Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  In 1987 came the most controversial book yet about Brooke. The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle was written by Paul Delany, a British-born Canadian professor of literature who sums up a contemporary view of Brooke with wit, brevity and understanding. At last, with the restraining hand of Geoffrey Keynes removed by his death, aged 95, Delany was able to give chapter and verse from those of Brooke’s letters that Keynes had silently and surgically vasectomized. These references included Brooke’s homosexual confessions and his rancid spleen against Bloomsbury. At long last, unsightly warts had been planted on the features of the ‘handsomest young man in England’. From praise of Ka’s ‘cunt’ to raging abuse of those he believed had wronged him, Brooke comes over as an astonishingly modern figure: flawed, self-pitying, with his emotions in such a hideous mess that he actually welcomed his death in war.

  Delany roundly denounces the Neo-Pagan dream as profoundly reactionary: ‘Nostalgic, anti-industrial, dedicated to leisure … and an Arcadian England’. He sees the ‘dew-dabbling’ delight in camping and nude bathing as essentially childish escapes from a world where someone else is always there to cook and clean. Brooke himself is represented as a failure in national nerve and imagination rather than the simplistic hero hailed by Churchill. And yet, and yet – Delany has the honesty to admit that there is something about Brooke and the Neo-Pagans that ‘still has the power to charm, resist it or debunk it as we may’.

  If Delany has written the last critical word on Brooke, biographical surprises continue to leap out: the belated publication of his correspondence with Noel, under the misconceived title Song of Love, appeared in 1990, edited by Noel’s granddaughter, Pippa Harris. The letters reveal a light and witty Brooke – albeit an irritatingly self-obsessed man, with the maddening habit of referring to every female as ‘Child’. Also on show is a surprisingly mature and sensible Noel, if on occasion displaying the icy, hard streak that seems so characteristic of the Oliviers. Another collection of letters, between Brooke and James, filled in more pieces of the puzzle when it was published in 1998 under the title Friends and Apostles.

  A self-confessed uncritical fan of Brooke, the disc jockey Mike Read, published the sensational claim in a 1997 biography, Forever England, concerning the poet’s daughter by Taatamata, backing up the story with a fuzzy photograph of Arlice Raputo, the woman in question. As Tahitian birth records are so scanty, the claim must ultimately remain unproven – but not unlikely. If true, it is appropriate that the one uncomplicated physical passion in Brooke’s life – and with a woman as unlike his mother as it is possible to be – should have borne such fruit.

  As the twenty-first century opened, a substantial revelation provided testament to both Brooke’s tangled relationships with women and his capacity to compartmentalize his life, keeping his friends in the dark as to what he was up to when he was not with them. It was his long-hidden affair with the artist (and later dog-breeder) Phyllis Gardner. Phyllis’s brief existence as Brooke’s passionate lover was unguessed at by any of his biographers until March 2000, when the British Library abruptly announced the discovery of a cache of 50 previously unseen letters between the pair, together with a 92-page account of the affair – which Phyllis coyly called ‘an acquaintanceship’ – in a memoir titled ‘A True History’.

  The documents had been gifted to the Library in 1948 by Phyllis’s sister Delphis, who stipulated that they should remain unopened for half a century, because of the ‘very intimate’ nature of their contents; but, in the confusion surrounding the Library’s move to its current St Pancras site, the documents were filed under Delphis’s name. They were thus temporarily overlooked in 1998, when they should have been read, and did not see the light of day until 2000, when the leather folder that housed them was finally opened. It revealed what Ann Payn, the Library’s Head of Manuscripts, described with understandable enthusiasm as ‘without a doubt the most exciting documents I have ever de-reserved’.

  Once rediscovered, their contents proved both explosive and corrosive to what remained of Brooke’s reputation as a golden boy whose character was as stainless as his Adonis-like good looks. They confirmed him as a cynical and heartless philanderer, with a streak of childish cruelty thrown into the strange mix that was his character. They also, however, confirmed the potent power of that most friable of Brooke’s positive qualities – charm – which even extended beyond the grave and bewitched poor Phyllis until her own sad demise.

  Phyllis’s mother, Mary Gardner (née Wilson), was the Irish-born daughter of a Scottish army officer. Phyllis’s father was Ernest Arthur Gardner, a man who attended City of London School before a brilliant career at Gonville and Caius College saw him graduate from Cambridge in 1884, with a double First in Classics. The following year he was made a Fellow of his college. In 1887, the year of Brooke’s birth, and after taking part in archaeological excavations in Egypt, Ernest was appointed Director of the British School in Athens. There, his wife joined him until she returned home to Cambridge for Phyllis’s birth, which took place on 6 October 1890. She would be the eldest of their three children.

  Their home in Pemberton Terrace was a substantial and solid five-bedroom Victorian townhouse, the work of the fashionable architect Richard Rowe, who also designed Cambridge’s Corn Exchange. It was a suitably imposing home for the rising academic, and it provided the centre of the tolerant, liberal, academic environment in which Phyllis grew up, remaining close to both her parents. Although her father was often absent abroad on archaeological digs, her relationship with her mother was particularly warm and affectionate, and it is evident from her account of the affair with Brooke that Mary Gardner took a protective, even possessive, attitude towards her daughter’s emotional storms.

  According to Phyllis’s account, she was with her mother when she first set adoring eyes on the man who would come to dominate her life. She was twenty-one and studying art, and he was twenty-four. Mother and daughter were taking tea in the refreshment room of King’s Cross Station on the portentous date, 11 November 1911, when Mary pointed out Brooke from across the room.

  ‘He had a mop of silky golden hair that he ran his fingers through,’ Phyllis recalled. ‘His face appealed to me as being at once rather innocent and babyish and inspired with an almost fierce life and interest and keenness.’ Later, still un-introduced, they found themselves sharing the same compartment on the train to Cambridge. Phyllis surreptitiously sketched the man she would describe gushingly as ‘this strong and brilliant creature … this rushing whirlwind,’ finding that ‘the more I drew him the better I liked him’.

  Soon afterwards, and seemingly by complete chance, Phyllis met Brooke in Cambridge and the relationship began. It should be remembered that at this moment in his crowded life, the late autumn of 1911, Brooke was on the cusp of major events in both his professional and private career. During the week he was living in the rooms found for him by Ka, in the Bohemian quarter of London between Soho and Bloomsbury that is now Fitzrovia, and working at the nearby British Museum on his thesis on Webster and the Elizabethan drama. At weekends he returned to Cambridge and to his rooms at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester. As Phyllis’s first sighting of him, on 11 November, was on a Saturday, this is presumably where he was bound.

  Brooke’s life was already amply and variously filled. Ka, from being a mere but more than usually helpful and comforting presence in Brooke’s life, was about to become the focus of his raging erotic obsession and, as it would transpire, the major emotional involvement of his existence. And of course, there was the continuing frenzied correspondence, punctuated by furtive meetings, with Noel Olivier. As well as his work on Webster, Brooke was also putting the finishing touches to his Poems, published the following month. At the same time, his always frenetic social life was continuing unabated in increasingly grand circles, under the guidance of Eddie Marsh.

  Despite all this, Brooke was more than happy to fit a new romantic involvement into his hectic schedule. Yet the burg
eoning romance marked time over the winter and spring of 1911–12, for Brooke was about to be plunged into his ‘Lulworth crisis’ and its lingering aftermath, with his morbid jealousy over Ka’s susceptibility to the charms of the wolfish Henry Lamb rapidly escalating into actual insanity. By the middle of 1912, and even after her miscarriage (or abortion), Ka had fallen for Brooke at the same time as he was withdrawing his labile affections from her. In the midst of these tribulations, Brooke had found time to compose his iconic hymn of nostalgia, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, and to conduct a flirtatious correspondence with Bryn Olivier – but he had found no lasting resolutions of his problems.

  In this sad state, he returned to Britain at the end of June and accepted a luncheon invitation from Mary Gardner, who claimed that she had read and enjoyed his Poems on their publication. Naturally, this invitation had actually been engineered by Phyllis, who, knowing little of Brooke’s other love tangles, was increasingly infatuated with the handsome poet: ‘I could not get him out of my head,’ she confessed. ‘I felt as if I knew him well, wonderfully well, as if I had always known him. I felt that here was a person cut out on a colossal scale.’ Brooke, for his part, was intrigued enough to agree to further meetings, without Mary present as chaperone. These took place at his new London base, Eddie’s flat at Raymond Buildings, which his mentor was happy to lend his protégé as a love nest.

  Brooke also paid a visit to the Gardner’s country home at Tadworth in Surrey. In the interim, his old madness had flared up again, and in a bout of misogynistic misanthropy he had ruthlessly cut his ties to four of his oldest friends and love objects: James Strachey, Noel and Bryn, and Ka herself. Decks had been cleared, perhaps creating a more propitious climate for Phyllis’s adoration. The couple lay in a pair of hammocks which, it may be remembered, had featured as potent erotic symbols for the younger Brooke during his Rugby-era stay-over at the home of Denham Russell-Smith. Phyllis and he compared notes about their lives, and Brooke was invited to admire her drawings, while she listened in awe to him reading his poetry: ‘His voice was such an exquisite instrument,’ she breathed.

  Then it was time for Phyllis to visit Brooke in his own domain – the Old Vicarage, Grantchester – where the climax of their brief but intense relationship took place across the summer of 1912. After entertaining Phyllis to tea, Brooke invited her to wander down to the banks of the Cam, where they both stripped off to go skinny dipping at Byron’s Pool, the spot where he had impressed the future Virginia Woolf with his instant erection on emerging from a dive. Phyllis does not record whether he achieved this feat for her, but she was certainly struck by his physical beauty. ‘He looked like a beautiful statue,’ she wrote. ‘And I could keep away from him no longer.’ After bathing, they chased each other naked around the meadows, and when he caught her by bringing her down with a rugby tackle, Brooke offered to dry her with the abundant tresses of his hair, which were ‘wild and tousled and standing on end like a mop’. Phyllis then let down her own hair and nuzzled his back with her locks. ‘I understood how an animal feels when it rubs you with its head,’ she said. ‘And I went on rubbing in a kind of ecstasy.’

  Then, suddenly, the sensuality got rough. Brooke caught hold of her neck with both hands and squeezed her throat with his thumbs, forcing her back onto the grass. ‘Supposing I were to kill you?’ he hissed. Not grasping his fragile mental state, Phyllis lightly replied: ‘Then I should be dead.’ Apparently annoyed by her frivolity, Brooke gripped her throat again, but Phyllis appeared to get some sexual satisfaction from the sensation of asphyxiation. ‘I was in a sort of heaven,’ she remembered, ‘though once he made me choke.’ Perhaps frightened, she asked how long it would take to strangle her. ‘Oh, two or three minutes,’ he replied casually.

  But the moment of madness passed, and the episode inspired Brooke instead to write a particularly dreadful, self-regarding poem, ‘Beauty and Beauty’:

  When Beauty and Beauty met,

  All naked, fair to fair,

  The earth is crying-sweet,

  And scattering-bright t he air,

  Eddying, dizzying round,

  With soft and drunken laughter,

  Veiling all that may befall,

  After … after …

  Where Beauty and Beauty met

  Earth’s still a-tremble there,

  And winds are scented yet,

  And memory-soft the air

  Bosoming, folding glints of light,

  And shreds of shadowy laughter;

  Not the tears that fill the years,

  After … after …

  Recalling their frolics in tranquillity later, during a third trip to Germany, Brooke – employing his usual patronizing ‘child’ epithet – wrote:

  Did you know what you were saying, child, when you said ‘Why shouldn’t one be primitive, now?’? God, it was a hard struggle in me, half against half, not to be. Sudden depths get moved – but it wouldn’t have done. It’s fine to be ‘primitive’ in a way: finer than to be merely a modern person. But there’s something finer yet – the best of each – beast and man.

  If the word ‘primitive’ meant different things to them both – to Phyllis a casting aside of restraints with clothes, and a return to some Edenic paradise, while to Brooke a more sinister shade of violence and death – Phyllis remained in blissful ignorance of her lover’s darker depths and she maintained her adoring mode.

  Meeting later that summer in Eddie’s flat, they finally consummated their passion. The seduction began with Brooke reading aloud his poem ‘The Night Journey’, with its concluding lines:

  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 strengths and splendour of our purpose swings.

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

  ‘There was a strange gripping of my heart,’ wrote Phyllis – an improvement, surely, on the strange gripping of her throat that had characterized their last encounter. ‘And the feel of him made my blood run fire. “You don’t know how your touch burns me” I said: and for answer he rose up a little and put his arms round me.’

  Phyllis fuzzes the actual detail of their love-making, blurring it into her memories of the electric light on the ceiling, the table by the window and the zebra-skin rug on the floor – the last a souvenir of Eddie’s safari to Africa with Churchill. She writes vaguely of ‘Things in a sort of rainbow whirl … the chief part of the picture is himself, radiant, beautiful, at once pathetically helpless and full of a wild, irresistible driving force.’ Afterwards, Brooke felt the sweat of her hands and, recalling his academic thesis, remarked that ‘The Elizabethans said that was the sign of a passionate disposition.’

  Leaving the flat in a dream and returning to her parental home, Phyllis appeared flushed, and her mother asked if she had had an accident. Phyllis denied it. ‘Has R. been making love to you, then?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘Yes’ came the honest answer. ‘And that,’ wrote Phyllis, ‘was all that was said.’

  Phyllis and Brooke continued their trysts at Eddie’s flat across the autumn, with Brooke comparing her naked body to that of ‘a rather pretty boy’. Gradually, however, some inkling of Brooke’s tortured and morbid personality began to shine through Phyllis’s dumb adoration. Walking through a London that was then, as now, bristling with builders’ cranes, he became possessed of the idea that they would drop their loads of bricks onto the people swarming below.

  Crossing Chelsea Bridge, he compared the bundles of straw hung from the bridge (to cushion it from passing river traffic) to the heads of decapitated felons and traitors that used to adorn London Bridge as a warning to others. Despite these ominous signs, Phyllis remained enthralled with her lover, and her eyes ‘were blinded with tears’ when she saw him off on the train
to spend his customary Christmas with the Ranee at Rugby.

  Phyllis would have been unaware that by now yet another love interest had just entered Brooke’s life in the shape of Cathleen Nesbitt: their first supper meeting (engineered by Eddie) took place at Raymond Buildings on 20 December 1912. Like Phyllis, Cathleen was of Irish extraction and had the dark good looks that Brooke admired. But Phyllis was vaguely aware that Brooke was being drawn by Eddie and others into higher reaches of the social strata where she could not swim after him. Nor, she darkly suspected, did his grand new friends share her monogamous sexual morality. She wrote: ‘I knew that he had been drawn into a vortex of would-be original people, who to satisfy their own base natures had made inconstancy a principle.’

  On New Year’s Day 1913, Brooke departed for Cornwall and the holiday with his Cambridge friends Francis and Frances Cornford. On his return, Phyllis and he met again at Raymond Buildings. But a seemingly trivial incident as they entered the flat made Phyllis aware of the growing gulf between them, which she characterized as a parting of their philosophies of life: she thought that life should be ‘some sort of striving after nobleness’ while she feared that he was a mere hedonist. As they stood before the door of the flat, the split (and Brooke’s growing misogyny) came into the open.

  She was unable to open the lock and, after fiddling with it in vain, passed the key back to Brooke, who opened it with the ease of long practice. She asked why he had been able to open it so easily. ‘Because you’re a rotten female,’ he replied, and then, in a startling reference to the current Suffragette campaign for the female franchise, added insult to injury: ‘All women are beasts! And they want a vote – but they’ll never get it.’ Angered by his response, Phyllis declined his invitation to spend the night with him, and a deep disillusion began to dissolve her romantic fantasies. ‘My heart sank within me. Where was my castle in the air, where my visionary child?’