Forever England (22 page)
Authors: Mike Read
Gibson has been staying with Abercrombie and has got a great idea that he, Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and I should combine our publics and publish from the Abercrombies (Mrs A. does the work) a volume four times a year. A. has done it with some of his own stuff, and finds he makes most money that way. The other three seem to be keen on the idea. Rather a score for me, as my âpublic' is smaller than any of theirs! But it's a secret at present.
The working title was to be âGallows Garlands'.
The first of the literary circle that was to become known as the âDymock Poets' to move to the area âdid a Dymoke' (a phrase meaning to have extricated oneself from a tricky situation or accomplished a difficult task) was Lascelles Abercrombie. Abercrombie had successfully liberated himself from being a trainee quantity surveyor to enter the world of literature on a full-time basis, as a reviewer for various newspapers in Manchester and Liverpool. In 1910 he came temporarily to Much Marcle, Herefordshire, where his married sister had settled, before moving to the Gallows, a pair of cottages on Lord Beauchamp's estate, just to the south-east of Much Marcle, at Ryton. His writing flourished and he published âEmblems of Love', âThe Sale of St Thomas' and âRyton Firs':
⦠From Marcle Way
From Dymock, Kimpley, Newent, Bromesbarrow,
Redmarley, all the meadowland daffodils seem
Running in gold tides to Ryton Firsâ¦
Wilfed Gibson moved to the area in 1913, taking the Old Nailshop at Greenway Cross, the former house of the Sadlers, the local nail-makers, having initially stayed close by with the Abercrombies. Some three years older than Lascelles, Gibson turned thirty-five in 1913 and Abercrombie thirty-two. The former's reputation was rapidly growing via his volume of verses
Daily Bread
, by then in its third edition, and
The Stonefolds
. Gibson, like Abercrombie, was also moved by the beauty of this remote part of England, as he expressed in poems such as âIn the Meadow', âThe Elm' and âTrees'.
Rupert and Wilfred Gibson, whom Brooke nicknamed âWibson', had been introduced by Eddie Marsh in London in September 1912, when they had gone to watch a fire blazing at King's Cross. The two became friends, and Gibson visited Rupert at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and attended the farewell gathering in May 1913 in London's Regent Street.
A year younger than Abercrombie and five years older than Brooke, John Drinkwater was a professional actor with the Birmingham Company, the Pilgrim Players, becoming the first manager of the newly built Birmingham Repertory Theatre in February 1913, directing countless production and increasing his reputation as a dramatist. Brooke was excited about the scheme, without doubt being delighted at the prospect of working with Gibson, to whom he would refer in August 1913 as âthe most loveable and simple person in the world'.
From Toronto, Rupert was scribbling snatches of nostalgic verse, to his friends in England:
My heart is sick for several things
Only to be found in King's.
I do recall those haunts with tears
The Backs, the Chapel, and the Rearsâ¦
and
⦠Dear Home of my Rememberings!
O Kings! O Kings! O Kings! O Kings!
Spot where I cheered the college bumps!
Place where I read the first Less'n in pumps!
Founded in New Jerusalem!
And breakfasted at 3 p.m.!
At the Niagara Falls, Brooke saw the commercial and vulgar face of tourism.
Hotels, power-houses, bridges, trams, picture postcards, sham legends, stills, books, rifle-galleries and side-shows ⦠Niagara is the central home and breeding place for all the touts on earth ⦠Touts insinuating, and touts raucous, greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class refined, gentlemanly, take-you-by-the-arm touts: touts who wheedle; touts who would photograph you with your arm around a young lady against a faked background ⦠touts who would bully you into cars, char-a-bancs, elevators or tunnels ⦠touts who would sell you picture postcards, moccasins, sham Indian bead-work, blankets, tee-pees and crockeryâ¦
From the Niagara Falls and Toronto he went to Sarnia, at the southern tip of Lake Huron, taking a boat north through its waters to Lake Superior, before travelling overland to Winnipeg, Manitoba. He found the local architecture displeasing. âIt is hideous, of course, even more hideous than Toronto or Montreal; but cheerily and windily so. There is no scheme in the city, and no beauty, but it is at least preferable to Birmingham, less dingy, less directly depressing.'
He wrote to Cathleen on 3 August: âToday, O my heart, I am twenty-six years old. And I've done so little. I'm very much ashamed. By God I'm going to make things hum, though. â But that's all so far away. I'm lying quite naked on a beach of golden sand.'
He wrote again from Edmonton, a town that had ballooned from a population of 200 in 1901 to 50,000 by 1913. Rupert was not only communicating with Cathleen; he had had a disturbing letter from Noel, in which she revealed that one of her other suitors, either Ferenc Bekassy or James Strachey, had told her that Brooke had complained that he was becoming bored with her. The tone of her letter hints at her feeling sorry for herself as well as being cynical. He replied: âYou're a devil. By God you're a DEVIL. What a bloody letter to write to me! ⦠Bekassy and James, who you say, tell you I'm bored, lie, on the whole. Certainly they can't know.' Then came the flash of the dagger as he plunged in with bravado: âI'm practically engaged to a girl you don't know to whom I'm devoted and who is in love with me. And if I don't marry her, I shall very swiftly marry one of two or three others, and be very happy.' She didn't rise to his taunts but did admit that it was Rupert's unpleasant sense of humour that finally killed off any love she had for him.
From Winnipeg he crossed the Prairies, visited Regina, Edmonton, Calgary and the Rockies and mourned the passing of the days of the old west; âHordes of people â who mostly seem to come from the great neighbouring Commonwealth, and are inspired with the national hunger for getting rich quickly without deserving it â prey on the community by their dealings in what they call “Real Estate”. For them our fathers died.'
At Calgary, photographs arrived from Duncan Campbell Scott, taken during his stay with him. In his thank-you letter Rupert
commented, âI don't know why the one of me alone should have caught me at a moment when I was trying to look like Arnold Bennett.' He wrote to Eddie Marsh from Calgary, about the number of interviews he was undertaking and how various towns saw him differently. Some considered him an expert politician, others a poet and others a thinker. âWhen I come back, though, I shall demand a knighthood from Winston. I've been delivering immense speeches on his naval policy.'
At Lake Louise, 100 miles north-west of Calgary, Brooke met a young American widow, the Marchesa Mannucci Capponi. They were obviously attracted to one another and were to keep in touch. Rupert was captivated by the scenery:
Lake Louise is of another world ⦠Imagine a little round lake 6,000 feet up, a mile across, closed in by great cliffs of brown rock, round the shoulders of which are thrown mantles of close dark pine. At one end the lake is fed by a vast glacier, and its milky tumbling stream; and the glacier climbs to snow fields of one of the highest and loveliest peaks in the Rockies, which keeps perpetual guard over the scene.
From Vancouver he dashed off many missives, including one to his mother, before visiting Victoria and Vancouver Island. Having completed the cross-Canada route through Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, Brooke took a train to San Francisco, from where he bemoaned to the Marchesa Capponi the loss of his work: âThat notebook which contained two months' notes on my travels, and unfinished sonnets, and all sorts of wealth I lost in British Columbia â yessir isn't it too bloody. I've been prostrated with grief ever since. And God knows how I shall get through my articles on Canada.' He reported to Eddie Marsh
that the Californians were friendly people and that mention of the name of Masefield opened many doors, and that he was upset to learn that the series of articles for the
Westminster Gazette
would probably be limited to six and that there was little hope for a second series.
R
UPERT BOARDED THE
SS
Sterra
bound for Honolulu. To the backdrop of a happy atmosphere on the boat provided by a crowd of young men with mandolins, he wrote in October 1913 the poem ‘Clouds’, imagining the clouds to be spirits of the dead, scudding across the moon and observing the living beneath them.
Down the blue night the unending columns press
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon’s hidden loveliness.
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.
They say that the Dead die not, but remain
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
And men, coming and going on the earth.
The poem was to become a favourite of both his mother and Cathleen Nesbitt.
On the same journey he began ‘A Memory’, a cathartic poem about Noel Olivier, born out of a letter written to Cathleen relating the story of his relationship with Noel.
Somewhile before the dawn I rose, and stept
Softly along the dim way to your room,
And found you sleeping in the quiet gloom,
And holiness about you as you slept.
I knelt there; till your waking fingers crept
About my head, and held it. I had rest
Unhoped this side of Heaven, beneath your breast.
I knelt a long time, still; nor even wept.
It was great wrong you did me; and for gain
Of that poor moment’s kindliness, and ease,
And sleepy mother-comfort!
Child, you know
How easily love leaps out to dreams like these,
Who has seen them true. And love that’s wakened so
Takes all too long to lay asleep again.
To Cathleen he wrote, ‘I would like to make a litany of all the things that bind me to the memory of holiness – of peaks. It would mean – “The Chilterns” – “Hampton Court” – “
Hullo, Rag-Time!
” – “Raymond Buildings” and a few more names. And it would begin and end with Cathleen.’ He was also beginning to come to terms with his guilt over the Ka situation and being able to think of her without discomfort. Being able to regard it from a distance, he put his feelings into another poem.
Warm perfumes like a breath from vine and tree
Drift down the darkness. Plangent, hidden from eyes,
Some where an
eukaleli
thrills and cries
And stabs with pain the night’s brown savagery.
And dark scents whisper; and dim waves creep to me,
Gleam like a woman’s hair, stretch out, and rise;
And new stars burn into the ancient skies,
Over the murmurous soft Hawaiian sea.
And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again,
And still remember, a tale I have heard, or known,
An empty tale, of idleness and pain,
Of two that loved – or did not love – and one
Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly,
A long while since, and by some other sea.
He took a boat to Kanai before returning to Honolulu and catching the SS
Ventura
on 27 October. The
Ventura
put into Samoa on 2 November. He described the scene to Cathleen:
In the evening the wharf was covered with torches, lamps and a mass of Samoans, all with some ‘curios’ or other on little stalls … great bronze men, with gilded hair, and Godlike limbs lay about on the grass … The whole was lit up by these flaming lights against the tropical nights and the palms and the stars, so that it looked like a Rembrandt picture…
He wrote to Eddie Marsh, ‘I lived in a Samoan house (the coolest in the world) with a man and his wife, nine children, ranging from a proud beauty of eighteen to a round object of one year, a dog, a cat, a proud hysterical hen, and a gaudy scarlet and green parrot.’
He dispatched poems to Wilfred Gibson for possible inclusion in the new project. The name for the anthology of verse was for a while to be
The New Shilling Garland
, after Laurence Binyon’s
The Shilling Garland
, before the idea of naming it
The Gallows Garland
was mooted. By the time the plans were finalised, the title of
New Numbers
had been settled upon. The publication would contain
the work of Brooke, Gibson, Abercrombie and Drinkwater. After a visit to Apia, Rupert took the SS
Torfua
to Fiji. There he entertained the fascinated locals with his prehensile toes, journeyed to the island of Kandarra, played Fijian cricket, took in Suva and sailed to the island of Taviuni. He wrote many letters home, factual to his mother, romantic to Cathleen, general to Eddie Marsh and others to the likes of Edmund Gosse, Dudley Ward and Denis Browne.
Denis! … it is mere heaven. One passes from Paradise to Paradise. The natives are incredibly beautiful, and very kindly. Life is one long picnic. I have been living in native villages and roaming from place to place … These people are nearer to Earth and the joy of things than we snivelling city-dwellers.
England, though, was still in his heart, as he informed Jacques Raverat: ‘Oh I shall return. The South Seas are Paradise. But I prefer England.’ To Violet Asquith he joked – from ‘somewhere in the mountains of Fiji’ – ‘It’s twenty years since they’ve eaten anybody in this part of Fiji, and four more since they’ve done what I particularly and reasonably detest – fastened the victim down, cut pieces off him one by one, and cooked and eaten them before his eyes…’
In mid-December he took the RMS
Niagara
from Fiji. From the Grand Hotel in Auckland he gave vent to his frustration to Cathleen:
Why precisely I’m here, I don’t know. I seem to have missed a boat somewhere; and I can’t get on to Tahiti till the beginning of January. Damn. And I hear that a man got to Tahiti two months ahead of me, and found – and carried off – some Gauguin paintings on glass. Damn! Damn! Damn!
He described New Zealand as ‘a sort of Fabian England, very upper
middle class and gentle and happy (after Canada), no poor and the government owning hotels and running charabancs. All the women smile and dress very badly, and nobody drinks.’ He stayed for a while with one of the early New Zealand families, the Studholmes, at Ruanni in the middle of the North Island, as well as seeing Warapei and Wellington where, at the Wellington Club, he read several of his
Westminster Gazette
articles and a complimentary write-up of Cathleen’s performance in the play
Quality Street
. He saw a specialist in Wellington about some poisoning in his foot, before sailing a week or two behind schedule to Tahiti. On board was the statuesque contralto Clara Butt and her family. They got on so well that they dined together on arriving at Tahiti in early February.
Rupert described his new surroundings to his mother.
I have found a fine place here, about 30 miles from Papeete, the chief town in Tahiti. It is a native village, with one fairly large European house in it, possessed by the chief, and inhabited by a 3/4 white man … it is the coolest place I’ve struck in the South Seas (Papeete was very hot), with a large veranda, the sea just in front, and the hills behind … there’s a little wooden pier out into the sea (which is 30 yards away in front of the house). With a dive into deep water … PS. They call me
Pupure
here – it means ‘fair’ in Tahitian – because I have fair hair!
Brooke immediately fell in love with the island, deciding to stay for at least a month, fishing, swimming, canoeing, exploring and eating ‘the most wonderful food in the world, strange fishes and vegetables, perfectly cooked’.
When the original settlers, the Polynesians, first came here in the seventh or eighth century the vegetation was limited to seeds and spores, forcing them to bring taro, yams, coconuts, bananas and
breadfruit; missionaries later introduced corn, citrus fruits, tamerinds, pineapples, guavas, figs and other vegetables. The first European to set foot on Tahiti, the most famous of French Polynesia’s 130 islands, was Captain Wallis of the HMS
Dolphin
in 1767; Captain Cook arrived there two years later, and HMS
Bounty
under Captain Bligh in 1788.
One hundred and twenty-five years on, no mutiny was necessary for Brooke to enjoy the Tahitian way of life for as long as he pleased. Within a day or two of arriving he met a local girl, Taatamata, who symbolically gave him a flower. Wearing a flower over the right ear meant you were looking for a sweetheart; over the left ear, that you had found a sweetheart; and behind both ears, that you had found one sweetheart and were looking for another. To Cathleen he wrote:
A white flower over each ear, my dear, is dreadfully the most fashionable way of adorning yourself in Tahiti. Tonight we will put scarlet flowers in our hair and sing strange slumberous South Seas songs to the concertina and drink red wine and dance obscure native dances and bathe in a soft lagoon by moonlight and eat great squelchy tropical fruits – custard apples, papia, pomegranate, mango, guava, and the rest…
From Eddie Marsh he heard news of Wilfred Gibson’s impending marriage, and Marsh’s delight at receiving Brooke’s poem ‘Heaven’.
Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream or Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto Mud! – Death eddies near –
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somehow, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almight Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
Marsh confessed to Rupert, ‘I do long to see you. Every now and then it comes over me, how much more I should be enjoying everything if you were here.’ He also mentioned the impending publication of the first edition of the Brooke/Abercrombie/Gibson/Drinkwater co-operative publication
New Numbers
. The volume published in February 1914 contained three of Rupert’s sonnets, ‘A Memory’, ‘Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)’ and ‘One Day’ written in the Pacific.
Today I have been happy. All the day
I held the memory of you, and wove
Its laughter with the dancing light o’ the spray,
And sowed the sky with tiny clouds of love,
And sent you following the white waves of sea,
And crowned your head with fancies, nothing worth,
Stray buds from that old dust of misery,
Being glad with a new foolish quiet mirth.
So lightly I played with those dark memories,
Just as a child, beneath the summer skies,
Plays hour by hour with a strange shining stone,
For which (he knows not) towns were fire of old,
And love has been betrayed, and murder done,
And great kings turned to a little bitter mould.
During his time in the South Seas, the quality and depth of Rupert’s poetry reached a new maturity, while at home his reputation was
growing. Wilfred Gibson was a little peeved that he had not been offered ‘Heaven’ for
New Numbers
, and the English Association wanted to include ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ in an anthology of modern poetry for use in secondary schools. The editor of a new series of
Body and Modern Development of Modern Thought
was keen for Brooke to contribute, having been impressed by his review of
Poems of John Donne.
Eddie Marsh suggested he might manage 40,000 words on somebody like the Stockholm playwright Johan August Strindberg, a subject close to Brooke’s heart. There was a splendid review of
New Numbers
in
The Times
, which quoted his ‘Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)’.
