by Nigel Jones
‘Your letter was incredibly nice to get … but I’m going. It’s the will of God.’ He explained soothingly that he would be back by the summer, and was going abroad to get ‘disentangled’ from his problems and complete his cure. ‘I see, you see, that I must go abroad for these things. There’s no point, after all, in my being in England. I’m rather unpleasant when I’m a whole person, and when I know what person I am, I’ll come back.’ Flirtatiously he implied that Bryn would be one of the magnets that pulled him back: ‘I do like it so – that you do mind. It makes me happy. But you mustn’t. I promise you I think everything’s quite right …’ He ended: ‘I’m glad you’re so beautiful.’
Then, after a ‘shy and hurried’ leave-taking with Ka, he was off, taking the night ferry from Harwich to Flushing (Vlissingen) on Saturday 20 April.
18
* * *
Three Women, a Play and a Poem
* * *
The Brooke who travelled to Berlin was still a deeply troubled, sick man. As his ship heaved across to Flushing, he felt he was falling, rudderless, into a vertiginous spinning void. A strange, drifting, almost insane letter to James Strachey, who had loyally financed the trip and seen him off at the station, described the crossing:
One hour, one gaunt shrieking hour I dozed. You have talked to the Major, abused yourself, & slept, since Victoria. In a few hours you will have a late, bitter breakfast. And I, I have only that one intolerable ghost of an hour between me and yesterday. I hover eternally on the doubtful borderland between today and yesterday: a grayhaired embryo; a creature of no world; horrible. A bell clanged us out of delirium at 3.30. We put on our life belts – I snatched the Photos of my Letter of Credit – & went on deck. It was merely Flushing.
Writing on the train carrying him across the flat north German plains, Brooke keeps a tenuous toehold on reality with a description of a fellow-traveller:
Mr D’Aucastre nods opposite. He has followed me like a dog, ever since he got over the shock of those first few minutes when, entering late & finding me in bed, my hair only visible, he thought he’d got into the lady’s quarters. Charming, sterling fellow. He brushed my forehead lightly with his dreamy brown mustache once, & twice, & then skipped aloft to the upper birth [sic]. Uninterestedly and with a brown bag he spent those throbbing dreadful hours in abusing himself. Lucky fellow!
Sexual frustration, insomnia and hopeless emotional confusion combined to form a toxic brew robbing Brooke of any semblance of stability. But, now and then, perceptive rays of insight and grotesque originality leap off the page: ‘Mr D’Aucastre (my last foot-hold over the abyss) sleeps opposite. He sleeps, always, with one eye, the right, not quite shut. A thin white line gleams, twixt lid and lid. The pupil is tucked away – he’s genuinely asleep. It’s a trifle like the moon we saw last night. What does it mean?’
An obsession with rancid sex – masturbation is always described as ‘abuse’ – has now congealed into open misogyny. Describing two women sharing his carriage, Brooke fantasized about their private thoughts:
They bend their bodies and souls in vague meek inferiority. ‘If it came to the Straight Thing between us’ they continually think, ‘you’d put us down, drive supremely home, & we’d open our legs, submit, accept mastery, whimper & smirk.’ Oh! oh! I am touched almost to tears for them: because they never quite know what’s up. Women aren’t quite animals, alas! They have twilight, shadowy souls, like a cat behind a hedge … but how dreadful that the whole world’s a-cunt for one. The clouds are but petticoats swirled so alluringly high … For THEM, do you think, are all the trees excitingly waving (trousers)?
Brooke signs off this strange, meditative missive with a gleam of self-recognition: ‘Unter vier Augen [‘under four eyes’ – i.e. ‘between you and me’] my dear chap. I’m more than a little tired.’
Reaching Berlin, Brooke installed himself as the guest of Dudley Ward, staying at a pension, but spending much of his time at Dudley’s apartment, in Kantstrasse 14, in the central district of Charlottenburg. It was a crowded household, containing Dudley, who was working as Berlin correspondent of The Economist; his flatmate Alfred Reynolds, a Daily Mail correspondent and Cambridge writer; and the mothers of both Dudley and his fiancée Annemarie von der Planitz. The flat was in the final throes of preparations for Dudley’s imminent marriage to Annemarie, and the fussing of the two mothers irked Brooke considerably – as he explained to Bryn Olivier, they were a little too like the Ranee for comfort:
Her mother was being a nuisance – crying for her, fussing her etc. The usual mutter-liebe [mother-love] worry. (Mother lust, I once said, and was hit in the mouth.) But she’s not as bad as Mrs Ward, who’s been here a month, and is going to see the thing through. She is a silly little woman who can’t speak a word of German and is absolutely dependent on Dudley all day. She objects to German food in the restaurants, and can’t think what she wants. She drags him round with her buying a hat, when he ought to be writing journalism. Reynolds … and I occasionally take her off his hands. From time to time she says ‘I’m afraid I’m taking up a great deal of your time, Dudley.’
Although expecting Ka’s arrival at any moment, Brooke kept up a postal flirtation with both Bryn and Noel Olivier. The plan was for him to find a house outside Berlin which he and Ka could rent as ‘Herr and Frau Brooke’ in an attempt at a second honeymoon after the fiasco of their previous German jaunt in February. He was, however, careful to gloss over this in his correspondence with Bryn, in which he is cursorily dismissive of Frau Brooke: ‘Ka appears in Berlin, I gather, in a few days,’ Bryn was told on 8 May. ‘I shall wait and see her for a bit, to cheer myself up. Then I shall wander off probably, for a time …’ The deliberate vagueness belies the fact that he was imploring Ka to make haste to join him:
I am here because I love Ka and she is coming to Germany and we are going to live in a house together … You, you’ll come, I know, and bring colour and things with you … You do want me a lot: and I you. And we know a great deal … I’m just passing through Potsdam. I’ve a fancy you may be, just now, in Grantchester. I envy you, frightfully. That river and the chestnuts – come back to me a lot. Tea on the lawn …
As was ever the case when he was abroad, Brooke had begun to wax nostalgic for England, and in particular, that corner of the country he had personally colonized: Grantchester. He already feared that the summer idyll he had briefly enjoyed in that blessed plot was irrevocably past – never again would he play host to flocks of visitors come to see him perform and dive naked into the embracing waters of Byron’s Pool. The complications of real life, the deadening weight of adult responsibility, the entangling weeds of sexual confusion, were dragging him down.
Escaping from the frenetic preparations for Dudley’s impending nuptials, Brooke, when not searching the surrounding countryside for a suitable love nest for himself and Ka, spent most of his time in the Café des Westens, a haunt of advanced intellectuals, where he tried half-heartedly to go native by smoking strong German cigars. It was here that his eddying nostalgia curdled with his coffee and gradually began to take on literary form in the shape of one of his most successful and best-known poems. He described the café’s ambience to Bryn:
a café thronged by all the intellectuals, advanced, temperamentvoll [temperamental] picturesque, geniuses, and so forth. Long-haired and extraordinarily clothed people sit round little tables and shout – the words ‘temperament’, ‘Kunst’, ‘Leben’ [art, life], float out to you. Dudley … breaks off to call attention to the figures – a well-known Socialist leader; a woman with very flaxen hair and quite black eyebrows, who might be – anything; a very nice Russian professor; a Natur-Mensch [child of Nature] in a sack and sandals; a well-known model … A young shapeless dumpy foolish woman in a black satin sack got up to go. She was holding one scarlet tulip in her hand, and walked along smelling it. ‘People here do the right things,’ commented Dudley … ‘but somehow it’s the wrong people who do them.’
Some o
f these images – ‘temperamentvoll’ Germans, tulips – wound their way into the nostalgic long poem about Grantchester that he now began, after half a year’s abstinence from poetry, to compose in the café.
Nostalgia for an even more distant section of his life than Grantchester coloured a letter to James. Recalling their preparatory-school days at Rugby, he speculated that their form master, Mr Sandford, had worked himself up, while ostensibly angry over their Latin grammar, into a state of ‘perfect orgasm and ejaculation of his rage. And, no doubt, there was a booming & swelling & throbbing below his flies, too. But for that, I never had the knowledge to look, in those days.’ The sexuality of prep-school masters was also the subject of a poem very different from ‘Grantchester’, which survives in a letter to James but was torn out of his notebook by his censorious literary executors. Punningly called ‘Ballade’, it is a parody of the sort of ‘facts of life’ lecture delivered by embarrassed and red-faced paedophile prep-school masters beginning: ‘Boys! mine is not a pleasant task today …’ and ending:
Prince, there is one fault you can hardly cure. Which, I regret … which makes me … to be terse! —
(You often must have noticed, I am sure!) Between your legs there hangs a Bag, or Purse.
In mid-May Dudley departed for his marriage in Munich, and almost simultaneously Ka at last arrived in Berlin. Her mood was very different from the way it had been during their previous German encounter. The scales had fallen from her eyes and she was now disillusioned with Henry Lamb, who, she had at last grasped, was more interested in her as an occasional dalliance and provider of funds in hard times, than in making her his official mistress in place of the more brilliant and influential Lady Ottoline Morrell. She was prepared to listen to Brooke’s protestations of love and become both his fiancée and sexual partner.
Tragically for Ka, however, Brooke’s mood had also changed. Now that he had gained complete sexual possession of her, and apparently seen off the threat of Lamb, his interest in her not only waned but changed into a sort of boredom that rapidly became disgust. The apparently bottomless well of the passion he had been fitfully proclaiming for the past four months had irrevocably run dry. The ‘second honeymoon’ proved even more of a disaster than the first.
While awaiting Ka’s arrival, Brooke had dutifully attended the theatre to see plays by Shaw and Ibsen, and scribbled letters. His main occupation, however, was finishing the long poem that was destined to set in stone his reputation as a hymner of a mythical English pastoral paradise; and starting to write a short play – his first – which, in contrast to the poem, made no impact at all. Today it is regarded as little more than an historic curio, interesting mainly because it is Brooke’s sole attempt to practise the dramatic arts that he had put so much labour into studying academically. The play, which he entitled Lithuania, had its origins, according to Brooke, in a story that Dudley Ward had heard in Berlin and filed as a stringer in the English press. Brooke outlined the plot to Bryn:
When I was in England I saw a very good story in the paper, and cut it out to file it … When I came out here, I found it was Dudley who had sent it to England – out of a German paper. I got more details: and now I’m trying to write it as a play. The son of some poor Lettland peasants ran away. After twenty years in America, he returned, very rich. He thought he would play a joke on his parents and sister – the household. He went to the lonely village they lived in, and, having confided in the innkeeper, went to his home and pretended to be a rich stranger who’d lost his way and needed a night’s lodging. They gave it to him. After he had gone to bed, they decided to murder him for his money. The father tried to go in and do it, but his courage gave; so he went down to the inn and drank himself into a fit state of mind. There, the innkeeper let out the joke. The father tore back the mile to his house: and found that the two women, who were strong, hadn’t been able to bear the strain of waiting, and had just killed the man with a hammer. The mother went mad: the other two to Siberia. Bright little story.
This is the exact sequence of events that Brooke set down, unaltered, in terse dialogue. It is a slight piece, which he never managed to get put on in his lifetime, but which was produced at Chicago’s Little Theater some six months after his death. It was a resounding flop. None the less, it does not quite deserve the oblivion to which even Brooke’s slavishly sympathetic official biographer, Christopher Hassall, consigns it. Another Brooke biographer, the playwright Michael Hastings, praises its ‘nicely cadenced sparse dialogue’ and Brooke’s ‘good ear’ and ‘natural flair for voices from a stage’. Lithuania is also interesting for its insight into its author’s psychology – given his bitterly misogynistic mood at the time, it comes as no surprise that his first and only play revolves around two murderous women and a helpless, sleeping male victim. Although Brooke claims the story was a real event reported in the press, it has the quality of myth – and indeed similar tales abound in European literature. It has elements of Macbeth and, of course, of that master of the grotesque, Webster.
But it was the other work he wrote in the Café des Westens that first made Brooke’s name as a poet with a wide audience, and which still stands as his monument as a master of light verse. Thinking longingly of his lost paradise at Grantchester, he began:
Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow …
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
His thoughts turn to the last summer of his uncomplicated happiness, when
… the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe …
He skilfully employs half-rhyme and alliteration – ‘green gloom’, ‘green and deep’, ‘Gild gloriously’ – to paint a picture of summer sweetness, and then grumpily contrasts it with his present situation, where he sits ‘sweating, sick and hot’ surrounded by beer-swilling ‘German Jews’, where a conformist society is held in check and even Nature obeys well-defined rules:
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done …
Writing from a Germany already committed to an arms race that would lead to war in two years’ time, Brooke thinks about an England that is languidly rousing itself to meet the threat. He ranges a corrupt, urban, stuffy Germany, nationalist yet cosmopolitan, against the purer rural values of an anarchic pastoral England where roses rather than guns are blooming. Asked to choose between the two, he knows where his heart lies: ‘In Grantchester, In Grantchester!’
Brooke makes a detour into whimsy, describing the village’s half-legendary past; a Grecian Arcadia with ‘A Faun a-peeping through the green’ and Naiads dancing to Pan’s half-heard pipe. Grantchester is not only a desirable slice of English real estate, it is a magic kingdom where the poet can:
lie
Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in the sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester …
Grantchester’s eminent former literary denizens are summoned up in a parade culminating, by implication, in Brooke himself. Chaucer hears:
his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by �
��
while ‘His ghostly Lordship [Byron] swims his pool’. The poets are followed by former residents of the Old Vicarage:
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean …
Once again the procession of ecclesiastics suggests Brooke’s ancestry, coming as he did, on both sides of his family, from countless generations of clerical Cotterills and episcopal Parker Brookes. Brooke’s nostalgia becomes unbearable:
*
God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of that district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
The list of ghostly Grantchesterians is succeeded by a roll-call of Cambridgeshire place-names, thrown in for comic effect in contrast to the sacred sward of his home hamlet: