Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Brooke’s partly fabricated account of their carnival night continued:

  But then we put hands on each other’s necks and shoulders for the millionth time and found them quite cool, and she raised her watery protruding eyes to mine, and I suddenly realized of her – and she of me – that she was in exactly the same state … was quite a conscious, sensible intellectual, real, modern person – might, in fact, in other circumstances, have been almost, not quite, one of Us – we found, in short – to quote one quite admirable sonnet I wrote on the whole thing next afternoon – ‘that we, Were you (whoever you may be!) and I!’ And as one can’t very well begin a new game at five in the morning, we very solemnly and pathetically kissed each other on our quiet intellectual lips and so parted …

  If we cut through the thickets of Brooke’s ridiculously laboured prose, what seems to have happened is this: the young couple ventured into the swarming streets – possibly chaperoned by Elisabeth’s mother Maria, who was in Munich at this point – got excited by alcohol and the anarchic party atmosphere, indulged in some mild petting, got more excited, but chickened out of consummating their new-found relationship and found their way to their respective homes in the cold light of dawn.

  But that was not the end of the affair by any means. We can piece together what happened next through brief mentions in Brooke’s letters home from Munich. He tells Geoffrey Keynes: ‘My life in München isn’t wildly thrilling. I don’t emulate Dudley with women. I sit alone in a cafe or my room and read or write … Of course there’s Elizabeth [sic] … But then there’s always somebody … But there’s never anybody quite like Elizabeth … Oh! Oh! But as she’s spoilt my life, and given me a devilish cold in the head … let’s pass to pleasanter topics …’

  In mid-March James Strachey was told: ‘I very nearly came to England ten days ago. But I shan’t now, of course. Mlle. van Rysselberghe has appeared since then.’ By now Elisabeth was alone in Munich, her mother having departed. Brooke determined to screw his courage to the sticking place and have full sexual relations with her. Elisabeth was an ardent and romantic spirit, with a weakness for weaker men than her. She was strong-minded, clearly falling in love with him, and obviously ready to ‘do the deed’.

  By mid-April, Brooke was anxiously quizzing the worldly James about the availability and efficacy of contraceptive devices:

  James dear, The world moved very rapidly and I’d like to prosecute my academic enquiries. It’s so difficult, here. You tell me the syringe (siringe?) is best. What I want to know is the exact name of the stuff. One’s at such a disadvantage in dealing with a foreign chemist. And I don’t want to poison anybody; least of all myself. In fact I want further information than one can get even from German textbooks – when one doesn’t know the language … in fact if you could just forward any information you can heap together, – or even a neat little package … – might save a ball or two for the nation, at the risk of preventing a future Brother …

  James dutifully responded to his friend’s plea and made the necessary enquiries: ‘I now know every detail of the whole sordid business.’ With evident distaste for the messy goings-on of heterosexual intercourse, James proceeded to list details of the condoms, pessaries and syringes available to the wealthy and discerning ladies and gentlemen of the era. He advised against condoms: ‘You get hardly any pleasure out of them and they are most likely to get torn in the excitement of the moment.’ Pessaries were damned as ‘unpleasant things … made of quinine and oil – and you shove it up the lady’s cunt before you start … it makes a filthy soapy mess that comes out over everything’. James obligingly enclosed his own drawing of various syringes. His letter concluded with a self-parody: ‘“My dear boy”, he wound up, “I recommend you to content yourself, if you’re dealing with a girl, with ‘playing about’ with her – you can get plenty of pleasure that way. But if you must block someone, my final advice to you is – let it be a married woman.”’ Brooke must have known what would follow these headmasterly words of warning on the letter’s final page: ‘Oh, but isn’t it all too incredibly filthy? Won’t it perhaps make you sick of it? – Come quietly to bed with me instead …’

  James’s postscript was eerily prophetic, considering Brooke’s future paranoid fears of his rival for Ka’s love, Henry Lamb, who already had a formidable reputation as a fearless ladies’ man and sexual athlete: ‘I forgot to remind you of Henry’s method – withdrawal before emission. But that requires an iron nerve – and if it fails …’ Brooke’s reply was brief and clipped: ‘Many thanks. I don’t admire your attitude. Cheer up, though: Elizabeth rather agreed with you & has funked it. (She’s sorry now) …’

  If Elisabeth did ‘funk’ it at this particular point, she was not alone in having cold feet. Brooke was already making her his unwilling partner in a push-pull game of love that was to become the characteristic hallmark of his future affairs. First of all he was the ardent pursuer: badgering Elisabeth to spend a romantic few days with him in Venice at the end of April. When she agreed, it was his turn to funk: he replied ostensibly full of desire, but the bulk of the letter was taken up with a sermon against the danger of pregnancy. Put off, Elisabeth withdrew her offer to ‘give herself’ to him. Reproachfully, Brooke chided her with her lack of courage: ‘I can’t help believing (am I right?) that if we’d met in Venice, that there, touching your hands, looking into your eyes, I could have made you understand, and agree. But I preferred to be honest. And so perhaps one of the best things in my life, or yours, is lost – for a time – through a desire for honesty.’

  A novice in the lists of heterosexual love, Brooke had still to learn that honesty was not the best weapon in the seducer’s armoury: he had told Elisabeth that their sexual encounter would be on a strictly no-strings basis, and a more experienced lover would hardly have been surprised at her reluctance to be used as a vehicle for Brooke to escape his burdensome virginity. As usual, Brooke had talked and walked himself into an unholy emotional mess.

  When he came to take leave of Elisabeth before leaving Munich in late April, he told James:

  The parting with Elizabeth [sic] was most painful. I felt an awful snake. Especially when she said she would kill herself, and I felt frightened of the police … I am very bitter with myself and frightened of England. Of the scene when the maidservant suddenly brought two students to see the room, and found her with her hair down, weeping, at full length, on that plateau of a sofa, and me in great pain on one leg in the middle of the room, saying ‘Yes … yes … yes’, very wildly … of that I will tell you later. But, anyhow, do assure me that one ought to tell the truth: and that it’s not honest to want to be raped.

  Brooke’s sexual inexperience had blown up in his face, leaving debris far messier than the soapiest pessary. Coldly and clumsily he had played Don Juan – and flopped miserably. His maladroitness may have stemmed from a secret fear of sexual failure with a woman. His sonnet ‘Lust’, which he claimed was inspired by Elisabeth, and which was to cause him much trouble with censorious publishers, hints at just such a problem.

  How should I know? The enormous wheels of will

  Drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet.

  Night was void arms and you a phantom still,

  And day your far light swaying down the street.

  As never fool for love, I starved for you;

  My throat was dry and my eyes hot to see.

  Your mouth so lying was most heaven in view,

  And your remembered smell most agony.

  Love wakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver,

  And suddenly the mad victory I planned

  Flashed real, in your burning bending head …

  My conqueror’s blood was cool as a deep river

  In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand

  Quieter than a dead man on a bed.

  If Elisabeth had been left high and dry by Brooke’s behaviour, she does not appear to have held it against him. She resolved to make another attempt to h
eat his ‘conqueror’s blood’.

  13

  * * *

  Virginia and the Old Vicarage

  * * *

  Brooke’s as yet abortive affair with Elisabeth was played out against the background of a cultural life in Munich that continued to be busy, as James Strachey heard from him: ‘Fifth Symphony tonight. Tomorrow (Wagner’s) Lohengrin. Friday Debussy. Saturday Schnitzler. Sunday Valkyries. Yesterday The Wild Duck. On Sunday I saw Ghosts for 6d: played as a farce. Mr Wedekind turns out to be a music hall singer: & has coffee at the next table after lunch. No other news. Rupert.’

  This crowded cultural calendar shows Brooke supping both classic and modern fare – Frank Wedekind was the contemporary enfant terrible of German theatre, whose now-classic Spring’s Awakening was an anarchic call to the young to rise and break the stultified grip of the older generation. Naturally its praise of parricide awakened a strong response in Brooke, who saw the play almost as often as he had seen Peter Pan.

  Behind Brooke’s back, as he grimly suspected, events and emotions in England were unravelling beyond his control. Another pair of his friends were about to break the unspoken rules of youth and seal the marriage knot. Ka’s final rejection of his marriage proposal at Lulworth had propelled Jacques Raverat decisively back in Gwen Darwin’s direction. The two shared an interest and ability in art, and, if not in love with each other, at least knew that they could live together in reasonable compatibility and contentment. Jacques apparently told Ka of his decision without emotion or rancour – merely remarking that he liked Gwen because she had ‘bones in her mind’.

  By the end of February their engagement was formally announced. The poisonously gossipy Virginia Stephen, a frustrated virgin if ever there was one, regaled her sister Vanessa with the complications of the ménage à trois: ‘[Jacques] says that now he is in love with them both, and asks Ka to be his mistress, and Gwen to satisfy his mind. Gwen is made very jealous; Ka evidently cares a good deal for Jacques … in my view J. is very much in love with K: and not much, if at all, with Gwen. Ought they to break off the engagement?’ They did not, but married in June, enjoying afterwards a month-long painting honeymoon in Lulworth, of all places.

  Brooke, learning in Munich of the betrothal, affected to be delighted at the union between two of his closest friends. ‘It fills me with joy,’ he wrote to Bryn in early March, while Noel was told: ‘I’m going to write to Jacques and Gwen and tell them how great they are. I’m glad they’re in love, and going to be married soon. You’ve heard? Quite sudden. And they’re very radiant. And Ka’s a little sad, but glad and very fine. And I wrote putting them all right … They and Ka worked everything out greatly. Be proud.’ Brooke’s self-assumed role as the ringmaster of his friends’ complex emotional manoeuvres is remarkable in its arrogant – and naive – assumptions. If he was disappointed that Jacques and Gwen had defected to the married enemy, he hid it well – although he privately sarcastically referred to the match as the ‘Moment of Transfiguration’. Most likely he was secretly envious of their evident happiness – and pleased that Ka would presumably now be more available for him to turn to and lean on.

  He offered his services as an unbidden counsellor to the lovelorn trio. Gwen was told: ‘You said you’d all three felt that week, as if you were in the hands of some external power, rushing you on … What? God? The Life-Force? Oh, my Gwen, be clean, be clean! It is a monstrosity. There is no power. Things happen: and we pick our way among them.’ This otherwise sensible piece of advice is disfigured by Brooke’s summons to cleanliness – a motif that was to become ever more obsessive in his life and letters. The evil demons of his lurking puritanism were beginning to awaken.

  His advice to Ka, the most vulnerable member of the trio, and the one who had most clearly lost the game, was less clearly disinterested: ‘Why are you sad? – Lust. But that’s absurd. You’d never have gratified that anyway … even if, as I’ll grant, a sort of lust-jealousy may plague you (an infinitely pale reflection of part of that plagues me every time I hear of anyone getting married!), that doesn’t come to much.’

  The miserable Ka was encouraged to buck her ideas up by the instant expert in married love. This was Brooke in his most insufferable Agony Aunt mode: ‘Jacques and Gwen are in love and are going to marry. That is very fine … It is a risky business, as they’re both so dotty. I hope Gwen won’t hurt her wood-cuts with babies, or Jacques get domesticated. It’s very splendid. They’ll be in love for a couple of years. I hope they do it more gracefully than most.’

  His vanity was further reinforced by news from James that he was the subject of hot gossip at home. James had bumped into their old school friend from Hillbrow, Owen O’Malley, who still seemed to be obsessed by Brooke – to the extent of accosting a girl at a ball who bore a vague resemblance to Brooke, with the line: ‘Miss Brooke, I believe?’ Interestingly, O’Malley also passed the rumour on to James that Brooke was in love with Bryn. At the same dance – a benefit for the Suffragettes – James overheard some guests discussing Brooke’s love life. Outrageously eavesdropping, James heard someone say they were not surprised that people didn’t fall in love with Brooke: ‘He’s so beautiful he’s scarcely human.’

  Brooke was in truth up to his old tricks of writing simultaneously to both Bryn – flirtatiously – and to Noel – more passionately than ever. Even when archly wooing the unintellectual Bryn, he could rarely resist a little sneer:

  Life is very noble, in spite of the way one treats it. And even here there’s the sun and a very beautiful city and lovely mysterious people in the darkness. Mostly I read the good John Keats. And once a week I sit in a corner of a café and brood over my sins and finally write a little poem. The little poems are not very good, nowadays. The elder ones are still with a publisher … the publisher thinks some of the poems too indelicate. Like you, he doesn’t think it quite nice to talk about love & sea-sickness like that [a reference to ‘A Channel Passage’]. Oh, you healthy people! You may have a specious air of intelligence, Bryn, but never forget that you have really the soul of an old sheep …

  But Brooke, too, had his philistine streak. After detailing his assiduous attendance at Munich’s concert halls, he added:

  But as I don’t care for music, it none of it makes any difference. So I sit in a patient way while they perform The Ring, and know all the time I had better be reading Endymion, or watching people’s faces. It’s that – watching faces – that’s really the chief thing in life, you know … Ho! I do like to see people who fairly burn with vitality … There are about 45 people in the world who are alive and the rest are mildewed corpses. But some of the corpses are better than the rest in that they can recognize the living. Such a corpse am I. One of the better ones. Lady, I take your congratulations with a little bow.

  Naturally, none of Brooke’s female correspondents – neither Bryn, Noel, nor Ka – was told of Elisabeth. His boasting of his amorous successes was confined to James, Jacques and Geoffrey Keynes. But his involvement with the Flemish temptress caused a hiatus in his stream of letters to Noel. Guilt-stricken, he wrote in mid-March: ‘Noel, whom I love! I am a worm, a crawling thing “Buried and bricked in a forgotten Hell”, because I have not written to you for months …’ Having got his excuses out of the way, Brooke was soon back to ludicrous, self-parodying preening: ‘I write damn good letters. I am a most clever creature, and can sometimes, write better than almost anybody in England. My God, I write well! And some of the letters I write to you – hoo, superb!’ But all this was by way of praising Noel’s own schoolgirl epistolary style: ‘If I … could write you down one tenth as well as you … write yourself down – I’d be the greatest poet England ever produced.’

  After burbling happily on in this vein for several pages, Brooke returns to his unvarying message: he is as ferociously ‘in love and lust’ with Noel as ever:

  I’ve such a passion to see you again, and talk, having kissed you. We’ve denied ourselves so much, there was Prunoy, and now Muni
ch! We deserve something. And these hurried snatches at bliss – they don’t admit of certain calmer longer glories. I must see you some time for a long while, day after day. Oh, Noel remember Grantchester! I want to sit and talk and talk and talk, and see you, in every light and mood and position … my dearest dearest – I love you. Rupert.

  On 8 April Brooke temporarily left Munich and his tribulations with Elisabeth. His destination was the Austrian Imperial capital, Vienna, and his host was Ernst Goldschmidt, a fellow-Fabian and Trinity man, and a native-born Viennese described by Brooke to the Ranee as ‘a very rich and clever Jew’. It is worth noting that it is about this time that occasional but persistent disparaging asides about Jews begin to creep into Brooke’s letters. (He described one of his Vienna haunts to James as a ‘Jews’ café’.) James, ironically for a man who would one day become one of Freud’s most devoted disciples, was at this time quite casually anti-Semitic in his comments. Such attitudes were the norm rather than the exception among the English upper and middle classes in the first half of the twentieth century. In continental Europe, particularly in Vienna, where a ragged tramp named Adolf Hitler was absorbing them at the time of Brooke’s visit, such prejudice was even more vicious and virulent. In Vienna Brooke saw more theatre, including Arthur Schnitzler’s Die junge Medardus, an epic which he described to Eddie Marsh as ‘a Hebrew journalist’s version of [Hardy’s] The Dynasts; but rather good’.

  After a week Brooke’s visit was curtailed by the news that he was wanted on a mercy mission: his former Rugby form master and godfather, Robert Whitelaw, recently widowed, had been escorted by Alfred Brooke for a recuperative holiday in Florence. Alfred left him there, but the old man promptly suffered a collapse in health and Rupert was called upon to help him home. He spent a few days dutifully revisiting the Florentine galleries he had first seen as an eager youth. Again, the pensione where they were staying was irresistibly Forsteresque, as he told Marsh: ‘Here I live in a pension surrounded by English clergymen and ladies … They are all Forster characters. Perhaps it is his pension. But to live among Forster characters is too bewildering. The “quaint” remarks fall all around one at meal-times, with little soft plups like pats of butter … So I am seeing life. But I am thirsting for Grantchester.’