The Great Lover (39 page)

Tiare Tahiti

by Rupert Brooke

The Soldier

by Rupert Brooke

The Orchard House and garden still exist in Grantchester and host the Rupert Brooke Society. I first had the idea for this novel when visiting with another writer (Martin Goodman), and buying a postcard of the maids who worked there in Rupert Brooke’s time, standing in their aprons in front of a tin-roofed pavilion. These girls were possibly the daughters of Mrs Stevenson, but one of them soon became, in my mind, Nell.

This is a novel. I have made things up. Nell and her family are made up, as are the other maids. Of course I made Rupert up, too, and he is ‘my’ Rupert Brooke, a figure from my imagination, fused from his poetry, his letters, his travel writing and essays, photographs, guesswork, the things I know about his life blended with my own dreams of him, and impressions.

Those wanting to know more about Rupert’s life are referred to the following books and letters. Where I think the reader might be interested to know in the novel whether there is a basis in fact, I’ve indicated what my source might be. I’ve also embedded in the text many of Rupert’s actual letters and phrases from his own writings, and where I could find them, first-hand accounts and recorded words of others, such as Gwen Raverat and Phyllis Gardner.

Preface from a letter of Rupert Brooke to Bryn Olivier, reprinted in
The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth
by Paul Delany, the Free Press, a division of Macmillan Inc., 1987.

Preface quote from child psychologist D. W. Winnicott.

In fact, Nell is wrong to say that Brooke’s biographers, being male, did not spot the meaning in Taatamata’s sentence: ‘I get fat all time Sweetheart’. It was Mike Read who revealed the existence of a daughter, and information about Arlice Rapoto can be found in his
Forever England
, Mainstream Publishing Company, Edinburgh, 1997.

Extract from
The Times
, 26 April 1915, by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London, on behalf of The Estate of Winston Churchill. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

The biography that Nell suggests Arlice should read is Christopher Hassall’s
Rupert Brooke: A Biography
, Faber and Faber, 1964. Extracts reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The prose book is:
The Prose of Rupert Brooke
, edited with an introduction by Christopher Hassall, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1956. Brooke’s lecture, ‘Democracy and the Arts’, in which he put forward an argument for endowing the artist at public expense, was enormously radical at the time. Thirty years later a body was instituted to do just that; it became the Arts Council of Britain.

The Royal Literary Fund also benefited from the estate of Rupert Brooke. I have been financially supported at different times by the RLF and I’m immensely thankful.

Nell’s account of how the letter from Taatamata was lost in the
Empress of Ireland
is true. The letter, dated 2 May 1914, reads:

The Letters of Rupert Brooke
, chosen and edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Faber and Faber, 1968; extracts reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and The Trustees of Rupert Brooke.

Letters of Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner, and
Memoir
of Phyllis Gardner, 1918; copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum. ‘He wore grey flannels and a soft collar with no tie; and his face appealed to me as being at once rather innocent and babyish and inspired with a fierce life.’ These lines said by Nell in Chapter 1 are taken from Phyllis’s descriptions of Rupert Brooke. Also Nell’s description of Rupert putting his hands around Phyllis’s throat by Byron’s Pool and his tussles with her over sex are taken from Phyllis’s own memoir. The lines in Chapter 4: ‘I stood by his bed. I did not know whether he was asleep at first, but then he whispered: “Well?” I sat down on the bed, and he put his arms around me, and I laid my head on his shoulder. He pressed me closer, and something in the touch of him made me suddenly afraid, and I began to tremble violently from head to foot. “Are you frightened?” he said. “Yes,” said I. “You needn’t be,” he said, “I wouldn’t do
anything you wouldn’t like.”’ are verbatim from Phyllis Gardner’s account in her memoir of Brooke,
A True History
, written in 1918.

John Frayn Turner,
The Life and Selected Works of Rupert Brooke
, Breese Books, 1922, contains the version of the obituary from
The Times
that includes the missing phrase: ‘ruled by high undoubting purpose’.

Mary Archer,
Rupert Brooke and the Old Vicarage, Grantchester
, Silent Books, Cambridge, 1989.

John Lehmann,
Rupert Brooke
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.

Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke,
with a Memoir by Eddie Marsh, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1926.

Gwen Raverat,
Period Piece: The Cambridge Childhood of Darwin’s Granddaughter
, Faber and Faber, 1952. Nell’s ability to slide outside her own consciousness and see herself is taken from Gwen Raverat’s description of the same. Also, descriptions of naked boys swimming in the river in Chapter 1 are hers, and the conversations with Rupert, such as the one about the seventeen-year-old girl painting her face, in Chapter 1. According to Raverat, this conversation took place in 1912. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Chapter 1, Letter beginning: ‘I am in the country in Arcadia; a rustic…’ is to Noel Olivier, reprinted in
Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier 1909–1915
, edited by Pippa Harris, Bloomsbury, London, 1991. Letters of Rupert Brooke © Estate of the late Rupert Brooke.

Chapter 1, The sonnet ‘Oh! Death Will Find Me’, written for Noel Olivier, can be found in the
Collected Poems
.

Frances Spalding,
Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections: A Biography
, Harvill Press, London, 2001, was useful for details of the relationship between Gwen Raverat and Rupert, details of Jacques Raverat, Jane Harrison, and Francis and Frances Cornford.

Michael Holroyd,
Augustus John: The New Biography
, Vintage, 1977, describes Augustus John and party visiting the Orchard. Nell’s description of the artist in Chapter 1 is taken from Edward Thomas’s: ‘exactly like a pirate: standing over six feet high, wearing the strangest jersey and check suit, and with a long red beard, just like the beard of Rumpelstiltskin’, reported in Holroyd’s book in Chapter 4. Rupert’s letters to Noel (in
Song of Love
) contain further details. It is here that Rupert repeats the ‘two wives’ rumour. Dorelia was in fact not a wife, and not mother to all the children either. Four were the sons of Augustus John’s wife Ida who had died in 1907. David would have been the eldest boy.

The Diaries of Beatrice Webb
, edited by Norman Mackenzie and Jeanne Mackenzie, abridged by Lynn Knight, with a preface by Hermione Lee, Virago Press, 2000, contains details of H. G. Wells’s affair with Amber Reeves, and Beatrice’s opinion of Rupert Brooke and his friends.

Chapter 1, Remarks of Rupert’s beginning: ‘Parents…’ are taken from an unpublished, novelised account by Gwen Raverat of conversations between herself, Rupert and others, reported in Hassall’s
Rupert Brooke: A Biography
. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Rupert’s description of the encounter with Denham Russell-Smith in Chapter 1 starting, ‘He was lustful, immoral, affectionate and delightful…’ and ending, ‘and wouldn’t ever want to see me again’ is in Rupert Brooke’s own words, verbatim, from his own
unabridged account in a letter to James Strachey, written in 1912. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke. The letter is reproduced in Nigel Jones’s
Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth
, Richard Cohen Books, 1999.

Chapter 2, Letter beginning: ‘January 1910. My dear James…’ is from a letter by Rupert Brooke, although with exclusions and more than one letter merged together, so not verbatim. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke. Included in the collection:
Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey
, edited by Keith Hale, Yale University Press, 1998.

Chapter 2, Rupert’s description of a dream, ‘I was lying out under a full moon…I expect it all happened, really, some time’ is in Rupert’s own words, from an abridged letter to James Strachey, included in Hale’s
Friends and Apostles
. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke.

Chapter 3, ‘How dreadful that the whole world’s a cunt for one’: from a letter to James Strachey,
ibid
.

Hermione Lee,
Virginia Woolf
, Chatto and Windus, 1996, for descriptions of encounters between Rupert Brooke and Virginia Woolf (née Stephen), alongside descriptions of the same occasion by Christopher Hassall.

Michael Holroyd,
Lytton Strachey: The New Biography
, Vintage, 1995, for an account of the relationship between Lytton Strachey and Brooke, and Brooke’s breakdown at Lulworth. John Lehmann’s
Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, gives a good account of his breakdown.

Chapter 3, Rupert’s description to Gwen and Jacques of the incident at Holy Trinity in Rugby is in Rupert’s words from an account in a letter to Virginia Woolf, written to her after her nervous breakdown.

Chapter 3, Letter beginning: ‘The important thing, I want to be quite clear about, is, about women “coming off”,’ are Rupert Brooke’s own words, from a letter to James Strachey. Copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke.

Chapter 4, Letter beginning: ‘Pango-Pango, Samoa, November 1913’, is from Rupert to Phyllis Gardner, included in the collection that her sister gave to the British Library.

Chapter 4, ‘Look at those niggers! Whose are they?’ This and other descriptions, and Rupert’s thoughts on Samoa and Fiji, are from Rupert Brooke,
Letters from America
, with a preface by Henry James, Echo Library, reprinted 2006.

Chapter 4, ‘Quite properly, I seem to have given up writing with any enthusiasm. While in the South Seas I found I had stopped thinking, and that was a Good Thing! My senses instead became more authoritative, more demanding, and I trusted them a little more. I do a little work, as I knock about’ are the words of Rupert Brooke, in a letter to Phyllis Gardner.

Chapter 4, ‘Words are things, after all.’ Brooke’s words, as recounted by Reginald Pole in a fictionalised narrative, included in Michael Hastings’
The Handsomest Young Man in England, Rupert Brooke
, Michael Joseph, 1967. Supplementary accounts of this time in Rupert’s life are in Maurice Browne’s
Recollections of Rupert Brooke
, Alexander Greene, 1927. (Thank you, Geraldine, for the gift of a first edition.)

Chapter 4, ‘Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes’ is a line from a poem ‘Day That I Have Loved’, written 1905–1908, published in
Poems, 1911
, Sidgwick and Jackson.

Chapter 4, Letter beginning: ‘My dear Dudley’ is copyright © The Trustees of Rupert Brooke. Cathleen Nesbitt,
A Little Love and Good Company
, Faber and Faber, 1975. Letters between Brooke and Nesbitt went on sale at Sotheby’s in 2007 but were not bought.

I am grateful to the Arts Council of England for a generous grant in support of research for this novel. I’m thankful, too, to Mike Read for meeting with me to share his knowledge of Brooke; also Robin Callan, owner of the Orchard, Grantchester, for allowing me access to Rupert’s old bedroom, to the Orchard and gardens and to Rupert’s diary, and for many hours of wonderful conversations about Rupert Brooke; also Andrew Motion, for his initial enthusiasm for the idea, and to him and Jon Stallworthy, the Trustees of Rupert Brooke, for their support and encouragement. Dr Mary Archer kindly showed me around the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, where she now lives, and was generous with her time and considerable knowledge of Brooke and his life; Lorna Beckett was helpful on questions regarding Phyllis Gardner; I’m also thankful to Karen Smith and all at the Rupert Brooke Society, based at the Orchard in Grantchester, and to Patricia McQuire, the archivist at King’s College, Cambridge. The warmest possible thanks must also go to my editor Carole Welch and my agent Caroline Dawnay; to John Lewis for expertise on beekeeping; to Ruth Tross, Hazel Orme, and all at Sceptre; also to writer friends Louise, Kathryn, Caz and Sally for helpful conversations; and to my beloved Meredith, the greatest lover of all.