Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  They too are human & alive (in a way). I tell you this, because I know. I am, so to speak, them. I am in charge, this term, of a houseful of youths, varying from four to seven feet in height. I like it, because I like them. They are a good age – fourteen to nineteen. (It is between nineteen and twenty-four that people are insufferable.) They look rather fresh and jolly too. But oh! the mask like faces that come before me. I am a ‘master’, & therefore a moral machine. They will not believe I exist. Also, I am shy. Occasionally I determine to make a great attempt to pierce to their living souls by some flaming, natural, heartfelt remark. So I summon one. And when he trots into the study, a sullen meekness. I can only say, in a mechanical voice, ‘Jones mi, I hear your Latin Grammar was not sufficiently prepared. Please do me fifty lines.’ And really, you know, they’re quite real, individual persons, rather bloody, of course, with accretions of the public school atmosphere, but human, and therefore conceivably nice. It’s really that I’m in a false position; and when I try to stretch out a jolly hand to any of them, the shades of a thousand schoolmasters rise between us, & form a black wall of fog: & we miss each other in the dark. Some of the elder ones are intellectually intelligent, if prim; & they are shocked & fascinated by the things I say about various deep, clear ulcers in their souls.

  In his isolation from his friends – despite supportive visits from the likes of James and Jacques – Brooke compared himself to the Roman poet Ovid in the bitterness of his final enforced exile, although, he patronizingly informed Noel: ‘of course you don’t know what that means.’ By this time the Ranee had rented a new home at 24 Bilton Road, Rugby, a tall house set back from the road. As they sorted out their possessions in preparation for the move, a sense of sadness for the past stole over Brooke: ‘It is unpleasant, turning out. One empties cupboard after cupboard, sorts and destroys …’ Tibby, the aged family cat, was a victim of the move – Brooke was deputed to kill her with a potion of poison in her milk.

  With the Ranee safely installed in her new home, Brooke, released from his duties, eagerly left for his old Dorset haunt of Lulworth, where he was to be joined by the Strachey brothers – Lytton and James – for an Easter vacation. On the eve of his departure from Rugby on 6 April 1910 he wrote to Eddie Marsh:

  I wept copiously last week in saying good-bye to the three and fifty little boys whose Faith and Morals I had upheld for ten weeks. I found I had fallen in love with them all. So pleasant and fresh-minded as they were. And it filled me with puerperal gloom to know that their plastic souls would harden into the required shapes, and they would go to swell the undistinguished masses who fill Trinity Hall, Clare, Caius … and at last become members of the English Upper, or Upper Middle Classes. I am glad I am not going to be a schoolmaster for ever. The tragedy would be too great.

  The impetus for the holiday had come from Lytton. Somewhat surprisingly, given the fact that the two had never been close, the older Strachey, in poor health and depressed spirits, had written to Brooke, proposing a week’s vacation. Brooke responded eagerly: ‘All I want is Intellectual Conversation and to avoid Rugby … I really don’t care where I go.’ Original plans to go to Holland or Dartmoor having fallen through, Brooke fell back on Lulworth and booked them in for a week at the Cove Hotel. He outlined the attractions to Lytton: ‘a fishing village, which had a beautiful left-handed boy in it two years ago’.

  Ironically, given the enormity of the damage his arrival would wreak in Brooke’s life at this very location of Lulworth in two years’ time, it was another ‘boy’ who was currently obsessing the ever sexually susceptible Lytton: the promiscuously bohemian artist Henry Lamb. Brooke had known Lamb’s elder brother Walter, a homosexual classics don at Trinity who had had affairs with both Lytton and James Strachey. Henry, by contrast, whom Brooke was yet to meet, was an enthusiastic and voracious heterosexual – a fact that would one day cause Brooke the greatest grief. All of this lay in the future that Easter, as Brooke lent a sympathetic ear to Lytton’s tales of woe.

  Lytton arrived at Lulworth in a state of exaggerated gloom – a frequent occurrence in the aesthete’s tortured life. His career was marking time, his friends were otherwise engaged, he feared that he was rapidly ageing and, above all, his love life was at an impasse, with Henry Lamb callously scorning his efforts at seduction. To add to his vexation, another love object, George Mallory, whose Cambridge home, Pythagoras House, he had been occupying, had invited him to Paris when he had already committed himself to Brooke and Lulworth.

  Brooke, however, provided balm for his bruised soul: James briefly joined them, and after his departure Lytton, left alone with Brooke, wrote to his brother: ‘Brooke read me some of his latest poems on a shelf by the sea, but I found them very difficult to make out, owing to his manner of reading.’ Lytton responded by reading Brooke the first act of his current literary project – a play on the Elizabethan Earl of Essex, which he later turned into a successful biography. Brooke pleased him by his appreciative response, which delighted the crusty critic and melted his reserve: ‘I found him, of course, an extraordinarily cheerful companion. I only hope, though, that he won’t think me … “an old dear”. I thought I saw some signs of it.’ Brooke even persuaded the notoriously hypochondriac and anti-hearty Lytton to partake in some unfamiliar athletics: getting him to plunge into cold baths and pull ineffectually at a chest-expander.

  Brooke, too, was cheered at Lulworth by a letter sent on from Rugby from The Nation, a recently founded radical weekly, to which he had sent a clutch of recent poems. The acting editor, H. W. Nevinson, a perceptive critic, while liking some of the verses, took strong exception to ‘A Channel Passage’, which he described as ‘the notorious disgusting sonnet’. When he had got to know Brooke, the journalist wrote of him with sharp acuity: ‘The fear of being petted and fussed over, for his beauty, the fear of falling into a flattered literary career, and of winning fame as one more beautiful poet of beautiful themes, it drove him into violence and coarseness …’

  On his way back to Grantchester from Lulworth, Brooke stopped over with Eddie Marsh in London and took the opportunity to drop into The Nation’s office and meet Nevinson, who, immediately after the poet’s death, recalled the impression he had made:

  Suddenly he came – an astounding apparition in any newspaper office. Loose hair of deep browny-gold; smooth, ruddy face; eyes not grey or bluish white, but of living blue, really like the sky, and as frankly open: figure not very tall, but firm and strongly made, giving the sense of weight rather than speed, and yet so finely fashioned and healthy … he wore a low blue collar and blue shirt and tie, all uncommon in those days. Evidently he did not want to be conspicuous, but the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful.

  Marsh was beginning to introduce his adored young friend into the grand social circles that were to become increasingly important in Brooke’s life. While Brooke was staying with his mentor at Raymond Buildings, they went to a performance of Trelawny of the ‘Wells’, then moved on to an evening salon in Bedford Square presided over by Lady Ottoline Morrell, one of the great literary, political and social hostesses in an age when such creatures were abundant. Lady Ottoline, sister of the Duke of Portland, was married to a radical Liberal MP, Philip Morrell, and patronized the wilder shores of London’s bohemia with generous abandon. Among those who enjoyed her hospitality were Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and the rest of the future denizens of Bloomsbury: Virginia Stephen, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Desmond MacCarthy and E. M. Forster. Her lovers were legion, but included Bertrand Russell and Henry Lamb.

  Brooke’s curiosity about his future nemesis, already aroused by Lytton, must have been further whetted by Eddie’s description of Lamb at a previous salon: ‘Do you know him? He was in a rough brown suit, with tails, shaped at the hips, and had a red handkerchief around his neck, but looked far more elegant and fashionable than any of the men in faultless evening dress. I’m afraid he didn’t take to me much, and I’m told he has a cold and selfish nature.’ Just how cold
and selfish Lamb was, Brooke would one day, to his cost, discover.

  While Lytton had been unburdening himself about Lamb, Brooke had been brooding about his own fruitless love: Noel. In December 1909 he had made another of his illicit descents on Bedales, accompanied by Jacques Raverat, on the thin excuse of seeing the school’s annual play. He had not managed to see Noel alone, and the ever-suspicious Margery had made sure that neither Bryn nor Noel had been present at Switzerland that Christmas. While he served out his time in the housemaster’s study at Rugby, a rival suitor for Noel’s favours, Bunny Garnett, who had known her since childhood, was continuing to press her. With wisdom far beyond her years, Noel coolly told Bunny that the whole charm of youth lay in falling easily in love, while remaining aware that such passing passions weren’t permanent and could therefore be taken lightly. This was a message that Brooke resolutely refused to hear.

  On his way to Lulworth he had stopped off in Birmingham in the vain hope of meeting Noel, who was passing through the city by train on her way to a rock-climbing holiday in Wales. Brooke’s physical clumsiness – the same deficiency that kept him off the dance floor – precluded him from climbing – a hobby that delighted several of his friends, including Geoffrey Keynes, George Mallory, Jacques Raverat, Godwin Baynes and the Oliviers. This was one area of Neo-Pagan activity where Brooke could, or would not, accompany his friends.

  Back at the Orchard after his long absence, Brooke hosted a May Day breakfast for a large group of his friends, including Ka Cox and Geoffrey Keynes, who was unsuccessfully pursuing the popular Fabian treasurer. The fondness of Brooke’s circle for outdoor activities had won them the derisory nickname in Cambridge of ‘dew-dabblers’, as Brooke explained to Noel the day after the party:

  The thing is that they insist on ‘dabbling in the dew’ & being ‘in the country’ on the first of May. I had to get up at half past seven to give them breakfast: though I had worked until 2. It rained in the morning; yet they all turned up, thousands of them – men and women, devastatingly and indomitably cheery. The world is hard, & I was very bitter. When rain ceased we put on galoshes & gathered cowslips in the fields. We celebrate the festival with a wealth of detailed and ancient pagan ritual; many dances & songs …

  Brooke was hard at work on his studies, and applying himself with more than customary enthusiasm now that he was concentrating on English with the aim of gaining a Fellowship in 1911 or 1912. He had started work on the chosen subject of his thesis, the dramas of John Webster, and was also reading up on the effects of Puritanism on English drama. Visitors to the Orchard in May included Lytton and a new friend, the swarthy and popular contemporary romantic poet James Elroy Flecker, with whom Brooke engaged in friendly and jocular rivalry. Another frequent visitor was the future novelist Rose Macaulay, the daughter of Brooke’s tutor at King’s. Rose, who was six years Brooke’s senior, nursed romantic desires for him, as her novels made clear.

  In June Brooke and Geoffrey Keynes took a tent out to Overcote, the quiet hamlet on the River Ouse that he had discovered a year previously. Alongside this ‘dew-dabbling’ his academic and political activities continued unabated: he led the Cambridge delegation to the Fabian national conference in London, and was amused by witnessing one of the many rows that rent the movement in its early years – this time over the hot topic of female suffrage. Brooke, whose misogyny was never far from the surface, reported approvingly to Hugh Dalton: ‘The Northern delegates were superb men. They lashed the women with unconquerable logic and gross words. There were the most frightful scenes, and the women gibbered with rage.’

  Inspired by new enthusiasm for the cause, Brooke began to plan a caravan tour of the south-west with Dudley Ward, during which the two friends aimed to hold wayside political meetings in favour of Poor Law reform. Funded by £2 12s. prised from the tight grip of treasurer Ka Cox, Brooke hired a caravan from two fellow Kingsmen, Hugh and Steuart Wilson, together with a horse named Guy. Posters advertising their meetings (‘Principal Speaker Mr BROOKE. Questions invited’) – were designed by Gwen Darwin, and Brooke threw himself into the minutest details of the tour with his customary furious energy and practical efficiency.

  Beneath the planning, as so often with Brooke, there was a secret agenda, and, as so often, it revolved around his semi-secret passion for Noel. He intended to use the tour as an elaborate cover for meeting his beloved. As ever, he laid his plans with spidery care. At the end of April he had engineered a four-day walking tour in the wooded countryside around Noel’s home village. His companion-cum-chaperone was Jacques Raverat. During this jaunt they dropped in on the Oliviers at Limpsfield Chart, and spent half a day with Bryn and Noel – the two less attractive sisters, Margery and Daphne, were, as Brooke well knew, safely an ocean away in Jamaica and would not return until October.

  It was during this eventful spring that Brooke began to play one of those double games of love that he relished so inordinately. While continuing his obsession with Noel, he started a prolonged flirtation/pursuit of her beautiful, but less intelligent elder sister, Bryn. The unobtainable, elusive Noel absorbed the romantic, yearning side of his nature, while the overtly sexy Bryn was a magnet for his lust. This parallel pursuit was carried on often when both sisters were present, and he simultaneously corresponded with both, so the opening of the morning mail around the Oliviers’ breakfast table must often have been an interesting occasion.

  Brooke had to be back in Cambridge by 9 a.m. on 27 April after his exhausting walking tour, to take an oral examination. Jacques woke him at 4 a.m. and he passed through an ‘absolutely empty & very beautiful & clean’ London before taking the first train to Cambridge ‘surrounded by milk-cans and the morning papers’, as he told Bryn. After sitting his exam along with ‘50 other fools’ he succumbed to a bad cold and headache. ‘Still,’ he reflected, the joy of meeting his two love-objects on their home ground meant ‘it was all worth it.’

  In mid-July, surrounded by clanking pots and pans, the caravan stuffed with books ranging from the poetry of John Donne to dry volumes on the Poor Law; with Dudley Ward on the box with the reins in his hands and Guy plodding grimly on with his muzzle in a nosebag, the private Fabian crusade got underway. The two friends set off from Winchester and meandered along the dusty byways of Hampshire and Dorset in the somnolent midsummer heat.

  Brooke had already written to Noel warning of his intentions: ‘I am coming to Petersfield. Is it permissible? The matter is this. Dudley … and I are going to start from Winchester in a cart … We can take Petersfield on the way … Jacques will be in Minorca and without him I should be too horribly frightened to come near Bedales.’ In the absence of his usual Bedalian chaperone, Brooke had craftily enlisted the aid of a new friend, the melancholy country writer and future poet Edward Thomas, whose wife Helen was a Bedales teacher, and who lived near the school in a house built by another teacher, the architect Geoffrey Lupton. ‘I thought of trying to get Thomas or Lupton to let Dudley & me slumber in their grounds that night, & give us a meal. If that is impossible, I suppose we shall just pass through the place and hang about for an hour or two, if it’s decent or desirable. But I want to see Thomas!’

  Brooke suggested that Noel obtain an exeat to visit them at Thomas’s house high above the village of Steep. Failing that, he held out the hope that they would meet at the annual camp organized by the Oliviers, which would take place this summer at Buckler’s Hard, on the River Beaulieu on the edge of the New Forest. ‘Our cart will land us there … By God! Life will be good, in August! I shall make a special endeavour not to die during July.’ Brooke made his plans even more plain to the absent Jacques: ‘But all, almost, we want to do is to see the gorgeous Noel and talk with the tired Thomas.’

  Not wanting to impose on the impoverished and permanently harassed Thomas, already the father of two young children, and with Helen Thomas heavily pregnant with their third, Brooke brought his charm to bear on Lupton, a follower of William Morris’s Arts & Crafts movement, who built the
Thomas’s home, The Red House, and the library at Bedales, virtually with his own hands. As a result he and Dudley spent their first night on the road under Lupton’s roof, and Noel Olivier joined them for tea, chaperoned by a school friend, Mary Newberry.

  After this entertaining diversion from the stern central purpose of their tour, they set off once more, heading in a south-westerly direction; stopping and holding their public meetings as the mood took them. They divided responsibilities: it was Dudley’s job to hand out leaflets drumming up interest, while Brooke made the main speech. He had a standard spiel, stressing the waste of letting between two and three million people idle in destitution while their energies could be put to productive use if the state put them to work. In his notes for the speech, we find pure Fabianism, as well as the doctrine of state-aided public works that was later to be associated with his Apostolic colleague Maynard Keynes. The influence of Keynes and the Webbs is clearly visible in the doctrines Brooke preached on village greens and market squares that summer. Only at Wareham, in Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck, did a downpour force them to abandon their itinerary and take refuge in the Black Bear hotel. Sadly, the rain continued, and they backtracked to Winchester with spirits somewhat dampened.

  10

  * * *

  ‘Life burns on’

  * * *

  While setting up his summer rendezvous with Noel, Brooke had not forgotten his parallel pursuit of Bryn. As usual he enlisted a third party as his agent in place to cover his covert actions. This time his fall guy was Bunny Garnett, the family friend of all the Oliviers. In order to ingratiate himself with Bunny, Brooke invited him to stay at the Orchard along with Bryn, seductively detailing its delights: ‘apple blossom now, later … roses … bathing and all manner of rustic delight, cheeses, and fruit’.