Forever England (19 page)
Authors: Mike Read
Brooke’s enthusiasm for
Rhythm
was still very evident in a letter to E. J. Dent in February 1913, in which he tried (successfully)
to enlist him as a music critic for the magazine: ‘
Rhythm
, which is being reorganised on a fuller basis, but equally advanced, is having occasional articles on music – not so much reviews of concerts, as enlightenment on modern or ancient good things … They don’t pay! But they’re doing good work – if you’re again in London we might talk.’ His friend from Rugby and Cambridge, Denis Browne, was the music critic for both
Rhythm
and the
Blue Review
, as well as the
New Statesman
. To Gwen Raverat, unconvinced about contributing, despite being a close friend, he wrote: ‘it’s by people who do good work and are under thirty-five. It shows there are such, and that they’re different from and better than the
Yellow Book
or the Pre-Raphaelites or any other body.’
Murry and Katherine Mansfield left Runcton in November 1912 for Chancery Lane. Later they rented the Gables at Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire, with John commuting to London and often staying in Brooke’s old room at Eddie Marsh’s; Rupert eventually relinquished his keys to Murry in March. Brooke would write to Marsh on 10 March 1913, ‘I grow Maudlin … I gave up my keys to Jack Tiger with a curse of jealousy.’
After a spell with Dudley and Anne Marie Ward in Berlin, he was back in Rugby for Christmas, from where he confessed to Eddie Marsh that his eyes were full of sleep and his heart was full of Cathleen Nesbitt.
O
N NEW YEAR’S
eve 1912, Brooke and Marsh went to the London Hippodrome to see
Hullo, Rag-Time!
before seeing the New Year in on the steps of St Paul’s. The following day Rupert took a train to the Lizard, this time staying with Francis and Frances Cornford, who were in lodgings there. It proved to be a very productive eleven days for the young poet, as he wrote two articles on H. J. C. Grierson’s new edition of Donne’s poems published by the Clarendon Press, declaring that Donne was ‘the one English love poet … who was not afraid
to acknowledge that he was composed of body, soul, and mind’. A great lover and champion of the Elizabethan metaphysical poet, he enthused that he was ‘by far the greatest of our love poets. ‘It would seem that while fired up, Brooke also put the finishing touches to his play
Lithuania
, and was also writing ‘Funeral of Youth’ amid the noise of the Cornford household – Frances recalled that he beavered away quietly ‘while people chatted and banged about the room’.
The day that
Youth
had died,
There came to his grave-side,
In decent mourning, from the country’s ends,
Those scatter’d friends
Who had liv’d the boon companions of his prime,
And laugh’d with him and sung with him and wasted,
In feast and wine and many-crown’d carouse,
The days and nights and dawnings of the time
When
Youth
kept open house,
Nor left untasted
Aught of his high emprise and ventures dear,
No quest of his unshar’d -
All these, with loitering feet and sad head bar’d,
Follow’d their old friend’s bier.
Folly
went first,
With muffled bells and coxcomb still revers’d;
And after trod the bearers, hat in hand –
Laughter, most hoarse, and Captain
Pride
with tann’d
And martial face all grim, and fussy
Joy,
Who had to catch a train, and
Lust
, poor, snivelling boy;
These bore the dear departed.
Behind them, broken-hearted,
Came
Grief
, so noisy a widow, that all said,
‘Had he but wed
Her elder sister
Sorrow
, in her stead!’
And by her, trying to soothe her all the time,
The fatherless children,
Colour, Tune,
and
Rhyme
(The sweet lad
Rhyme
), ran all-uncomprehending.
Then, at the way’s sad ending,
Round the raw grave they stay’d. Old
Wisdom
read,
In mumbling tone, the Service for the Dead.
There stood
Romance,
The furrowing tears had mark’d her rouged cheek;
Poor old
Conceit
, his wonder unassuag’d;
Dead
Innocency
’s daughter,
Ignorance
;
And shabby, ill’-dress’d
Generosity
;
And
Argument
, too full of woe to speak;
Passion
, grown portly, something middle-aged;
And
Friendship
– not a minute older, she;
Impatience
, ever taking out his watch;
Faith
, who was deaf, and had to lean, to catch
Old
Wisdom
’s endless drone.
Beauty
was there,
Pale in her black; dry-ey’d; she stood alone.
Poor maz’d
Imagination
; Fancy wild;
Ardour
, the sunlight on his greying hair;
Contentment
, who had known Youth as a child
And never seen him since. And
Spring
came too,
Dancing over the tombs, and brought him flowers –
She did not stay for long.
And
Truth
, and
Grace
, and all the merry crew,
The laughing
Winds
and
Rivers
, and lithe
Hours
;
And
Hope
, the dewy-ey’d; and sorrowing
Song
; –
Yes, with much woe and mourning general,
At dead
Youth
’s funeral,
Even these were met once more together, all,
Who erst the fair and living
Youth
did know;
All, except only
Love. Love
had died long ago.
It is a fair supposition that ‘Funeral of Youth’ looked for its inspiration to an ode written in 1763 by the Cambridge-born Poet Laureate William Whitehead. Written for the double celebration of the end of the Seven Years War and the birth of George IV, it was composed in the spirit of a patriotic poet who loved England. It is easy to see its influence on Brooke:
… Soft-smiling PEACE, whom
Venus
bore
When, tutor’d by th’ enchanting lore
Of
Maia
’s blooming Son,
She sooth’d the synod of the Gods,
Drove
Discord
from the blest abodes,
And
Jove
resum’d his throne.
Th’ attendant
Graces
gird her round,
And sportive
Ease
, with locks unbound,
And every Muse, to leisure born,
And
Plenty
, with her twisted horn,
While changeful
Commerce
spreads his loosen’d sails,
Blow as ye list, ye winds, the reign of PEACE prevails!
And lo, to grace that milder reign,
And add fresh lustre to the year,
Sweet
Innocence
adorns the train,
In form, and features, Albion’s heir!
During his stay with the Cornfords at the Lizard, Brooke wrote to Jacques Raverat: ‘Cornwall’s so nice, 300 miles from anywhere’, and to Ka, who still carried a torch for Rupert, ‘Love is being at a person’s mercy. And it’s a black look-out when the person’s an irresponsible modern female virgin. There’s no more to say.’ The Lizard clearly proved inspirational for Brooke, as he confessed in a letter from there to Geoffrey Keynes: ‘I have written nothing for months, till I came here.’ Just over seven years before his visit to the Lizard, Marconi had transmitted the first-ever transatlantic radio message from the peninsula to Newfoundland – three dots, signifying the letter ‘S’. Those three dots were to begin a new era in communication that was to revolutionise the entire world. A world Brooke would never see.
On 8 January 1913, Marsh attended the opening of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop just off Theobald’s Road in London. The poet Henry Newbolt made an opening speech and Robert Frost, the American poet, was also present. Later that month he was to enjoy Brooke’s first public reading there, although he felt that he tried to be a latter-day John Donne. At the opening Harold Monro introduced Marsh to W. H. Davies, the one-legged Welsh ‘tramp’ poet, who subsequently invited Marsh and Brooke to tea at the house where he boarded, in the then dormitory town of Sevenoaks, in Kent. His landlady was Wordsworth’s niece. Davies’s genuine fondness for children and his penchant for giving them sweets for halfpennies, aroused so much suspicion among the Sevenoaks parents that he was later forced to move.
Having admired the work of sculptor Eric Gill at the London Grafton Galleries the previous November, Brooke and Eddie Marsh
went to visit him at Sopers, his home at Ditchling in Sussex, just before he moved from the village to Hopkins Crank, at Ditchling Common. Rupert had previously written to Geoffrey Keynes, ‘I’m trying to buy a Gill. He’s done an extraordinary good cast for a bronze – a Madonna. If he can only sell one cast he has to charge me an immense sum, which I can’t pay. If more it gets cheaper. He can sell six at £8 or £10 each. If you’re wanting a Gill, now’s your chance!’ Rupert did buy one, as a gift for Ka, although after their departure Gill referred to Brooke and Marsh as ‘aesthetical beggars’, presumably as the statue was desired more for its aesthetic beauty than its religious meaning.
During the last week of January and the first week of February 1913, Rupert was staying with Jacques and Gwen Raverat at Manor Farm, Croyden, in Cambridgeshire. He had his play
Lithuania
with him, meaning to copy it out but not finding the energy. He sent a letter to Ka from Manor Farm in which he jokingly refers to his host and hostess: ‘I’ve been fairly comfortable with these people. I’ve even given them a few hints on sensible living – for they’re apt to be too fidgety, and when Jacques’ nerves are too bad for painting, he thinks it sensible to dig in the garden all day!’ Jacques’ nervous disorder, which flared up periodically for years, was eventually diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. Despite his condition, the Raverats also received Geoffrey Keynes and Justin Brooke during Rupert’s visit there. Gwen was fast becoming an acknowledged wood engraver, and both of them were accomplished artists. While staying with the Raverats, Rupert wrote to Eddie Marsh asking him to try to include Cathleen Nesbitt in a theatre party he was organising, before adding the self-deprecating comment, ‘But no doubt it’s quite impossible – I suppose she dines with millionaires every night – I can see a thousand insuperable difficulties – it was scarcely worth mentioning it.’ Cathleen turned out to be far more down-to-earth and approachable than Rupert imagined.
Croyden at the time rather confusingly had several alternative spellings, including Croyden, Crawden and Croydon (the current spelling). In the past it had also been Croydon am Clapton and Croydon cum Clapton; the lost village of Clapton now lies beneath the fields above Croydon. The name is said to originate from Craw Dene, ‘the valley of crows’. With the upper reaches of the Cam meandering below it, the village lies on the south slope of a low range of clay-covered chalk hills, about 15 miles south-west of Cambridge, overlooking southern Cambridgeshire and north Hertfordshire.
The 380 acres of Manor Farm were worked by Maurice Gribble in the Raverats’ day, with the Gape Estate owning the whole. Jacques and Gwen Raverat had part of the farm converted into a studio by local builder W. King, who had the misfortune to walk in one day while Jacques was painting a picture of Gwen, posing in the nude. It must have created an impression, as the story is still told, along with yarns of the local peasants’ revolt under the mythical Captain Swing, a would-be Ned Ludd, when they rioted against the new steam threshing machines by wrecking them, setting fire to hayricks and attacking stock. Manor Farm was worked by the Willinks after the First World War until the mid-1940s and from 1949 to 1990 by the Horsfords.
On 7 February, Dudley and Anne Marie Ward had a baby boy, Peter, so in a more buoyant mood Rupert headed off to Raymond Buildings to stay with Eddie, be thrown into the social whirl and hopefully to engineer a meeting with his favourite actress, Cathleen Nesbitt. To Noel he painted a gay picture:
[Y]ou, poor brown mouse, can’t in the dizziest heights of murian imagination, picture the life of glitter and gaiety I lead. A young man about town, Noel (I’ve had my hair cut
remarkably
short), dinners, boxes at the opera, literary lunch-parties, theatre supper-parties (the Carlton on Saturday next) – I know
several
actresses.
By February, he was on first-name terms with Cathleen. The first time she had seen Brooke she confessed to being immensely ‘taken by these looks’, but was later attracted more by his ‘vitality and his sense of fun and his fantastic enjoyment of life – rather sort of laughing at himself ’. They went for outings to Kew Gardens and Hampton Court, Cathleen later recalling their blossoming romance with affection:
I remember at the beginning – when we began to discover we’d been in love – and, as we’d both been in love with somebody else quite recently, we were both a little wary of whether this was real, and he wrote a little poem … he sent it to me on a postcard.
‘Oh love is fair, and love is rare,’ my dear one she said,
‘But love goes lightly over.’ I bowed her foolish head,
And kissed her hair and laughed at her. Such a child was she;
So new to love, so true to love, and she spoke so bitterly.
But there’s wisdom in women, of more than they have known,
And thoughts go blowing through them, are wiser than their own,
Or how should my dear one, being ignorant and young,
Have cried on love so bitterly, with so true a tongue?
At Raymond Buildings Rupert entertained W. B. Yeats, Duncan Grant, Geoffrey Keynes, Denis Browne, Wilfred Gibson and Edward Thomas and read
Lithuania
aloud. John Masefield felt that he should place it on a music-hall bill, as it was only half an hour in duration and couldn’t be billed as an evening’s entertainment by
itself, encouraging Rupert with a rather noncommittal, ‘I hope that it will be produced and you will go on writing plays.’
When news reached Rupert at Gray’s Inn that he had been elected a fellow of King’s, Eddie hosted a supper party in Rupert’s honour, where his protégé met Lady Cynthia Asquith, Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine and the Prime Minister’s daughter Violet Asquith, with whom he was to strike up a strong friendship. He thought her very witty; she in turn brought out the humour in him. The following month the two began a communication that was to gather momentum slowly. In March she sent a note inviting him to her birthday dinner at 10 Downing Street. Other guests included George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, Edmund Gosse and J. M. Barrie. A fortnight later she accompanied Brooke and Marsh to the Hippodrome to see Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
