Fatal Glamour (42 page)

When Gauguin left in 1893, he was two years older than when he came and, he said, twenty years younger in spirit: “Yes, the savages – these ignorant people – had taught many things to this old civilised man, many things about knowing how to live and about how to be happy. Above all, they made me know myself better, they had shown me my own truth.”
⁵⁶
Gauguin went back to Europe to sort out some financial affairs. He did not even meet the wife and five children he had left behind. Two years later he was back in Tahiti, though not at Mataiea. After six years he moved on to the Marquesas, a place he hoped would be more “savage,” and died there in 1903. What he had discovered in Tahiti he followed out to its end, both in life and in art. Rupert agreed with everything Gauguin said about life in the South Seas, but still went back to civilisation, and died in uniform. He had failed, also, with his quest to get rich by finding a Gauguin painting. Somerset Maugham turned up three years later and asked Lovaina if there were any Gauguin's still around. She directed him to a house in Mataiea where Gauguin had stayed; Maugham found a painting of a young woman holding a breadfruit on a glass door, and carried it off for two hundred francs.
⁵⁷
How did Rupert miss it?

“I was sad at heart to leave Tahiti,” Rupert said, “but I resigned myself to the vessel, and watched the green shores and rocky peaks fade with hardly a pang.” Yet he also said that he “got out . . . not without tears.” So the tears must have been Taatamata's, who called Rupert her “dear Love darling.”
⁵⁸
In 1893 Gauguin's beloved Teha'amana had cried every night before he left. His farewell gesture was his great portrait of her,
Merahi Metua
.

One reason for Taatamata's tears might have been that she was pregnant; if so, that could have been an incentive for Rupert to leave, in less than gentlemanly fashion. In mid-January 1915 Rupert returned from a
day in the field at Blandford Camp to find a letter from Taatamata, which she had sent off on 2 May 1914, a month after he left. The liner
Empress of Ireland
had sunk after a collision in the St Lawrence at the end of May, with the loss of over one thousand lives. Some months later, divers recovered her mailbags and Rupert got his letter, which was extremely difficult to read:

I wish you here that night I get fat all time Sweetheart you know I always thinking about you that time when you left me I been sorry for long time. whe have good time when you was here I always remember about you forget me all readly oh! Mon cher bien aimé je t'aimerai toujours . . .

Je me rappeler toujour votre petite etroite figure et la petite bouche qui me baise bien tu m'a percee mon coeur et je aime toujours.
⁵⁹

Lovaina had also used the phrase, “she get very fat,” to describe a pregnant woman. “I can't decipher any reference to prospects of a baby,” Rupert told Dudley Ward, “So that dream goes with the rest.”
⁶⁰
Mike Read has identified one “Arlice Rapoto” as Brooke's daughter. But Alice Tapotofarerani was born on 20 October 1908, so she cannot have been Rupert's child, and Taatamata had no other children between 1912 and 1920. If she was pregnant in April 1914, the baby was not carried to term.
⁶¹
In any case, a month later she had dried her tears and was enjoying all-night parties at Lovaina's hotel with a hundred cadets from an Argentinian training ship.

Rupert left Papeete around 5 April on the
ss
Tahiti
again, headed this time for San Francisco.
⁶²
There were English newspapers on the ship, and his political irritations immediately started to fizzle. His prejudices had hardened into an ill-assorted bundle of dislikes: of plutocrats, especially Jewish ones, who were grinding down the working man; of the feminists who were now running New Zealand and the United States, and trying to run Britain; of, worst of all, “hermaphrodites and eunuchs, Stracheys, moral vagabonds, pitiable scum.”
⁶³
The common thread in these rants was anxiety about sex. Apart from the usual charges about Jewish affinity for money, Rupert saw them as a sexual threat to Anglo-Saxon womanhood. Feminists were perverting the “natural” role of women; Stracheys were despicable because a hermaphrodite was nothing
like a real man. Reading such letters, one sees that Rupert's 1912 breakdown had also been a conversion experience, like those of people who go from extreme left to extreme right with no delay in the middle. Things that had been incidental annoyances for Rupert before 1912 were now consolidated into a comprehensive worldview – in effect, a character suffused by paranoia.

Rupert was trying to forget his bisexual past by asserting a stern, one-dimensional masculinity. Since his encounter with Denham Russell-Smith in 1909 he may have renounced further interest in gay sex. But he had set up his homosocial ménage with Eddie Marsh in the autumn of 1912, and never broke away from it until he went into barracks with the Royal Naval Division two years later. All the while, he would be saying how eager he was to marry and father a son, but there was always something he preferred to actually doing it. Marriage was a proof of masculinity, yet also a danger to it, because a wife was bound to have some power over you. With his parents, the wife's power had been total, but Rupert respected his mother's petticoat rule. Now he was eager to get back to Rugby.

The journey back, halfway around the world, took two months. On arrival in San Francisco, Rupert went back to his friends in the Berkeley English department: C.M. Gayley, Chauncey Wells, and Leonard Bacon, who all lived on the same block of Piedmont Avenue. After a week, during which Rupert gave another poetry reading, he left on the California Limited for Chicago. En route, he treated Jacques Raverat to a tirade against American women, who must have been the students or faculty wives he had been meeting in Berkeley: “I see with intense clearness exactly what all those unovaried spectacled precise dirty minded Newnham bitches (an insult to an honest word) are coming to . . . 'Tis the one boast in America that's true, that she's twenty years ahead of England on the slimy downhill path. I know what my daughters will be like . . . There is no young woman in America who could, under
any
circumstances, give a self-respecting penis an erection.”
⁶⁴
There was one exception, perhaps because she was not really young. As his train left the Bay Area, Rupert received a letter from Agnes Capponi, telling him that she had just returned from Europe and was now in Washington,
DC
. He replied saying he would meet her there: “I want to lie on a sofa and talk,” he told her, “There's lots of things I want.”
⁶⁵

Rupert first stopped over for a few days in Chicago, kept there by his
liking for Maurice Browne and his wife, the actress Ellen van Volkenburg.
⁶⁶
Together they ran the Chicago Little Theatre. They had put on plays by Wilfred Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie, and Rupert now read to them his play
Lithuania
, which he had written in Berlin in May 1912.
⁶⁷
He was starting a phase of being stage-struck, hoping that he could establish a theatre in Cambridge on his return. The Georgian poets dreamed of reviving the Elizabethan spirit in a great popular theatre – a will-o-the-wisp, as it proved.

After a grim day in Pittsburgh, Rupert arrived in Washington on 5 May, where he stayed for nine days. He dined with the British ambassador and saw the usual sights, but his main purpose was to be with Agnes again. The letters he sent afterwards suggest that it was an affectionate reunion, though the transcripts have been expurgated. That Rupert could conduct affairs with Maaua, Taatamata, and a forty-three-year-old American widow, a month or two apart, shows versatility at least. While in Italy Agnes had become a disciple of Maria Montessori, and she now hoped to promote her educational methods in the United States. In principle, Agnes was the kind of do-gooder that Rupert abhorred. But she gave him a motherly warmth that soothed his irritable passions. Perhaps she had learned something when she visited Rugby two months before.

For his last fortnight, Rupert visited friends up and down the east coast. He went back to Boston, gave a reading at Yale, and spent time at the McAlpin Hotel in New York (at that time the largest in the world). Much of this was arranged by Russell Loines, the successful lawyer who was a patron of poetry and also a poet himself. If Rupert read at Princeton, and was heard by the freshman F. Scott Fitzgerald, it must have been during these two weeks.
⁶⁸
But his business with America was over, no more travel articles had to be delivered, and everything now focused on what he was coming back to on the far side of the Atlantic.

When the
Philadelphia
docked at Plymouth on 25 June 1914, Rupert was twenty-six years old and eager to return to English life. But what sort of life? For a young man in his position it should include a place to live, a job, a set of old friends, and a suitable woman to marry. In a year or two, he could put down roots, making the transition from wanderer to householder, from uncertain youth to an established man. The war would cut across his course, but without that intervention from history Rupert would still have had great difficulty in finding his place or, to put it bluntly, growing up.

Rupert's rooms at the Old Vicarage had been let, so he had no home of his own to return to. When the train from Plymouth arrived in London, at two o'clock in the morning, Eddie Marsh and Cathleen Nesbitt were there on the platform to take Rupert to Gray's Inn for the night. The next day he went up to Rugby to spend five days with his mother; but he would only tell her about his life in London on a “need to know” basis. After Rupert's death, when Marsh showed Mrs Brooke a draft of his
Memoir
, she said, “Who is Cathleen Nesbitt?” The two most important women in Rupert's last two years of life had been kept strictly apart.
¹
After Rugby, Rupert went back to Eddie's flat. This would remain the closest thing to a home for the rest of his life; though there was much to be concealed from Eddie too.

One way of looking at Rupert's alternatives in May 1914 is to follow the money. The
Westminster Gazette
had paid a share of his expenses for his year of travel, and four guineas more for each of his thirteen articles.
Still, he had to borrow money and run up an overdraft at his bank. He had his fellowship income from King's, where he planned to claim his rooms in the autumn and assist Professor Quiller-Couch with some teaching. His mother refused to increase his income, and sometimes reduced it when he had a windfall from his writing. Not only that, she could cut him off at any time. He had to keep her in the dark about anything that might offend her, and especially his relations with women.

Eddie was happy to give Rupert his free board and lodging. In exchange, he could show off Rupert as the “flower in his button hole,” a supremely decorative young man who could be taken to 10 Downing Street and dine with Eddie on his left, the prime minister on his right. Rupert had to do everything to cast reflected glory on Eddie – except go to bed with him, which, so far as the evidence goes, neither of them wanted. Nonetheless, Phyllis Gardner cannot have been the only one who saw Rupert and Eddie together and thought that she “never saw a worse-assorted pair.”
²
But being admired, or even desired, by men had never troubled Rupert. Male worship, by St John Lucas or James Strachey or so many others, could either be accepted or laughed off. Female worship was the problem, unless it came from his mother. A woman could not show that she loved him without violating his instincts about how women should behave (other than in Tahiti).

Before Rupert's year of travel, having his rooms at Grantchester kept Raymond Buildings in the category of a London pied-à-terre. Now it was unquestionably his home. For a freelance poet and journalist, a London base was a great advantage. The success of the first Georgian anthology had launched a group of younger poets whose work suited the times. Indeed, from about 1912 to 1918, it seemed that the Georgians represented the future of English poetry. Rupert was happy to join forces with them, even though his better poems had more of an edge than the Georgians' often flaccid celebrations of rural life. Some of Rupert's edge came from his admiration for Hardy's poetry, which dated from the appearance of
Time's Laughingstocks
in 1909. Hardy showed the potential grandeur in Georgian themes, even as he refused to be seen as a member of their group.
³

Rupert aligned himself with a core group of Georgians whose talents proved fairly slight: W.W. Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, Walter de la Mare. These were also the poets who would enjoy a small fortune from
Rupert's literary estate.
⁴
Stronger poets either remained on the fringes of the group (Lawrence, Graves, Sassoon) or were excluded on grounds of nationality (Pound and Frost). Gibson, Abercrombie, and de la Mare were also replacements for friends that Rupert wanted to leave behind: some Neo-pagans, all Bloomsberries. Georgians had in common lower-middle-class origins, lack of Oxbridge education (except for Rupert), scrambling for a living in the literary marketplace, long-suffering and unglamorous wives with flocks of children in tow.
⁵
Rupert's Georgian friends wrote about the countryside, but it was also the only place they could afford to live.

On 24 June Rupert went to stay with Wilfred Gibson at his cottage, the Old Nailshop, near Dymock in Gloucestershire. This was, first of all, a business meeting about the Dymock journal
New Numbers
, which had proved both popular and financially successful. As always, poets were joining forces in pursuit of money and fame. But it was also a happy moment of fellowship in that last pre-war summer, with five of the poets present.
⁶
Gibson commemorated their first evening together in “The Golden Room”: