Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  The vision of Brooke in bowler hat and neat stiff collar is a little hard to reconcile with the commonly accepted image of him in loose collar, ‘poetic’ puffed tie and with dishevelled hair – especially considering the mockery he continued to heap on such conventional figures, witness the smart little squib ‘Sonnet Reversed’ that he composed while still at Lulworth, on New Year’s Day 1911:

  Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights

  Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.

  Ah, the delirious works of honeymoon!

  Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures,

  Settled at Balham by the end of June.

  Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures,

  And in Antofagastas. Still he went

  Cityward daily; still she did abide

  At home. And both were really quite content

  With work and social pleasures. Then they died.

  They left three children (besides George, who drank):

  The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell,

  William, the head-clerk in the County Bank,

  And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.

  The poem, successful in its cynical way, is really ‘Menelaus and Helen’ in a modern suburban setting. It demonstrates anew Brooke’s disgust with the humdrum banality of modern life; and his execration of the capitalist, rentier class that he saw in full cry around him. And once again there is that lurking dread of marriage, children and responsibilities that he equates with ageing and death. And was there a personal touch in the final line? The poem was composed in the presence of Ka, whose own father, named Henry, was a stockbroker who had done very well indeed – enough to buy his daughter a substantial Surrey mansion and a lifestyle of horses, nursing her friends’ emotional wounds, and indulging her Fabian ideals.

  As the Lulworth break drew to a close, Brooke’s thoughts turned to his imminent departure to Germany. He told Bryn: ‘I go to Germany in a week. La! la! I hope to do infinite work there. I shall never return, and never see you again, – unless your ship touches at Munich. But perhaps Munich isn’t on the sea. Send me, once, a card to say when you return, and on what day, with blanket + gun, we meet among the brigands in Spain … I will write to you from Munich … it will be all about Wagner, no doubt.’

  As the prospect of a lengthy separation from Bryn, Noel and the rest of his friends sunk in, Brooke’s mood waxed melancholy and philosophical:

  I am overcome by the way things slip along and away, and the extraordinary chance that blew dust together & made me & the people I know & threw us together, and how little we know each other, and the queer way we smile at each other (or frown) and talk and fumble along, risking all sorts of dangers. I am impressed by it. I sit and gloom at people, with round eyes; and think how silly it is to be angry or to worry or to misunderstand, when we’re all stumbling and groping in the dark. Also I think how silly it is to let things slide on and not to snatch at opportunities. One will be so sick one didn’t. And only a fear of what a few people’ld say, or of telling the not-highly-thought-of Truth, stops one. I agree that these are sentimental truisms. But if they affect one’s conduct, as some of them do & some may, I suppose they’re important, in a way … I am as flat as the Fens, and as wearying to you as Paradise Regained. Farewell. You are splendid. Do not decay. I cast passionate hands towards you. Rupert.

  Brooke returned to London with his friends. They were met by Ka’s rival, Gwen, who accompanied Jacques and Brooke to Ka’s Westminster flat. In an unpublished autobiographical novel, Gwen sketched the scene:

  They sat like mummies on the sofa while [Ka] lit the fire. [Jacques] thought there was something terribly feminine about her heavy form, as she squatted on the hearth, puffing with round cheeks; something eternally servile and domestic, utilitarian … ‘She’s a good woman,’ said [Jacques] to [Brooke].’A good squaw,’ said [Brooke]. These were almost the only words that were said … The fire and the tea melted them a little, but they would not talk; and directly afterwards [Brooke] said: ‘Come on [Jacques]’ and with a couple of gloomy goodbyes they left. In the street [Brooke’s] arm came through [Jacques’]. ‘I like men,’ [Brooke] said.

  If this scene is a faithful account of what passed between the friends it indicates the growing emotional tension between Ka and Brooke, and the fading tension between Ka and Jacques. Brooke was coming to value Ka’s sheer availability, as a creature comforter and helpmate, in contrast to Noel’s maddening elusive evasions. Brooke could never do anything without complications, and as he reluctantly recognized the beginning of his great love for Ka – which, ironically, would only burst into full and frenzied life a year later, and again at Lulworth, under the spur of jealousy – his mixed-up feelings caused him to reach, as of old, for what he supposed to be the straightforward simplicities of male bonding.

  In the meantime he sought a showdown with Noel before leaving for Germany. Perhaps hoping to jog her slumbering emotions into life, he travelled down to Limpsfield Chart and made a sort of confession of his growing attachment to Ka. Whatever his motives in making a clean breast – and he told himself that he only wanted to keep his relations with his beloved open and above-board – they must have served only to make Noel even more mistrustful of his mercurial emotions. He met up with her in London just before leaving for Munich, but, significantly, also saw Ka again, having supper with her just before he boarded the boat-train at Victoria.

  It was to Ka, too, that his first letter was dispatched after his arrival at the Pension Bellevieu in Munich’s Meresienstrasse. Typically, he was already regretting his weakness in leaning so heavily on his ‘cushion’: their supper, he said, was ‘a mistake’: ‘I don’t mind giving way to emotion if there’s nothing else to do … But I’d made myself rather hysterical.’ He half-apologized for walking away from her too abruptly before being overcome by tears. For Brooke, the bewildering cocktail of emotions he was experiencing was all too much. He was not exactly in love with Ka, he told himself – but if not, what was he? For the time being he shrugged his shoulders and gave way to the novel experience of enjoying himself in a foreign city.

  Brooke had arrived in the Bavarian capital with a letter of introduction to a Professor Schick, an English specialist who would give him German lessons. Schick introduced him to a student, Ludwig Dellefant, who was eager to improve his English in return for coaching Brooke in German. Together the two young men wandered around the city’s cafés and beer halls, and Dellefant introduced Brooke to the Bursenschaften, traditional students’ associations where the Cambridge Apostles’ evenings of high-minded talk over sardines and tea were replaced by the quaffing of vast quantities of foaming beer from stone mugs and the communal singing of raucous Saufer-lieder – drinking songs. Brooke was condescending about the company: ‘The Germans consume an enormous amount of beer, but they don’t get drunk in the same way that English undergraduates do,’ he told his mother. ‘[They] are extremely simple compared with English undergraduates. They are more like very simple, fat, and hearty public-school boys; docile and sentimental.’

  Behind the Ranee’s back, his secret feelings about her were expressed in an aside to Jacques Raverat. Writing of a performance of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman that had much impressed him, he commented: ‘Therein is a youth who will fly from his mother in order to live (it happens in Norway also).’

  He was soon feeling homesick, an emotion reinforced by solitary trips to the Café Bauer, where he would read a day-old copy of The Times over an abstemious hot milk. His friends received long bulletins about his doings. Noel – like Ka – was informed that their last supper together in London had been ‘a mistake’. But he made the best of their separation, he said, and maintained a stoutly stiff upper lip: ‘I can take the wider view, and see all the splendour of you, and the blinding wonder that you love me, – that we love each other.’ In a rare moment of perception he added: ‘You must, after these months, be getting sick of my whinings. Ignore them!’
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  Turning from contemplating his navel, Brooke gave Noel a picture of his fellow-guests at the Pension Bellevieu that recalls the opening of his friend E. M. Forster’s Room with a View: ‘Two English ladies, a Romanian economist, his brother, professor of Physics in Bucharest, an Italian Count who is a cavalry-colonel, an Australian sheep-farmer … a Franco-German dancing master, and about eight Germans, male & female. One of the last is a dowager of sixty-five with white hair & a bright yellow face, that reeks of sin. She is the most hideous thing in the world; & fascinates me.’

  He repeated what became a plangently enduring theme about his German hosts: ‘They’re Soft. That is all. Very nice, but … Soft. It comes out in their books, and everywhere. Their grasp is of a fat hand. Pictures, books, ideas, faces – it is all the same.’ Damningly, he withered the Wandervögel worship of nature that was and is a truism of the German character: ‘You hear and see a so fat, so greasy, so complacent and civilized German roll up his eyes and wheeze ‘Ich habe gern die Natur’ [‘I love Nature’] – and the whole thing flies to pieces before you. You have a picture of that coated belly in the woodlands, waddling helter skelter from Pan, or Diana’s hounds …’

  Noel responded thoughtfully with a touchingly honest letter making it clear that despite all his theatrical protestations and scenes she loved him. Yet, cautiously, she was very conscious that she could not come up to his exaggerated estimations:

  Rupert, when he bowed his head & said the truth about what he felt; I understood & was sorry & I loved his head so I kissed it & then he & history made me believe that I was a lover as well as he. I’m not, Rupert. I’m affectionate, reverent, anything you like but not that. And so I get worried & sorry when you look devoted & I dont mind about Ka or German Duchesses at all, & I never feel jealous; only afraid of your loving me too much … I shall always love you. Noel.

  Brooke’s still-shaky command of German led to one comic misunderstanding with a fellow Pension guest who had allowed himself to fall in lust with Brooke. This man, the Romanian professor of physics, described to Noel as ‘a nice little dark strange Slavonic creature’, had invited Brooke to come and stay with him in the Balkans. But this half-serious plan was aborted when the professor came to Brooke’s room to make his farewells before returning to Romania. Bidding goodbye, Brooke inadvertently called him ‘Du’, in German the intimate form of ‘you’, and strictly reserved for close family, other intimates or lovers. The result was predictable, as Brooke related to James Strachey:

  There was, just for a fraction of a second, a dead pause … then I was confusedly conscious of a wrinkled dark nose – down there – a round Slavonic mouth; and an on-the-point-of-grabbing-left-hand and, concurrently, of myself, hat-on-head, half-way-through the door, screaming ‘Leben Sie wohl, Herr Professor! …’ & leaping downstairs, into the street … The Professor was left alone with the Stove. But whether he raped that, or merely abused himself in my bed, I don’t know.

  Beneath the hilarity, Brooke was unsure of his true purpose in Germany. His stay was supposed to turn him into a fluent German linguist and expert philologist; but he found it hard to concentrate on this – there were the distractions of the city: he supped enthusiastically of Munich’s cultural feast, enjoying the première of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, and dutifully watching Wagner’s Ring cycle, although, as he told Noel: ‘I shall never be musikalisch.’ Ibsen was more to his taste. But, all told, it was far from the ideal study-trip or the rest-cure he had told Ka he was seeking: ‘Rest means being where no-one knows you.’ However, in the cosmopolitan society of pre-1914 Europe, disappearing was not so easy – Brooke even bumped into a Rugby contemporary in Munich – and his personality was so vivid that he made friends wherever he went.

  Before leaving England, Brooke had deposited a putative collection of verse with E. J. Dent, a Cambridge don who had set up his own publishing company. In return Dent had provided him with a letter of introduction to Frau Doktor Clara Ewald, an artist who kept a Munich pension, and her student son Paul, who had spent a year in Cambridge. The Ewalds lived in Schwabing, the leafy suburb that was Munich’s artistic quarter. Brooke got on so well with the Ewalds that he changed his lodgings early in February in order to be close to their home. Though he slept in the Ohmstrasse, he took most of his meals with the Ewalds in Friedrichstrasse, and exerted his matchless boyish charm over Frau Ewald to notable effect. She began an oil painting of him in a wide-brimmed hat that now hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery, and was sometimes constrained to command him to keep his unruly locks out of the jam pot.

  Paul Ewald was useful in taking Brooke out of his introspective self and introducing him to some of Schwabing’s more colourful artistic characters. Pre-eminent among these was one Karl Wolfskehl, a sort of German Lytton Strachey, complete with long beard and pince-nez. Wolfskehl was a disciple of Germany’s illustrious poet the legendary and reclusive Stefan George, whose circle, inevitably of handsome young men, regarded their master as a guru of mystic wisdom. Wolfskehl would intone George’s gnomic verse in hushed salons at his home. He and Brooke shared an enthusiasm for Swinburne, who, Brooke alleged, he would recite ‘in a vile German accent’.

  February was the month of Fasching, the uproarious German carnival, which in Munich took the form of the Bacchus-Fest, when even staid citizens would unbutton their lederhosen and generally let their cropped hair down. In a final effort to propel Brooke into a more active role in the city’s scene, Paul took his friend along. It was high time: when he wasn’t attending high-minded evenings at the theatre or opera, Brooke generally kept to his room, reading. And he was distinctly underwhelmed by the current artistic explosion in the city, where the painters of the Blaue Reiter group – Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, Arp and Klee – were setting new limits for the avant-garde to follow. ‘I move among the München P[ost] I[mpressionist]s,’ he told Jacques.

  They got up an exhibition of their French masters here last year; and go on pilgrimages to all the places where Van Gogh went dotty or cut his ears off or did any of the other climactic actions of his life … They are young and beetle-browed and serious. Every now and then they paint something – often a house, a simple square bordered by four very thick black lines. The square is then coloured blue or green. That is all. Then they go on talking … it is all very queer and important.

  In mocking modern art – belying his fine words to the Fabians about the ‘duty’ of backing contemporary art – Brooke was exposing his cultural conservatism – and the insularity that the Ewalds complained of in their English friend. In addressing his remarks to Jacques, he had chosen his confidant well: Jacques made something of a career of running down modernism in the arts and was a fervent Germanophobe into the bargain. Brooke received similar reassurance from Frances Cornford:

  It made me shake with joy to know that Cambridge and England … was all as fine as ever. That Jacques and Ka should be sitting in a café looking just like themselves … I fairly howled my triumph down the ways of this splendid city. ‘Oh you fat muddy-faced grey jolly Germans who despise me because I don’t know your rotten language. Oh! – the people I know – and you don’t. Oh! You poor things.’ And they all growl at me because they don’t know why I glory over them.

  Thus armoured in his prejudices, Brooke ventured out into the teeming streets of the Bacchus-Fest. The idea was that every man should find his Bacchus-bride for the night, and sure enough, Brooke found his.

  12

  * * *

  Elisabeth

  * * *

  True to his habitual form, Brooke was evasive to the point of duplicity in revealing anything about the young woman with whom he now had his first heterosexual love affair. The smokescreens he threw up to conceal the relationship succeeded in blinding and baffling his biographers over the decades, and it is only since her death, aged 90, in 1980 that the remarkable story of their liaison has gradually emerged from the shadows he cast over it. (And it would not be the last of its kind.)

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nbsp; According to Brooke’s only extant account of their meeting – in a lengthy letter to Jacques Raverat – the pair bumped into each other by chance in the street during the Bacchus-Fest:

  Then there’s me and the sculptress. I don’t know what to make of that quite. To begin with you must know that we have carnival here in February. Joy. Youth. Flowers … The young lay round in couples, huggin’ and kissin’. I roamed around, wondering if I couldn’t, once, be even as they are, as the animals. I found a round, damp young sculptress, a little like Lord Rosebery to look on. We curled passionate limbs round each other in a perfunctory manner and lay in a corner, sipping each other and beer in polite alternation … We roamed and sat and even danced and lay and talked, and the night wore on. We became more devoted. My head was in her lap, she was munching my fingers, when suddenly I became quite coldly aware of my position in the Universe …

  This account of a casual street pick-up is disingenuous at the very least. In fact the sculptress – whom Brooke calls ‘Dutch’ – was a Flemish Belgian named Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, two or three years his junior, who, like him, was in Munich to improve her German and partake of the city’s lively artistic scene. She had been adopted by the Ewalds, who had introduced her to Brooke as a suitable Faschingsbraut or ‘carnival bride’. Her father was a prominent neo-Impressionist painter, Theo van Rysselberghe, and her mother, Maria, a writer, was a member of André Gide’s circle.