Rupert Brooke Read online

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Reviews

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  For Lally

  with love

  * * *

  Contents

  * * *

  Welcome Page

  Main Text

  Introduction

  1 Breathing English Air

  2 Youth is Stranger than Fiction

  3 ‘Every hour as golden’

  4 ‘Forward the Day is Breaking’

  5 Apollo and Apostles

  6 Fabian Summer

  7 In Arcadia

  8 Milk and Honey

  9 The Old School

  10 ‘Life burns on’

  11 Munich

  12 Elisabeth

  13 Virginia and the Old Vicarage

  14 You and You

  15 Lulworth and the Ka Crisis

  16 Madness

  17 Herr und Frau Brooke

  18 Three Women, a Play and a Poem

  19 Broken Glass

  20 New Friends, Now Strangers

  21 Rotters and Fellows

  22 A New World

  23 Heaven on Earth

  24 Homeward Bound

  25 ‘If Armageddon’s On’

  26 The Soldier

  27 A Body of England’s

  Epilogue: Brooke Now – From Myth to Man

  Afterword: The Strange Death of Ka Cox

  Preview

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Sources and Further Reading

  Index

  Picture Credits

  About this Book

  Reviews

  About the Author

  Also by this Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  * * *

  Introduction

  * * *

  What’s in a name? ‘Rupert Brooke – isn’t it a romantic name?’ trilled Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf after meeting the brilliant and handsome young Cambridge freshman who was about to conquer the university, just as he had cut a swathe across the sacred sward of Rugby School’s famous Close.

  It takes a huge leap of the imagination for us, at the end of the century whose batting he opened, to imagine what the mere words ‘Rupert Brooke’ conjured up for his contemporaries and the generations that followed his death en route to the blood-drenched beaches of Gallipoli. Those three syllables encapsulate a world: a timeless world of honeyed teas, cricket whites on greens, the rap of leather on willow and the mild ripple of applause that follows, punts languidly negotiating a river bend where weeping willows lean, girls in gypsy headscarves and floppy-haired young men; a world where – except at rural camps – someone else was always there to cook and clean. A world of class distinctions, rotten teeth and people who knew their place. But I find myself drifting into one of Brooke’s ‘list’ poems, in which, simply by ticking off material objects in which he took delight, he attempted to summon and sum up a world to defy time, change, decay or, in one of his favourite words, ‘transience’.

  It is a measure of Brooke’s success as a writer that it is so difficult for us to picture the Edwardian and Georgian period in which he bloomed except through the rosy-lensed prescription glasses that he provided. But the golden glow surrounding him and his friends, the misty aura that he so mysteriously casts over his era, is essentially sentimental and false. It is a myth created not so much by Brooke himself but by some of his friends, and by politicians, propagandists and a public hungry for heroes in a war of unprecedented ferocity and tragedy.

  One of the many paradoxes about Rupert Brooke is that no one more bitterly loathed sentimentality than he did. E. M. Forster remarked that he did not envy anyone who applied to Brooke for sympathy, since his hatred of ‘slosh’ ran so deep that it had poisoned the ‘eternal wellsprings’ and curdled the milk of human kindness. And yet both Brooke’s persona and his best-known poetry are steeped in mawkishness. ‘He has clothed his attitude in fine words, but he has taken the sentimental attitude,’ his fellow war poet Charles Hamilton Sorley justly remarked of the famous 1914 sonnets. Some of Brooke’s lines have entered the language, certainly; but what lines – a glance at the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations gives the answer: ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three?/And is there honey still for tea?’ ‘If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.’ ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour/And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.’ And so on. There is little sense here of the bitter Brooke whose sour ‘love’ sonnets usually ended with a spurt of vitriol at the beloved; nor of the ‘sick’ Brooke whose sonnet comparing seasickness to the pangs of love – ‘’Tis hard, I tell ye/To choose ’twixt love and nausea, heart and belly’ – so outraged his contemporaries; and not just for its awful closing rhyme.

  Yet such paradoxes litter his life: the super-patriot of 1914, the ‘chauvinistic fugelman’, as Michael Holroyd characterizes him, was also the socialist who proclaimed in 1910: ‘I hate the upper classes.’ The ‘Great Lover’ of women was almost exclusively homosexual – in spirit if not often in flesh – at Rugby and Cambridge. The youth whose carefree charm dazzled (almost) everyone who met him could also admit that his air of easy grace was an assumed act, a careful performance: ‘Oh yes, I did the fresh boyish stunt,’ he boasted airily after his first meeting with a bedazzled Henry James, during which he poled ‘the Master’ down the Cam in a punt. Sure enough the besotted novelist joined the legion of Brooke’s admirers, to the extent that his last published work was an introduction, dribbling with doting drool, to Brooke’s posthumous Letters from America.

  Brooke was a formidably energetic letter-writer – few weeks passed in his adult life without at least one, more often three or four, lengthy screeds splashing from his pen, to his biographers’ mingled delight and despair – who was also permanently prey to nervous exhaustion. The Brooke whose sheer love and zest for life shines out in the scores of recollections and memoirs of him could speak and write privately with a scorn, prejudice, paranoia and downright madness that can still shock the unprepared reader. The open, smiling countenance hid a Dorian Gray face twisted by hatred of women, homosexuals, Jews, pacifists, promiscuity (except in himself); and above all the group of former friends we now lump together under the term ‘Bloomsbury’. The barefoot boy with the sun in his eyes and hair became a rabid ranter, obsessively raving about ‘dirt’, ‘cleanliness’, ‘foulness’ and threatening to shoot himself or his enemies. Plainly there is something wrong here; badly wrong.

  Brooke was, in current jargon, ‘a control freak’. Rigidly ruled and directed in his own early life by a mother whose tyrannical grip he never entirely escaped, and by the iron codes of boarding-school life, he subsequently demanded freedom for himself, yet could not bear to see the same privilege exercised by others – especially women. One of his more bizarre fantasies was the idea of kidnapping a woman who briefly obsessed him – Bryn Olivier – and ‘going shares’ with her with a male friend in Brighton’s Metropole Hotel. Another face of his controlling tendency was his fears about Bryn taking a country walk on her own – so much so that he gravely warned her sister Noel against the danger of her being abducted in the street. So how did this hysterical bundle of prejudice, neurosis, nastiness and insanity come to exercise such a spell over so many of his contemporaries?

  It was not only obviously susceptible figures like Henry James or his patron Eddie Marsh, but hard-bitten old buzzards like Herbert Asquith, Churchill, General Sir Ian Hamilton and D. H. Lawrence who fell swooning at his feet. He was welcome at the high tables of Cambridge colleges, and nursed by
the Prime Minister’s family at Downing Street in wartime; he conferred alone with Churchill at the Admiralty; he interviewed premiers; joined a West End chorus line; slept under the stars; seduced South Sea island maidens; and carved his name indelibly into the memories of a generation. In short, he was endowed with more than his fair share of that most intangible of all qualities: charm. He had it by the truckload.

  So heavily laden with charm was Brooke that it became an insupportable burden. And it has long outlasted his brief life. One of his most critical biographers, Paul Delany, has the honesty to admit: ‘There is something in Rupert Brooke and Neo-Paganism that still has power to charm, resist it or debunk it as we may.’ As to what that ‘something’ is, Delany identifies it as ‘hope. It is an emotion that, in any collective form, seems almost extinct today – deposed by its bastard child, ambition.’ Delany also remarks that, from his earliest youth, Brooke was always performing before an unseen audience. Certainly, he was always painfully conscious of his place in posterity. At the end of a slightly callous letter to Eddie Marsh explaining why he would not be marrying the actress Cathleen Nesbitt – one of many women he pursued with apparent ardour only to reject when they began to look attainable – he scribbled in parentheses: ‘This is the sort of letter that doesn’t look well in a biography.’

  Two years later, when his early death had ceased to be a possibility to be toyed with at leisure, he wrote to another lover, Ka Cox, from the ship that was taking him to extinction on the eve of the Gallipoli campaign: ‘Dear child, I suppose you’re about the best I can do in the way of a widow … They may want to write a biography! How am I to know if I shan’t be eminent? … It’s a good thing I die.’ Brooke was right: ‘They’ did indeed want to write a biography; but the battles that ensued for possession of the barely cold corpse of his ‘repper’, as he called his reputation, would have both amused and amazed him. In the end, his friends failed him. They disobeyed his dying injunction to ‘let the world know the poor truths’ about him, and they buried the real Brooke beneath a heap of rubble as heavy as the marble chunks that were heaped on his tomb.

  By the time he died Rupert Brooke was not just a minor poet whose charm and real, if limited, talent, had enchanted a generation of close friends. Thanks to the war’s exigencies he had become a symbol of the nation’s youth in arms, a name, a face and a body that could be conveniently corralled as the first steer for the slaughterhouse. Winston Churchill twirled the lasso: ‘Rupert Brooke is dead,’ he informed readers of The Times portentously: ‘A voice had become audible, a note had been struck … more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms … than any other … The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.’ After more in similar vein, Churchill concluded his propagandizing tribute: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.’

  But the figure eulogized in this magnificent example of Churchillian rhetoric – and in countless poems and tributes by less gifted wordsmiths – was almost unrecognizable to Brooke’s friends. As well as being ‘joyous, fearless, versatile’ and so on, the man they had known was also at times cold, cruel, pettish, weak, a poseur, anti-Semitic, anti-women, paranoid and childish. In short, he was a human being with a full flush of faults and flaws. The Brooke who was presented to the public was not a real man, but a gilded cardboard cut-out. Those who knew better kept their reservations to themselves. They shrouded the real man and refined the image, until their ‘Rupert Brooke’ bore as much resemblance to a living, breathing man as the outsized statue of a hunky Belgian male prostitute that was unveiled in the 1920s as a memorial to the poet on Skyros, the Greek island where he had died.

  The first gilder who set to work was Eddie Marsh, whose memoir of Brooke, delayed until 1918 by the necessity of placating the dead poet’s formidable mother, horrified his friends by making no mention of his intimate life at all: major friends like Noel Olivier or Cathleen Nesbitt were omitted altogether, and the central crisis of Brooke’s life – the total mental and physical breakdown he suffered in 1912 – was discreetly left out of this anodyne account. By the time the account appeared, a huge wall of corpses separated Brooke’s world from the grey, famished, flu-stricken, bereft post-war era. The poetry of Sassoon, Owen and Eliot more closely resembled such a wasteland – yet Brooke’s poems continued to sell in spades, producing a healthy income for the three Georgian poets he had nominated as his heirs. Despite, or more likely because of, this popularity with the public, critical opinion turned irrevocably against Brooke, bracketing him with the Edwardian celebrants of an unreal England that had died with the shots at Sarajevo. His friends continued to grumble among themselves, but in the popular mind he was a sunny lightweight poet who had written a clutch of naively patriotic verses ludicrously celebrating the coming of the worst war in human history.

  By 1930, when the death of Brooke’s overbearing mother removed a boulder blocking the path of biographical enquiry, the world had worse things to worry about than the switchback emotions of a dead poet. Brooke’s surviving friends remained reticent, and to ensure continued silence Mrs Brooke’s gagging role was assumed by Geoffrey Keynes, a school friend of her son, and a man who worshipped both Brooke and his mother: ‘I came to love her very dearly.’ It was Keynes who wrested Brooke’s papers from his designated literary executor, Eddie Marsh; Keynes who sat on his letters, until eventually producing a heavily bowdlerized version as late as 1968; and Keynes who discouraged any attempt to write an objective biography of the friend whom he described at the end of his own long life as ‘quite the most wonderful person I have ever known’. An uncomplicated heterosexual who was able to overlook even the rampant homosexuality of his more famous elder brother John Maynard Keynes, Geoffrey Keynes waited until the 1950s before finding a man he felt could be entrusted to write a ‘safe’ official biography.

  The man he and his fellow-Trustee, the even more cautious Dudley Ward, chose for this delicate task was a minor poet and opera librettist named Christopher Hassall. The Trustees were able to count on Hassall’s discretion as he had written in 1955 a huge and exhaustive biography of Eddie Marsh, which, although 700 pages long, manages to avoid the topic of its subject’s homosexuality. Hassall duly repaid their trust with another huge volume into which he stuffed almost every fact known about Brooke – except any mention of his sexuality, his paranoia or any other shadowy aspect of his brief existence. Although Hassall died of a heart attack just before publication of Rupert Brooke: A Biography in 1964, the most sensitive and secret areas of Brooke’s life remained, for the time being, inviolate from enquiry. Even Hassall, however, left silent clues for a bolder biographer to follow: by colouring in the details of Brooke’s everyday existence, he made the gaps stand out all the more glaringly.

  In 1968 a bolder biographer did step forward: the young playwright Michael Hastings produced The Handsomest Young Man in England. This lavishly illustrated pictorial account of Brooke and his circle performed a necessary demolition job on both the myth of the untainted golden boy and the excessive anti-Brooke critical reaction that had damned most of his work to the limbo of the great unread. Hastings explained neatly why the Brooke myth had arisen. He pointed out how perfectly the poet embodied a pastoral dream of innocence and youth, and of a mythical pre-modern England. Finally, with the daring of youth and the sixties, Hastings hinted that the reluctance of Brooke’s surviving friends like Keynes, Dudley Ward and Frances Cornford to expose the full truth about him had something to do with their fear of destroying a legend on which the foundations of their own lives rested.

  Twelve years later, in 1980, the editor and critic John Lehmann published Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend, a brief and elegant account which told the story of Brooke’s breakdown for the first time. Leh
mann, who had known many of Brooke’s friends, correctly identified the episode as the central crisis in his subject’s life.

  The slow process of revelation continued through the eighties and nineties with dribs and drabs of information leaking out at intervals from a variety of sources. In 1987 came a study, The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle by Paul Delany, that began as a collective biography of the Olivier sisters and ended as the most striking revelation of Brooke’s life and personality so far. Delany, the first writer to examine Brooke since the death of the watchful Keynes in 1982, gave chapter and verses from the poet’s letters to illustrate his manic assault on Bloomsbury. Perhaps Delany went too far in his distaste for Brooke’s ravings and slipperiness. Brooke may have often overreacted, but the Stracheys and most of the Bloomsberries were truly poisonous people, whose gossip about each other was bad enough, but whose malice about outsiders was absolutely toxic.

  Brooke comes over as a surprisingly modern figure, with his emotions in such a hideous mess that the war and his death must have come as a blessed relief. This picture was reinforced by the appearance in 1990 of Song of Love, the inappropriately titled collection of the often blistering letters between Brooke and Noel Olivier, edited by Noel’s granddaughter, Pippa Harris. Another piece from the vast jigsaw that is Brooke’s correspondence fell into place in 1998 with the publication of his even more revealing letters to his oldest and most intimate friend, James Strachey: Friends & Apostles, edited by Keith Hale. The same year saw the appearance of Forever England by Mike Read, the disc jockey, an unashamed admirer of Brooke of the old school. To Read belongs the credit for discovering the existence of Brooke’s probable illegitimate daughter, Arlice Raputo, by his Tahitian lover Taatamata.