Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  He was not tempted to go back on his vows of August and recline on Ka’s waiting bosom – not even when she wrote him that she had definitively broken with Henry Lamb, enclosing his last letter to her in proof. He sent it back to her. In desperation, Ka had even offered to fund his trip to the California sunshine, should he ever make up his mind to go. This too he refused: ‘Oh child, oh my dear. I can’t take money … Don’t waste yourself or anything of yours on me … It would be wonderful, if you could be your lovely self again. It would give me a sort of peace, to know it.’ Slowly, although he was still prone to erupt into little spurts of rage against Ka for the ‘crime’ she had committed against him with Lamb, the primary emotion he was coming to feel with her was guilt at his own behaviour.

  His main work in Berlin was a reworking of his dissertation on Webster, on which, for a second year round, he was pinning his hopes of a Fellowship. An important late influence on the text was his conversations with T. E. Hulme, who had arrived in Berlin to attend an international philosophical convention. The two dissimilar men spent more than a week together, touring galleries, attending concerts and talking in Brooke’s old haunt the Café des Westens. They were wandering near the Zoo station late one night, discussing Hulme’s idea that material objects, especially man-made ones, born of the time in which they were living, were somehow more real than ethereal ideas or passing emotions, and as they talked a train thundered over their heads. At once an image was sparked in Brooke’s mind, and this became his poem ‘The Night Journey’, which encapsulated both the sense of human will, as remorseless as a train roaring along its tracks, and man’s essentially tragic solitude: ‘the gloom’

  Is hung with steam’s fantastic livid streamers.

  Lost into God, as lights in light, we fly,

  Grown one with will, end-drunken huddled dreamers.

  The white lights roar. The sounds of the world die

  And lips and laughter are forgotten things.

  Speed sharpens; grows. Into the night, and on,

  The strength and splendour of our purpose swings.

  The lamps fade; and the stars. We are alone.

  Brooke’s thoughts, as this poem indicates, were becoming resigned and fatalistic. Rationalizing the crisis of the year just ending, he told Frances that he had been the mere plaything of forces far stronger than himself. And it was with the idea of throwing himself further into fate’s hands that, so he told Ka, he was seriously thinking of abandoning his dissertation and travelling to Russia as a correspondent if current tension between Germany and the eastern giant should burst into war. ‘It would be fun,’ he added, in a characteristic taste of the mood that would take him in the summer of 1914. ‘In that case England wouldn’t see me for a bit – for ever, if a bullet or the cholera were kindly … Be proud of the fineness we have done together. And think in years.’

  In contrast with his previous deluge while abroad, he was sparing in the number of letters he wrote to friends. Noel received just one, in mid-November, its tone cool, tired and resigned. He recalled his disappointment at not having gone camping with her, as he had planned: ‘It was somewhat melancholy unpacking the clothes I’d carefully packed for camp, all unused, and the books I’d thought might be nice to read there. I wept at the pathetic figure I’d made, trailing them round Scotland & London & God knows where … One is like a child, in the important little way one trots round with one’s dreams – so unrelated to reality.’

  He painted a patronizing portrait of his Berlin hosts: ‘Dudley sits yonder clacking his typewriter; making history … his wife leads a quiet existence. She is very large with child. I hope it won’t kill her – she’s very tiny. I work indoors most of the time. Sometimes I go out of an evening to a theatre. And every other day I go out to lunch in a cafe, rather dignifiedly, to show I’m independent.’ Although he lacked the energy to muster his furious forces of hate, bitterness against Bloomsbury still rankled. He referred to the area of London where his former friends lived as ‘pestilential parts’.

  A month later, on 12 December, he was back in London. His first night home he spent at Raymond Buildings catching up with the Georgian anthology. Eddie had been working like a Trojan in his absence, proofreading and ‘puffing’ the book extravagantly to his many influential friends. Advance copies were sent to all the main newspapers, not only in London and the provinces, but throughout the English-speaking world. Brooke, Monro and Lascelles Abercrombie helped Eddie package the review copies and post them off. As he awaited publication day, Brooke supervised the typing of the final edition of his dissertation, which incorporated the changes in the text he had made as a result of his intense conversations with Hulme. But there was another, less intellectual, preoccupation that increasingly took up his thoughts.

  While staying at Raymond Buildings in September Brooke had accompanied Eddie to a fashionable first night – a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Savoy Theatre. He was much taken by Cathleen Nesbitt, the beautiful young actress playing the part of Perdita, and saw the play for a second time before his departure to Germany. Learning of Brooke’s interest, Eddie had got to know Miss Nesbitt through the actor-manager Henry Ainley, with whom Cathleen was ending an unhappy love affair. He lost no time in inviting them to a supper party at his home to meet Brooke, who, so Cathleen recalled, was uncommunicative and rather tongue-tied. ‘I saw a very good looking, very shy young man, sitting in a corner and I do remember being struck by his extremely blue eyes, and I sat beside him and he said “Do you know anybody here?” and I said “No”. He said “Neither do I” and then we vaguely started talking about Georgian Poetry … I said there was an extraordinary poem called “The Fish” in it, and I quoted quite a bit of it and he blushed very scarlet and said ‘You have very good taste – I wrote that …’

  This momentous first meeting with Cathleen, on 20 December, was the beginning of perhaps the most uncomplicatedly happy love affair of Brooke’s life. Sixteen months Brooke’s junior, Cathleen had been born of Irish extraction in Cheshire and brought up chiefly in Belfast and France. She had made her stage début in 1910 and had toured with the Irish players in America, as well as appearing at Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre. Blessed as she was with a fine bone structure, a flawless skin, dark hair and luminously lovely eyes, it is scarcely surprising that Brooke was instantly smitten by her physical charms. Her membership of the Irish players, whose work he had seen and admired, and her more than professional interest in contemporary poetry, drama and literature, provided the bond of mutual interests. In addition, she possessed the inestimable advantage, given Brooke’s present mood, of having no connection with his previous circle of friends, and complete ignorance of the crises that had so convulsed his recent life. Last, but by no means least, both were on the rebound from recent disastrous relationships.

  There were shadows lurking in the sunlight: following up the supper party with a private lunch, Brooke made it clear to Cathleen that his bright and boyish appearance concealed a darker side. He was feeling ‘neurotic and depressed’, he let her know, and, to her disappointment, ‘against love altogether’. For her part, she was by no means the sweet young innocent that – perhaps from over-identifying her with the role of Perdita – he assumed her to be.

  The Winter’s Tale was not the only play Brooke saw as 1912 ended – he and Hulme had been deeply impressed by Strindberg’s Dance of Death in Berlin. Its powerful message of the hopelessness of male–female relations had appealed to the misogynistic impulses of both men. On a lighter note, just before Christmas Brooke attended the opening night of the show Hullo Ragtime at the London Hippodrome. As he had with Peter Pan and the Ballet Russe, he fell for the show, which he was to see at least ten times – seven times in Cathleen’s company. His latent anti-Semitism did not prevent him from enjoying the music of Louis Hirsch and the songs of Irving Berlin, nor the performance of Ethel Levey, the show’s sexiest star, who, with bare arms and legs and a cropped head under ostrich feathers, belt
ed out the show-stopping songs that seemed to herald a new and exciting age – barbarous, discordant, but indisputably alive. It was a melody Brooke was all too ready to hear.

  He was soon tunelessly humming the ragtime tunes, which in their brash discordance, and bursting with American energy and panache, seemed to break asunder the genteel cords that had bound and limited his natural exuberance all his life. They were a message from the New World to what increasingly seemed an old and exhausted one, and, in their mindless optimism and cheerful inanity, they seemed to reflect Brooke’s present hunger for change and amusement.

  Having lingered in London long enough to see both Georgian Poetry and the ragtime craze launched on a waiting world, Brooke was in the more melancholy atmosphere of Rugby for Christmas, where he promptly succumbed to his usual seasonal ailment – flu. While there, he heard from Ka that she was about to depart for Germany, Poland and Russia. He was delighted that she was on the move: ‘I’ll sleep a fortnight without a care in the world,’ he told her, ‘if I can think you’re out of England at last and without a care in the world.’ Ka was angling for a goodbye meeting before she left, but Brooke was briskly discouraging of her pining. His language was insensitive, to say the least. Rather than ‘loiter helplessly round London’ he said she should better ‘die en route’.

  On New Year’s Eve he returned to London, took Eddie to Hullo Ragtime and then joined the celebrating crowds waiting for the midnight chimes on the steps of St Paul’s. Nineteen twelve was a year that Brooke was well pleased to see go. At least 1913 held out the promise of a better future.

  21

  * * *

  Rotters and Fellows

  * * *

  The first anthology of Georgian Poetry had appeared in the dying days of 1912. Its appearance, so assiduously heralded by Eddie Marsh’s tireless publicity efforts, was eagerly awaited. Herbert Asquith, it was reported, temporarily forgot the political crises with which he was beset, and dispatched a car to Bumpus, the Oxford Street bookshop, to pick up a copy on the day of publication. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, if only because Eddie would have made absolutely sure that the Prime Minister received a pre-publication copy. It was Eddie who had had the last word in the final selection of the poets and poems represented, riding roughshod over Brooke’s objections to some of his choices. As a result, Brooke complained to Ka, there were ‘too many rotters’ in the book.

  It is interesting to speculate whom Brooke meant by this gibe, since most of the Georgians were his own friends and acquaintances: there were six poems from W. H. Davies, most famous for his lines

  What is this life, if full of care,

  We have no time to stand and stare?

  Brooke himself had five, as did Walter de la Mare; Gibson and James Stephens had three each; Gordon Bottomley, Flecker and Monro two; and a single poem or long extract from Lawrence, Masefield, Sturge Moore, Abercrombie, G. K. Chesterton, Drinkwater, and the now-forgotten Ronald Ross, Edmund Beale Sargent and R. C. Trevelyan – the latter an Apostle and likely ‘rotter’ – made up the rest of the book.

  Eddie had exercised his editor’s prerogative in providing a somewhat grandiloquent preface that amounted to a Georgian manifesto. It began: ‘This volume is issued in the belief that English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty.’ Eddie proclaimed the dawn of ‘another “Georgian period” which may take rank in due time with several great poetic periods of the past …’. The reception of the book surpassed his and Brooke’s wildest dreams – the first edition rapidly sold out, and would eventually sell 13,000 copies – an astonishingly high figure for verse. For Brooke personally, it placed his name firmly in the public domain as a promising and increasingly accomplished practitioner of poetry; while the royalties that flowed from the book were a very useful addition in his always straitened financial circumstances.

  Brooke was not the only Georgian to be grateful to Eddie. A year after its publication, a surprised yet pleased Lawrence, for whom money would always be a worry, and whose single contribution, ‘Snapdragon’, is one of the few Georgian poems to have survived subsequent critical derision, wrote to Eddie to thank him for a much-needed royalty cheque: ‘That Georgian Poetry book is a veritable Aladdin’s Lamp. I little thought my “Snapdragon” would go on blooming and seeding in this prolific fashion.’

  The Georgians were the complete creation of Eddie and Brooke’s drive and energy. In no sense did the poets represent a coherent group, or even a united set of values or attitudes. Most have long since fallen into neglect; and those that survive in the public memory – Brooke, Masefield, Chesterton, Davies, De la Mare and Lawrence himself – are so different in theme and style as to be unclassifiable. De la Mare the mystical whimsyist; Davies the cracker-barrel sage; Masefield the muscular celebrant of the seafaring life; Lawrence the quirky free-versifier of genius; Chesterton the comic satirist – these poets are only Georgians in the sense that they were writing in roughly the same epoch, and, apart from Lawrence, using traditional forms.

  Later volumes of Georgian Poetry edited by Eddie contained the Great War poets Sassoon, Blunden, Graves and Rosenberg – once again, a very diverse quartet, whom only the accident of enduring the common experience of combat in the trenches of the Western Front delineates as a group. Although Brooke eagerly used Georgian Poetry as a vehicle to promote his own career, his entanglement with the venture has done as much harm to his subsequent reputation as a poet as the uncharacteristically romantic and patriotic sonnets that he produced under the shock of the outbreak of war. In the light of the war, the Georgians came to be regarded as impossibly reactionary and backward-looking – celebrants of a mythical England of beer and cheese, rural backwaters and cosy firesides – utterly at variance with the modern reality of cities, cars, speed and violence. Looked at without that hindsight, however, they can be placed more fairly and squarely in their true context.

  Following the fatuousness of the late Victorians and the preciousness of the early Edwardians, the poets in Eddie’s anthologies did bring a breath of fresh air into what had become a stuffy hothouse. They were not a brick through the glass, but they were an opening of a door. They wrote about everyday things in plain language that was generally shorn of artifice and exaggeration. Their worst fault was sentimentality; but they cannot fairly be charged with failure just because they did not see the catastrophe lurking just around the corner. Few did.

  Eddie’s fifth and final Georgian collection, produced in 1922, coincided with the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land, that epochal moment in literary history that changed the course of poetry as Joyce’s Ulysses, which appeared in the same year, changed the novel. Modernism in all its aspects swept aside the last vestiges of Georgianism, but the Georgians were as broadly representative of the decade 1910–20 as Eliot and Pound were of the twenties and the Auden school of the thirties. The poetry we remember of the years that contained the Great War is the poetry of the men represented in Eddie’s anthologies – Brooke, Blunden, Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg. The subsequent denigration of Eddie’s unfortunate label ‘Georgian’ was itself overblown.

  It was the war that altered perceptions. As the critic John Wain wrote: ‘If the First World War had not happened, the new idiom in English poetry would have been a development of Georgianism … the seeds were there: the honesty, the dislike of cant, the “selection from the real language of men”, the dissatisfaction with a narrow tradition of poetry laid down by the literary establishment.’ Wain cites two poets, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen, both victims of the war, who exemplified this neo-Georgianism stifled at birth by the brutal fact of their deaths. ‘If their flight had been longer, there would have been no need for a modern poetic idiom imported from France via America … Owen and Thomas, abetted by the excellent poets who survived the war, by Graves, by Blunden, by the older poets like Hodgson and De la Mare [all Georgians] would have made a living tradition out of English materials arising naturally from English life.’

>   As for Brooke’s own role in the poetic politics of his time, it is much more radical than has been widely assumed. Just as his personal life has been misrepresented as clean and simple, so his poetry has been misread or simply dismissed as sentimental and reactionary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like his friend Thomas and like Wilfred Owen he wrote of taboo themes – breakdown, physical decay, ageing, the banality and disgust of domestic life, the stultifying incompatibility of eroticism with marriage – using traditional forms. His early socialism was more progressive than the politics of the reactionary Eliot or the overtly fascist Pound, while his poetics were just as radical as theirs – albeit couched in traditional style over which he developed an awesome technical mastery. Eliot and Pound themselves recognized this. Brooke knew Pound personally, favourably reviewed his early poetry and recommended him to Eddie for inclusion in the anthology. Pound returned this high regard and referred to Brooke as ‘the best of all that Georgian group’.

  Only a predictable disagreement between the fastidious Eddie and the irascible Pound kept the work of the master of modernism out of a book that has been unfairly seen as the bible of backwardness in English verse. Eliot knew of and admired Brooke’s critical work on Webster and drew on it and ‘Grantchester’ in his poetry. For his part, Brooke’s critical eye was almost unerring when it came to separating the sheep from the goats in literature.

  He demonstrated this early in the New Year when he left London on 1 January and took a train for Cornwall’s far-flung Lizard peninsula, where the Cornfords had taken a house for their holidays. Here, ignoring the hustle and bustle of the household, he laboured over two critical articles on a poet he had long regarded with reverence: John Donne. His immediate inspiration was Stanley Spencer’s painting John Donne Arriving in Heaven, which he had seen at the post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries. Writing at a time when Donne was by no means widely seen as the genius he was, Brooke presciently hailed him as the greatest love poet in English. During his fortnight with the Cornfords, Brooke also wrote a long poem called ‘The Funeral of Youth’, his first major poetic effort since ‘Grantchester’ and a clear sign that he had regained the stability and energy needed for creative work.