by Nigel Jones
But, besotted as she was, she was not so blinded by Brooke’s ‘radiance’ that she missed the dark undertow to his sunniness that would eventually be his downfall: ‘deep-ingrained in him, and handed down to him I should imagine through generations of English ancestors, was the puritanical spirit … nobody could miss it, whoever saw the scorn and sternness in his face when he spoke of things that he hated, things corrupt and unclean.’ Unclean! Again that word that sounds a bell toll beneath Brooke’s apparently easy hedonism. The black-clad Puritanism he was quick to mock in the Elizabethans was paradoxically built into his own genes by generations of clerical and schoolmaster Brookes and Cotterills. Under the slow-gliding waters of the Cam, the austere spirit of the Ranee was waiting to reclaim him. One day he would dive in and fail to surface.
Towards the end of August, Brooke began to badger his friends with anxious queries about that year’s summer camp. Who was organizing it, Noel was asked. Would ‘Bruin’ be doing it? ‘I’d hoped she were organising some party of wild adventurers & that my meek, silent, upturned face’d possibly secure an invitation …’ In the event, a coincidence brought the two streams of his life, which he had striven to keep apart, together in one of England’s last wildernesses, Dartmoor, which he had briefly visited two years before.
Lytton Strachey was the first to make his way there, journeying down in July to work in peace on his first book, Landmarks in French Literature, at Becky Falls in Devon. He found the isolated cottage in the rocky and remote location conducive to his literary labours, and summoned fellow-Bloomsburyites G. E. Moore and Leonard Woolf to share its delights. By chance, Bedales’ annual camp was being held nearby, at Clifford’s Bridge, where a long meadow bordered the River Teign. The Old Bedalian Justin Brooke arranged to take over the school’s tents and camping gear for his friends, and swiftly invitations were issued for a long camp beginning in August. With the Bloomsbury party ensconced in the vicinity, it was fated that the two streams in Brooke’s life were about to converge.
He was still mostly at Grantchester, trying his hand at translating a new enthusiasm – Strindberg, whose rampant misogyny and emotional dialogue must have appealed – under the tuition of a Swedish student at Newnham, Estrid Linder. Estrid photographed him hard at work in the garden of the Old Vicarage, bent over papers on the round table brought out from his room, with the ramshackle veranda of the house behind him. Bored by the solemn Swedish girl – ‘Estrid’s a limpet … she crawls,’ he wrote to James contradictorily – Brooke was looking forward to the glories of Dartmoor, and was quick to round up his lady friends: he took advantage of a stay with Virginia at Firle, in Sussex, to invite her to the Clifford’s Bridge camp, thus making the first daring cross-pollination between sterile Bloomsbury and the fertile Neo-Pagans; then rushed up to Woking to make sure of Ka, who was in residence at Hook Hill Cottage.
Virginia was another witness to Brooke’s creative process as he sweated over his poems. ‘Virginia,’ he called suddenly. ‘What’s the brightest thing in nature?’ ‘Sunlight on a leaf,’ she responded. ‘Thanks,’ he said simply, and at once the line went down in his poem ‘Town and Country’ as: ‘Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare.’
After collecting his ladies like an anxious shepherd – Noel, already on Dartmoor at the Old Bedalians’ camp, resisted his proposal to meet secretly and ‘dash across Dartmoor alone with light knapsacks … and careless hearts’. ‘You must wait until I’m 21,’ she replied – Brooke arrived in Devon on 27 August.
Participants at the Clifford’s Bridge camp included Justin, James, Geoffrey Keynes and, surprisingly, Maynard, who was trying out life under canvas for the first time. On the distaff side there was Daphne, Bryn and Noel, Ka and Virginia – another camping virgin. Gerald Shove, staying at Becky Falls with Lytton, also put in a brief appearance. There were two newcomers, a doctor, Maitland Radford, one of many men in hot pursuit of Bryn Olivier; and Paulie Montague, an Old Bedalian Cambridge man from nearby Crediton, who entertained the campers with his virtuoso performances of Elizabethan songs, accompanying himself on his own home-made instruments.
Brooke arrived at the camp in a state of intellectual exhaustion. ‘I’ve been working for ten days alone at this beastly poetry,’ he told Ka. ‘Working at poetry isn’t like reading hard. It doesn’t just tire and exhaust you. The only effect is that your nerves and brain go … I had reached the lowest depths possible to man.’ On 30 August Paulie Montague issued a general invitation to his fellow-campers to walk over to his family home, Penton, and take tea, with his mother acting as hostess. It was to be a momentous occasion, for Brooke, eyeing his friends around the table, began to finalize the poem ‘Dining-Room Tea’, which he had begun in Munich. It is his own personal celebration of, and farewell to, his Neo-Pagan way of life.
Towards the end of the summer at Grantchester Gwen Darwin, sensing that the Neo-Pagans’ fraternity and solidarity were beginning to fracture and slip away, had written:
I wish one of us would write a ‘ballade des beaux jours à Grantchester’. I can’t bear to think of all these young, beautiful people getting old and tired and stiff in the joints. I don’t believe there is anything compensating in age and experience – we are at our very best and most livingest now – from now on the edge will go off our longings and the fierceness of our feelings and we shall no more swim in the Cam … and we shan’t mind much … Do you know how one stops and sees them all sitting around – Rupert and Geoffrey and Jacques and Bryn and Noel – all so young and strong and keen and full of thought and desire, and one knows it will all be gone in 20 years and there will be nothing left … If one of those afternoons would be written down, just as it was exactly; it would be a poem … Oh it is intolerable, this waste of beauty – it’s all there and nobody sees it but us and we can’t express it …
Now, in ‘Dining-Room Tea’, Brooke was to attempt to answer Gwen’s call, and produce his own Proustian effort to capture their golden hour in amber before time had its inevitable way with them:
When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
On plate and flowers and pouring tea
And cup and cloth; and they and we
Flung all the dancing moments by
With jest and glitter. Lip and eye
Flashed on the glory; shone and cried,
Improvident, unmemoried;
And fitfully and like a flame
The light of laughter went and came.
Proud in their careless transience moved
The changing faces that I loved.
The poet concentrates on the scene until he is rewarded with the transformation that lifts the ‘immortal moment’ from time into eternity:
I saw the marble cup; the tea
Hung on the air, an amber stream;
I saw the fire’s unglittering gleam,
The painted flame, the frozen smoke.
No more the flooding lamplight broke
On flying eyes and lips and hair;
But lay, but slept unbroken there …
His friends’ conversation turns to ‘words on which no silence grew’ and their transfigured faces are ‘Holy and strange … Freed from the mask of transiency’. But it is only a mystic moment; inevitably ‘mortal strength wearied; and Time began to creep’. As his world returns to the everyday:
The cup was filled. The bodies moved.
The drifting petal came to the ground.
The poet cannot communicate his vision. He remains roped in his isolation:
*
You never knew that I had gone
A million miles away, and stayed
A million years.
But despite his return to the prison of time and transience, nothing can rob him of his enduring sight of another reality:
I sang at heart, and talked, and eat,
And lived f
rom laugh to laugh, I too,
When you were there, and you, and you.
Brooke lost no time in adding the hastily completed poem to the sheaf that he now posted to Sidgwick to form the manuscript of his definitive first collection. It was a worthy jewel in the crown. The task done, he felt free to relax and enjoy the exuberant pleasure of the camp.
They tarried in Crediton to enjoy a performance of a popular drama, The Lyons Mail, at the town’s fair, and afterwards the joys of the fair’s side-shows detained them for longer, so that it was late at night when they finally breasted the top of the valley which held their camp-site, and silently surveyed the white tents bright in the still moonlight. In their absence Ka and Virginia had arrived at the camp, tired and hungry after an eight-mile tramp from the nearest station. In the darkness they came upon a blackberry pie, made some days earlier by Justin Brooke and by now far gone in dissolution. They ate several mouthfuls before discovering its mouldy state – and only then found a note pinned to the flap of the kitchen tent, explaining their friends’ absence.
The stay at Clifford’s Bridge was an unusually lengthy one: the Neo-Pagans camped there for 18 days, although the visiting Bloomsberries – Shove and James Strachey – could not face more than a night or two in the great outdoors. James arrived late at night and, disdaining to disturb his friends, flung himself down in a heap of blankets under a gorse bush. There he was discovered at daybreak by Justin and Ka, rising at 5.30 to prepare the breakfast porridge. Always ready to poke fun at the faithful but sometimes comically absurd James, Brooke composed a couplet in his dishonour:
In the late evening he was out of place,
And utterly irrelevant at dawn.
Discomfited by this less-than-welcoming reception from the Neo-Pagans, James retreated to Lytton’s lodgings at Becky Falls, where he was joined by his fellow-Apostle Gerald Shove, now known to Brooke, owing to his taciturnity, as ‘the silent Shove’. Pictures taken at the camp portray a boyish-looking Brooke in a variety of poses: grinning maniacally at a tweed-suited Shove; alone in a field in a white, cable-knit sweater, with damp hair parted in the middle and gazing moodily at the ground; sitting cross-legged in shorts outside a tent; absorbed in writing, with a windswept Ka in squaw-like pose in the foreground; or looking solemn in shirtsleeves in front of a five-bar gate, accompanied by Virginia – grinning self-consciously in Neo-Pagan-style gypsy scarf – along with Noel and Maitland Radford.
Maynard Keynes, rather unexpectedly enjoyed his taste of open-air life when he turned up: ‘Camp life suits me very well,’ he told his father. ‘The hard ground, a morning bathe, the absence of fresh food, and no chairs, doesn’t make one nearly so ill as one would suppose.’ Lytton Strachey, a martyr to piles, stayed in his cottage, characteristically commenting to Brooke that the ground ‘was rather an awkward shape to sit on’. Their days passed in the usual round of activity – swimming in the river, with Brooke ‘looking very beautiful’, according to Paulie Montague’s sister Ruth; and going on long hikes – on one enthusiastic occasion they made a 30-mile round trip to Yes Tor, breaking the journey with a visit to Lytton at Becky Falls, and organizing a woman-hunt with Bryn as their quarry on the way home. In quieter moments Brooke took up his work on Webster, which had been interrupted by his poetry, or read the passionate love-letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne.
Sexual and emotional currents criss-crossed the camp-site: Bryn took a dislike to Justin – a photo shows them sharing kitchen duty, with a grim-faced Bryn sitting as far as possible from an oblivious, grinning Justin. Bryn was fancied by Maitland, Brooke and Gerald Shove; and Brooke was also caught between his declining worship of Noel and his growing affection for Ka. When Ka left the camp early, he seems to have received some sort of rebuff from Noel, for, so he told Ka, he ended up by going off in a tearful huff and spending the night alone on a hill.
When the Neo-Pagans struck camp, Brooke went alone to stay with the Strachey brothers at Becky Falls. The meeting between Bloomsbury and the Neo-Pagans had not really worked: Bloomsbury, in the form of James, Virginia, Shove and Maynard Keynes, had taken a look at their boisterous younger brethren and decided they preferred the more cerebral air of their accustomed lifestyle. But Brooke still felt he could keep a foot in each camp.
After five days scrambling over the rocks with the Stracheys, he headed for London, where an unwelcome, but not unexpected, piece of news awaited him. After attending a concert of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with James, he met Dudley Ward at the National Liberal Club to introduce Bunny Garnett as a new member. It was then or soon afterwards that Dudley told him that he would be marrying Annemarie von der Planitz. Another desertion! Brooke endeavoured to make the best of it, and minimize the blow: ‘Luckily it’s not very definite,’ he reported to Ka, one of the diminishing band of single heterosexuals in their circle. ‘Dudley won’t give up his freedom for some years yet. But I so idolized him … I felt so awfully lonely.’
On his return to the Old Vicarage in mid-September, the autumnal gloom that had descended on the damp riverside seemed to seep into Brooke’s soul: what was to prove his last Neo-Pagan summer was over. His gloom was compounded by a letter from Frank Sidgwick complaining about ‘Lust’, the sonnet inspired by Elisabeth van Rysselberghe that he had included as an afterthought in the collection. Ostensibly his publisher thought it a bad poem; but really, Brooke suspected darkly, his objection was due to its title and sexual theme. He decided to stand firm and insist on the sonnet’s inclusion.
He wrote to Sidgwick: ‘Is the objection to “Lust” only that it’s bad as poetry or also that it’s shocking as morals? … If it’s thought to be improper, it must be sadly misunderstood. It’s meaning is quite “proper” and so moral as to be almost untrue. If the title’s too startling “Libido” … could be substituted.’ He added: ‘My own feeling is that to remove it would be to overbalance the book still more in the direction of unimportant prettiness. There’s plenty of that sort of wash in the other pages for the readers who like it.’
It is striking that Brooke is himself so critical of his own work that he attacks it even before publication for ‘unimportant prettiness’ – the very charge brought against him by unsympathetic critics ever afterwards. His reputation as a poet would probably stand much higher today had he had the wisdom to exclude such verse from the volume in favour of more unsentimental pieces – even if that would have held up publication for several years. Instead he let his desire for fame and his friends’ acclaim get the better of him.
He masochistically continued: ‘About a lot of the book I occasionally feel like Ophelia, that I’ve turned “Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself … to favour and to prettiness.” So I’m extra keen about the places where I think that thought and passion are, however clumsily, not so transmuted.’ After more haggling with Sidgwick, Brooke got his way. Ka was triumphantly informed: ‘He wanted it left out. Said a woman’s smell was excrement … This morning he’s come down like a shot possum. Compromise: It’s to be printed, but called “Libido” (Latin!) Let us pray.’ In copies of the book that he distributed to friends Brooke meticulously crossed out ‘Libido’ in pencil and restored the original title.
Brooke now had less than three months left to complete the dissertation on Webster on which his academic – and financial – future depended. He knew that when the Michaelmas term began, the flow of visitors to Grantchester would resume and his chances of concentrating on his work would depart. There were other reasons, too, that encouraged him to desert the Old Vicarage: with the onset of autumn it had lost much of its summer enchantment; and if he lived in London the British Museum and its works of reference that he needed would be close at hand. Last but not least, Ka would be there, offering hospitality and – who knew? – the romantic comfort he craved.
But it was another, older form of comfort that he took up on a preliminary reconnaissance of the capital on 17 September, when he dined with Eddie Marsh, Duncan Grant and George Mallory – all three homose
xuals. This, and the fact that Brooke took for his London pied-à-terre a studio in the Bloomsbury heartland at 21 Fitzroy Square, sometimes used by the lovers Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes, caused the rumour mills to spin. Although Brooke defensively told the fiercely homophobic Jacques Raverat that the place was ‘inconceivably disgusting’, his residence there was enough to set Bloomsbury tongues wagging that the star of Grantchester had reverted to former sexual inclinations.
Writing later of this period, Virginia Woolf recalls being told by her sister Vanessa that James Strachey was ‘in despair’, because Brooke had ‘been to bed twice’ with a handsome Cambridge catamite of Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant named Arthur Lee Hobhouse, a youth elected to the Apostles on account of his looks rather than his brains. In the version of the rumour heard by Virginia, Brooke’s bed partner was Mallory, the handsome mountaineer and another lover of Grant’s. This Bloomsbury bitchery may have been inaccurate gossip relating to Brooke’s years in Cambridge; but if it was true that he had indulged in dalliance with his male friends while increasingly involved with Ka, it suggests a degree of sexual confusion that was indeed to become apparent in the very near future.
Whatever the truth of the stories, Brooke’s contact with his old pals was brief – by November the squalor of the studio in Fitzroy Square had driven him to nearby rooms, found for him by Ka, at 76 Charlotte Street. This was a convenient love-nest for them both, tucked away out of sight of their nosy friends’ notice. By day, Brooke, armed with his newly acquired reader’s ticket, laboured over Webster in the British Museum, while by night he played with Ka. The mild flirtatiousness of his by now daily letters to her is deceptive: ‘Your body’s strong and adequately divine; … you’ve an affectedly drawling laugh that puts several pounds on a sick man’s weight, even down 85 miles of telephone; that if one sees you swing … across the street, the world’s on the instant radiant and immortally good.’