Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Having disposed of James, Brooke left Rugby to visit a more reliably supportive old friend, Justin Brooke, with whom he stayed at his palatial family home, Leylands, at Wotton in the Surrey countryside. He told Bryn of his plan to go abroad – although the destination had shifted to Canada: ‘It’s thought that it’s the only way of saving my health & reason … I consort with the old now: & find a comparative peace and fitness in that.’ Brooke was still wheedling for Bryn to join him on a walking tour before the summer ended and she embarked on marriage. He was, he said, ‘available’ after burning his boats with James: ‘I have, in my course downhill, separated from him. I like him: but I disapprove of Stracheys & such like …’ Half-seriously he threatened to ‘shoot himself unless she agreed to his proposal. But then came a spurt of malice: ‘I suppose if you seem happy, I shall suddenly put a knife into you, out of sheer envy.’ He hinted that he was relying on her to ‘set me going again’. But this thin ray of hope, too, was not to be: a diplomatic bout of flu prevented Bryn taking up Brooke’s invitation. As she explained to another victim of Brooke’s wrath, James Strachey: ‘no good could have come of my seeing him. He’s evidently got to get through this – whatever “this” is, by himself. I can’t help being slightly muddled by his rhetoric even after all these years and don’t say the things I meant to when I’m with him, so what’s the good? One comes away feeling baffled and exhausted.’

  Bryn was not the only old friend to be running out of patience with Brooke’s tantrums, inconstancy and sheer purblind, self-obsessed stupidity. James and Noel, too, had separately thrown in the towel. The only alternative left open for Brooke was to turn to new friends with only a sketchy knowledge of his dark history and tribulations. So he reached for the next link in the chain on which he hung over the abyss.

  This was Rectory Farm, near Great Hampden in the Chilterns, the home of the poet John Masefield and his wife Constance. By this time Brooke had received another of Noel’s coldly bracing letters from Switzerland in which she called him ‘wrong and pathetic’. She added: ‘Ka’s probably right: that you ought to marry someone, she understands you. But if you cant, if there’s no one that you can or will marry now, dont become dotty, like Margery is supposed to be, you MUST be able to do something to keep alive; without that. Be fine again, & dont spoil whats left by fury.’ It was good advice, but wasted on Brooke in his present negation. At any rate it left him in no doubt that Noel had finally ruled herself out as his wife.

  From Great Hampden he told Ka, ruefully but truthfully, that Noel ‘rather dislikes me, and always will’. Revelling in his abject bitterness, he called the world ‘a horror’ and talked longingly of suicide: ‘the days bring a sort of pain and nothing else; and I think I’m a little mad. My dear, it’s nothing to do with you – I’m somehow rotten. And I guess it’ll be better if I don’t leave children – people like me – behind.’

  By 21 August he was back in Rugby. On the way he had stopped off in London to see the lying in state of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Brooke’s reaction to the hushed obsequies could have been a description of his own mood: ‘Hysteria – hysteria gone stale in the air!’ At Bilton Road he was plagued by ‘ghastly’ headaches, doubtless of psychosomatic origin, that prostrated him for 30 hours at a stretch.

  In this pitiful condition, perhaps the lowest point he had touched, he forced himself to make a final throw of the dice with Noel. She had left Switzerland and was staying with Gwen and Jacques at the Raverats’ grandiose château in Prunoy. From these loyal friends of Brooke, who would always believe that Ka was the right partner for him, Noel learned further wounding details of the full extent of the Ka–Brooke imbroglio. The news merely hardened her resolve to make a clean break with the hysterical and treacherous invalid. As she told her Bedales school friend Mary Newberry: ‘He thought I wouldn’t mind if he went off with Ka. But I did.’ Her antipathy would have been stronger still had she read a letter that Brooke wrote at this time to Jacques in which he dubbed her ‘one of these virgin-harlots of modern days; a dangerous brood …’. With unwitting irony he added: ‘Margery is the only decent one of the family …’. In fact Margery was rapidly descending into the madness that would eventually devour her brilliant mind.

  On 28 August Brooke wrote his make-or-break letter to Noel. He described himself as ‘in far dissolution’ and predicted: ‘It is very probable that I shall smash up altogether this autumn. I think a great deal & very eagerly of killing myself, if my present state goes on. I spend an intolerable time in every kind of agony, day after day. I can do no sort of work, reading or writing …’ But after this burst of self-pity he still had the energy to haul Noel over the coals of his misanthropic hatred: ‘You are enabled, by initial stupidity and by years of careful & laborious practice, to despise me. There is the extraordinary spectacle of a silly little worm like you thinking me “unbalanced” and “pathetic”.’

  Brooke knew better. In a sad display of Lear-like impotence, he defied the world: ‘I know, & a few more know, what I am & can be like. I know how superb my body is, & how great my bodily strength. I know that with my mind I could do anything. I know that I can be the greatest poet and writer in England. Many know it.’ But, he insisted, he still needed Noel beside him as he performed these marvels: ‘I could be anything in the world I wanted, with you. And nothing without you.’ He actually proposed accompanying Noel to a summer camp, but lest she be tempted, capped the invitation with an arrogant burst of murderous rage against James: ‘I find creatures like that, Stracheys & so forth, not only no good, but actually dangerous, spots of decay, menaces to all good. Even if one doesn’t mind rats qua rats, one has to stamp out carriers of typhoid …’ Absurdly, he then reflected: ‘This isn’t much of a love letter …’ Even more astonishingly, this tirade of abuse was leading up to a postal proposal of marriage – something Brooke had carefully avoided throughout the four years of their tangled relations. ‘You needn’t tell me I’ve “fallen from love to love”,’ he began:

  I know. I’m ashamed, & sorry. Oh God! I deserve reproaches. But I’ve paid enough, haven’t I? for being unfaithful to you. I was evil. I’m sorry. I’ll pay & pay. I’ve come back, child. I committed adultery. But what you threaten is divorce. It may not be. We’ve gone too far. We must marry. Not immediately, if you will. But we must. I’ll give you everything in the world – You mustn’t kill me. I must marry you.

  In its bravura ignoring of reality, this was a typical Brooke performance. But his desperate plea fell on stony ground. On the last day of August, Noel replied that it was not the Ka affair alone or even at all that had put her off. Her disillusionment with him pre-dated Lulworth: ‘It was last November that I decided and you found out I didn’t love you – the idea of marriage & lots of thought about it has just strengthened my knowledge.’ Yet, once this blunt and bare rejection was out, Noel bent over backwards to buttress Brooke and indulge his whims and fantasies. She would even camp with him, ‘if you like’, and she would not fall into the bad company he so paranoiacally feared: ‘James … won’t be allowed to do anyone any harm … In the winter I shall see only Bryn & Hugh & Margery & Ethel Pye & some old Bedalians, and Jacques & Gwen … but that will be all. You need have no fear of slug-like influences from the people Jacques calls “the Jews”. (They comprise the Bloomsbury household & the Stracheys, I believe.)’ Having mollified Brooke’s morbid fear of cultural and racial contamination – he and Jacques referred to Bloomsbury as ‘the Jews’ even though Leonard Woolf was the sole Jewish member of the coterie – Noel also tried to calm his sexual jealousy of her other suitors: ‘Especially I shal’nt see James, nor Adrian – that I have decided for my own good.’ She ended the letter practically on her knees: ‘Do write & say how I can be agreable [sic]. I’m humble. I’m penitent. I’m fond. & I want to be made use of, or kicked away for a cure, if I’m not wanted. Tell me what I can do.’ Altogether, it was more than Brooke deserved.

  At the end of August, looking back over th
e two months since his return from Berlin, Brooke surveyed a landscape of what he called ‘waste’. He had torched the boat that could have carried him back to a past and happier existence, and one by one he had chopped off the four main props of his sexual and emotional life – Ka, James, Bryn and Noel – with a sort of cold, nihilistic fury. Now, like a chair without legs, he sat uselessly on the ground. He was left with the choice of sinking even lower or building his life anew.

  20

  * * *

  New Friends, Now Strangers

  * * *

  It took some time for the fact of Noel’s rejection to sink in. By the end of August Brooke was in Scotland, but not in the company of James, as had originally been planned, nor of Bryn, as he had so forlornly hoped. His host was yet another concerned Apostle, Harry Norton, who had witnessed Brooke’s collapse at Lulworth. Staying at Moffat, near Dumfries, Brooke was not up to much beyond sleeping and eating; in his words he was ‘loitering about in a stupor’. But he was stung by Noel’s resolve and her claim that she did not love him: ‘You lie, Noel,’ he wrote angrily. ‘You may have persuaded yourself you don’t love me, or engineered yourself into not loving me, now. But you lie when you say you never did & never could. You did – Penshurst & Grantchester & a thousand times. I know you did; & you know it. And you could.’ Even this plea failed to move Noel from her firm stance – although she softened sufficiently to agree to meet him, she held out no hope of a revival of their love.

  On 17 September Brooke met Noel at her home, but all his desperate eloquence could not move her, and he returned to London that evening sick at heart. He was not to know that he had touched bottom and was on the brink of a revival after so many months of misery. He had been invited to stay for a week with Eddie Marsh at Raymond Buildings. Although Eddie had not played much part in Brooke’s life during the long months of his breakdown – such emotional turmoil would have bewildered the rational, humorous and generous civil servant – he had continued to take a fond paternal interest in his favourite protégé’s career. For example, in February a mutual friend had introduced Eddie to Harold Monro, the chief entrepreneur of contemporary poetry. Monro edited the influential Poetry Review, the house journal of English verse, and was about to open the Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street, probably the first shop in Britain devoted exclusively to the selling and promotion of poetry, including the unheard-of innovation of public readings by living poets and the provision of rooms above the shop where impecunious poets could stay.

  Monro encouraged Eddie to write a long and laudatory appreciation of Brooke’s poems in the Poetry Review. Eddie obliged with an extravagant plug, telling Brooke he hoped it would give his career a boost and make his name known to the 4000 fans of modern verse who bought the publication. He also showed Brooke’s poems to leading contemporary critics, including Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson, although he took care to steer them clear of what he called ‘the ugly poems’ like ‘A Channel Passage’. At this time Eddie had only heard vague rumours of Brooke’s condition in Cannes, and imagined him to be on some sort of rest cure after overworking. Comically, considering Brooke’s real plight, he had written: ‘I was delighted to hear rather vague reports that you are now bursting with health and had been revelling in the Riviera – I had a dismal picture of you in my mind, broken and prematurely aged by excess of milk and honey diet, mooning disconsolate in a depressing cosmopolitan watering place …’

  Embroiled that spring in the latest of a succession of constitutional crises convulsing English political life – the government’s Irish Home Rule Bill and Protestant Ulster’s resistance to it – Eddie had still found the time to promote his young friend’s verse, as E. M. Forster later recalled: ‘Our oddest meeting was in a Belfast hotel, in the midst of a raging anti-Churchill mob. The lift descended into the lounge – there was a rush at it, but out got a slim figure [Eddie] who advanced toward me saying, “Have you wead Wupert’s new poem?”’

  Though grateful for his patron’s shameless bugle-blowing on his behalf – the next Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, was the latest target of Eddie’s exhortation to read Brooke – the poet was too preoccupied by his personal problems to show Eddie ‘The Sentimental Exile’ (as ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ was originally titled when it appeared in Basileon). Eddie was slightly piqued when he found out, as he adored the poem to excess: ‘It’s lovely, my dear … the most human thing you have written, the only one that has brought tears to my fine eyes’ he gushed to the author. It was he who pressured Brooke into changing the title to the one it bears today.

  When Brooke arrived at Eddie’s home on 17 September, he was given the key to the two-floor flat and invited to make it his London pied-à-terre in place of the National Liberal Club. He was glad to do so, and moved many books and other personal effects into the spare room, which was adorned by Stanley Spencer’s striking painting The Apple Gatherers – the diminutive and eccentric artist being yet another of Eddie’s innumerable protégés. Not the least of the charms of the flat was the comfortable presence of Eddie’s housekeeper, Mrs Elgy, an apple-faced woman from Derbyshire. She found Brooke ‘a stoojius type’ who caused her little trouble, apart from his preference for eating his meals off a tray while sprawled on cushions on the living-room floor.

  Brooke’s initial stay as Eddie’s semi-permanent guest lasted a week. On his first evening he went with his host to watch a fire that was consuming a timber yard behind nearby King’s Cross station in a vast conflagration. On the way they stopped to pick up another of Eddie’s poetic protégés – the Northumbrian poet Wilfrid Gibson, nine years older than Brooke, who had made a name for himself as a celebrant of the working lives of northern folk and had recently arrived in London in an attempt to make his way in the literary world. Arriving at the site of the blaze, the trio linked hands to keep from being swept apart by the huge crowd, and later, exhilarated by the disaster, they excitedly talked literature far into the night. It was Brooke’s first meeting with a poet who would become close to him – he affectionately nicknamed him ‘Wibson’ – and would eventually be numbered among his three literary heirs.

  A day or two later another late-night conversation resulted in the birth of a project that would have momentous consequences for the history of English poetry – and for the development of Brooke’s own career. Arriving back home after a hard day at the Admiralty under the unforgiving lash of Winston Churchill, Eddie found Brooke lying half undressed on the bed but still wakeful. The insomnia that had plagued him since Lulworth was a hard habit to shift. Enchanted by the sight of the recumbent semi-naked Brooke, Eddie lingered to talk. The subject turned to poetry, and how best to foster the renaissance in English verse that they both believed was under way. Brooke facetiously suggested an anthology written entirely by himself under 12 different pseudonyms. Eddie countered with the idea of a genuine anthology written by their own friends.

  They began to toss names about. There was Brooke’s recent host John Masefield, whose violent narrative poem ‘The Everlasting Mercy’, dealing with earthy goings-on in rural England in a language shocking in its frankness, had been the poetry publishing success of the year. There was Gibson, the one-legged tramp poet W. H. Davies and Brooke’s old friend James Elroy Flecker; as well as two acquaintances of Eddie’s – Walter de la Mare, whose ‘Listeners’ had proved as popular with the public in its mysteriously romantic way as Masefield’s saltier verses – and Gordon Bottomley, a fine writer confined to his Lakeland home by chronic illness. And what about A. E. Housman, the austere author of the haunting A Shropshire Lad, or the brash and flamboyant young American Ezra Pound, who was making quite a splash in London’s sedate literary scene? The more they considered the scheme, the more feasible and attractive it looked. Their shared aim – although Eddie approached it with a more conservative and cautious attitude than Brooke – was to demonstrate to the reading public that a new poetic wave had swept away the frigidity of the late-Victorian era and the artificial decadence of the
Edwardian period that had so dominated Brooke’s own juvenilia.

  What they lacked was a name to grab public attention. Eddie suggested ‘the Georgians’, in honour of the new king. Brooke was scornful: it had too stuffy and respectable a ring about it; but he was stumped for an alternative, and the label stuck. They turned to the problem of finance, and Eddie suggested subsidizing the venture with the ‘murder money’ he had inherited as a result of the public sympathy that had followed the untimely assassination of his great-grandfather, the prime minister Spencer Perceval. He already drew on this cash to give handouts to the more cash-strapped of his protégés and was prepared to spend more to underwrite what became the first anthology of Georgian Poetry. They resolved to ask Monro to publish the book under the auspices of the Poetry Review, and, fired with enthusiasm, retired to bed long after midnight.

  The next day a hastily arranged lunch party took place at Eddie’s flat during which Eddie and Brooke outlined their scheme. Gibson was there, and Monro, along with his assistant Arundel del Re. Also present was John Drinkwater, an actor, playwright and poet who was a friend of Monro’s; and another poet, Lascelles Abercrombie, may have joined the group. Both Drinkwater and Abercrombie had published their first well-received books of verse in 1908. The gathering agreed to help Eddie put together a collection of a dozen or so poets in an anthology to be published by Christmas. The royalties would be split between the Poetry Review and Eddie, who undertook to distribute them equally among the contributors. In blithely agreeing to fit the editing into his already hectically busy life, Eddie had little idea what he was taking on. There would eventually be five volumes of Georgian Poetry and much unsung work involved. But Eddie was a meticulous editor, whose main occupation in life would be as unpaid copy-editor to Churchill’s voluminous writings – not for nothing was Eddie unkindly dubbed ‘a valet to his hero’. He threw himself into the project with an energy and enthusiasm that surpassed Brooke’s own.