by Nigel Jones
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts …
For all its farcical intent, the list demonstrates Brooke’s obsession with ‘dirt’, women, the ageing process and ugliness. It is not clear, however, whether he counts himself among those with ‘Splendid Hearts’ or ‘twisted’ ones. The whole long poem shifts uneasily between its comic intentions and its more serious undertones. Just as his bathers gild their feet with flowers, so Brooke gilds the lily of his exaggerated lauding of Grantchester’s virtues. We are not meant to take him seriously, surely, yet the suspicion lingers that this is just what we are supposed to do:
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
*
This demi-paradise is, naturally, inhabited by the purest of the pure:
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night.
And naturally they live by Brookian regulations:
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) …
– as the poet had so miserably failed to do the previous month in the New Forest. No matter, the touchstones of his heart, the well-springs nourishing this ‘sentimental exile’ – as he first entitled the poem – stand and stir him still:
Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Was ever nostalgia for an unreal elysium so achingly invoked? As the poem builds to its climax, using the rhyme scheme of octosyllables in which he had made himself an expert, Brooke deploys all his skill, coupled with his genuine emotions of loss and guilt, to produce lines that transcend light verse and become, despite their mawkish content, true poetry:
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
The rolling rhetorical questions plunge on, as Brooke reaches again for the sacramental elements which will either wash away his sins or drown him:
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? … oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, the title Brooke eventually plumped for, is a prime example of what Orwell called ‘good bad verse’. Ludicrously antiquated to a modern ear, and deliberately sentimental even as it was written, it nevertheless demonstrates a formidable skill in handling its material and tumbling line on memorable line. Not for nothing is it, despite its length, Brooke’s most anthologized poem, apart from ‘The Soldier’. No matter that the Grantchester elms are down now, victims of the humble bark beetle. No matter that the honey sold there today is produced far away in little processed plastic packets. Brooke has immortalized a place in a time that never was – a never-never land worthy of Peter Pan, where the clock does always stand at ten to three; a land of milk and honey, a refuge – and a salvation; but one he half-knew was already lost to him.
He made two fair copies of the poem, from the rough drafts scribbled in an accounts book given him by Maynard Keynes. One copy was posted to Bryn Olivier, tacked on, as if an afterthought, to a lengthy letter. He described it dismissively it as ‘a silly quickly written thing – but it may amuse’. His true opinion of the poem is probably contained in the cable he sent to Basileon ahead of the poem itself: ‘A Masterpiece on its way,’ he told the editor of King’s college magazine. In its own limited way, it was.
The Brooke Ka found waiting for her in Berlin must have been – for all his earnest importuning by post – a severe disappointment. She should have been warned by a letter in which he meditated sombrely on the essential loneliness of the individual, and the impossibility of a real marriage of minds: ‘everybody’s a pretty lonely figure, drifting in the gloom …’ he said, citing his distinguished fellow-Rugbeian Matthew Arnold’s famous lines about the God who bid the ‘unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’ to flow for ever between the shores of two longing lovers. The same sentiment informed a more-or-less simultaneous letter to Bryn: ‘We’re all, you know, we human beings – tied fast to posts, each to a separate one, dotted about apart from one another, in the middle of the deserts. The vultures sit round in a large circle, waiting for the deaths. And occasionally we flap a hand or wriggle a nose to show we aren’t dead. So I flap you so distant and grey a hand, Bryn, to show you I’m not dead.’
The ‘deadness’ he complained of was compounded in part by the collapse of his feelings for Ka, and in part by a smart rebuff Bryn had mailed him in a belated response to his drunken, maudlin hints that they might become a couple, contained in the letter he wrote from the National Liberal Club on the eve of his departure to Germany. It was far from a formal proposal of marriage, though that is how Brooke chose to represent it to James:
I’ve just had a – ‘a’ – ‘the’ were better – letter from Bryn. Oh, my God. Frightfully nice of her, of course. And an absolute smack in the face for me. Refused – oh, Lord. There are some people (including all women) one should never propose to by letter. Remember that.
‘Dear Rupert’ it begins. So that’s something. ‘R’ is dropped. The words are well-formed. The letters go stiffly up and down. Not much give and take about her, a graphologist would murmur. The spelling is inaccurate enough to be completely vulgar, but not sufficient to be – like Noel’s – insane and rather fascinating. The whole page gives the impression of a thoroughly superior housemaid.
Brooke, when he wished, could be as bitchy as an ageing and on-the-skids opera diva overtaken by a younger rival. This state seized him most frequently in relation to those he professed to love the most.
He extends the attack from Bryn to all women: ‘Did I ever tell you women were vague & sloppy? Not at all, James, not at all. Clear as Euclid. She sizes up and dismisses my letter to her. The emotional one. All things considered, disingenuous was, I thought, the word for it. So that’s at an end.’ Brooke, unable to be alone in agony, does not neglect to drag James down with him in the wreckage: ‘It goes on to be pretty fairly beastly about you. But I mayn’t say.’ He caps this spit of venom with a breathtaking piece of hypocrisy: ‘At Ka she [Bryn] gets in a nice hit or two. Females are at their best in malice.’
All in all, Bryn’s breezy insensitivity to Brooke’s suffering had driven him down to the depths of distraction. If he had hoped to leap like a crazed circus acrobat from the back of one galloping horse to another, just as he had abandoned Noel for Ka, Bryn had surely let him down. He ended the lette
r with a shriek of despair: ‘Oh James: I think that Life’s just too beastly to bear. Too utterly foul. But it’s the irresistible, false fondness of the whole that pins me shrieking down.’
In a postscript, he sternly urges James: ‘I’m almost completely hard now. Do be hard, James. Hard. Hard. Hard. Damn you. Hard as stone …’ But in his own reply to Bryn, Brooke hid this new iron hand in a velvet glove of silky hypocrisy: ‘I was pleased to get your last letter. Oh, and so nicely a long one … Oh you nice Bryn! I was immensely cheered …’ After spinning this sugary candy-floss of untruth, he can’t help getting to grips with his gripes:
I’d planned, you know, such an outburst on you – against you … It’d just have shown you what a damned silly tight Weltanschauung you’ve got. Oh Lord, Lord, I did want to shake you! Oh my Bryn, meine Brunn, Brinna mia, mea Brynna, what do you think the world’s made of? What do you think happens? What do you think counts? …
By the time this wheedling plaint was penned, Brooke’s awkward ‘second honeymoon’ with Ka had come and gone. On her arrival he lost no time in whisking her off to the quiet village of Neustrelitz on 20 May; restless after a couple of days they moved on to the lakeside resort of Feldberg, and from there the unhappy pair journeyed to Müritz on the north Baltic coast near Rostock. Lacking much evidence apart from Brooke’s spiteful little barbs in letters to his most loyal friends like Dudley and Jacques, we can only speculate as to what passed between him and Ka during this troubled fortnight. The atmosphere must have been artificial, owing to a pact as well as the troubles of the recent past. The strain contributed to one of Brooke’s regular feverish collapses – and Ka, too, fell unaccustomedly ill.
The exact nature of this sickness is mysterious, but it is possible that it was a miscarriage. Almost certainly pregnant as a result of their first lovemaking at the end of February, she was no longer in that state by the end of May. What happened? An abortion is very unlikely, which means that Ka miscarried either in England while Brooke was in Berlin without her, or soon after joining him – perhaps as a result of more clumsy sexual fumblings between the inexperienced lovers. In any event the general misery of their trip in the mournful backwoods of Pomerania was mercifully cut short by a message from Ka’s sister Margaret, summoning her home to comfort her after a broken engagement. True to form, Ka obediently returned. Brooke was glad to see her go.
Before parting, the couple agreed to stay apart for several weeks and separately consider their future. Brooke did not need the time – his mind was made up. Tired of Ka, and spurned by Bryn, predictably he turned his thoughts, like a dog returning to its vomit, to Noel. ‘The crux is that that absolutely dead feeling I had when I was in Berlin before she [Ka] came, hasn’t vanished,’ Dudley learned in a letter that can hardly have enhanced the enjoyment of his Venetian honeymoon.
I was afraid, beforehand, I might – when I saw her – be dragged down into that helpless tortured sort of love for her I had all the first part of the year, and had just crept out of. The opposite. I remain dead. I care practically nothing for any person in the world. I’ve anxiety, and a sort of affection, for Ka – But I don’t really care. I’ve no feeling for anybody at all – except the uneasy ghosts of the immense reverence and rather steadfast love for Noel, and a knowledge that Noel is the finest thing I’ve ever seen in the world, and Ka – isn’t. But that doesn’t come to much.
Throughout his time in Berlin Brooke was continuing to correspond with both Bryn and Noel – playing a triple instead of his more usual double game. He was consumed with both guilt at having so woefully neglected the woman he now once again regarded as his true love during his Ka crisis; and a nagging certainty that his conduct had finally and irrevocably destroyed his credibility, and with it his last chance of regaining her love and respect. In an otherwise understandably incoherent and inordinately long letter to Noel on 2 May, he struggles to explain himself and make plain his hopeless complexity: ‘One wants one thing now & one later, and most of the time one doesn’t know what one wants.’
Even while awaiting Ka, he counsels Noel not to feel any sympathy for her about-to-be-rejected rival: ‘it’s fatal to be in the power of that sort of woman. I know this sounds beastly to you, you little fool … You don’t understand. It doesn’t matter about hurting Ka. You’re not to talk about it … she’s not fit for you to talk about … Ka’s saved, it doesn’t matter if she’s suffered in the process. She’s deserved a lot more than she had suffered and will suffer. If she’s lost, the more broken up & spoilt she is, the better.’
Brooke’s sheer stupidity and nastiness are shocking. This passage, and many like it, demonstrate, not only his hopeless, crack-brained confusion but also his lamentable lack of insight into female psychology. If he really thought that this was the best way for him to crawl back into Noel’s good books – by simultaneously putting her on a pedestal and screeching at her for her lack of understanding, and by denigrating her cruelly spurned supplanter in his affections – he was not just a nasty piece of work but an utter fool. The charitable explanation is that he was still, simply – mad.
As if to confirm this diagnosis of his sickness he added: ‘Ka’s done the most evil things in the world. She has – or she’s on the way to have – dirtied good & honour & all high things, & betrayed & degraded love. Think of the filthiest image you can for the fouling of the best things by the worst. Ka is doing that. For the sake of all those things, & for the sake of the Ka I used to know, & for the sake of the good love there was between us, I’d not care if I saw Ka dying of some torture I could inflict on her, slowly.’ Having delivered this evil and insane rant, Brooke admits his sentiments are not noble and are unworthy of a fine or decent person: ‘But I’m just a scuffling dirtied hurt maimed human soul …’
Admitting that he might ‘sound silly’, he portrays himself as ‘the champion of good’ and ‘the instrument of punishing Evil’. As such, by some perverted twist of logic, he was a suitable partner for the degraded Ka:
I’ve been in love with Ka: & I am in love with her in a way, & I shall be, I suppose; & I know her better than anyone does. She’s better than you, than any of you, in many ways. She’s, in most ways, unusually brave. You’re all rather cowardly. She has feelings. None of you has any. But, I tell you, she’s infinitely below any of you: and you, Noel, she’s not fit – it’s sacrilege & shame if she ever touches you. That’s truth, you little fool. I may marry her. I may kill myself for love of her – but I know that’s true.
Whether this farrago of hysterical and contradictory nonsense meant anything to its recipient beyond the clear fact that Brooke was beyond help and reason is unclear, but one factor that was goading him to the point of madness was Noel’s refusal to descend to his histrionic level. The cool, almost cold-hearted, collectedness that she shared with Bryn here stood her in very good stead. Brooke would far rather have her hate him or love him than remain as she was: ‘Oh, if you loved me, I couldn’t write to you or be anything but dead to you. And if you cared not at all, I couldn’t bother you. But as it is you’re rather luckily between – interested in me, aren’t you. “fond” & a little solicitous, as one might be for a favourite horse or dog. Damn you.’
But this long and frankly tedious tirade of abuse, self-pity and arrant contradictory twaddle was merely Brooke’s peculiar way of wooing the lost Noel. He was preparing a peroration in which, he assured her, unless they got together the central meaning of his life would be missed. Times, dates, places and means are left typically vague – but they must unite: ‘Noel, Noel, Noel; Noel with whom I’ve been through – all that these years have held – & to whom I can say anything; this is what, I sometimes know, you are to me. Soberly, greyly, clearly, as the dead see. I see that you’re – that you & I is – the greatest potentiality for me – & for you, I think. Life together, somewhere & how, & for some period, the whole thing: being one. You, Noel & I.’
Anticipating her reaction, Brooke added an afterthought: ‘It’s a queer thing to be wri
ting this, when I’m just going to live with – perhaps marry – someone else. It’s unfair & insolent to you & unfair & treacherous to Ka (if anything can be unfair & treacherous to Ka.) But it’s not either, really. Anyhow, it’s true.’ He finished his outpouring with a weak apology for being ‘a nuisance’. ‘Adroitly managed,’ he explained, ‘I’m capable of being quite sociable & friendly.’ It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that not many people would be interested in ‘managing’ him – adroitly or otherwise.
The grey Berlin dawn was breaking through his windows as he finished his dark night thoughts. What he needed, he told Noel brokenly, was marriage or some equivalent: ‘Care for me, care for me, Noel,’ he pleaded pathetically as his sleep-starved hands spilt ink across his pillow, the smell of which reminded him of ants in camps gone by: ‘I’m not fit to write.’
Noel replied with a brisk, no-nonsense letter recommending that Brooke emulate a lobster she had just seen being tranquillized in a medical lecture: ‘They stood him on his head on a piece of glass over water and rubbed him up & down all along his back until he became languorous & finally slept, letting his pincers droop & his long red feelers lie flat. It looked dilicious [sic] for him. Get some one to treat you in the same way.’ This piece of advice can hardly have failed to enrage Brooke still further. But it was not to be the last of his humiliations at the hands of the Olivier sisters. His ire was further stirred by Noel’s casual news that she was seeing his closest friends, who were ‘very pleasant to me’. She was posing for Gwen and Jacques, being courted by James in his new-found heterosexual guise and about to visit Virginia at her new house on the Sussex Downs. Brooke must have felt his solitary state still more keenly as he skulked in Berlin and its environs with the burden of Ka lying heavy on his hands.