Forever England (13 page)
Authors: Mike Read
[I]f I could only beat you suddenly on the nose, very hard, or pull your hair with painful and unexpected vehemence – Oh Noel, but I must see you. I weary you with another long slushy letter. I mistrust myself letter writing … I know I often fail to convey the effect I desire.
On 6 December, he enclosed a sonnet written the previous spring; ‘Don’t go reading anything into it except itself. I’ve never seen you “cry and turn away”.’
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old…’ ‘And when we die
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips,’ said I.
– ‘Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!’
‘We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!’ we said;
‘We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!’ … Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
- And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Noel appeared ambivalent to his poetry: ‘I liked the old “Mummy” poems better than this “we flung us” one.’
During November, Rupert dined at Magdalene College with his friend A. C. Benson, who recorded Brooke’s physical attributes and countenance:
He was far more striking in appearance than exactly handsome in outline. His eyes were small and deeply set. It was the colouring of face and hair which gave special character to his look. The hair rose very thickly from his forehead, and fell in rather stiff arched locks on either side – he grew it full and over-long, it was of a beautiful dark auburn tint inclining to red, but with
an underlying golden gleam in it. His complexion was richly coloured, as though the blood were plentiful and near the surface; his face much tanned, with the tinge of sun-ripened fruit. He was strongly built, but inclined to be sturdy, and even clumsy, rather than graceful or lithe … his voice was far from beautiful, monotonous in tone, husky and somewhat hampered in the throat.
Notwithstanding Benson’s comments about his voice, Rupert was a convincing speaker, addressing the Cambridge Fabians a month later for the last time as their president. His lecture was on ‘Democracy and the Arts’, and included various interesting observations and thoughts: ‘It seems to me that this century is going to witness a struggle between Democracy and Plutocracy’, and:
Observe the situation and remember it’s a real one, not one in a book. (1) Art is important. (2) The people who produce art at present are, if you look into it, nearly always dependent on unearned income. (3) We are going to diminish and extinguish the number of those dependent on unearned income. We shall also reduce the number of those rich enough to act the patron to artists, and change in a thousand other ways the circumstances of the arts and of the artists.
Brooke was clearly concerned that the system which enabled artists, writers and musicians to live was being destroyed, debating how much literature would have been lost to us, had writers over the centuries not received patronage:
Poetry is even worse off than the other arts. Even Mr Rudyard Kipling could not live on his poetry. Very few poets, perhaps one or two in five years, sell 1,000 copies of a volume … An
experienced publisher tells me no one in England makes £50 a year by poetry – except perhaps Mr Kipling and Mr Noyes.
Brooke stressed the importance of contemporary art as opposed to excepting the standards of former generations: ‘Beware for the generations slip imperceptibly into one another, and it is so much easier to accept standards that are prepared for you. Beware of the dead.’
R
UPERT HAD ALSO
to beware of the living, in the shape of Mrs Stevenson at the Orchard, who had been getting increasingly disenchanted with the comings and goings at all hours of Rupert and his friends, and especially with his habit of going barefoot. The landlady and lodger reached an impasse, which concluded in him defecting to the Old Vicarage next door, with his beloved Granta running at the bottom of the garden.
In 1380 Corpus Christi College had appropriated the Rectory at Grantchester, appointing the first vicar, William Wendye, and
establishing a building on the site of the Old Vicarage, built on a strip of land that ran down to the river at a place where the locals extracted gravel from a pit called Hog Hunch. The present dwelling was erected in the 1680s and remained as a vicarage until early in the 1820s, when it was advertised to be let, and was taken by the Lilley family who also owned Manor Farm. In the middle of the century Grantchester’s new vicar, William Martin, had a new vicarage built, and the old one was bought by a local market gardener, Samuel Widnall, on the occasion of his marriage to Elizabeth Smith; Widnall lived there until his death in 1894. The house then passed to his sister-in-law and subsequently a niece; she, having decided not to live in the house, installed Henry and Florence Neeve and their son Cyril as tenants. The fourth member of the family was the bull terrier that Brooke nicknamed Pudsey Dawson. The dog seemed equally at home in the Orchard and the Old Vicarage.
No sooner had Rupert moved his things into the Old Vicarage than he announced that he was soon to leave for Germany and would return in May. Before going abroad, though, he returned to Lulworth early in the new year, staying again at Cove Cottage – with Gwen Darwin, Ka Cox and Jacques Raverat, the latter drawing Rupert’s portrait. Ka tried to buy Rupert a belated Christmas present of a book, and when he seemed indifferent as to what it was she was clearly hurt, for he felt compelled to write, ‘Oh tell me that you’re unhurt, for I hurt you in such a way, and I was mean and selfish, and you’re I think one of the most clear and most splendid people in the world.’ On 1 January 1911 he wrote ‘Sonnet Reversed’:
Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights
Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.
Ah, the delirious works of honeymoon!
Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures,
Settled at Balham at the end of June.
Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures,
And in Antofagastas. Still he went
Cityward daily; still she did abide
At home. And both were really quite content
With work and social pleasures. Then they died.
They left three children (besides George, who drank);
The eldest Jane, who married Mr Bell,
William, the head-clerk in the County Bank,
And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.
Despite the seemingly one-sided relationship with Noel, Brooke was a frequent visitor to The Champions, where Bryn, Daphne and Margery all enjoyed his company. Prone to more than a little exaggeration on occasion, Rupert wrote to Ka Cox:
I’m staying – I don’t know how long, at The Champions. ’Til Wednesday afternoon or Thursday dawn … Limpsfield. It is very unpleasant. The atmosphere at Priest Hill [the home of the Oliviers’ neighbours, the Pyes], and The Champions is too damned domestic. I love the people and cough the atmosphere.
Although he would later write to Noel, ‘Limpsfield made me incredibly better. Could you let it get round to your mother how nice I found it?’ Rupert later went through a period where he felt drawn to the sensuality and beauty of Noel’s sister Bryn, but nothing ever came of it and it seemed to be a fleeting fancy. Margery became temporarily obsessed with Rupert, which was attributed to her mental instability and her assumptions that many of the males she met were in love with her.
Rupert went to Europe for three months, writing to various friends, ‘I shall be in Germany at peace’, ‘I shall be in Germany for ever’ and, ‘It is a thousand years since I have seen you and it will be more before I can see you again, for in three days I go to Germany, and from there I shall wander south and east and no one will hear of me more.’ During January, February and March. Rupert resided in Munich, where he learned German, watched Ibsen plays and saw one of the first performances of Strauss’s new opera,
Der Rosenkavalier
. Through an introduction from the publisher Dent, he stayed for some while with the painter Frau Ewald, through whom he was thrust into the social and artistic circles of the city. There was a part of Brooke, though, that couldn’t shake off England completely, which diminished his ability to enjoy Munich to the full. Despite having been away for some while, he was still much talked about in Cambridge and London, one friend declaring to James Strachey, ‘I’m not surprised people don’t fall in love with Rupert, he’s so beautiful that he’s scarcely human.’ By the end of this period, he had produced an excellent new poem, which he explained to Eddie Marsh. ‘I spent two months over a poem that describes the feelings of a fish, in the metre of “L’Allegro”. It was meant to be a lyric, but has turned into a work of twenty lines with a moral end.’ He copied the original onto two separate postcards, which he sent to Ka; this was the version published later, containing several changes.
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o’ the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.
Those silent waters weave for him
A fluctuant mutable world and dim,
Where wavering masses bulge and gape
Mysterious, and shape to shape
Dies momently through whorl and hollow,
And form and line and solid follow
Solid and line and form to dream
Fantastic down the eternal stream;
An obscure world, a shifting world,
Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,
Or serpentine, or driving arrows,
Or serene slidings, or March narrows.
There slipping wave and shore are one,
And weed and mud. No ray of sun,
But glow to flow fades down the deep
(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);
Shaken translucency illumes
The hyaline of drifting glooms;
The strange soft-handed depth subdues
Drowned colour there, but black to hues,
As death to living, decomposes –
Red darkness of the heart of roses,
Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,
And gold that lies behind the eyes,
The unknown unnameable sightless white
That is the essential flame of night,
Lustreless purple, hooded green,
The myriad hues that lie between
Darkness and darkness!…
And all’s one,
Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,
The world he rests in, world he knows,
Perpetual curving. Only – grows
An eddy in that ordered falling,
A knowledge from the gloom, a calling
Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud –
The dark fire leaps along his blood;
Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
The intricate impulse works its will;
His woven world drops back; and he,
Sans providence, sans memory,
Unconscious and directly driven,
Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.
O world of lips, O world of laughter,
Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,
Of lights in the clear night, of cries
That drift along the wave and rise
Thin to the glittering stars above,
You know the hands, the eyes of love!
The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,
The infinite distance, and the singing
Blown by the wind, a flame of sound,
The gleam, the flowers, and vast around
The horizon, and the heights above –
You know the sigh, the song of love!
But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare;
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.
Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run,
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.
After Munich he moved south to Vienna, before continuing to Florence to meet up with his godfather and Rugby schoolmaster, Robert Whitelaw, who had journeyed south with Rupert’s younger brother Alfred. From there Brooke wrote to Eddie Marsh, ‘I am thirsting for Grantchester. I am no longer to be at the Orchard, but next door at the Old Vicarage, with a wonderful garden.’ And a letter to Gwen Darwin also showed an element of homesickness: ‘Oh my God! I do long for England!’
Although Noel and Rupert were technically engaged, there now seemed to be a gulf between them preventing any real relationship from developing. Rupert had been in Munich mingling with painters, psychologists and poets, while Noel was mending underclothes with Miss Middlemore or making dresses and blouses under the watchful eye of Miss Rice. While she attended school dancing classes, and practised Irish jigs and Morris dancing, Rupert was revelling at the ‘Bacchus-Fest’ and having a romantic dalliance with Elizabeth Van
Rysselbergh, the daughter of a neo-impressionist painter. But on 10 February 1911, Noel’s last letter to Rupert before leaving Bedales shows that she had grown to understand him more and, although putting a disclaimer on any jealousy on her part, following his other flirtations, and writing about him in the third person, she does open up more about her feelings. Doubtless her refusal to become involved in a physical relationship, or even display interest in that direction, coupled with Brooke’s own sexual frustration, led to his affair with Elizabeth in Munich. She wrote:
[H]e is very beautiful, everyone who sees him loves him … I fell in love with him as I had fallen in love with other people before, only this time it seemed final – as it had, indeed, every time – I got excited when people talked of him and spent every day waiting and expecting to see him and felt wondrous proud when he talked to me or took any notice.
So what happened? Rupert and Noel both approached the relationship from angles alien to the other; they did not always communicate with ease; and Noel never really opened up until later in life – by which time Rupert was dead, and she declared that she knew then she would ‘never marry for love!’. Her school, Bedales, continues to thrive; many eminent citizens and household names emanating from the establishment founded by the still spiritually present J. H. Badley, 300 feet above the Rother Valley, where Noel Olivier received those tortuous love letters from Rupert.
By May he was back at Grantchester and settled in at the Old Vicarage, seeking solace in the tranquil atmosphere, and trying to sort out his emotions. In June he gave vent to his feelings in a letter to Ka. ‘How many people can one love? How many people should one love? What is love? If I love at 6 p.m. do I therefore love at 7?’
During May and June, Rupert was writing regularly from the Old Vicarage to both Noel and Ka. To Noel: ‘Oh it is the only place, here. It’s such a nice breezy first glorious morning and I’m having a hurried breakfast, half dressed in the garden, and writing to you. What cocoa! What a garden! What a you!’ And to Ka: ‘You must come this weekend. Then we’ll talk: and laugh … Come! and talk! And love me – a little.’ He also sent her his list of
the best things in the world – a sketchy list: and, of course generalities have an unfair advantage –
| | (1) | Lust |
| | (2) | Love |
| | (3) | Keats |
| | (4) | go |
| | (4 ½) | Weather |
| | (5) | Truth |
| | (5 ½) | guts |
| | (6) | Marrons glacés |
| | (7) | Ka… |
| | (29) | Rupert |
During the third week of July, Rupert visited Oxford to see Noel, who was staying off the Banbury road, in north Oxford, at 2 Rawlinson Road, a large bulky house that Noel considered ugly. As inconsistent as Rupert in her own way, now the warm side of her feelings for him shone through in the invitation, which, uniquely, began, ‘Rupert,
darling
!’ and continued, ‘so please, if you come, be stern with me, because I should hate to find myself drifting into a relationship that I can not maintain with you.’ And of Ka she says, ‘Oh it would have been so much better, if you had married her ages
ago!’ While staying at Rawlinson Road, Rupert rose early, bathed in the Cherwell and worked in the Bodleian Library.