly alongside the lush sentiment of some of his poems. A closer reading of the bulk of his verse, however, reveals that the predominant mood is satire and cynicism. These strands in his character derived from his mother’s scornful Victorianism and from his own annoyance at being the unwilling love-object of so many unwelcome suitors – especially men like James Strachey and Forster, to whom he was not sexually attracted. Seen in this light, his ‘hardness’ is at least understandable, and even forgivable.

  5

  * * *

  Apollo and Apostles

  * * *

  Brooke returned to Cambridge early in May. Before he was embroiled in the hurly-burly of the May exams, he found time to reply to a plea by Erica Cotterill which echoed Keynes’s earlier advice to drop his pose of poetic Weltschmerz and stop ‘extracting unreasonable misery from art’. ‘This,’ spluttered Brooke, ‘is all bosh. Art isn’t the thing that makes one happy or miserable: it’s Life. Art is only a Shadow, a second-rate Substitute, a refuge after Life – real Life.’

  Brooke feared he had not done well in his exams. His lack of interest in Classics could no longer be concealed. There was still time to make up lost ground, but his thoughts were turning to drama and literature. He had been putting more time and energy into the stage, playing the part of Stingo in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer for the A.D.C. Theatre in February. Now he got involved in a production that was to be instrumental in widening his social circle and providing a new direction for his aimless way of life.

  Inspired by the freshness and vigour displayed by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre company on a visit to Cambridge, Justin Brooke suggested to the A.D.C. that it abandon its usual fare of farce for something more serious. Receiving a dusty answer, he resolved to mount his own production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, and formed the Marlowe Dramatic Society for the purpose. Its members consisted almost entirely of his own friends and contacts. His first port of call was Brooke, who was already a Marlowe fan. Together they called on an Old Rugbeian Trinity man, Andrew ‘Granny’ Gow (later a teacher of George Orwell at Eton). Gow won permission of the university authorities for the project, and roped in another Trinity don, Francis Cornford. Justin himself played the part of Faustus and the rest of the cast and stage staff form a roll-call of Brooke’s friends.

  Brooke himself took on the role of Mephostophilis. Geoffrey Keynes was the Evil Angel, Hugh Russell-Smith Gluttony and Denis Browne Lucifer. George Mallory played the Pope. Although no women were permitted to take acting roles, they were actively engaged backstage. Rehearsals started, with the aim of staging the play in the autumn. Meanwhile summer was approaching, with the pleasures of the long vacation.

  Brooke began by mortifying his flesh with a stay in the uninspiring company of his maiden aunts in Bournemouth, where, in between secreting the writings of the gay and atheistic Marlowe from their censorious eyes, he wrote comically despairing descriptions of his fate to his friends. ‘My Evangelical aunts always talk at meals like people in Ibsen. They make vast Symbolic remarks about Doors and Houses and Food. My one aim is to keep the conversation on Foreign Missions, lest I scream suddenly,’ he informed Lucas.

  Bournemouth brought Brooke within striking distance of a part of Dorset that was to loom large in his future: Lulworth Cove. Poring over a map of the area, his eye was drawn to the oddly named Mupe Rocks. (‘Have even we made a better name?’ he asked Hugh Russell-Smith, whom he had recruited for a repetition of their walking tour in the spring.) Intrigued, he resolved to make Lulworth, just half a mile from the rocks, the base for their tour and reserved rooms above West Lulworth post office, mocking the illiteracy of the postmistress, Mrs Emily Chaffey, as he did so: ‘Mrs Chaffey thanks me for my card and will reserve rooms ‘“as agreeded”.’ Brooke persuaded a new Cambridge friend, a dour and studious economist named Dudley Ward, to join the party.

  Just before leaving Bournemouth he received the results of his exams – a disappointing Second. It was said that his ‘flippancy’ in his History papers had greatly contributed to his poor showing; but neither this news, nor a comic mishap on arrival at Lulworth – having forgotten his keys he was obliged to force open his trunk with a pickaxe – seem to have dampened his exuberant high spirits at the prospect of a seaside holiday in one of the most attractive and invigorating spots in southern England. Even a bout of food poisoning after sampling Mrs Chaffey’s home cooking failed to depress him: ‘Today I am weak but cheerful,’ he told Keynes as he recuperated. ‘I can sit up and take a little Plato.’

  This holiday at Lulworth seems to have been beset by comic interludes. Another such saw Brooke drop his volume of Keats into the sea. After a frantic search by boat, the missing volume was spotted by Hugh ‘in the midst of a roaring vortex’. ‘I cast off my garb and plunged wholly naked into that “fury of black waters and roaring foam”.’ The bedraggled book was safely retrieved. Brooke was to discover subsequently the ‘amazing’ coincidence that Keats had made his last landfall in England at Lulworth en route to Rome and death, and had taken the opportunity to write his last great sonnet, ‘Bright Star’.

  A poem written on 8 July at Lulworth, ‘Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening’, indicates that the open-air life had succeeded, where Keynes and Erica had failed, in blowing away some of the cobwebs of Brooke’s former melancholy. In it, he describes a gathering evening that inspired his usual thoughts of decay and transience:

  And I was sick and tired that all was over,

  And because I,

  For all my thinking, never could recover

  One moment of the good hours that were over.

  And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.

  But then all is transformed:

  Then from the sad west turning wearily,

  I saw the pines against the white north sky,

  Very beautiful, and still, and bending over

  Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.

  And there was peace in them; and I

  Was happy, and forgot to play the lover,

  And laughed, and did no longer wish to die;

  Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!

  The previous term he had published another poem in the King’s college magazine, Basileon, a sonnet entitled ‘Dawn’ which successfully essays his first exercise in the mood of disgust with bodily functions that he was to make his own. Inspired by his train trip to Florence with Alfred in a closed carriage, it repeats the refrain, ‘Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore’, and concludes:

  One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again.

  The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain

  Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere

  A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air

  Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before …

  Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.

  After his apprenticeship in
the purple shadows of decadence, Brooke was, however haltingly, casting off their stifling influence and beginning to find his voice.

  He passed his twentieth birthday at Brockenhurst in the company of the Russell-Smiths. As the tonic of the Lulworth ozone wore off, the anniversary gave rise to predictably melancholy reflections, as expressed to Lucas:

  Now I am staying with this foolish family again … They are delightful, and exactly as they were last year … A few days ago they found I was exactly 20; and congratulated me on my birthday, giving me a birthday cake, and such things. I hated them, and lost my temper. I am now in the depths of despondency because of my age. I am filled with a hysterical despair to think of fifty dull years more. I hate myself and everyone. I have written almost no verse for ages; I shall never write any more …

  This petulant rant shows Brooke in his worst, though sadly all too frequent, mood: that of the spoilt, self-pitying brat. Its only saving grace is that he recognizes its hysteria for the childish tantrum that it is. More miserable, though accurate, self-analysis followed to Geoffrey Keynes: ‘What I chiefly loathe and try to escape, is not Cambridge nor Rugby nor London but – Rupert Brooke. And I can only do this by rushing suddenly to places for a few days. He soon overtakes me.’ Brooke’s rush to escape himself for the rest of the summer took him to Rugby, then on a family holiday to Belgium in September.

  While in Antwerp with Alfred he witnessed a demonstration by striking workers violently dispersed by the police. This inspired a curiously reactionary response in a letter to Lucas: ‘I prayed that some great archangel would smite suddenly, blazing down the street, and blast the crawling maggots. The English are the only race who are ever clean and straight and beautiful; and they rarely.’ His sentiments show clearly that his recent interest in socialism was only skin-deep – in essence just another fashionable pose – and that his real instincts were deeply conservative. His fear of the inchoate masses – ‘crawling maggots’ – is plain, and his deep belief in the racial superiority of the English over more benighted nations, which was to surface so virulently in the last years of his life, is seen in its true inglorious colours. Ironically, the next time he would see Antwerp would be at the outset of the Great War, when he returned in uniform to defend the ‘crawling maggots’ from the German army.

  For the moment, as he told Lucas, his heart was sick at the thought of having to ‘go back to Cambridge for my second year and laugh and talk with those old dull people on that airless plain! The thought fills me with hideous ennui.’ He was soon able to repay the debt of influence – albeit a mixed blessing in the progress of his poetry – that he owed to Lucas when he reviewed two volumes by his first literary mentor in the Cambridge Review. These were The Oxford Book of French Verse and The Marble Sphinx, a violent and exotic Oriental fantasy. Reading the latter in Rugby while laid up with a knee injury from a football game, he wrote to tell their author of his admiration: ‘It has coloured my dreams for nights.’ Comparing his bruised leg to Lucas’s jewelled prose, he added: ‘It is swollen and strangely green and black as your prose style, but not nearly so pleasant.’

  Back in Cambridge on 7 October, Brooke found his second-year dwelling in Room 1 on Staircase E of Gibbs Building, in a corner of King’s front court furthest from the chapel. A new friend was acquired in the shape of a freshman, Arthur Schloss – later, as Arthur Waley, a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry. But another friend, Jacques Raverat, was temporarily absent – convalescing in France after the first attack of a mysterious illness that was for a long time misdiagnosed as nervous exhaustion but eventually proved to be the cruel and wasting creeping paralysis of multiple sclerosis.

  Possessed by his customary beginning-of-term blues, Brooke vented his spleen on Cambridge, variously dubbing it ‘a miasma’, ‘a swamp’, ‘a wilderness’ and ‘a bog’. He sought distraction in renewed rehearsals for Dr Faustus, which opened on 11 November in the presence of Prince Leopold of Belgium. The King’s don E. J. Dent, who was also there, criticized Brooke’s ‘thick and indistinct voice’ thanks to his head being half-concealed in a Mephistophelean cowl and turned away from the audience. Despite its imperfections, the production made a handsome £20 profit, which enabled the Marlowe Dramatic Society to be established on a firm footing as a permanent addition to the university’s theatrical life.

  Charles Sayle threw a post-performance party for the cast, although the main attraction for the host was Brooke, who had now become a regular visitor at Trumpington Street, as ‘Aunt Snayle’ recorded: ‘I did a little shopping and came home. Standing in my hall in the dark, and thinking of other things, I looked towards my dining room, and there, seated in my chair, in a strong light, he sat, with his head turned towards me, radiant. It was another unforgettable moment. A dramatic touch. A Rembrandt picture. Life.’

  Meanwhile Brooke’s involvement with socialism was deepening. He was elected to the Cambridge Fabian Society Committee with Hugh Dalton’s support, and travelled to Oxford with his fellow-Fabians, ‘an indecorous, atheistical, obscene set of ruffians’, as he told Michael Sadler in an advance letter, for a meeting with like-minded students in ‘the other place’. Back in Cambridge, he attended a meeting addressed by the Fabians’ founding father, George Bernard Shaw. He was not impressed by the garrulous dramatist: ‘It was the same speech as he made the night before in London and the night after, somewhere,’ he told Erica. ‘Mostly about the formation of a “middle-class party” in Parliament which didn’t interest me much.’

  Shaw was not the first eminent man of letters Brooke had encountered at Cambridge. In June his hero Hilaire Belloc had read a paper to a private group at Pembroke, and he had been able to study the massive bulk of the great controversialist at close quarters. Reporting the event to Erica, Brooke recounted how the Anglo-Frenchman ‘talked and drank beer – all in great measure. He was vastly entertaining. Afterwards Gow and I walked home with him about a mile. He was wonderfully drunk and talked all the way.’ Then came the characteristically Brookian note of alarm: ‘You can tell Ma if you see her; but for God’s sake don’t say he was drunk, or she’ll never read him again.’

  It is easy to see what superficial attraction Belloc held for Brooke – his beer-swilling advocacy of a mythical ‘Merrie England’ that had been destroyed by capitalism, industrialization and the Protestant work ethic would have been instantly appealing. But there was a darker side to Belloc’s politics that found an answering echo within Brooke’s divided heart – his English patriotism contained a worm of xenophobia, particularly anti-Semitism, that Brooke shared. Brooke’s feelings were bolstered by Jacques Raverat, who equated the modernism he abhorred with the machinations of international Jewry. With the Dreyfus affair still a recent memory, such prejudice was common in Frenchmen of Raverat’s and Belloc’s class, but it was a virus which crossed the Channel too – as the Marconi scandal would shortly prove.

  *

  Ever since he had been up at Cambridge, Brooke had been under the scrutiny of a secretive élite society with a weather eye out for new members – students of particular promise or brilliance, especially if they happened to be handsome too. The Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as ‘the Apostles’, had been founded in 1820 as an informal discussion group to bridge the divide between colleges throughout the university. It was particularly strong in King’s and Trinity. Over the years its secretiveness increased, as did its selectivity. No one could apply to become an Apostle; as with the Freemasons, suitably qualified individuals were discreetly approached to become a candidate member, or ‘embryo’ in Apostle jargon. If he passed a period of probation satisfactorily, the embryo would be admitted to the select inner circle, given an Apostolic number and sworn to secrecy. Membership lasted for life.

  The Apostles met every Saturday behind closed doors at Trinity for tea and elevated conversation over anchovies on toast. Tennyson, Arthur Hallam and Edward FitzGerald, the translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, had been among the earliest member
s. By the turn of the century, the society, which had always had a homoerotic tinge, had become almost exclusively homosexual: a tendency that was confirmed when Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes came to be members. Almost all Brooke’s teachers at King’s, including Lowes Dickinson, Harry Norton and Jack Sheppard were Apostles, as was Oscar Browning, who had donated the wooden chest, known as ‘the Ark’, in which the papers read by members at their meetings were solemnly deposited. The ethics of the Apostles, which became the guiding spirit of Cambridge in the Edwardian era, were best summed up in the work of one of their members, the philosopher G. E. Moore, who preached a gospel of sceptical rationalism and friendship uncontaminated by passion among a civilized élite.

  As is the way with secret societies, the original disinterested aims of the Apostles became corrupted by intellectual snobbery, mutual back-scratching and back-stabbing, and downright arrogance. High standards slipped when it came to electing good-looking but intellectually undistinguished youths as members. Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes played their part in this process, which was well advanced by the time Brooke came under their collective eye.