by Nigel Jones
After lunch the group walked around to the site of the Poetry Bookshop to see what they envisaged as the new clearing-house for the book, although most of the work would in fact be done at Eddie’s flat. That evening Brooke looked up his old Rugby friend Denis Browne, now a composer and working as the organist at Guy’s Hospital. He introduced Browne to Eddie and Gibson. Already the makings of what would become a new circle of friends was forming to replace those that Brooke had lost. Returning to Rugby after his momentous week in London, he reported to one of his old friends who had remained faithful, Frances Cornford: ‘I’ve been meeting a lot of new poets … they were so nice: very simple and very goodhearted.’ He noted the change that was already being wrought in his own condition: ‘I do believe, just now, that God’s giving me a kind of respite. He seems to have ceased to fiddle with me for the last week …’
But Brooke was still looking for an anchor to root him more securely in reality. What he needed above all, he told Frances, was to get married. ‘I can’t … be permanently and properly all right till I’m married. Marriage is the thing.’ Unlike Byron, Brooke believed that love was more important to men than women. A woman could half-fulfil herself through children – but a man had only the hope of love. He ruefully quoted an observation of Bryn’s that had been reported to him: ‘Rupert holds such dreadfully conventional views nowadays.’ Perhaps, he reflected, she was right, and maybe that was no bad thing after all.
Letters began to fly back and forth between Rugby and London, as Eddie reported on the progress of the project and Brooke responded with comments and criticisms. Their views about what was and was not worthwhile in contemporary poetry often clashed, but Brooke was careful not to push his luck too far, for Eddie was too influential and useful a friend to offend terminally: ‘I can’t set up to advise you, but I can taunt!’ he teased.
The tireless Eddie went down for a weekend to visit the struggling young writer and critic John Middleton Murry and his talented girlfriend Katherine Mansfield. The couple had taken a cottage in the hamlet of Duncton, not far from Chichester in Sussex. Since June 1911 Murry and Mansfield had been editing Rhythm, an avant-garde arts review, produced in Chancery Lane a stone’s throw from Eddie’s flat. They too were added to the long list of bright young things deserving of encouragement and the occasional lob of Marsh money. Not the least of his services was to get them to take on the cash-starved Wilfrid Gibson as editorial assistant. Eddie secretly paid Gibson’s salary, thus elegantly combining support for a struggling magazine with support for a struggling writer. It was an act typical of the extraordinary generosity which endeared him to many grateful denizens of the world of arts and letters. Brooke was soon to follow Eddie’s footsteps in beating a path to the Murrys’ door, and thus a new pair of friends were added to a widening circle and a suddenly brighter world.
The beginning of October brought a reminder of the world he had lost. On 3 October Bryn Olivier became Mrs Hugh Popham in a secular ceremony in London, although Bryn, really quite conventional herself, had wanted a white wedding. James, Ka, Noel and Bunny Garnett were among the guests; but Brooke stayed away. However, on the eve of the wedding, he wrote Bryn a remarkable letter of farewell that mixed renunciation, recrimination and longing in equal portions. In its own way it was a revelation.
‘Dearest Bryn,’ he began tenderly:
I sit here, and, occasionally, think of you; and of the extraordinary mutations and incompleteness of life – the way we all drift and touch and swirl on under these gray & permanent skies. Oh dear, I get so solemn thinking of Eternity and Plus & Minus & the rest! Human Accounts are so devastating – all the things one didn’t invest in, & so forth. And we’re all twenty five, and we’ve done so little – this isn’t cheering or polite, to an almost married lady. But I wanted to explain my mood. Otherwise you might think this too pompous …
Recalling their last, catastrophic meeting at Everleigh, Brooke admitted: ‘I fell into an abyss of despair that day, you happened to be going the next, we happened not to meet in Scotland, through ill-luck – you’re going to be married, & I’m going – I really don’t know, or, often, care, to what far parts of the two worlds, material & spiritual, I may be going.’ He again touched on the theme of the eternal isolation of human beings, which he had already offered to Ka as an explanation for the changeable nature of his feelings. Bryn and Brooke, he slyly suggested, could have been different:
It’s not entirely an ordinary bump-&-part of the twigs on the stream. I mean that in this infinitely secretive & shy & ignorant world, where nobody says, at all, ever, what they’re at, we had – whether through some greater honesty or friendliness in you, or daring in me – gone a faltering step or two towards hearing distance of each other. So I thought. But you, perhaps, are always as honest & intimate with everyone you know, and find them as honest & intimate with you – I don’t know. I’m possibly queerer & shyer … I don’t think that’s so. Anyhow, I’ve more to be dishonest about.
So there Bryn had it – an honest admission of dishonesty – something she had long suspected in Brooke, but none the less refreshing to have from his own lips. Suspecting her derisive snort of ‘I thought so!’, Brooke continued: ‘Oh but come, don’t even you, my dear “sensible” unmorbid straightforward Bryn, think that everyone is infinitely incomprehensible & far & secret from everyone, & that approach is infinitely difficult & infinitely rare? One tells, some times, some people, a few things, – in a misleading sort of way. But any Truth! … oh, Bryn!’
At last Brooke was baring his soul to a woman he knew was already lost to him. Perhaps her very unavailability was a spur to sting him into truth – or rather his belief in the impossibility of truth:
One of the great difficulties, & perils, you see, in ever telling anyone any truth, is the same as in ever loving anyone, but more so. It gives them a devilish handle over you. I mean, they can hurt. If I love a person & say nothing, I’m fairly safe. But if I tell them, I deliver myself bound into their hands. They can cry ‘What bad taste, to feel & tell that!’ or ‘cheeky youth’ or laugh ‘I despise you’ or ‘Thanks for nothing’; or they can tell the public … But I don’t care … I’m proud of myself. I’m proud of my relationship towards you, and my feelings towards you, and I wish it had gone further, but I’m proud anyhow. And even if you said you despised it, you couldn’t make me not proud.
As he had done with Bryn’s sister Noel, Brooke, well aware that his relationship with Bryn, if not entirely at an end, at least could never be the same, tried to sum it up through an evocation of shared good times:
Well, then … I settle up so much nowadays with the Recording Angel. You may overhear: & be damned to you. I say to him ‘They are really very important items on the side of Good, my relations with Bryn – all the various minutes, days, or months. They were very good. The time on the Broads. The various camps. There was always great delight in her presence, and in her appearance. Beauty like hers filled one with joy to see. Seeing her, knowing her so well, being with her, touching her, – among all the many other good & bad things in this one & only life of mine, those things were good, pure good …’
Then there was Bank, Bryn. For three whole months I’d been infinitely wretched & ill, wretcheder than I’d thought possible. And then for a few days it all dropped completely away, and – oh! how lovely Bank was! – I suppose I should never be able to make you see what beauty is to me, – physical beauty –, just even the seeing it, in spite of all the hungers that come – Bank passed & was good & is a lovely memory to you & me. A funny world!
But Brooke was still not too pure for a postal flirtation:
And then, earlier & more definitely at Bank & after, there was what I told you of. You’re beautiful. I’ve wanted you so passionately some times. I’ve known to myself how glorious it might be if ever we went away together. The joys of the body are infinite. And our clean and fine bodies! – Such thoughts were (I’ve told you) at the back of my relationship with you: hopes that it mig
ht come to that. (You would have had the strength to do it, & finely, if you’d wanted to; and there are so few people like that.)
And so, after suggesting the joys they had missed, he had to account for the fact that they had never come together. He attempted to do so:
I don’t think I’m afraid of anything in the world. But I’m damnably shy. So I didn’t ever (why doesn’t one ever in this world) come, & say: – Also I was ill & less than fit for life, this summer. So things slipped along. I hoped that, when we were together in August, we might make something fine, together. And then, at Everleigh, you told me you were ‘engaged’. I was glad enough of your happiness, for I love you a great deal. But it was also, to me, a ‘blow’. I told you a lot, in that conversation that never got well finished. (It’s so nice being able to talk to a person like you, after all, are: – i.e. talk freely. I dare say anything to you, now: or hear anything from you. We are a good pair.)
But now he is left holding dust and ashes:
We did well. We might have done better, I believe. But time past is past. Tomorrow, or whenever it is, you marry. I’m jealous of Hugh, a good deal, for marrying, living with, & copulating with you, & having your beauty & fineness. And I am envious of you both because you’re happy & married, and I (though I’m well & cheerful now) am sad & very lonely. Perhaps you don’t understand this. It shows that my nature isn’t very nice. But there it is, you nice old Bryn, black lonely envy of you two. And if a spasm of it came on when I was seeing you, – & it quite probably might – I should hate both you and try, even, to hurt you.
At last, cleaned out, Brooke launched into his peroration:
Marriage is very lovely … I tell you so, & I know everything in the world, & I know that. ‘I cannot say more than that I hope your married life will be as happy as mine’ – imaginings of what it can be – for you, or me, or anyone: – each in his own way, of course. – Oh, that’s all it is; good material. Each makes what he likes; as with all other good material – even love-affairs. But it is lovely. Giving is lovely. Taking is lovely. Breakfast is lovely. I swear to you – Hush; Hush! I expect I only annoy you. You must be tired, just now, with all these arrangings and fusses. Please don’t let that tiredness make you take this letter angrily. It would be so easy. We’re beyond that. I’ve just put some of the thing, from my point of view, & God’s. ‘In its way, it’s a kind of compliment.’ And it’s probably the only wedding present you’ll get from me, until I’m a rich man: unless a friendly sort of love is any use. I don’t know when I shall see you again, or what I’m going to do. Goodnight! Goodbye … I take hold of you with my arms & kiss your mouth – With all love Your devoted Rupert.
And so, with this extraordinary letter, Brooke bid farewell to Bryn – and to his old mode of life. He would see her again, but usually in the company of Hugh, and in a fairly perfunctory, steadily dimmer way. Perhaps because it lacked the deeply churning emotions that muddied his relations with Ka or Noel, his letter seems less hysterical, more open and objective. At last, we feel, the real Brooke may be getting a look-in, in all his confusions, hesitations and disarmingly declared duplicity and shallowness. To Bryn, scanning the letter as she prepared for a wedding to a man she was already regarding as dull, it must have been a disturbing goodbye.
After mailing the letter, Brooke went to spend the weekend with the Murrys in Sussex, where he and Murry strolled about the coastal marshes, discussing plans for the Georgians and Brooke’s contributions to Rhythm. He delighted Katherine Mansfield with a macabre tale, which bears the mark of the same sort of myth that spawned Lithuania, about an old lady who sat motionless in her window for days, before neighbours broke in and found the lower half of her body had been gnawed away by her hungry cats.
Brooke returned to London to find preparations for the Georgian anthology in full swing. Over a meal at the fashionable Moulin d’Or restaurant, Eddie introduced him to Walter de la Mare, who would one day become, with Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie, the third of Brooke’s literary heirs, and would write the first book about him. It was another momentous week for meeting new people, for Eddie introduced him to the young philosopher, poet and artistic theorist T. E. Hulme, who was currently evolving a new anti-romantic aesthetic that would prove increasingly influential among the artistic and literary avant-garde, via such movements as Imagism in poetry and Vorticism in art. Influenced by Bergson, whom he had translated, Hulme was a tough-minded critical spirit, much possessed by the hard ‘cindery’ nature of matter, and instinctively distrustful of the lush romanticism that characterized many of the Georgians.
Then Brooke was off to Cambridge, to read a paper to the Apostles entitled ‘In Xanadu’. The paper was something of a kick in the pants for his audience, since it represented his farewell to the milk-and-water philosophy of G. E. Moore that underpinned much of the Apostolic outlook. In contrast to Moore’s emphasis on ethics based on cool, intellectual reason, Brooke declared, he now believed that ‘goodness’ was the most important quality a person could possess. He called it ‘Moral Taste’ and argued: ‘It is the most important thing in a man – its possession the only thing I care for … its absence almost the only thing I hate.’
The Brothers must have sat up as they heard Brooke rejecting the cynicism of his youth: ‘I think, now, that this passion for goodness and loathing of evil is the most valuable and important thing in us.’ If ever one encountered evil, he concluded: ‘One should count to five, perhaps, but then certainly hit out … It’s the only battle that counts.’ This was an open declaration of war on the moral relativism of the Strachey way of seeing things. Appropriately, Brooke also was about to address a rival Cambridge society calling itself ‘the Heretics’. He too was now the holder of heretical opinions – or rather, heretical to his old friends who had long since rebelled against the values he claimed he espoused. Privately, it was not only Lytton’s ideas that he wished to knock down – he was sorely tempted to do the same to the man himself.
After the meeting he dined with his Cambridge mentor A. C. Benson, who noticed a ‘great weariness’ overshadowing his young friend’s former ebullience. Brooke referred only obliquely to the travail he had passed through, seeming most anxious to stuff its memory out of reach: ‘He spoke of his trouble very seriously, and even with a sort of terror, as if he had for the first time realized that there might be … wounds which he could not cure.’ The next day Geoffrey Keynes dropped in on Brooke at the Old Vicarage and confided that he was in love with Ka.
The change recently wrought in Brooke, part of which was an utter weariness with his long, sapping fever of love, is amply indicated by the fact that this news moved him not a jot. He even wrote to Ka recommending that she take Geoffrey’s suit seriously: ‘It doesn’t distress me … he’s a good person – and so unique in London … when I’ve thought of you, what you could be doing, I’ve sometimes thought “She may be with Geoffrey”, and glowed with content … I wish you would [fall in love with him]. His devotion to you makes me rather happy.’ Brooke added that he was seeking comfort with the old familiar faces – Frances, Gwen and Jacques – but was still liable to be thrown into a pit of black envy and rage by any indication – an arm around a neck or a touch of hands – that his married friends were happier than he was: ‘I go sick with envy, and blind – and generally say something to hurt them.’
Another visitor to the Old Vicarage was his new friend Gibson. He watched Brooke in some astonishment, as he wrote a quartet of inferior poems that had been demanded by the Poetry Review. Such a literary cottage industry was unknown to Gibson, and he wrote to Eddie in wonder: ‘I rather marvelled that poems could be written because Monro wanted them … It seemed queer – but never having seen poetry being written before, I didn’t know – and anyhow from the spectacular point of view it was superb.’
Brooke was unabashed: he was prepared to do almost anything to thrust his name before the poetry-loving public. ‘Have written four poems,’ he wired Monro. ‘Do you want more?’ Meanwhile
Eddie was feverishly at work lining up the Georgians. Some early choices – Housman and Pound – were ruled out, and some new ones – D. H. Lawrence and James Stephens – roped in. By the time of Brooke’s next visit to Eddie’s flat, on 1 November, the galley proofs of the poems were ready for his critical perusal. While in London he reviewed an exhibition of post-Impressionist art at the Grafton Galleries for the Cambridge Review – he was not overly impressed, except by Matisse and the work of Eric Gill, one of whose sculptures of a Madonna and Child he would acquire as a gift for Ka. He spared a few words for one of the portraits of Ka painted by Duncan Grant – without mentioning his own connections with artist and sitter: ‘One always feels there ought to be more body in his work, somehow. Even his best pictures here are rather thin. But there is beauty in The Seated Woman,’ the magazine’s readers were told.
This duty over, and wearing one of the bold coloured shirts that Ka had sewn for him (this one sported green and purple stripes) he was off once more to Berlin, where he had been invited to recuperate by Dudley Ward and his heavily pregnant wife Annemarie. He soon fell into his accustomed state of mildly irritable jealousy when in the company of married friends: ‘One suddenly finds oneself four million miles away from any human companionship, on the top of a frozen mountain, among stars and icicles.’ Brooke’s cure for his malady was simple: ‘I shall work.’ And work he did, this time without the distractions of love and letters that had marked his previous stay in the German capital.