Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  There is a sinister foretaste here of Brooke’s later rejection of the woman he now appeared to worship so abjectly. In his desperation he had indeed revealed the reverse of his ‘golden boy’ image – allowing Ka a long look into the seething, festering depths of his ‘dirty abyss’. This was what he would never forgive her. Even now, as he closed his long, bruising letter, he wondered whether he had let her see too much: ‘I suppose I oughtn’t to post this. I think I shall. I’ll write better … does one still say “with love”?’

  On Saturday 27 January he wrote to James Strachey in quite another tone; but this letter too contained a revealing insight into his desperate mental condition: ‘The Ranee, mixing my Ovaltine, was alarmed to see me get out of bed a few minutes past ten last night & stand, hands folded and head bent, on my lips nothing “roby [sic], – buzz … vacuum …” they framed. She made no comment. It’s part (I’ve discovered) of the Treatment to pretend that nothing I do is out of the way. Daresay I often get out of bed in the worser moments.’

  He told James that he doubted whether he would ever return to ‘fair health’ again. James had hardly helped Brooke’s recovery by sending him a series of gossipy letters retailing the doings of the Apostles, including the election to their ranks of the young pretender to Noel Olivier’s hand, Ferenc Békássy. This elevation of his rival, made at the behest of Maynard Keynes, who was in love with Békássy, was one more wedge hammered into the widening rift between Brooke and his oldest friends. But, he told James, he no longer cared: ‘The gloom of Cannes is a trifle lightened for me by the reflection that “gott sei dank” [‘thank God’] I’ve done with all that.’ Brooke was washing his hands of his old self – he had yet to face up to the near impossible task of creating a new one.

  Cautioning James – in vain, for his loose-tongued friend shared his family’s love of malicious rumour-mongering – not to ‘spread it to your grinning fellow-countrymen’ – Brooke reported on the details of his painfully slow climb out of the abyss. During the fortnight he had been in Cannes, he said, he had regained seven pounds of the weight he had lost. But he was ‘sick of this place’ and his invalid existence. His overpowering desire was to cut loose from the soft tentacles of his mother, which seemed to be drawing him down into childlike dependence: ‘I’m going to try more violent methods. Kill or cure, for me …’ Ominously, there were also signs of his growing paranoia and a total rejection of the past that had made him: ‘I shall, with great pleasure give orders that England is to be wiped out, sunk, and deleted.’

  The hatred he expressed for his country was rather his sense of shame at the place that had witnessed his complete collapse, for which he refused to take any personal blame:

  Was I fairly beastly in Lulworth & in London? I’m very sorry. I really wasn’t responsible for my behaviour. I see now in a dim way that I have been infinitely ill for months and more than infinitely ill during this month. I got far worse after that Swanage journey … [a reference to the walk across the Purbeck peninsula that he had taken with James after Ka’s announcement of her love for Lamb] I didn’t know one could be like that for days and days without intermission – even Jews sleep. You were really well out of that grey hole. I was entirely unpleasant to everybody. The lucky presence of Cox (an admirable nurse) prevented me committing suicide in the drawing room, out of spleen …

  Here again is a worrying storm signal of Brooke’s worsening paranoia – his surfacing anti-Semitism and his revulsion from Ka. His slights sit oddly with the torrent of words of love that he was daily pouring out to her.

  No sooner had he sent off this jet of spleen to James, than he began to fret that his long letter to Ka had been a cry too far. Knowing her kindly, nurturing nature as he did, he started to worry that she might suddenly show up at Cannes, and expose his duplicity to the Ranee. That would never do. He started to write another letter to her in calmer, more matter-of-fact tones, reporting rosily on his daily doings. But the hysterical undertone of guilt continued: he had been a ‘devil of ingratitude’ to her and was ‘dirty, dirty, dirty’. However, he had cleansed his filthy self with a nice hot bath which had left him feeling ‘radiant’.

  I almost rushed to you. I looked at myself, drying, in the glass, and I thought my body was beautiful and strong, and that I was keeping it and making it splendid for you. And I know that if I rested for a night on your breasts, and then caught fire from you, my mind and heart too would be able to give you a million things that only I in the world knew of and could give. I was so happy. I was happy thinking of Munich …

  As he went from rampant narcissism to cringing abasement in almost the same sentence, it was clear that Brooke was still very far from stability or the glowing health he boasted of: ‘And then at other times I lie and ache to twist my thoughts on to Shakespeare, a poem, anything; and they always go back to the blackness, till I can’t bear it and from thinking of suicide then, think of it immediate, to cut the thing clear and set you free from a fool.’

  Ill as he was, he was still slyly determined to outwit his mother and get to Munich and Ka’s imagined salvation by hook or by crook: ‘Eh, I do want your presence, you know, to keep me fine and sane, just now. But tonight I know I shall get to Munich. I can see the Ranee thinks she’s going to keep a hand on me for a month or six weeks. But I give her ten days at the outside. I shall have to be beastly to her, I suppose.’

  He continued to fantasize about Ka’s suddenly discovered charms: ‘Oh my dear Ka, Ka with that particular hair and head and neck, and a certain walk, and a special way that clothes have of going down over the hip, and strong hands, and a hundred other things, Ka peering about and saying “Hoo!”, Ka whom I know so very well, and whom I’ve been so beastly to, and whom I love so …’ Imagining her ‘peering about’ in Munich, he gives a sketch of his own more prosaic life in Cannes – catching a glimpse of the Tory statesman Arthur Balfour and the novelist Arnold Bennett (‘England in a nutshell’) and taking tea with the Ranee – while all the time nerving himself up to break the news to his mother of his impending flight to Munich.

  Among the news from Ka that was unnerving him was a worrying chance encounter with a young woman he had met there the previous year. The girl – Joanna – claimed to have been in love with Brooke and to have kissed his cheeks: ‘Damn Joanna and my cheeks. I never even let her kiss them. Why am I old and dead and ugly, and why do they think me a lovely child.’ As ever he was put out at being taken for younger than he was, and annoyed at the effeminacy noticed by the elderly residents of the hotel: ‘old Mrs Woolaston … thought Alfred and I were twins aged eighteen, she confided in mother … after I’d tottered to bed. “He has a skin like a girl’s – He looks very like a girl … in his Face” put in Miss Barclay. God! God!’

  Like his beloved Keats, who had been given a nightcap sewn by Fanny Brawne to comfort him in his final, fatal exile in Rome, Brooke wore a loud yellow tie – a present from Ka – to remind him of his love. Naturally, it annoyed the Ranee: ‘She says it is “so conspicuous”’ – and naturally, Brooke concocted a lie to explain away the offending garment: ‘It is understood that … I bought it at Liberty’s on my way through.’

  Suddenly his relative equanimity was shattered by a telegram from Ka in which, thoroughly alarmed by his self-portrait as a suicidal madman, she announced her intention to descend on Cannes to succour and console him. Thoroughly alarmed and panicked himself – how on earth was he to explain this to an increasingly suspicious Ranee? – he pretended the wire was from James, and sneaked away from his half-tearful mother to send his own telegram in a bid to put Ka off: ‘For heaven’s sake don’t come on account of me or my letters[.] Was mad and wicked[.] Other letters on way[.] Am much better …’ Suddenly the big, bold lover had become the quivering schoolchild, scared to death of his mother’s anger.

  He followed this with an abject letter of self-abnegation: ‘Just back to find your telegram. And now from telegraphing; I must send this tonight, in case you don’t come: as I hope
. For I diagnose that my beastly letter upset you. I’m worthy of treading to death in dung. I was ill, and am a bit; but I’m much better. I will get to Munich in a week …’ The next three days passed in an agony of suspense for Brooke, who, with no further word from Ka to indicate whether she had got his wire in time to forestall her mission of mercy, was dreading her appearance at any moment at his hotel: ‘If you suddenly appear I know I shall cry,’ he wrote pathetically.

  But the knowledge that the woman he meant to make his mistress might suddenly materialize in front of his mother gave him the courage to face the Ranee. He told her he had gone out to consult the travel agents Thomas Cook about the times of trains to Munich. The Ranee was outraged, insisting that Brooke was not well enough to travel and should stay on with her in Cannes for at least a month: ‘I felt the old helplessness before authority creeping over me: and wished you had emerged from the morning train. But I aped cold astonishment and colder reserve. And she began to crumble. I conveyed that I hated Cannes, her, the sea; that I should rest superbly in Munich, so quiet and healthy. So battle’s joined. She wants to wire Dr Craig for a forbiddance. By God, I will come.’

  As he locked horns in a battle of wills with his mother, Brooke was reinforced at last by a telegram from Ka saying that she was still in Munich but was ready to meet him at some halfway point between there and Cannes – Milan, perhaps, or Verona. Galvanized into action, he decided upon Verona, and booked the train for the following Tuesday, 30 January – exactly one month after Lulworth. He placed total reliance and trust in Ka – she would, she must, heal him: ‘Ka! It will be good. I shall be infinitely gay and well. I look Italian. You look merely German. Oh, but to see you again and touch you! We shall be splendid … You’re going to make me so amazingly strong and fine. And I’m going to give you undreamt things … You’re to be the Ranee and Dr Craig and everything else!’ Ka would have been hardly human if she had not been daunted by the burden of responsibility that Brooke was hanging on her sturdy shoulders in place of her favoured rucksacks. But her yearning to be needed came to the fore again. She – mother, lover and psychiatrist too – would not fail him in his hour of need.

  The final days in Cannes passed in a whirl of letters and telegrams finalizing the details of their meeting, and pacifying the anxious Ranee. Brooke’s penultimate letter to Ka was filled with erotic longing – the spur which must surely have put the touch of steel in him as he doggedly negotiated his departure with his mother: ‘I think of your gently strong soft body – my thoughts are entirely indecent and entirely clean. I see you with your head thrown back. I put my bare arm round your bare back; and my arm’s infinitely strong and the curves of your back are the loveliest things in the world.’

  Desperately, the Ranee used the excuse that he was not putting on weight with the expected rapidity to demand that he delay his departure. But it was too late. His ticket was purchased. They were on their way. His last letter to Ka read:

  Damn! Weight only ½lb up, in a week. Ranee sicker than ever. Your telegram has just come. (Ranee intercepted, but didn’t read, of course. She’s sure something’s up.) All’s right, then. You’ll get there at 10, wander till 11.55 and then meet me. Verona. Tuesday.

  From noon on Tuesday, you’re in command.

  Auf wiedersehen!

  … Till Tuesday. R I kiss you.

  As Brooke’s train chugged east along the Riviera Corniche, and then cut north-east through the Alpine tunnels and into the valleys of northern Italy, he must have willed its wheels onward. He was going towards his girl, the woman he had convinced himself would solve all his problems. Like a bridegroom to a wedding, a warrior to the battle, a patient to the operating table that would cut out his pain, he looked forward to this meeting more than to any other of his life.

  As he leaned out of the train window, straining for his first glimpse of her face, his tousled locks thrashing in the slipstream, small eyes screwed up against the tears, he was not to know that the meeting he rushed towards would be as ill-fated as that of Shakespeare’s star-crossed young lovers in the same city. Just before noon his train pulled into Verona. She was there.

  17

  * * *

  Herr und Frau Brooke

  * * *

  As the lovers embraced on the station platform it quickly became apparent to Ka that the Ranee had been right – Brooke was in no condition to be alone, to travel or to undertake many of the marvels of love he had promised her. For the present, her role would be the accustomed task of nursemaid to a sickly child. Brooke was no Romeo, and she no Juliet. Almost immediately she took him to a chemist’s shop to purchase various pills, placebos and tonics to steady his jangling nerves. Instead of a planned romantic trip to Venice, she took her charge, after a brief and dutiful glance at Verona’s historic sites, straight back to Munich.

  As they arrived in the city, preparations were being made for the Faschings-Fest carnival – the scene of Brooke’s inconclusive erotic encounter with Elisabeth exactly one year before. These memories must have added to the strain on him as he contemplated the woman at his side, so long desired, who, unlike Elisabeth, seemed fully prepared to go to bed with him in all seriousness. The question was: was he up to it?

  With a practicality worthy of the Ranee, Ka installed Brooke in the lodgings he had occupied the year before, and primed his landlady with the task of continuing to fatten the calf-child with his diet of Ovaltine, sweet beer and bromides. Diplomatically, she herself was staying with friends nearby. Brooke’s continued weakness and the frenetic atmosphere of Fasching were convenient excuses to hold off the consummation that he had affected to want for so long.

  After a week of concerts, masked balls and gallery-going but, as yet, no lovemaking, they made a short trip to Salzburg, just over the Austrian border, on 9 February. Once again, his courage failed him: he took to his bed all right, but with a fever rather than Ka. She sat up with him all night, mopping his brow, and they talked, endlessly circling around their problems.

  They returned to Munich, and on 13 February an apparently restored Brooke wrote to James, apologizing for being out of touch and mysterious about his movements: ‘Secretiveness, I think, grows to a monomania, as the bonds of the body are breaking, and all comes in sight. Poor Dad, towards the end, used to hide little pieces of string. I took the most elaborate pains to prevent anyone knowing where I was … I knew Cox would be here, prattling eight letters a day to England.’ Significantly, given his sexual travails, he compared himself to ‘a chap at Rugger, kicked in the balls, doubling up and vanishing’. Again referring to Ka sneeringly by her surname, he none the less admitted his utter dependence on her: ‘I lean with all my weight on Cox. It is infinitely wicked, but I’m beyond morals. I really rather believe she’s pulled me through. She is stupid enough for me to be lazy and silly enough for me to impose on her.’

  It seems that a bare fortnight in Ka’s company has been enough to turn the fire-breathing lover into a cross between a sneering schoolboy and a milk-guzzling infant. This letter, the first of many in a similar vein disparaging Ka to his friends, sends a chill shudder down the spine. Brooke was kidding himself, as well, that he was ‘beyond morals’: he was no amoral seducer à la Lamb – rather more of a randy boy afflicted by a fatal straitjacket of moral repression. It was a combination fatal to his own happiness, and to those who tangled with him. But, in his huffing, puffing way, he boasted to James that he would do great things between Ka’s sheets – or rather, between her mountainous Bavarian bolsters: ‘I’ll tell you … authentically and as a not too strict confidence, there’s very little doubt now, but that it’s going to stand. It may be rather a grubby affair in some ways, but it’ll possess some surprising features. And if it does come down, by God, you’ll hear of it. I’ll give you something to chat about. Damn it, one lives only once, one may as well flaunt.’

  As yet though, Brooke had very little to ‘flaunt’ about. He closed his letter with a smutty couplet about a woman masturbating with a ca
ndle – but his sniggering ignored the fact that he had yet to give Ka the chance to do anything more satisfying. Sexual frustration was only one reason for the increasing tension she was under: ministering to a demanding, infantile invalid was bad enough, but his fragile state had also prevented her from telling him the truth about her continuing love for Henry Lamb; an admission which, in her honest way, she was determined to make at the right moment.

  The moment was further delayed by the untoward arrival in Munich of Hugh Popham, the dull fellow who was Bryn’s most persistent suitor. He insisted on dogging their footsteps, and, since their affair was still a secret from most of their friends, they had to endure this. In any case it may have been a relief to Brooke – yet another excuse to put off the moment of truth.

  But for Ka at least, her moment came, as Neo-Pagan moments often seemed to do, on the platform of a railway station. It was in Munich as, having at last shaken off the insensitive presence of Hugh, they awaited a train to the lakeside resort of Starnberg on Saturday 17 February. As gently as she could, she told him not only that she still loved Lamb, but that they had spent a weekend in each other’s company at a house party given by Lady Ottoline Morrell at her country home at Garsington. To add insult to injury, she added that Lytton Strachey had also been among the guests.

  Brooke was stupefied with horror. He worked out that his telepathic feeling that ‘something was happening’ to Ka on the night of Friday 12 January had been precisely the time that she had begun her house party with Lamb on her last weekend in England. Once again, all the horrors of Lulworth came flooding back with redoubled force. The emotions he had felt then, and had only begun to slough off after a month of the most bitter suffering, returned in their naked fury: shock, disbelief, betrayal, jealousy, fear, rage, dismay – one by one, like falling clubs, they crashed into him with dull thumps. So Ka did not love him after all; she admitted that she had only come to Munich on a quasi-medical mission of mercy to succour a friend – not a lover – in his hour of direst need. Instantly, the slow and halting progress that he had made in Cannes, the crawling journey from darkness to light, was swept away and he was plunged back into the pit.