by Nigel Jones
The nickname stuck – on his visit to Tahiti four years later, Maugham found the islanders did not remember Gauguin but still wept when they talked of ‘Purpure’, the golden-haired youth who had once lived among them. Brooke’s magic, it seemed, even survived transplantation to a culture as far removed from genteel Cambridge as it is possible to get. The love affair was mutual: Brooke instantly fell head over heels in love with the island and decided to stay for a month at least. Nineteen fourteen, he told himself, did indeed promise to be an eventful year.
Accommodation at Brooke’s pension, with French wine thrown in, came to just over six shillings a day, and armed with a cash injection that Professor Wells had wired to New Zealand, fell well within his budget. The place was run by a Tahitian couple, and his only fellow-guests were a pair of English ranchers from Canada on an extended holiday. Brooke soon fell into a pleasant routine of eating, swimming, working and sleeping, with occasional fishing trips and journeys into the surrounding hills. He described the country and its life as ‘Greece without the intellect’ and he found the native Tahitians – particularly the women – graceful and comely. Gauguin, he complained to Eddie, had grossly maligned the ladies in his work. One such beauty was soon to loom large in his life, and give him a better reason than shortage of funds to tarry in Tahiti for far longer than he had originally intended.
Her name was Taatamata, and little is known of her origins. One report claims she was daughter to the village chief, while another writer, Paul Delany, says ‘she was vaguely attached to the hotel’, adding unchivalrously: ‘It would be unfair to call her a prostitute, but the English idea of virtue had no relevance to her life of easy sensuality.’ What is certain is that Taatamata had charm and beauty in abundance, and that the combination beguiled an entranced a Brooke only too ready, at last, for real physical romance and uninhibited love. A handful of surviving photographs taken by him of his mistress show a lovely, half-smiling face beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, with wavy black hair tumbling round her shoulders, and lithe limbs apparently willing to cast off the clothes that temporarily hide her charms. Her English was limited, and Brooke and she conversed in her pidgin English, his schoolboy French and one or two words in Tahitian that he quickly picked up. But these two beauties had little need for spoken words; within days, days that are significantly void of his endless chatty letters home, they had consummated their quick-flowering love, and a sated, utterly happy Brooke was writing perhaps his finest poem in praise of the woman he named ‘Mamua’. He called it ‘Tiare Tahiti’:
Mamua, when our laughter ends,
And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
Are dust about the doors of friends,
Or scent a-blowing down the night,
Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
Comes our immortality.
Mamua, there waits a land
Hard for us to understand.
Out of time, beyond the sun,
All at one in Paradise,
You and Purpure are one,
And Taü, and the ungainly wise.
There the Eternals are, and there
The Good, the Lovely, and the True,
And Types, whose earthly copies were
The foolish broken things we knew;
There is the Face, whose ghosts we are;
The real, the never-setting Star;
And the Flower, of which we love
Faint and fading shadows here; …
Woven from octosyllables, the poem is at once a lyrical celebration of unrestrained simple love, and a mockery of the ideal of Platonic Love:
Instead of lovers, Love shall be;
For hearts, Immutability;
And there, on the Ideal Reef,
Thunders the Everlasting Sea!
Later there is a nod towards Marvell’s plea to his coy mistress to make love while there is still time: for Brooke, Marvell’s
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace
becomes:
And there’s an end, I think, of kissing,
When our mouths are one with Mouth.
He calls on his willing lover to join him in the only possible Paradise: here and now:
Taü here, Mamua,
Crown the hair, and come away!
Hear the calling of the moon,
And the whispering scents that stray
About the idle warm lagoon.
Hasten, hand in human hand,
Down the dark, the flowered way,
Along the whiteness of the sand,
And in the water’s soft caress,
Wash the mind of foolishness,
Mamua, until the day.
For the first time in his life, water became an enfolding warm embrace that united lovers, rather than a brisk, bracing douche to douse away uncleanliness. The cold showers of Rugby and the chilly disapproval of the Ranee had never seemed further away. No wonder that he dallied in Tahiti even after his self-allotted month had passed. At last, too, his fearful self-consciousness was erased. Here, where every body was beautiful, every face striking, and where shame and vanity were cast off as easily as clothes, he was just one of the crowd. No longer need he act a part, nor strut and fret.
Ignoring Eddie’s squeak of protest that the stream of poems arriving steadily from the South Seas were all about ‘Love’, Brooke, writing on the veranda at Mataia, with the enticing Taatamata swaying and shimmying temptingly around him, embarked on yet another long poem, modestly entitled ‘The Great Lover’. Pompously, it begins:
I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,
My night shall be remembered for a star
That outshone all the suns of all men’s days.
But this ‘great lover’ now indisputably a virgin no more, is not boasting: the loves he wishes to ‘crown with immortal praise’ turn out to be, somewhat bathetically, another of Brooke’s lists of homely things he has enjoyed. Prosaic perhaps, but presented with a sensuality almost worthy of Keats in ‘St Agnes Eve’ – this is a list that we too can touch, handle, taste and smell:
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crusts
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and others such—
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year’s ferns …
Dear names, …
Dear indeed, and Brooke has not finished yet. As he sits in the tropical, chirruping night; his mind clutters with images from the north, from damp, chill, sodden but beloved England:
Royal flames;
Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that
do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;—
All these have been my loves.
Jesting and self-mocking he may have begun, but, as so often with Brooke, he has swapped horses in midstream, and the self-mocking laughter has become more than a little choked:
—Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what’s left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers …
But the best I’ve known
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains.
O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, ‘All these were lovely’; say, ‘He loved.’
For Cathleen, and anyone else who enquired, he found excuses for staying on; Mamua was only hinted at. ‘I’ve decided to stay here another month,’ he told Cathleen in February:
for two very good reasons: (1) that I haven’t enough money to get out, (2) that I’ve found the most ideal place in the world to live and work in. A wide veranda over a blue lagoon, a wooden pier with deep clear water for diving, and coloured fish that swim between your toes. there are also … scores of laughing brown babies from two years to fourteen. Canoes and boats, rivers, fishing with spear, net and line, the most wonderful food in the world – strange fishes and vegetables perfectly cooked. Europe slides from me terrifyingly … Will it come to your having to fetch me? The boat’s ready to start; the brown lovely people in their bright clothes are gathered on the old wharf to wave her away. Everyone has a white flower behind their ear. Mamua has given me one. Do you know the significance of a white flower worn over the ear? A white flower over the right ear means ‘I am looking for a sweetheart’. And a white flower over the left ear means ‘I have found a sweetheart’. And a white flower over each ear means ‘I have one sweetheart, and am looking for another.’ A white flower over each ear, my dear, is dreadfully the most fashionable way of adorning yourself in Tahiti.
It was a heavy enough hint to his ‘official’ girlfriend that he had found love elsewhere, but it does not seem to have alienated the actress’s sensible, tolerant affection for her wayward man.
Brooke was now burbling with joy:
Good luck to everyone. Love to the whole world. Tonight we will put scarlet flowers in our hair, and sing strange, slumberous South Sea songs to the concertina, and drink red French wine, and dance, and bathe in a soft lagoon by moonlight, and eat great squelchy tropical fruits, custard-apples, papaia, pomegranate, mango, guava and the rest. Urana. I have a million lovely and exciting things to tell you – but not now.
Meanwhile he was learning the truth of Gauguin’s summary of the easy-going Tahitian attitude to love: ‘in Europe you fall in love with a woman and eventually end up having sex with her; while in Tahiti, you start with the sex, after which you may fall – often quite as deeply – in love too’.
Soon Brooke had a genuine reason to linger in his island paradise, for a worm, or rather a germ, had entered it. In mid-February, while diving near the pier he had lyrically written about, he spied a turtle and gave chase. In the excitement, he failed to notice a jagged coral reef, and ripped his leg on it. Coral is notoriously poisonous, and Brooke’s immune system was notoriously weak: soon the five wounds – he would have noticed the Biblical parallel – were suppurating, and his primitive home treatment of dabbing them with iodine only made things worse. He was put to bed in a downstairs room at the back of the hotel, where Taatamata nursed him devotedly. By March, with the wounds still slow to heal, he travelled to Papeete accompanied by the loyal Taatamata.
He took the opportunity to post a package of poems to Eddie. Beside ‘Tiare Tahiti’ and ‘The Great Lover’, there was ‘Retrospect’ – a long and gentle meditation on Ka’s ‘mother love’; guilt about her was still gnawing him – and his masterpiece of satiric verse, ‘Heaven’, inspired by the many-coloured fish of the islands. It is a brilliant and devastating satire on religious belief, and almost unanswerable:
Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud!—Death eddies near—
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
He was suitably grateful to Taatamata for her tender loving care. He told Eddie that she was ‘a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a Goddess, & the heart of an angel, who is, luckily, devoted to me. She gives her time to ministering to me, I mine to probing her queer mind. I think I shall write a book about her – only I fear I’m too fond of her.’
By the end of March he was back at Mataia, and feeling the tug of home. He knew that an earthly paradise, by its nature, is fragile and fleeting. That was its charm. ‘Call me home, I pray you …’ he wrote to Cathleen. ‘I have been away long enough. I am older than I was. I have left bits of me about – some of my hair in Canada, and one skin in Honolulu, and another in Fiji, and a bit of a third in Tahiti, and half a tooth in Samoa, and bits of my heart all over the place.’
In the end it was not a call from Cathleen but the more mundane appearance of more money from Professor Wells that turned his reluctant footsteps homewards. The cash was enough to book a passage for San Francisco on the Tahiti, which was currently in Papeete. In a hurry, he said his sad farewells and boarded the boat on 5 April. As it steamed slowly across the broad Pacific he watched the green shores and mountain tops fade over the horizon: ‘I suddenly realised,’ he told Cathleen, ‘that I’d left behind those lovely places and lovely people, perhaps forever. I reflected that there was surely nothing else like them in this world, and very probably nothing in the next.’ His South Sea bubble had burst.
24
* * *
Homeward Bound
* * *
The magical spell that the South Seas had woven about Brooke during the six months he had spent there was slow to fade. As the Tahiti crawled slowly across the Pacific to
wards San Francisco, he lovingly imagined the bright Southern Cross that shone down on the ship also burning bright for ‘those good brown people of the Islands’, as he called them in a letter to Cathleen. He went on: ‘And they’re laughing and kissing and swimming and dancing beneath it. But for me it is set. And I do not know that I shall ever see it again … I’d told so many of those that loved me, so often “Oh yes, I’ll come back … next year perhaps: or the year after …” that I suppose I’d begun to believe it myself.’
Although Brooke told Cathleen that he ‘greatly desired’ to see her, there was a certain stiltedness about his conventional declarations of adoration. He hinted at the reason: ‘There are too many vagabond winds blowing through this evil and idle heart of mine, child. Do not let me wander. You are better than wandering.’ He ended: ‘English thoughts are waking in me. They’ll fetch me back.’ When the ship glided into San Francisco harbour, the sight of western civilization in all its vainglory induced another spurt of nostalgia for ‘his’ islands: ‘How I hate civilization & houses & trams and collars,’ he grumbled to Eddie. ‘If I got on the Tahiti and went back again, shouldn’t I find a quay covered with moving lights & lovely forms in white & pink & scarlet & green? And wouldn’t Taatamata be waiting there to welcome me with wide arms?’
By the time he got round to writing to his confidants the Cornfords, whose daughter, Helena, had been born during his travels, his nostalgia and distaste had curdled into sour bile:
It’ll be good to get back to theatres and supper parties & arguments & hedges & roast beef & misty half-colours. But oh! sometimes – I warn you – I’ll be having Samoan or Tahitian ‘thoughts’. When everything’s too grey, and there’s an amber fog that bites your throat, & everyone’s irritable and in a high state of nerves, & the pavement’s greasy, and London is full of ‘Miles of shopping women, served by men’, and another Jew has bought a peerage, and I’ve a cold in my nose, and the ways are full of lean & vicious people, dirty, hermaphrodites and eunuchs, Stracheys, moral vagabonds, pitiable scum – why, then I shall have a Sudseegedenke, a thought of 20º South, a Samoan thought …