Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Brooke’s Heimweh was soon to be requited. He was on his way home. And was glad to be shaking Teutonic dust from his feet. He repeated to Eddie the same message he had already given Bryn and Noel: ‘I have sampled and sought out German culture. It has changed all my political views. I am wildly in favour of nineteen new Dreadnoughts. German culture must never, never, prevail. The Germans are nice, and well-meaning, and they try; but they are soft. Oh! They are soft. The only good things (outside music perhaps) are the writings of Jews who live in Vienna.’

  It is no accident that Marsh was the recipient of this nationalistic diatribe – his political boss, Winston Churchill, was about to take over as First Lord of the Admiralty, overlord of the largest navy in the world, and the ultimate arbiter of Brooke’s own life and death when war with Germany arrived four years later. The political climate in which Brooke visited Germany was one of escalating tension. The country was not only a centre of the artistic and literary avant-garde; its politics were dominated by rising nationalism and a naval race with Britain – hence Brooke’s reference to Dreadnoughts. Not the least important factor in the shift in his politics was his encounter with the reality of German power and vigour. His recoil from Germany and the Germans, despite, or because of, his frequent visits to the country, marked a decisive stage in his move away from Fabian socialism towards patriotic nationalism.

  Yet there were limits to Brooke’s metamorphosis from radical youth to conservative conformist: he was and remained a fierce, even a fanatical, atheist. As such he issued a stern rebuke to Gwen Darwin, who had written to him suggesting that the working out of the eternal triangle between herself, Ka and Jacques was akin to a ballet in which they all danced the steps allotted to them by some controlling force. To Brooke, a believer in the random workings of chance, this was all arrant nonsense, and he told Gwen so: ‘Oh! Oh! I implore you to extend the flickering fingers of derision at the sky.’ Inspired by his sojourn in Florence he continued:

  Did that vapid blue concavity make Brunelleschi build the Pazzi chapel? No! no! Derision’s for God. But if it’s really that madder horror, the Life-Force, that you’re so anthropomorphically female to, even derision won’t do. Laws do not wince. When you jeer, they wear the set, tired smile of a man who politely listens without hearing what you say … But there aren’t laws. There aren’t. Take my word for it. I saw – I lifted up the plush curtain and looked behind – nobody, only dust and a slight draught from the left … There are no laws; only heaps of happenings, and on each heap stands one of us and crows – a cock on a dung-heap or a beacon on a hill (in Lord Macaulay’s poem) according to taste.

  As the Florentine sky darkened, Brooke strove to sum up what he saw as the Neo-Pagan philosophy:

  The Puritans dimly try to build up the background: the hedonist flaps inconsistently for the thing. We go for both; we join up Puritan and Hedonist: we have (once more) only connected … The great thing about Life is to realize three qualities in things (1) this controllability I’ve mentioned; (2) Uniqueness; (3) Transience. All things are so; pins, moments, paramours, letters, intimacies, lamps, spinach. I saw Giotto’s tower with the sun on it this afternoon. I saw Giotto’s tower on April 28, 1911, with 6.0. p.m. sunlight on it. I needn’t have done it. I splendidly came out of all the ages. I hurtled out of the darkness to do it. It was half a second – it changed as I looked; and so did I. It and I and the light won’t be quite the same again. If you let the principles fairly sink in, and begin to realize Life, it leads to fainting in restaurants, screaming before a wallpaper pattern and madness in the end … You have no conception of the depths of horror of the mean and egoistic human heart.

  Brooke drew his melancholy meditation on transience and time to an existential end:

  But perhaps you’ve already discovered the Great Secret – the Horror – that joy’s as incommunicable as sorrow. Loneliness. Crying alone is bad enough: but that’s an old story. It’s when one discovers that one must always and for ever laugh alone … That’s one of the things that, two by two, people sooner or later learn, and never tell for the sake of the young … It’s so late: the stars over Fiesole are wonderful: and there are quiet cypresses and a straight white wall opposite. I renounce England; though at present, I’ve the senile affection of a godfather for it. I think of it, over there (beyond Fiesole) Gwen and Jacques and Ka and Frances, and Justin and Dudley … good night, children. Rupert.

  So the poet of England, sitting in a foreign field, against an appropriate background, struck another pose. For Brooke, England would be his friends, and the portable memories he had of them. A couple of days afterwards, Brooke steered his doddery godfather back to Rugby. It was the merry month of May and a final Neo-Pagan summer beckoned. He left for the Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

  Brooke’s new home was a rambling Restoration building, with three storeys made of red brick, complete with attics and dormer windows. A veranda covered with Virginia creeper gave on to the wild rear garden, with chestnut and box trees and various nineteenth-century features made of cement – a sundial, a disused fountain and a strange mock-Gothic folly. The long lawns running down to the river were pervaded by a rank smell of weed and wild mint. The vicarage had last been used as a clerical residence in the 1820s, since when it had been lived in as a private family residence, but was now in the hands of tenants, Henry and Florence Neeve.

  For a rent of 30 shillings a week, Brooke was assigned three rooms – in the spring and summer he spent most of his time in the garden, writing or reading, with frequent trips to the river pools to bathe. In his early days there, his alfresco expeditions were encouraged by the presence of fleas and woodlice in his rooms – which Mrs Neeve attempted to keep down with insect powder. He would sleep on the lawn, waking to birdsong in the small hours with dew in his hair, before hurrying off to take an early-morning plunge. Jacques witnessed Brooke’s war against the Old Vicarage’s unwelcome wildlife: he caught him on all fours, stark naked, searching for fleas between the floorboards with a lighted candle. Jacques sensibly suggested applying more flea powder, but Brooke gloomily shook his head: ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘They rather like it. It just excites their appetite.’

  The Neeves were more tolerant of their sub-tenant than the Stevensons had been, allowing him the privacy to come and go and entertain his many visitors as he pleased. Returning late at night from Cambridge by foot or boat, he would raid the pantry to carry off a slice of Mrs Neeve’s prized home-made fruit pie, and for breakfast there would be lashings of honey from the hives Mr Neeve kept in the garden. Altogether it was a delightful nest for Brooke to enjoy the last summer of unalloyed happiness that he would ever know.

  He summed up his delight in a letter to one of his oldest correspondents, his cousin, Erica Cotterill: ‘This is a deserted, lonely, dank, ruined, overgrown, gloomy, lovely house: with a garden to match. It is all of five hundred years old, and fusty with the ghosts of generations of mouldering clergymen.’ Despite his rationalist attitudes, Brooke was much possessed by the supernatural: his bedroom had formally been the vicarage’s children’s nursery, and he claimed he felt the tug of tiny hands as he climbed the stairs to bed.

  One thing did not change from the Orchard: the constantly replenished stream of visitors who sought Brooke out in his rural hideaway. They were a disparate and sometimes ill-assorted crowd, for, as Jacques Raverat commented, Brooke liked to keep his friends in separate watertight compartments: ‘He had two sets of friends that he was not interested in bringing together; for a long time he even tried to keep them apart. Was this because of his natural love of mystery, from fear of too great an incompatibility and mutual disdain, or did he fear a rapprochement at his own expense – that both sides might be exposed to a dangerous influence?’

  One who crossed the lines between the groups was James Strachey; he was a social butterfly who corresponded as busily as Brooke – and with more venomous gossip – with the likes of Noel and Ka. Another was James’s friend Virginia Stephen, who had
known Brooke from his childhood but had faded from his intimate circle in more recent years. Now she was back – thanks to a friendship with Ka, who extended her comforting aid to nurture Virginia in her mental breakdowns, for, by 1911, the would-be author was describing herself as ‘29 and unmarried … a failure … childless … insane, too, no writer’.

  Getting to know Ka, Jacques and Gwen, it was Virginia who formally dubbed them ‘the Neo-Pagans’ – a term she borrowed from the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites and the homosexual social and sexual reformer Edward Carpenter. Virginia was at first envious and admiring of the Neo-Pagans’ apparent freedoms – and their outdoor vitality; such a stark contrast to the sterile and waspish world of Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster that she inhabited. For the wispy beards and bony chests of etiolated Bloomsbury, breathing the rarefied and stifling air of pure intellectualism, the lifestyle of the Neo-Pagans seemed at first a literal breath of fresh air. ‘I mean to throw myself into youth, sunshine, nature, primitive art,’ vowed Virginia. ‘Cakes with sugar on the top, love, lust, paganism, general bawdiness …’ Entranced by Ka, she gave her the affectionate nickname ‘Bruin’, suggesting at once her heavy sluggishness and her protective maternalism.

  Safely installed at the Old Vicarage, Brooke lost little time in reassembling his friends. After dashing down to Limpsfield Chart to see Noel and Bryn (the latter back from Jamaica and hankering for marriage and children: ‘I really must get married soon: I should make such an excellent mother … One can’t go on living the life of the idle rich for ever,’ she told Brooke), he gathered a party at Grantchester and the nearby Darwin home, Newnham Grange. Present were Jacques, Gwen and Bryn – and two interlopers, Virginia Stephen and the acidly observant philosopher Bertrand Russell, who recorded: ‘I went to Grantchester … to tea with Jacques Raverat who is to marry Gwen Darwin. He had immense charm, but like all people who have superficial and obvious charm, I think he is weak and has no firm purpose. He is staying with Rupert Brooke whom I dislike … young people nowadays are odd – Xtian names and great familiarity, rendered easy by a complete freedom from passion on the side of the men.’

  Virginia, too, soon came to regard her new-found Neo-Pagan chums with weary Bloomsbury cynicism: ‘considering the infantile natures of all concerned I predict nothing serious. Ka will marry a Brooke next year, I expect. J. will always be a volatile Frog. Gwen will bear children, and paint pictures …’ Her habitual squirts of poison and malice at anyone she suspected might be happier and more fulfilled than she was are clearly in evidence here; but she is prescient in predicting Brooke’s tumultuous involvement with Ka, which would indeed reach its apogee in the following year.

  Virginia was a guest at the nuptials of Jacques and Gwen in Cambridge as May turned to June. Brooke took the opportunity of inviting her to stay. Meanwhile close observation of his friends in their married bliss had sparked his always lurking jealous rage into rancid life. He let it out to his fellow-sufferer, Ka: ‘I’d a bad touch of that disease you too’ll have known. The ignoblest jealousy mixed with loneliness to make me flog my pillow with an umbrella till I was exhausted when I was shut into my lonely room to read myself to sleep …’ It was not so much jealousy of Jacques’ new-found regular sex with Gwen – Brooke had never fancied his friend, whom he described dismissively as ‘a square-headed woman who cuts wood’. Rather it was the old anger at friends who deserted him and the single state for matrimony.

  Brooke and Ka were drawn closer together in their mutual loss, and many of their friends shared Virginia’s view that they would make a logical pairing in the kaleidoscope of shifting relations within the Neo-Pagan fraternity. Brooke, too, began to see the logic of emotional events. Cautiously he sounded Ka out with a catechism of the Neo-Pagan ethics that governed their set: ‘We don’t copulate without marriage, but we do meet in cafés, talk on buses, go [on] unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other books, without marriage.’ He coupled this with a warning about his own evasiveness: ‘I’ll try to cut off all the outside, and tell you truths. Have I ever seemed to you honest? That was when I got one layer away. There are nineteen to come – and when they’re off what?’ Like the layers of an onion, which when peeled reveal yet another layer, Brooke had an obvious fear that his secrecy and subterfuges concealed a void. ‘How many people can one love?’ he demanded of Ka, ‘How many people should one love? What is love? If I love at 6 p.m. do I therefore love at 7?’ Like Noel before her, if Ka was considering a love affair with Brooke, she could not claim that she had not been warned of his waggling vacillations.

  James Strachey was one of the catalysts working to break down the walls between Brooke’s mutually exclusive circles. Just as his obsession with Brooke had caused him to become a Fabian without believing in the ideology, and to get his friends elected to the Apostles without much intellectual clout, so now he strove to bring Bloomsbury and the Neo-Pagans together in a wider circle orbiting around Brooke – with eventually disastrous results. Some of the Neo-Pagans were innately suspicious of this proposed merger – not least Brooke himself, as Jacques Raverat recalled:

  He did everything he could to hold off a rapprochement … he may have been right, but despite all his efforts he couldn’t prevent it. Finally, James, whom he could not keep away, made the treaty of union between these two milieux, which had become too curious about each other, but which were deeply incompatible. The results were sometimes comic; but the rapprochement led Brooke into an ordeal that was sufficiently cruel and tragic to justify fully the instinctive fear he had of it.

  James, an inveterate and interfering mischief-maker, kept up a correspondence with Ka and Noel, at least in part because he knew of Brooke’s attraction to the two women. The perceptive Jacques saw through James’s motives: ‘He felt for our group, and perhaps especially for Ka, a kind of jealousy. He had the face of a baby and the expression of an old man; he seemed to take no pleasure or interest in material life or the physical world, and to exist only in the realms of pure intellect.’ Although this assessment overlooks James’s phenomenal skill as a serial seducer of both men and women – Brooke was one of his few failures – disdain and dislike of the younger Strachey was widely shared among the Neo-Pagans; he was frequently compared to a self-satisfied and fastidious cat, and there was certainly something feline about his constant efforts to ingratiate himself into the good graces of Brooke and his friends.

  Meanwhile, as spring turned to one of the summers that appeared so golden in retrospect to the world which followed the Great War, Brooke played the country gentleman and host at the Old Vicarage. The Oliviers’ friend Sybil Pye, still as besotted with Brooke as she had been a year before, was one of the guests who bothered to note down her impressions – conscious perhaps that she was in at the birth of a legend. She admired Brooke’s talent for easy social mixing. Early in June, when members of three separate May Week parties from Cambridge assembled in the Old Vicarage garden: ‘he just moved from group to group, dissolving incongruities and creating links …’

  Amid the social whirl there were also quiet, lazy days of study on the river: ‘On some days …’ wrote Sybil, ‘he would take an armful of books into a canoe, and keeping a paddle in his left hand to steady it while the current drifted him along, would make rapid notes on scraps of paper from one book and another, and, in an easy mood, read out passages to enjoy the sound of the various forms and cadences.’ Brooke’s thesis on Webster, on which he was hard at work that summer, with completion due by the year’s end, dictated the choice of writers:

  Spenser, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher … and many lesser-known … all these keep an added gracious quality for those who heard them in this manner, among the dark reflected trees and the sudden wide openings across flat misty meadows … The affection he felt for the river is already familiar to readers of his poems. Each curve of its course, and each tree-clump that marked it, seemed known to him with a peculiar intimacy – like that which attaches sometimes to things constantly
and affectionately handled.

  Sybil noticed Brooke’s surprising tenderness to animals – how he would break off from reciting poetry to rescue the frogs that infested the gardens from the slavering jaws of the Old Vicarage’s resident dogs – a bull terrier named Pudsey Dawson by Brooke, and a puppy called Laddie. She also remarked his tendency to wear the same clothes continually. On being told that the black flannel shirt and red tie he was wearing were the same ensemble he had donned the previous year, Brooke remarked that he found it easy to clothe himself on £3 a year. Another observer, the Neeves’ young son Cyril, recalled seeing the result of such parsimony: Brooke’s white shirt-tail peeping out through a hole in the seat of his trousers.

  Maintaining his friends in their separate boxes, Brooke was also careful to keep the Ranee in ignorance of his love for Noel. Writing in mid-May he told her of an impending visit by Mrs Brooke, adding: ‘You (“that youngest Olivier girl – I hear she’s left school”) needn’t meet my mamma.’ But he tried to lure Noel up to his new demesne: ‘Grantchester’s much the same. Come back to it! Here’ll be dog roses soon. Mrs Neeve, Byron’s Pool, the Trees and the Village Idiot – all the old landmarks waiting for you.’