Forever England (21 page)

In March 1913, he sat in the small corner room that he usually frequented and scribbled a note to Cathleen: ‘I write in the Pink and Lily. The hill drops a few hundred feet in front, and beyond is half Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. In this little room is the publican, asleep rather tipsy.’

Cathleen and Rupert loved to spend time in the local countryside:

On 21 March, Rupert dropped a line to Geoffrey Fry asking him to subscribe to
Rhythm
, as Brooke’s poems were being published in it: ‘I wrote in January on a puff-puff.
Rhythm
is being reorganised and permanently draws, hereafter, on Gilbert Cannan, L. Abercrombie, W. W. Gibson, me, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole, Dent, A. Rothenstein, Duncan Grant, D. Lees and a hundred more artists.’ Rupert’s poem, which he dismissively describes as being ‘on a puff-puff ’, was ‘The Night Journey’, which had been inspired by the overhead steam railway in Berlin near Dudley Ward’s flat, and tipped its hat to Brooke’s love of the dramatist Strindberg.

When
Rhythm
was reconstituted as the
Blue Review
, in May 1913, Albert Rothenstein was assistant editor, Brooke was on the committee and Murry was still at the helm. Unfortunately it closed down after just three issues; despite financial help from Eddie Marsh, Murry would declare bankruptcy in 1914, unable to keep up payments of the debt incurred by the absconding publisher.

During March, Brooke was living at 5 Thurloe Square in Kensington, London, at the apartment of Albert Rothenstein. They discussed the new discoveries and revelations by the wireless pioneer Marconi, as well as seeing Arnold Bennett’s play
The Great Adventure
, a dramatisation of his novel
Buried Alive
. An enthusiast for Bennett’s work, Rupert had also read and enjoyed
The Old Wives’ Tale, Hilda Lessways
, and seen
What the Public Wants
on the London stage; and later he wrote to his mother from New Zealand enthusiastically quoting
Clayhanger
.

In a letter to Walter de la Mare from Kensington Square, Rupert reveals a day’s eating habits – at least three square meals. ‘I shall be lunching at Treviglio’s (in Church Street) at 1.30–3.00 … and dining at the Pall Mall, Haymarket at 6.45 (on the balcony) … If you don’t come up for lunch, drink coffee with me. Or come to tea at Gallina’s, opposite the Royalty Theatre.’ He wrote from Rothenstein’s to Cathleen, pledging his love yet determined to leave England for a while to clear his head: ‘I’ve got to wander a bit. You chain one to England horribly.’ His other close friends received pre-departure letters from the Kensington Square address. To Jacques and Gwen: ‘We may meet again in this world – I brown and bearded, you mere red round farmers. When that’ll be, I know not … My literary agent
is Eddie. My heart is yours.’ To Francis Cornford he poured out his concern for Ka, still recovering from being let down by him: ‘Ka is still in a bad way … Ka has no one – her family know nothing of her real life, and she won’t see much of them. So her friends have to look after her.’ On a final postcard to Cathleen, he wrote a poem that was to take the title ‘The Ways That Lovers Use’. He asked her to give it a name and rather obviously she chose the first line.

Cathleen understood Rupert’s reasons for his decision to travel to America, even with no specific time limit attached. But safe in the knowledge that all was on an even keel with her, he seemed more concerned about leaving Noel to her other suitors. He worried that she might submit herself to one of them during his time abroad.

Edward Thomas received a letter excusing Rupert from not coming down to see him before he went: ‘I could leave the muses of England in your keeping – I do that anyhow.’ He went to take his leave from the Ranee, with whom he discussed the merits of poets Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater and Wilfred Gibson. Denis Browne, his musician friend from Cambridge, and long-time chum Geoffrey Keynes received a few lines of farewell. A day or so before departing, he dined with Noel at Treviglio’s in London’s Soho.

His trip was to be subsidised by the
Westminster Gazette
, the periodical’s literary editor Naomi Royde Smith having suggested that he should be paid four guineas an article for his impressions of the United States and Canada. Just two days before sailing he was officially engaged as a correspondent for the newspaper.

Two weeks before Brooke’s departure, Eddie Marsh hosted a farewell supper at Raymond Buildings, the guests including Violet Asquith, Cathleen Nesbitt, Wilfred Gibson and Gilbert Cannan. Marsh gave Rupert a full set of Jane Austen novels as a parting gift the following day. Eddie was also journeying abroad on 9 May, aboard the
Enchantress
, in the company of the Prime Minister, Mrs Asquith, Violet Asquith and the Churchills. There was another ‘last supper’ on the evening before he was due to sail. A gathering in London’s Regent Street under Gambrinus, between 10 p.m. and midnight, saw the likes of Wilfred Gibson, Geoffrey Keynes and John Middleton Murry in attendance. Murry wrote to his wife Katherine Mansfield about the evening; ‘I’m going to supper with Rupert tonight because he’s going off to America in the morning; it’s all very silly but a free meal is fascinating.’

Although Eddie Marsh was a generous benefactor of the
Georgian Poets
, who, of course, included Brooke, those he did not publish in the book rebelled. Murry certainly did: ‘They are spreading a miasma of sickening falsity. Page after page of the Georgian book
is not merely bad poetry – that would be a relief – but sham naive, sham everything.’

Despite Murry’s criticism
Georgian Poets
ran for many years. None of the poets involved, or Marsh himself, would have dreamt that the next edition would carry an ‘In Memoriam’ to Brooke.

O
N
22
MAY
, the train carrying Rupert pulled out of London's Euston station with its stunning, now long-demolished booking hall. At Liverpool docks he boarded the SS
Cedric
, where he gave a local ragamuffin named William sixpence to wave him goodbye. Ensconced in Cabin 50, selected because that was his phone number at Rugby, he set off on a voyage that was to be of an indeterminable length and produce far more than a series of articles. Angry that he had left all his letters of introduction at Thurloe Square, he had time to dwell upon the conversation
he had had the previous day with Denis Browne about the possibility of collaborating on a musical show the following year. He set out to explore the ship and study his fellow passengers.

On board, he wrote a long rambling missive to Cathleen, which included a reference to Ka:

He mentioned the presence on board of the Liverpudlian poet Richard le Gallienne – a topic he also raised in a letter written from the SS
Cedric
to Eddie Marsh:

Brooke and le Gallienne weren't acquainted, but were undoubtedly aware of each other's presence and would almost certainly have met on the journey. His disparaging comments about le Gallienne to Marsh didn't touch on the ever-present urn containing the ashes of
his great love and first wife Mildred, which le Gallienne took with him everywhere. Brooke's keen eye would not have failed to notice this bizarre behaviour by the Liverpool poet; and it was clearly the inspiration for what could be construed as Rupert's cruellest piece of satire. But was it a deliberate attempt at satire? The poem certainly reads as if Brooke were writing with genuine compassion, but his reference to ‘a ballade, an imitation of Villon' is a possible clue to the style of poem that was really in Brooke's mind. The fifteenth-century French poet was not only famous for his satiric humour, but also gifted in the field of lyrical pathos. It seems that ‘For Mildred's Urn' was one of a batch of poems that Rupert was to mislay while travelling through Canada, and has remained unpublished until now.

On docking he checked into New York's Broadway Central Hotel, and, feeling sorry for himself, was overwhelmed by feelings of loneliness and homesickness:

Subsequently, though, he began to perk up a little and to look to his task of committing his observations to paper and arranging them into digestible parcels for the
Westminster Gazette
. His second article began: ‘In fine things America excels modern England – fish, architecture, jokes, drinks and children's clothes.' He also noticed that ‘the American by race walks better than we; more freely, with a taking swing, and almost with grace. How much of this is due to living in a democracy, and how much to wearing no braces, it is very difficult to determine.' Another interesting observation was the scope of educational facilities, much broader than the British system, not academically, but in terms of opportunity.

During much of his time in New York, he was looked after by Russell H. Loines, a New York lawyer, through an introduction from his former tutor Lowes Dickinson. Loines showed Brooke the sights and took him canoeing in the rapids on the Delaware river. Loines made many young Englishmen welcome at his house on Staten Island. Rupert took time out to write to Ka: ‘[Y]ou must get clear of me, cease to love me, love and marry somebody – and somebody worthy of you.'

To Cathleen his tone was decidedly warmer and more descriptive: ‘The little white wisps of mist are creeping and curling along the face of the great wide river.'

Back in work mode, Brooke also captured the noise and bustle of the city. ‘Theatres and “movies” are aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the elevated train clangs and curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their obscure challenges to one another, “I should worry!” or “She's some daisy!” or “Goodnight nurse!”.' He wrote to Marsh on different topics, including the candidates in the running for the Poet Laureateship following the death of Alfred Austin: ‘All the papers have immense articles, with pictures of Masefield and Noyes. They mention everybody except me and Wilfred. Even Will Davies…'

From New York he travelled to Boston, where a middle-aged lady told him, ‘What is wrong with America is this democracy. They ought to take the votes away from these people, who don't know how to use them, and give them only to us, the educated.'

After Boston he attended the Harvard–Yale baseball match across the river in Cambridge, where he witnessed cheerleaders raising the crowd to new heights. At Harvard he noted a march by graduates from the class of 1912 stretching back to the veterans of the 1850s: ‘It seems to bring the passage of time very presently and vividly to the mind. To see, with such emphatic regularity, one's coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after summer!' At Harvard one octogenarian asked Rupert, ‘So you come from Rugby, tell me, do you know that curious creature Matthew Arnold?' Brooke noted, ‘I couldn't bring myself to tell him that even in Rugby, we had forgiven that brilliant youth his iconoclastic tendencies some time since, and that, as a matter of fact, he had died when I was eight months old.'

But it was time to put the United States behind him.

Brooke took leave of Harvard and headed north to Canada on the Montreal Express, from where he wrote to Eddie Marsh:

Marsh's mischievous reply included a newspaper cutting stuck on to the letter: ‘BROOKE – On 9 July, at Ashford Hill, Newbury the wife of R. C. Brooke, of a daughter', adding, ‘Evidently the fat lady seen in the train has nipped over to England and is foisting her bastard on you – so beware.'

The American and Canadian magazines were still full of talk of an imminent appointment of a Poet Laureate. In a letter to Marsh, Brooke wrote: ‘Laureateship is discussed ardently and continually. They think le Gallienne is in the running otherwise they're fairly sane. Except that everybody here thinks Noyes a
big
poet; bigger than Yeats or Bridges for instance … why not Bridges? … Kipling'd be fine too…'

Masefield, however, seemed to be quite candid about his chances: ‘I haven't got a ghost of a chance, and never had. I can't possibly be in the six most likely names. As far as one can see, the appointment lies between the following: Robert Bridges, Edmund Gosse, Henry Newbolt, Austin Dobson, Thomas Hardy and Sir Quiller Couch.' Masefield would become Laureate, but not for another seventeen years after the death of the man who would be named as Laureate, Robert Bridges.

The younger poets were able to make their voices heard in several literary organs including John Middleton Murry's
Rhythm
, which became the
Blue Review
in the spring of 1913. The magazine also encompassed articles on other aspects of the arts as well as featuring literary contributions from such writers and poets as
Lascelles Abercrombie, Gilbert Cannan, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, W. H. Davies and Brooke. Vol. 1 no. 3, which was eventually published in July 1913, contained two of Brooke's poems, ‘Love' and ‘The Busy Heart'.

Of all the contributors to that edition, Rupert seemed most impressed with the work of Katherine Mansfield: ‘She
can
write, damn her.' The
Blue Review
collapsed after that particular edition, with Murry moving to Paris in an attempt to escape his creditors. His problems had begun when the publisher of
Rhythm
absconded in October 1912 leaving a printing debt of £400. Murry would be made bankrupt in February 1914, and another outlet for Brooke's poems was sealed off.

Occasional bursts of homesickness saw Brooke making up ‘minor painful songs':

In Canada, Brooke visited Quebec, from where he sailed up the St Lawrence Seaway, 18 miles across at the point where his boat turned up the Saguenay, which flows beneath massive cliffs of black granite, to Chicotimi.

In Montreal, he noted how the British sector was dominated by the Scots; and after its ‘strain and lightness' considered Ottawa a relief. ‘The streets of Ottawa are very quiet, and shaded with trees. The houses are mostly of that cool, homely, wooden kind. With verandahs, on which, or on the steps, the whole family may sit in the evening and observe the passers-by.'

In Ottawa, he stayed with the poet Duncan Campbell Scott and his family. He wrote to Wilfred Gibson about Scott, ‘Poor devil, he's so lonely and dried there: no one to talk to. They had a child – daughter – who died in 1908 or so. And it knocked them out … Their house is queerily desolate, it rather went to my heart.' Scott had been an introduction from John Masefield.

During Brooke's Canadian travels, Wilfred Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie had come up with a bright publishing idea for publishing their poems from the Gallows, the Abercrombies' house in Dymock, Gloucestershire. Gibson wrote to Rupert about it in a letter that caught up with him on the banks of Lake Ontario. Rupert
passed the exciting information on to his mother in a letter from the King Edward Hotel, Toronto, dated 21 July 1913.