Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Brooke’s bequests, written in full knowledge of his impending likely demise, must have seemed simple to him, but he could not have known of the complications they would cause. While explicitly appointing Eddie as his literary executor – ‘This is very odd. But I suppose I must imagine my non-existence, and make a few arrangements. You are to be my literary executor’ – he qualified the instruction by asking Eddie to let his mother keep his papers until his death (minus the love-letters and other revealing material that he had already instructed Dudley to abstract from Grantchester and destroy before the Ranee could clap eyes on them). Then he further muddied the waters by asking Eddie to let Ka and Alfred have any papers they might wish to keep. He ended his confusing letter, which amounted to a will and testament:

  You must decide everything about publication. Don’t print much bad stuff. Give my love to the New Numbers folk, and Violet and Masefield and a few who’d like it. I’ve tried to arrange that some money should go to Wilfrid and Lascelles and de la Mare … to help them write good stuff, instead of me. There’s nothing much to say. You’ll be able to help the Ranee with one or two arrangements. You’ve been very good to me. I wish I’d written more. I’ve been such a failure. Best love and goodbye. Rupert.

  As an afterthought he added: ‘Get Cathleen anything she wants.’

  Brooke’s financial affairs were in chaos: his mother found he had a huge overdraft of £300 at Barclays bank in Cambridge, and owed rent to the Neeves at Grantchester. Fortunately, his galloping popularity ensured that sales of his posthumous 1914 and Other Poems – rushed out by an enterprising Frank Sidgwick within months of his death – were stratospheric; and their continuing popularity – even at his critical nadir the public appetite for Brooke’s poems ensured that they never went out of print – gave his three designated heirs a healthy addition to their income for the rest of their days.

  The Grantully Castle was only one ship in an armada of 200 Allied vessels sailing towards the Dardanelles. The RND sheared off to make a diversionary attack. When they were 6000 yards from the shore Denis Browne finished his letter to Eddie Marsh with a paean of praise to Freyberg: ‘He loved and understood Rupert intuitively in spite of the differences in their temperaments, and last night, when we were making the grave, he was as tender as a woman, and as strong as a giant.’ The gallant Freyberg distinguished himself again during the landings, winning the DSO for swimming ashore alone, and lighting flares to guide his troops in. The Hood Battalion lost II of its 15 officers during the war: Freyberg, though severely wounded at Gallipoli, survived to become a general by the war’s end. Asquith, too, survived, despite the loss of a leg, to become Britain’s youngest general, and so did Johnny Dodge, who stayed in his adopted country at the war’s end to become a London stockbroker.

  Of the others, Denis Browne was the first to follow Brooke, as he predicted to Eddie at the beginning of June: ‘I’ve gone now, too; not too badly I hope. I’m luckier than Rupert because I’ve fought. But there’s no-one to bury me as I buried him, so perhaps he’s better off in the long run.’ He died on 7 June. Charles Lister, who, like Brooke, had spoken in longing terms of ‘fighting on the plains of Troy’, survived until the autumn. ‘Cleg’ Kelly was the next to go, dying at Beaumont-Hamel on the Somme, the battle that also took Oc Asquith’s brilliant elder brother, Raymond. Patrick Shaw-Stewart died the following year on the Western Front. By the war’s end only two of the five officers who had buried Brooke were still alive. The war took other friends too – Ben Keeling, another socialist and patriot; Hugh Russell-Smith, close friend of Rugby days; and in June 1915 – the same month that saw the death of Ferenc Békássy, fighting against the Russians with the Hungarian cavalry – a fresh blow struck at Bilton Road, Rugby: Alfred Brooke was killed by a stray shell at Vermelles in France. In his last letter home he had implored his mother not to believe the sentiments voiced in Brooke’s notorious sonnets; war, he said, was hell.

  As the casualty lists lengthened, the first signs of a reaction against the cult of Brooke’s death began to faintly glimmer. Unsurprisingly, and cautiously at first, they began to surface in Cambridge. Writing in the Cambridge Magazine a month after Brooke’s death, Harold Monro protested courageously against Brooke being used as a ‘poster-poet’ to boost recruitment for the war: ‘One fears his memory being brought to the poster-grade. “He did his duty. Will you do yours?” is hardly the moral to be drawn. Few people trouble to know much about poetry – but everyone takes an intelligent interest in death … His whole poetry is full of the repudiation of sentimentalism. His death was not more lovely than his life.’

  Jack Sheppard, Brooke’s former tutor, complained in the Cambridge Review that his friends owed a duty to Brooke not to comfort themselves by dwelling on a ‘mythical being who was not the real Rupert’. Gwen Raverat, too, privately protested – in a letter to Stanley Spencer – that the Brooke they had known was being taken from them and twisted into a lie to suit the needs of the hour. The myriad articles she had read about their friend, she said, ‘might have been written about King David, or Lord Byron, or Sophocles, or any other young man that wrote verse and was good looking … they never got the faintest feeling of his being a human being at all’. Among the vague abstract sentiments that were being voiced, the flatulent poetic tributes that were being penned, there was very little concrete personal reminiscence about the ‘real Rupert’: most likely because, for those in the know, the ‘poor truths’ about him were too rawly painful to be told.

  Meanwhile the cloying sentimentalists had the field to themselves; and their ranks were swelled by some friends of recent vintage like Wilfred Gibson, who wrote a poem – only a marginal improvement on the tide of verse tributes that the abrasive editor of The Nation, H. W. Nevinson, complained was deluging him:

  THE GOING

  He’s Gone.

  I do not understand.

  I only know

  That as he turned to go

  And waved his hand

  In his young eyes a sudden glory shone

  And he was gone.

  Frances Cornford chimed in with her own poem, ‘Rupert Brooke’, which ends:

  O friend we have loved

  Must it be thus with you? – and if it must be

  How can men bear laboriously to live?

  When he had got over his immediate grief for Brooke and Denis Browne, Eddie took leave from the Admiralty, and, after calling on Mrs Brooke to pay his condolences and help her open the boxes of her son’s possessions – ‘I had never seen such grief – went to stay with the Gibsons at their country cottage, where, as Gibson’s poem ‘The Golden Room’ recalled, Brooke had enjoyed the company of his fellow-poets only a year before:

  Do you remember that still summer evening

  When in the cosy cream washed living room

  Of the Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed –

  Our neighbours from the Gallows, Catherine

  And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;

  Eleanor and Robert Frost, living awhile

  At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them

  Helen and Edward Thomas? …

  ’Twas in July

  Of nineteen fourteen that we talked

  Then August brought the war, and scattered us.

  Now, on the crest of an Aegean isle,

  Brooke sleeps, and dreams of England: Thomas lies

  ‘Neath Vimy Ridge, where he, among his fellows,

  Died, just as life had touched his lips to song …

  Here, working eight hours a day in the attic, Eddie finished in eight days a 150-page memoir-cum-biography of Brooke, which, written in the first flush of grief for his dead friend and much altered by the censorious hand of the Ranee, is little more than a parade of surface facts, spiced by extracts from his letters: all designed to show Brooke in the flattering, one-dimensional light Eddie preferred to remember.

  The path to publication of the memoir was slow because it did not meet the Ranee’s
high expectations of what a memorial to her beloved son should be. She was mistrustful of Eddie by instinct, and her hostility was heightened by the fact that Brooke had appointed him as his executor: in her view, Eddie had snatched her son into the corrupting world of high politics and higher society; and she was not minded to lose him again now that he was dead. On the contrary, her view of Brooke as ‘just a fresh, charming boy’ was all the more enhanced by the fact that his living reality was not there to contradict and escape her, as he had maddeningly done so often in life. With icy determination, she swooped to reclaim her boy from the world’s clutches.

  The Ranee, almost demented with grief after Alfred’s death – ‘there is nothing nobler in England now than your sorrow,’ Abercrombie told her – vetoed the publication of the memoir, ostensibly on the grounds that it included some casual juvenile remarks by Brooke mocking schoolmasters, and hence, by implication, her husband. Eddie was irritated by her nitpicking: ‘How Rupert could be produced by a woman without sense of humour, or beauty, and narrow to that degree I shall never understand,’ he wrote to Frank Sidgwick.

  Exasperated, but determined, Eddie produced a second version of the memoir tailored to meet the Ranee’s requirements. But Mrs Brooke turned it down a second time in order to solicit the views of Geoffrey Keynes, always her favourite among Brooke’s friends, and her own choice to oust Eddie as executor. Keynes himself had known the Ranee since she was his housemistress at Rugby and loved her dearly – almost as deeply as he resented Eddie’s friendship with Brooke.

  After some months the Ranee had a change of heart: she accepted a much bowdlerized third version of the manuscript, which excluded a few ‘damns’ and almost all mention of Cathleen Nesbitt, whom she considered, like all actresses, to be ‘fast’. Maddeningly, she then changed her mind yet again and wrote a scorching letter to Eddie questioning his right to write the memoir because he was (a) too old; (b) ‘almost a stranger’ to the family; and (c) ‘almost absurdly inaccurate’ in his facts. As the kindly Eddie had gone out of his way in his busy life to boost her son’s reputation and had been consideration itself to Mrs Brooke in her bereavement, it beggars belief that he persisted with the project in the teeth of such insulting discouragement, but persist he did. Gritting his teeth, he wrote back in tones of injured moderation pointing out that if his memoir did not appear, years after it had been announced, the task would fall to other, even more untrustworthy and possibly less friendly hands.

  Chastened, the Ranee consented to a fourth version, happy at least in the knowledge that she had prevailed on Eddie to slur over all the central crises of Brooke’s life. After three years of this vexation, Eddie himself was on the verge of a breakdown as his work at last went to press. It appeared in 1918, in a different world from the one in which Brooke’s poems had been written. A hecatomb of corpses, and a great gulf of disillusion, now lay between the war sonnets and the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen.

  If Cathleen Nesbitt felt marginalized in Eddie’s memoir, being referred to mysteriously as X, one can only guess the feelings of Brooke’s last lover, Lady Eileen Wellesley, who was not mentioned at all. By July 1915 she was gossiping about her love affair with the freshly dead Brooke to her society friends. Violet Asquith’s sister-in-law Lady Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary on 3 July: ‘Eileen Wellesley claims very serious love affair with Rupert Brooke saying that quite unsuspected of everyone else they used to meet in Richmond Park and Eddie’s flat. No doubt Rupert Brooke had the thoroughly polygamous instincts of most poets.’ Eventually Eileen was to sell Brooke’s love-letters to her in order to buy a car.

  As the adulation of Brooke subsided under the increasingly heavy weight of the war and its unimaginable tragedies and losses, his friends were left to debate his legacy. Virginia Woolf spoke for many of them when, in an unsigned review of the memoir for the Times Literary Supplement in August 1918, she called it ‘incomplete’, pointing out that the most intimate (and interesting) parts of his letters had been rigorously excluded. She damned with very faint praise indeed, concluding by archly suggesting that only his friends could have known the real Brooke – Eddie, by virtue of his age, being excluded from this inner circle – and that the friends weren’t telling.

  Indeed they were not, at least in public. Privately, however, it was a different matter. Virginia, in contrast to her cool and polite TLS article, privately called the memoir ‘a disgraceful, sloppy, sentimental rhapsody’ which left Brooke ‘tarnished’. Before she wrote the review, she met James Strachey to discuss their joint views of Brooke: ‘We couldn’t say much … save that he was jealous, moody, ill-balanced, all of which I knew, but can hardly say in writing.’

  Coincidentally, much of the meeting had been taken up with discussion not of Brooke but of the news that Ka had just got engaged to be married to a young and weedy-looking Navy officer, unknown to their circle, named Will Arnold-Forster. Ka, it was generally agreed, had never and would never, get over her love for Brooke. Staying with Frances Cornford soon after his death, she had pathetically shown her Brooke’s last letter from the Aegean, drawing attention to the line ‘You were the best thing I found in life’. During the war she had plunged into work, trying to forget her grief. For six months she ran a camp for Serbian refugees in Corsica, then returned to London and worked as a civil servant organizing Allied shipping. During this time she met and, despite her old friends’ disdain, married, her Will. After the war they moved to Cornwall, where she stayed in distant touch with her friends – and, in accordance with Brooke’s wishes, had children and was happy. Or ostensibly so. Virginia thought differently:

  Her own identical life ended when Rupert died. So I think. After that she was acting a part very carefully and deliberately chosen. Maternity, Will, public life; hence some squint; she was never natural; never with me at least. And I was self-conscious; remembering how she had seen me mad. She used to come to Asheham, or Holford: condescending, patronising, giving up her own pleasures to tend me and help L[eonard] … But … that was her role: to help; to lift lame dogs; to entertain; to arrange; manage; receive confidences … after Rupert’s death she was playing a part. Yet this is superficial, for there was a trustiness in her; a stable goodness; a tenderness.

  After years of blameless life and toil – raising her children; presiding over her local magistrate’s bench; supporting her husband in his thankless attempts to promote the rural Labour party; even, on one occasion, enjoying a family day out with the cause of all her trouble, Henry Lamb, and his new family – Ka died of a heart attack, aged only 51, on 22 May 1938.

  Two of the Olivier sisters – those least important in Brooke’s life, Margery and Daphne – were afflicted, like Virginia, by mental illness. Margery’s madness was already well advanced in Brooke’s lifetime. She imagined most men she met to be in love with her, and eventually attacked her father violently. Noel signed the certificate confining her to an asylum, and she remained in such care until her death in 1974, outliving her younger sisters. Daphne recovered from her breakdown, which had been touched off by Brooke’s death – both she and Margery, like Brooke, were treated with the ‘stuffing’ method. Marrying relatively late, she and her husband, Cecil Harwood, opened England’s first Rudolph Steiner school. She divided her time between teaching and bringing up her five children, and died of cancer in 1950.

  Brynhild, too, was a victim of cancer. After she had had three children by Hugh Popham, his dullness finally dawned on her and she began an affair with a younger man, Raymond Sherrard, in 1918, a liaison which scandalized her friends and family. Hugh divorced her and she married Sherrard, and had three more children in conditions of growing poverty as her husband’s business ventures failed. In 1933 she developed lymphatic cancer, and died, after an agonizing illness, on 13 January 1935. The ruthless Noel evicted Sherrard and his children from the farmhouse at West Wittering on the Sussex coast, and used the place as a holiday home.

  Noel herself qualified as a doctor and married a co
lleague, Arthur Richards, in 1920. They had a son and four daughters. Late in the day, she too, like Bryn, grew bored with her conventional husband, and in 1932 started an affair with her former suitor, James Strachey – which, had he known of it, would doubtless have caused Brooke a wintry smile. The relationship lasted for a decade, and then Noel resigned herself to middle age. In contrast to Ka’s correspondence, her letters to and from Brooke remained unavailable until they were edited for publication by her granddaughter in 1991. In retirement Noel remained active, enjoying frequent visits to the London theatre, where she would speak of her long but ultimately fruitless liaison with Brooke with affection and regret. She died on 13 April 1969, aged 76, of a stroke while pruning a vine at the Sussex home she had inherited from Bryn.

  Elisabeth van Rysselberghe had been the recipient of one of Brooke’s shipboard farewells. He was cruelly dismissive, telling her that he was destroying her letters and that she should forget him. She, like so many others, continued to mourn his bright but brittle spirit for her whole long life, despite bearing a child to André Gide, of all people. She kept a photograph of Brooke by her bedside, and maintained that they had enjoyed a passionate physical affair – a claim which seems, on the scanty evidence available, quite plausible. After giving birth to Gide’s child, Catherine, Elisabeth married another man in 1931 and spent the rest of her life in seclusion in the South of France. She died in 1980, aged 90.

  Dudley Ward, in his quiet way the most loyal of Brooke’s friends, faithfully executed the task of extracting and destroying the embarrassing love-letters from Elisabeth and Eileen, from the mass of Brooke’s voluminous papers, before handing them over to the Ranee. He was aided and abetted by the equally loyal Jacques Raverat. Becoming a career civil servant and eventually head of the British branch of UNESCO, Dudley enjoyed a marriage to Annemarie von der Planitz which survived two world wars and produced one son, Peter, who still lives at Cley, in Norfolk, where Brooke was staying when the Great War broke out. Dudley inherited the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and, along with Geoffrey Keynes, was the chief keeper of the poet’s flame. One of his strangest duties was to investigate reports from distant Tahiti that Brooke had fathered a child by Taatamata only a few months before his own death.