Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  While in Cornwall he heard from Ka, who had arrived in Berlin and was waxing sentimental about their former haunts. Again he was harshly unsympathetic. In a brusque put-down aimed as much at Noel as at her, he told Ka: ‘Love is being at a person’s mercy. And it’s a black look-out when the person’s an irresponsible modern female virgin. There’s no more to say …’ She was advised to steer clear of ‘reminiscence-ful’ places and to ‘Eat plenty’. He now came under renewed pressure from Frances Cornford to follow Ka’s example and shake the clinging dust of England from his feet. Brooke, still irresolute, and awaiting the judgement of Cambridge on his Fellowship, postponed any decision, and hurried back to London to immerse himself anew in the giddy whirl of Eddie’s social round.

  After arriving at Raymond Buildings on 15 January he visited the Murrys – whom he dubbed ‘the Tigers’ – at the offices of Rhythm in Chancery Lane. They asked him to join the board of the magazine, and he eagerly threw himself into this new project with his old energy, roping in his friends Denis Browne and E. J. Dent to write on music and unsuccessfully attempting to persuade Gwen Raverat to send one of her woodcuts. Gwen, staunchly reactionary in artistic as well as political matters, refused, as she distrusted Rhythm’s modernist and avant-garde tone. Brooke sprang to the defence of his new friends against his old. He told Gwen:

  I hope the things you hate in it, the ‘modernness and desire to shock’, will continue. Of course, it’s modern. It’s all by people who do good work and are under thirty-five. It shows there are such, and that they’re different from and better than the Yellow Book or the Pre-Raphaelites or any other body. Do you think it ought to look as if it was written by Gosse and Tennyson and illustrated by Whistler and Madox Brown? … As for ‘shocking’, it’s impossible to do much good or true work without shocking all the bloody people more or less.

  This letter shows that Brooke, for all his recoil from Bloomsbury, had not retreated completely into reaction. The Murrys and other artists and poets he was now befriending, were just as radical and avant-garde as the Strachey set – but, in his view, they lacked the befouling personal deceits and general creepiness with which Bloomsbury was now irretrievably marked.

  He accompanied Eddie on a tour of his protégés, visiting W. H. Davies at his Kentish retreat near Sevenoaks for tea after dropping in at the Sussex studio of Eric Gill in Ditchling. Here he purchased the Madonna and Child he had admired at the Grafton Galleries, intending to present it to Ka as a cross between a goodbye gift and a guilt offering. The eccentric sculptor, who combined incest, bestiality and pious Roman Catholicism in a weird personal creed, was not highly impressed by his visitors, describing Eddie and Brooke as ‘aesthetic buggers’.

  Back in London, there were more new and old friends to meet. Eddie introduced Brooke to the ambitious and rising young novelist Hugh Walpole, part of his discreetly gay network; and there was a lunch with Davies and De la Mare at the Moulin d’Or, followed by an evening with Pound and W. B. Yeats. On this occasion the great master of modern poetry praised Brooke’s work, but advised him to abandon what he called ‘languid sensuality’ in favour of a ‘robust sensuality’. And it was following this meeting that Yeats made his famous remark that Brooke was ‘the handsomest young man in England’, adding, less famously, that he also wore the most beautiful shirts. Brooke had Ka to thank for the garment in question. She had sewn and sent it to him in a bid to pacify his wrath at one of the worst moments of his madness the previous spring. He had responded in delight: ‘The shirt’s so extraordinarily nice. I’ve worn it ever since … It is, my dear, such a feminine shirt.’ Now, bursting with pride, he wrote to tell her of the admiration of the great Yeats, who had even asked if he could get him one to match it. ‘I promised to find out where he could get the stuff,’ he explained, adding: ‘“You’ll never get anyone who can make it as this is made,” I flung at him as I vanished.’

  Brooke also told Ka that though he thought of her continually, his aim was to make his life so ‘chock-full’ that he had no time to worry. Still driven by his restless demons, he left London on 24 January to stay with Jacques and Gwen Raverat, who had installed themselves at Manor Farm, Croydon, a hamlet some 15 miles south-west of Cambridge. While there, he put the finishing touches to Lithuania, which he had been working on intermittently since conceiving the idea in Berlin nearly a year before. Two other members of the original Neo-Pagan circle, who had remained loyal to Brooke throughout his crisis – Geoffrey Keynes and Justin Brooke – dropped in to pay their respects during Brooke’s stay. From Croydon, he wrote to Eddie, falling back into his old habit of using a friend to covertly advance his love life, to suggest that Cathleen Nesbitt be included in an après-theatre outing they were planning: ‘But no doubt it’s quite impossible – I suppose she dines with Millionaires every night – I can see a thousand insuperable difficulties …’

  Brooke returned to London four days later to attend a debate between Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc, sponsored by the Fabians at the Queen’s Hall. By chance, Noel Olivier was also there. Two days afterwards Brooke told Ka he had ‘unluckily ran into that swine Noel. However we put up our noses and cut each other, which was good fun.’ But from a letter to Noel herself, written on the night of the debate, a rather different picture emerges. If not exactly affectionate, the tone is one of tentatively fishing for some sort of reconciliation: ‘Did you mind – or did you notice? – that I didn’t write to you. I occasionally thought of it. But I nearly always was in a condition of hating you a great deal; so I didn’t trust myself to write. I’m hastily taking advantage, now, of a friendly lapse …’

  The letter goes on to reveal a continuing hatred of Noel’s admirer Ferenc Békássy, who, in an effort to be friendly, had sent Brooke some of his poems for appraisal: ‘I immediately hated him, & sent his poems back without comment.’ Brooke sarcastically commiserated with Noel for ‘so many people falling in love with you … I quite agree; Love’s an entirely filthy business.’ He remarks that, like Békássy, his feelings for Noel had been merely calf-love. ‘Calf-love that goes wrong only hurts so-so – a remedial & finite business, merely a hand or foot off; not both legs.’ While exhibiting bruised pride and hurt feelings, the letter is not entirely devoid of self-knowledge. Brooke is now ready to admit that a good deal of the blame for the rift between them lay with him: ‘I have come more & more to see you’ve had a deal to bear from me in the past. I’ve always been horribly unpleasant. Good God! You were really very tolerant – Calf-love goes over, draggingly. It’s a pity you’ve always elicited the worst side of me …’

  Resuming the letter the next day after returning to Croydon, Brooke ‘preaches’ a little ‘sermon’ cautioning Noel against becoming too hard of heart, while he draws a fine distinction by praising her hatred of ‘softness’, which he shares. He as good as admits that his overblown rhetoric of hatred merely serves to protect his own vulnerability. ‘I tell myself, and everyone else, most of the time, that you’re the bloodiest & pettiest person in England. But I suppose I don’t believe it. One has to say something, – in order to – well, you know as well as anyone the furtive way one builds up armour plating in personal relationships.’ He ends by bestowing the same sort of benediction he had given to Ka when saying farewell: ‘I don’t care what happens, as long as you stay fine, are fine. If you betray that, I swear I’ll kill you. One must invest one’s money somewhere … Child I wish you well. Good be with you. Be happy, incidentally – I’m trusting you that you’ll tell me if ever you want any help about anything or need anything or are in any difficulty. I’m almost infinitely powerful …’

  Then, instead of leaving it at that, he returns to his bizarre obsession with Noel’s personal security – his almost transparent tendency to wish to control her life and insulate her from the company he fears and detests:

  So many people get kidnapped nowadays: & you’re always drifting about alone. Please, I’m perfectly serious – be careful. – Don’t ever, on any pretext, go off with p
eople you don’t know, however well authenticated, or get into cabs – it’s impossible to be too careful. I demand this. Also, bewahr Dich Gott! [may God protect you] What I hope is that, at some crossing, when you’re just going to be run over by a motor-bus one of these days, I may pull you out of the way, & get run over myself. It’d be a good way out of a bloody world for me: & I should go with the satisfaction of knowing that you’d feel horribly awkward for a great many weeks, or months. And how my book’d sell! with love Rupert.

  To show that his hard-done-by feelings were lessening, Brooke sent Noel the two-volume edition of Donne’s poems that he had reviewed for The Nation and Poetry and Drama (as the Poetry Review had just been renamed). When Noel replied with a friendly note of thanks, he responded with a description of his social whirl in London, as though to let her know that he was enjoying life to the full without her:

  But you, poor brown mouse, can’t, in the dizziest heights of murian imagination, picture the life of whirl glitter & gaiety I lead. A young man about town, Noel, (I’ve had my hair cut remarkably short-). Dinners, boxes at the opera, literary lunch-parties, theatre supper parties, (the Carlton on Saturday next) – I know several actresses. Last night, in the stalls at the Ballet, Eddie & I (I’d wired for my white waistcoat) bowed & smiled – oh, quite casually at

  Queen Alexandra

  The Marquis de Soveral

  The Duchess of Rutland

  Countess Rodomontini (or such)

  Mrs George Keppel

  and a host more. And in the interval Mrs Humphrey Ward shook me very warmly by the hand, under the impression I was someone quite different from what I am. But as I’m an anti-Suffragist, I was, of course, rather flattered.

  This display of schoolboy snobbery is both risible and typical of Brooke at his least sympathetic. Like an overawed teenager’s bragging after his first grown-up party, his enthusiasm for a parade of faded Edwardian society figures, such as the late King’s wife and mistress, and Mrs Humphrey Ward, the lady novelist who was Thomas Arnold’s granddaughter and a leading light in the anti-Suffragette campaign, shows his weakness for consorting with the grand – a tendency Eddie was only too willing to exploit. Before Ramsay Macdonald took over the role, Eddie was the most assiduous duchess-kisser in London, and now that he had introduced Brooke into the capital’s literary élite, his protégé was clearly ready for the next stage in his social elevation – the political and aristocratic worlds in which Eddie smoothly circulated when he was not wading into London’s literary whirlpools. It was a world to which Noel, who belonged to another sort of élite, the progressive Fabian nexus, did not belong, and had little wish to. Once again Brooke was turning a tin ear to the subtle hints given out by those he most wished to impress.

  On 8 February, still staying with the Raverats, Brooke went to Cambridge as the guest of Eddie’s father, Howard Marsh, the Master of Downing College, to attend a college dinner at which he met two past masters of poetry: Sir Henry Newbolt, whose patriotic verses were once ranked with those of Kipling; and A. E. Housman. The following evening the melancholy Housman watched admiringly as Brooke played billiards with Professor Marsh. Jacques had heard that Annemarie Ward had given birth to a son, Peter, in Berlin. The news coincided with a letter from Ka in the same city, to which he immediately replied. Once again, he said, he had been stricken by jealousy at the Wards’ marital happiness. The news had come as ‘an awful blow,’ he admitted. But he was still not ready to give in to love: ‘Love is being at a person’s mercy,’ he gloomily maintained. But he promised Ka he would not fall again into the pit from which he had just crawled: ‘I’m not ill, and never shall be again … If ever we meet again, it’s got to be from strength – not weakness.’ However lonely Ka felt amid the memories of Berlin and the Wards’ example of the parenthood that had been snatched from her, Brooke could only offer words of comfort, not deeds. The decision he had told her of at Bibury was irrevocable: ‘You don’t know how I want to help you, child. I’ve loved you so and we’re so closely entangled: I can’t grow whole unless you do …’ But Ka’s pleas for his love was driving him to exasperated desperation: ‘You’re lonely. I can’t bear it … I’d cut and tear myself all day, if it’d do anything. I’d cut my hand off. Oh my God, I can’t have you going on like this …’ Nevertheless he would have to go on grinning and bearing it – a task made easier by his growing enchantment with Cathleen Nesbitt, whom he was continuing to see in London.

  Cutting between Cambridge and the capital, where the giddy whirl of parties, dinners and theatre visits continued without pause, Brooke was soon back in his alma mater to address the Heretics Society, ostensibly on the state of contemporary theatre. Under the thin veneer of a comparison between the two reigning giants of the Scandinavian theatre – Ibsen and Strindberg – he let loose a withering attack on the Norwegian master, with his sympathy for oppressed women. Scarcely concealing his pathological hostility to feminism, he charged Ibsen with a diseased, unhealthy morality, whereas he praised Strindberg for daring to ‘declare that men are men and women women’. The strength of Strindberg, his ‘wholesomeness’, he claimed, lay precisely in the bitterness with which he denounced women. The Swede had been born into ‘a community suffering from a “women’s movement”,’ Brooke caustically continued. ‘He not only stood for the tragedy of Feminism, but also for the revolt against it, and especially against its apostle, the great and dirty playwright Ibsen.’

  These biting remarks were delivered in the soft tones Brooke employed when speaking in public; but the bitterness of his own condemnation of feminism was betrayed, according to one witness, by the way he tossed his lecture notes aside ‘with a brusque flick of the wrist’, as though he would consign uppity women and their treacherous male supporters to the same oblivion. Another personal prejudice came out in the same lecture when, speaking of the Ballet Russe, which he was about to revisit in London, he complained of Diaghilev’s genius being ‘handicapped by the extremely tawdry and inharmonious scenery and dresses of a Russian jew [sic] called Bakst’.

  Having thumbed his nose at women and Jews in so public a fashion – a performance made still more piquant by the presence in his audience of women students from Newnham and Girton colleges – Brooke returned to London to step up his pursuit of one woman who, he felt quietly confident, would not disturb his fragile equilibrium with any untoward display of female revolt or unseemliness: Cathleen Nesbitt. By now he and the actress were on first-name terms. She was increasingly charmed by his looks, and still more by what she called ‘his sense of fun and his fantastic enjoyment of life’. Their romance blossomed on outings to Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. Slowly, Brooke unburdened himself to Cathleen about the sad saga of his involvement with Ka, and she responded with the story of her own unhappy affair with Henry Ainley. Her confession inspired a poem, which he sent her on a postcard. The title, given his recent outburst in Cambridge, is ironic: ‘There’s Wisdom in Women’:

  ‘Oh love is fair, and love is rare;’ my dear one she said,

  ‘But love goes lightly over.’ I bowed her foolish head,

  And kissed her hair and laughed at her. Such a child was she;

  So new to love, so true to love, and she spoke so bitterly.

  But there’s wisdom in women, of more than they have known,

  And thoughts go blowing through them, are wiser than their own,

  Or how should my dear one, being ignorant and young,

  Have cried on love so bitterly, with so true a tongue?

  Apparently in high spirits but gnawed inwardly by a cancer of guilt over Ka, Brooke had in effect taken over Eddie’s flat for his own purposes. A slightly startled Eddie, returning on 1 March from a holiday in the Lake District, was bemused to find a note on the hall table from Brooke inviting him to attend a party in his own home. The ‘party’, Eddie discovered, consisted of Brooke and Cathleen, clearly on the closest of terms. The following day more friends congregated to hear Brooke read Lithuania, which he was seeking to ha
ve performed. The guests included his new friends Cathleen and Gibson, and an assortment from much earlier days – Geoffrey Keynes and Denis Browne as well as Duncan Grant – an interloper from Bloomsbury, presumably invited because he was close to Eddie. Also there, yet another of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of young writers at Eddie’s door, was Brooke’s former lover from Rugby, Michael Sadler, now calling himself Sadleir.

  Eddie and Brooke again met Yeats, at the home of the Irish poet St John Ervine in Hendon, on 3 March. Two days later Edward Thomas visited Raymond Buildings for breakfast. In addition to this literary socializing, Brooke agreed to give a reading at the Poetry Bookshop, which had opened its doors in January. It was a disappointment, as only half a dozen people turned up to hear him read from Donne and Swinburne, according to Harold Monro’s biographer. Brooke himself gave a characteristically inflated account of the occasion to Noel, telling her that ‘thousands of devout women were there’. He added: ‘An elderly American female cried slightly, & shook me by the hand for some minutes.’