Forever England (5 page)

Of William Morris's book he said, ‘I found
News From Nowhere
in my room and read it on and on all through the night till I don't know what time! And ever since I've been a devoted admirer of Morris and a socialist, and all sorts of things!' Rupert was allowed to keep his uncle's copy. Although the Utopian ideas it embraced were delightfully idealistic, he wholeheartedly embraced Morris's socialist ideology in his day-to-day life.

R
UPERT’S RETURN TO
King’s in the autumn of 1907 saw his pen in vitriolic mood towards the university town: ‘Cambridge is less tolerable than ever’; ‘I pine to be out of Cambridge, which I loathe’, ‘Cambridge is a bog’, ‘in Cambridge the hard streets are paven with brass and glass and tired wounded feet of pilgrims flutter aimlessly upon them’. In a letter to his cousin Erica he was also disparaging about George Bernard Shaw: ‘[I]t was the same speech as he made the night before in London and the night after, somewhere. Mostly about the formation of a “middle-class party” in Parliament: which didn’t interest me much.’

As well as being a member of the Carbonari and acting in the
ADC, Brooke became a co-founder of the Marlowe Society, formed with the object of staging Elizabethan plays. By October, the finishing touches were being put to their debut production, Marlowe’s
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
, due to be performed on Monday 11 November, and Tuesday 12 November. Rupert was not only playing the part of Mephistopheles but had agreed to take on the role of President of the Society. Among the first-night audience were Prince Leopold of Belgium, the former Cambridge don E. J. Dent, and Rupert’s mother. Hugh Russell-Smith played one of the Seven Deadly Sins, Gluttony; Geoffrey Keynes, the Evil Angel; Justin Brooke, Doctor Faustus; W. Denis Browne, Rugby’s star music pupil, Lucifer; and George Mallory, who was later to lose his life on Everest, the Pope. The chorus was directed by Clive Carey, of Clare College.

Later that month, Brooke was elected to the Fabian Society, as an associate member. As such he had not as yet signed the Basis (a commitment to the party), but his interest in politics was increasing. His Uncle Clem, an advanced socialist, had just published
Human Justice for Those at the Bottom; An Appeal to Those at the Top
, prompting Brooke to write to him, while staying with his aunts in Bournemouth, with the news that socialism was making great advances at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He had read his uncle’s book and wondered whether ‘this Commercialism or Competition or whatever the filthy infection is, hasn’t spread almost too far, and that the best hope isn’t in some kind of upheaval’. Despite being

The one Society that was decidedly ambivalent about Brooke was the Apostles. Founded in 1820 by a group of friends dedicated to working out a philosophy for life, its hierarchy would mark out suitable young men, undergraduates mainly from Trinity and King’s, to swell its ranks by two or three a year – if that. The Society was intimate, secretive and often predominantly homosexual. ‘Born’ into the inner circle at various times before Brooke’s day were: Bertrand Russell, Eddie Marsh, Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore, Leonard Woolf, Oscar Browning, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Lytton Strachey. James Strachey had suggested Rupert to Lytton as a possible candidate, before Brooke even came up. The Society meetings, invariably on Saturday evenings, were often graced by the occasional appearance of an ‘angel’ or retired Apostle, but it was Lytton and Maynard Keynes who were the main deliberators in the decision as to whether to enlist Brooke. Lytton felt that Rupert’s influences at Rugby – Arthur Eckersley and St John Lucas – had not helped his literary style, expression or quality of thought, and the idea that the young Rugbeian had not read the novels of the celebrated American writer Henry James was too abhorrent to Strachey for him to further consider the application.

It was at this time that Lytton, who had met Brooke briefly, dubbed him ‘Sarawak’, as there was some talk of his family being related to James Brooke, the British administrator who became the ‘White Rajah of Sarawak’. This led to Brooke referring to his mother as ‘The Ranee’, a nickname that he was to use for the rest of his life.

By 30 October 1907, Maynard Keynes, too, was still undecided about electing Rupert to the Apostles. Of the others who were in on the discussion, Harry Norton didn’t really know Brooke, although 
he’d met him briefly, Jack Sheppard was faintly opposed, while James Strachey was enthusiastic. Maynard wrote to Lytton: ‘I’m damned if I know what to say. James’s judgements on the subject are very nearly worthless; he is quite crazy. I have been to see R. again. He is all right I suppose and quite affable enough – but yet I feel little enthusiasm.’ During November, Rupert went to Oxford with the Fabians, for a debate at the university. Despite referring to his own party as ‘an indecorous, aesthetical, obscene set of ruffians’, Brooke was elected by a large majority to the committee. He was also elected, in January 1908, to the Apostles. He was the first new member for two years, and membership meant membership for life, to a fraternity that hermetically sealed itself from outside forces. This led to, or was often because of, the insecurities of many of its members – brilliant intellectuals, who were often awkward in day-to-day situations or with ordinary people. For some, membership of the Apostles became a way of life; for Rupert there was a wider world waiting.

Strachey, as well as being an Apostle, was also a member of the Bloomsbury group, a circle of friends who’d begun meeting a couple of years previously at the Bloomsbury home of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. The arts-orientated coterie would include among others Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry and Leonard Woolf, several of whom would figure in Brooke’s life, although he would never be a member of their circle.

During the Christmas break, he went with friends on a skiing holiday in Andermatt, staying at Danioth’s Grand Hotel; while there they rehearsed and performed Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Then he went back to the grind of exams and his continued disenchantment with living in Cambridge. His apparent despondency continued into 1908: a letter to St John Lucas ended with the gripe, ‘I pine to be out of Cambridge which I loathe’, and to Jacques Raverat he wrote:

These exaggerated lines, intended to amuse or create a dramatic air for his friend to marvel at, are earthed by the line, ‘I have a cold.’

In early April, Brooke escaped from Cambridge to Torquay to read Greek for Walter Headlam – a fellow of King’s – who had introduced Brooke to the plays of John Webster and the poetry of John Donne. Headlam was to become a friend and mentor. Brooke’s lodgings were on the east side of the bay at 3 Beacon Terrace, facing Beacon Quay.

Beacon Hill itself had been quarried away during the 1860s to provide the requisite limestone to infill the new Haldon Pier – not surprisingly causing a storm of protest from the locals. The pier had been completed by 1870. Beacon Terrace itself, hard by Beacon Hill, had been completed in 1833, when it was deemed to be ‘a fine example of Regency marine building, with its crisp stucco facade and projecting cast-iron balconies’. In Brooke’s day the Bath Saloons, originally the Medical Baths, were to his left, looking from his apartment window, and a little nearer stood the Electricity Generating Station, inaugurated in March 1898 – not pretty, although not blocking this view over the bay. At the time of Brooke’s stay in Torquay, the town had just changed its public transport system from fifteen-seater steam buses to trams, and the town’s first public library had just opened.

On 8 April, Rupert wrote from Beacon Terrace to Hugh Dalton, a devout Fabian, about his decision to sign the Fabian Basis: ‘I have decided to sign even the present Fabian Basis and to become
a member (if possible) of the central Fabian society. The former part I suppose may wait till next term, as I have no Basis with me, spiritually, the thing is done (not without blood and tears).’ During his ten-day sojourn in Torquay he was moved to take time out from his political thoughts and Greek studies to write the sonnet ‘Seaside’.

Highlights of his stay there were an invitation from his cousin Erica, who had asked him to go with her to see George Bernard Shaw’s new play,
Getting Married
, the following month at the Haymarket Theatre in London, and a play of hers that she had sent to him. He replied, ‘Thanks for the play. Its market value would be higher
if you had written “from the authoress to her adorable cousin” or words to that effect, inside. I carry it about with me and sit on it at intervals, so that it often lies quite flat now.’ His thoughts were also on a chance meeting and conversation he had with the author H. G. Wells in London, en route to Torquay. He was more than happy to let his friends know about it, including the fact in letters to both Hugh Dalton and Geoffrey Keynes, to whom he wrote, ‘Shall you be in London on Thursday or Wednesday? I am at my club. Last time I was at it I met Wells and talked with him – a month ago. Did I tell you? If not, you’re a bright, bright green.’ In the same letter, written from 3 Beacon Terrace on 17 April, he wrote, ‘I am not a poet – I was, that’s all. And I never, ah! never was a superman – God forbid.’ The sea brought back fond memories of Lulworth, necessitating a postcard to Geoffrey, who was staying there: ‘I hope you’re still there [Lulworth Cove]. Give my love to the whole lot, downs and all, and especially the left-handed boy, who dwells in the coastguards’ cottages, and the village idiot, and all the Williamses.’

From Torquay Rupert returned to the inn on the western edge of Salisbury Plain, where he and Hugh Russell-Smith had stayed during a walking tour the previous Easter. This time the Green Dragon at Market Lavington was the venue for a gathering organised by Geoffrey Keynes’s eldest brother Maynard, later to become one of the century’s most eminent economists. Among those present were Desmond MacCarthy, hailed as his generation’s greatest drama critic, Lytton Strachey and the philosopher G. E. Moore, whose revolutionary ethical concepts were woven into his
Principia Ethica
, published in the autumn of 1903. The novelist E. M. Forster was also present, and that Brooke was reading his ‘The Celestial Omnibus’ at the time was either an interesting coincidence or well-organised public relations by Rupert. The weather was bitter and the food ghastly, according to Strachey, but it clearly
didn’t deter Moore from accompanying himself on the piano. He sang many of Schubert’s songs during the temporary lulls in a weekend that swung from intellectual jousting to overt flirtation, in the maze of lofty rooms with their fine views towards the Plain and along the narrow high street. Brooke was younger than the others at the gathering, and one wonders whether the invitation would still have been forthcoming if he hadn’t looked as he did. He appeared to cope with the homosexual proclivities of many of the Apostles, without either becoming involved or being rejected for not doing so.

In May 1908, a shaft of sunlight fell on King’s when Brooke met Noel Olivier, the youngest daughter (then fifteen) of Sir Sydney Olivier, the Governor of Jamaica, at a dinner held in Ben Keeling’s rooms in his honour. The dinner guests included H. G. Wells, Newnham students Amber Reeves and Dorothy Osmaston, and Noel’s sister Margery. Rupert and Noel got on famously and he was clearly taken with her, the young girl becoming the object of his affections for several years. Her family lived at Limpsfield Chart, in Surrey, where she and her three sisters, Bryn, Daphne and Margery, would often spend all day in the local woods and fields leading a tomboy existence. The fact that Noel was still a schoolgirl (at Bedales in Hampshire) did not deter Brooke from pursuing her with dogged determination.