by Nigel Jones
In the event, Brooke’s planning went for naught: the Olivier girls all accompanied their returned parents to the Lake District and he had to shelve his plan. But it remained in his mind, to be fulfilled at a more propitious time. Meanwhile he turned his attention to the highlight of his summer: the Fabian summer school at Llanbedr, near Harlech, on the remote north-west coast of Wales. Political summer schools were a novelty in British political life: the first such Fabian school had been organized by Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte only the year before. However, Brooke felt more confident about attending the event than he had at Andermatt or among the Apostles at Market Lavington, not least because he would be with a large posse of his Cambridge friends. The party included James Strachey, Ben Keeling, Hugh Dalton, Dudley Ward, Arthur Schloss and Gerald Shove. Female Fabians attending included Margery Olivier and Amber Reeve.
The prospect of the camp cheered Brooke’s otherwise muted celebration of his twenty-first birthday in the bosom of his family. The event was marred by his mother’s reaction when he told her that his chief aim in life was pleasure – the confession reduced her to tears. Before setting off for Wales he entertained a group of his friends to lunch – Dudley Ward, who was coaching Alfred Brooke in history, Keeling and Dalton. The Fabian trio were under strict instructions from Brooke to keep their socialist politics concealed from his devotedly Liberal mother, and he remained in Rugby for a few more days to soothe her when they left.
Before long he rejoined his friends, and the Cambridge party found themselves staying with Sidney and Beatrice Webb at a farmhouse near Leominster. It was Brooke’s first encounter with the formidable Mrs Webb, whose ferocity and belligerence made even the Ranee look mild-mannered, and he must have felt he had fallen from the frying pan into the fire in swapping one censorious middle-aged lady for another. For their part, the founding Fabians eyed up these representatives of the new university élite with a jaundiced eye. Like Wells, the Webbs believed in a secular band of warrior-priests who would inaugurate socialism, and they clearly hoped that these young Cambridge men would form the nucleus of such a group. The brief encounter at Leominster left the couple feeling equivocal, but by 1910 Beatrice had made up her mind about Brooke and his friends: ‘They don’t want to learn, they don’t think they have anything to learn … the egotism of the young University man is colossal.’
It must be admitted that, from the Webbs’ sombrely earnest viewpoint, the Cambridge contingent did not come up to scratch. Healthy, good-humoured, exuberant – Brooke’s peer group were at least as interested in having a good time as they were in studying the sacred, and sometimes turgid, texts of socialism. James Strachey, in particular, was clearly more interested in moving his mattress next to Brooke’s in the communal dormitory, while Hugh ‘Daddy’ Dalton, the future Labour Chancellor, was on this occasion equally preoccupied by carnal desire, as Brooke reported in a letter to Lytton Strachey:
Daddy was a schoolboy in dormitory and conceived a light lust for James – who, I thought, was quite dignified about it. He would start up suddenly behind him and tickle him gently under the armpits, making strange sibilant cluckings with his mouth meanwhile. And when James was in bed Daddy stood over him, waving an immense steaming penis in his face and chuckling softly. Poor James was nearly sick.
The summer school was held in a cliff-top farmhouse, Pen-yr-Allt, which had stables converted into dormitories and a plunge bath for cold early-morning dips. The Cambridge group arrived on 30 August after a stop on the way to visit Ludlow Castle, in Shropshire, the site of the original production of Comus. In the absence of the Webbs, the young people let off steam with cruel mimicry of their recent hosts. The tone of the school was high-minded in true Fabian style, with vegetarian food, Swedish-style physical jerks, lectures on subjects ranging from Tolstoy to the Poor Law and plenty of time for both reading (Brooke had brought no fewer than 19 books) and rambles in the surrounding hills. It was a mind- and body-stretching programme, but Brooke was not put off, and left the school more of a convinced Fabian than ever.
7
* * *
In Arcadia
* * *
The Michaelmas term at Cambridge promised to be filled with as much hectic extracurricular activity for Brooke as the Comus-dominated previous term had been. He was uneasily aware that he was falling behind with his studies, and without the encouraging presence of Walter Headlam, his interest in Classics, never pronounced, had completely vanished. For the moment, he was able to shove this problem to the back of his mind, but he knew he would soon have to confront it.
Meanwhile there were friends, politics – and poetry. As always, Brooke was rehearsing his place in posterity; and, half-seriously, imagining himself as a literary immortal. Showing Hugh Dalton round Rugby chapel, he pointed to a gap beside the plaque to Arthur Hugh Clough and remarked: ‘They’re reserving that for me.’ Sure enough, that exact place on the memorial wall was eventually to be filled by Brooke.
An even more fervent admirer was James Strachey, who had suffered wretchedly at Llanbedr when he persuaded himself that Brooke was at last returning his love. True, there were uneasy suspicions in his mind that Brooke was in love with a woman – he suspected Daphne Olivier, being as yet unaware of Noel. ‘Why did we think him a sodomite?’ he asked Duncan Grant piteously. Three days later his hopes revived: ‘Good God – he’s falling in love with me,’ ran his running report to Grant. ‘No, no, no. I can’t bear it. This is too vast.’ It was. Four days after, James was once again plunged into the depths: ‘panic fell – oh, on him perhaps too – and it all dissolved into air … So everything’s to end in utter misery, after all.’
While James retired to lick his wounds, Brooke resumed his social round in Cambridge. One new passing acquaintance was a second-year Trinity man, Vyvyan Holland, second son of Brooke’s early idol, Oscar Wilde. Holland invited Brooke to a champagne supper with Ronald Firbank in honour of Robert Ross, Wilde’s most loyal friend and indefatigable defender of his posthumous reputation. Very different from this homosexual trio was another casual acquaintance made this term, Herbert Morrison, later a leading Labour politician and a bitter rival to Hugh Dalton.
Brooke and Dalton continued to promote the Carbonari, who discussed topics like ‘Immortality’ – the former remained a firm and increasingly dogmatic atheist – and Brooke read a paper on ‘Satire in English Verse’, in which he lauded the poetry of Hilaire Belloc, whom he was to meet again in the New Year.
One more figure who entered Brooke’s life at this time was destined to become his most powerful and influential literary mentor, and a man whose wealth, generosity and total devotion to Brooke was to last for the rest of his life and well beyond it. Eddie Marsh, at the time of their meeting, was a high-flying civil servant who had recently hitched his professional wagon to the meteoric star of Winston Churchill, whose Private Secretary he became in the Colonial Office, and later at the Home Office and Admiralty.
Marsh was born to wealth as a great-grandson of Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated. A shocked parliament had voted a huge sum to Perceval’s many children after he was shot by a deranged bankrupt in 1812. Eddie continued to use his share of what he called ‘the murder money’ to promote his major interests – the arts, and particularly handsome and talented young painters and poets. Homosexual, but, because of a childhood bout of mumps, probably non-practising, Eddie had been aware of the handsome young Kingsman on previous visits to Cambridge. An Apostle in the 1890s, the 36-year-old Eddie was now an ‘Angel’ – Apostolic jargon for a member who had left the university but still attended meetings of the group; and it was at one of these that he invited Brooke for a tête-à-tête breakfast.
A boastful Brooke read his future mentor a new poem, ‘Day That I Have Loved’:
Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes,
And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands.
He went on to read a second poem, ‘The
Jolly Company’, which had just netted him another prize in his regular outlet, the Westminster Gazette. Brooke was frankly cynical about the reasons for his regularly churning out inferior poems and other pieces for the Gazette – money. He was on a safe but not lavish income of £150 from his mother, doled out in quarterly instalments, and depended on his literary work for any monies beyond this basic allowance. As he told James Strachey, he felt he was rich when he made £7 in a single day – £2 from the Gazette and £5 from a prize-winning King’s essay. With his tongue in his cheek, he computed that if he could keep up this rate of income, he would be earning £1895 a year.
Brooke was brooding on his unfulfilled – and apparently unfulfillable – passion for Noel Olivier. Tortured by frustration in Wales, his emotions intensified by the presence of Noel’s less fanciable sister, Margery, Brooke began to dream of extreme remedies. Noel was a pupil at Bedales, the establishment that had been attended by his friends Justin Brooke and Jacques Raverat, and in late October he wrote to Dudley Ward suggesting that they kidnap Noel from the school. It was only half in jest.
Soon a more plausible plan suggested itself. Brooke learned that Margery and Noel would be taking a Christmas holiday at Klosters in the Swiss Alps, among a party of around 30. The cost of the II-day vacation – a guinea a day – he managed to wangle out of the sceptical Ranee on the pretext that he needed to recover from his (non-existent) academic labours of the term. Any increase in his intimacy with Noel he regarded as money well spent. Noel celebrated her sixteenth birthday on Christmas Day, and the following evening the company presented the melodrama From the Jaws of the Octopus, which Brooke had written specially for the occasion, and in which he played the hero, Eugene de Montmorency. On New Year’s Day he told James Strachey: ‘Switzerland fair. (I morose). Noel Olivier superb.’ At last he had lifted a corner of the veil of his secret romance to a savagely jealous James, who would enjoy a passionate physical affair with Noel some 15 years after Brooke’s death.
The mountain air and vigorous skiing and tobogganing had doubtless raised Brooke’s libido to new heights; but, bound by the sexual etiquette of his class and time, he was no nearer to a physical consummation of his passion for the 16-year-old schoolgirl, with her strong, chunky body and cool grey eyes. Noel, for her part, was fascinated and flattered by her handsome admirer, but she had more than her share of the Olivier family’s distrust of excess of feeling and, for the moment, kept Brooke at arm’s length. He consequently returned to Rugby in a foul mood, and took out his frustration in a two-hour row with the Ranee – an unheard-of insubordination.
The new term began at Cambridge with Brooke coming under fire from his elders during a general discussion at an Apostles meeting on 19 January. It was a salutary drubbing. Leading the assault was the King’s don Jack Sheppard, who pitched into Brooke for daring to defend H. G. Wells’s ethics, and, as Maynard Keynes put it in a letter to Duncan Grant: ‘for thinking truth beauty, beauty truth. [Harry] Norton and Lytton took up the attack and even James [Strachey] and Gerald [Shove] stabbed him in the back. Finally Lytton, enraged at Brooke’s defences, thoroughly lost his temper and delivered a violent personal attack.’ The seeds for Brooke’s later extreme antipathy to the elder Strachey were already being sown.
Three weeks later, apparently reconciled, Brooke invited his fellow-Apostles to meet Hilaire Belloc over dinner in his rooms. The evening lasted for over three hours, one of which was taken up with a monologue over the coffee by the loquacious author. Brooke still showed little sign of knuckling down to his studies, and yet again much of his time was taken up with a Marlowe Dramatic Society production of Ben Jonson’s The Silent woman, produced by a friend and fellow Kingsman, the future actor and author Reginald Pole.
Belloc was a clear influence on a paper read by Brooke to the Carbonari entitled ‘The Romantic History and Surprising Adventures of John Rump’ in Dalton’s rooms later in February. Brooke took as his motto for the piece an Arnoldian precept he had heard preached from the pulpit of Rugby chapel in 1904: ‘It is character we want, not brains.’ His piece, retailing the life history of Rump, an archetypal middle-class Englishman, is a telling insight into the well-springs of Brooke’s psychology, with obvious autobiographical roots. Rump’s father is a public-school housemaster, while his mother is ‘a peculiar mixture of irritable discontinuous nagging and shrill incompetence’. The family make up for the shortfalls in their income caused by their financial mismanagement by cheese-paring economies like cutting the food rations of the boys in their charge. Many of Rump’s characteristics reflect Brooke’s – such as his lifelong aversion to religion caused by an overdose of evangelism in the nursery. His adult life is a wilderness of dreary mediocrity until death mercifully snuffs him out at the age of 70. The satire is notable for its brutal rejection of the money-grubbing philistinism of the middle class, summed up in Rump’s greeting to God as he arrives in Heaven complete with top-hat, frock-coat and, of course, umbrella:
You long-haired aesthetes, get you out of Heaven!
I am John Rump, this is my hat, and this
My umbrella. I stand here for sense,
Invincible, inviolable, eternal,
For safety regulations, paving-stones,
Street-lamps, police, and bijou residences
Semi-detached. I stand for Sanity,
Comfort, Content, Prosperity, top-hats,
Alcohol, collars, meat. Tariff Reform
Means higher wages and more work for all.
Dalton had succeeded Ben Keeling as President of the Cambridge Fabians, and Brooke was being groomed to follow his friend into this august office. He helped organize a visit by Ramsay Macdonald, then the fiery chairman of the Independent Labour Party, and decades away from his role as the gravedigger of socialism as Prime Minister of the first Labour government. Brooke’s prominence in Fabian activities made him a target of the Tory hearty faction at the college, and he had to bribe his bed-maker to warn him of a planned raid on his rooms after the hearties comprehensively trashed the lodgings of his Fabian friend Gerald Shove.
The hearty threat was one of the reasons why Brooke began to contemplate moving out of Cambridge altogether. More pressing was the advice of his teachers to accept the inevitable and take the consequences of the realization that he would never be a Classical scholar. Two of his tutors, the brothers W. H. and C. G. Macaulay, concurred in counselling Brooke to concentrate, in his fourth Cambridge year, on his obvious preference for English literature. The Macaulays pointed out that, so long as he remained in college, he would be continually tempted to neglect his studies by the constant stream of visitors who dropped in on his rooms. They were well aware, also, of the drain on Brooke’s time and energy imposed by his extracurricular activities – and successfully persuaded him to turn down an invitation to edit the Cambridge Review.
With his tutors’ advice ringing in his ears, Brooke returned to Rugby, where his mother was laid low with illness. There he wrote his first surviving letter to Noel Olivier in his frequently employed voice of a flippant and witty show-off. The letter is full of elaborate – but abortive – plans to meet up in Devon, and Brooke cannot resist playing the didactic elder brother as he recommends a raft of new writers for Noel to read ‘whose names you have never heard before I uttered them’: Wells, Belloc, Algernon Blackwood and W. B. Yeats.
Kicking his heels in School Field House, Brooke was buzzing with intricate plans for the Easter holidays. He meant to squeeze in no fewer than five separate vacations, each representing a different facet of his increasingly complex and secretive life. There was a party at Becky Falls, a Dartmoor beauty spot near Manaton in south Devon; an Apostles reading group at the Lizard in Cornwall; and ‘duty calls’ on his surviving ‘mad aunt’ at Bournemouth and his parents at the resort of Sidmouth in south Devon.
Over and above these, however, was his determination to get together with Noel Olivier. He had gone about arranging this longed-for conjunction with almost serpentine care. The fir
st move in his campaign, begun in the aftermath of his Christmas meeting with Noel at Klosters, was to initiate a weekly correspondence with her elder sister and ‘minder’ Margery Olivier. From these letters he had gleaned the information that Noel and Margery would be spending part of their Easter holidays at an isolated cottage at Bank in the New Forest. Brooke promptly enlisted the aid of Dudley Ward, his dull but dependable Fabian friend, as an unlikely chaperone of his wooing of Noel:
Well! If they’re in the New Forest, good, I’ll go … But I leave it to you to learn of their arrangements, discover all, and break to them that we shall be passing their door. I do so because (a) I’ve been writing to Margery about once a week since January, and she’ll be about sick of me, (b) I daren’t do it, (c) I have no time and you have plenty. So you must settle. But oh! be tactful, be gently tactful! Perhaps they will hate us? Horrible thought! Do not intrude! apologize! apologize!
Brooke had to conceal his amatory ambitions, not only from the Ranee but also from other friends who would disapprove of him wooing a schoolgirl. He planned to enlist another old friend, Hugh Russell-Smith, as a convenient ‘cover’ for his journey to the New Forest, simply because the Russell-Smiths’ family home was close to Bank. ‘I have told him [Russell-Smith] ‘I am going to “seek Romance!”’ he wrote to Dudley. ‘He believes I am going to wander through Surrey disguised in an Italian sombrero, with a guitar, singing old English ballads for pence! Ho! ho! But remember, a profound secret. It adds SO much to the pleasure of it all.’