Fatal Glamour (50 page)

The question of what Rupert might have done as poet or statesman after the war has to remain open, which is not the same as calling it an idle question. His actual legacy is known: that he left his capital from his father and the royalties from his poems to Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Walter de la Mare. The massive sales of the poems provided all three with comfortable lifetime incomes. Rupert hoped that what they wrote after the war might compensate for his own death. Unfortunately, their best work was already behind them by 1915, and they gradually sank into eclipse.
⁴²
Better poets might have benefited, but
Rupert preferred those who were both personal friends, and most likely to write poetry in his own Georgian vein.

Two months after Rupert another poet, Apostle, and Kingsman died, at Bukovina on the Eastern Front.
⁴³
Feri Békássy made his way out of England after the declaration of war to enlist in the cavalry and fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like Rupert he wrote a poem, in English, with the title “1914”:

He went without fears, went gaily, since go he must, And drilled and sweated and sang, and rode in the heat and the dust Of the summer; his fellows were round him, as eager as he. While over the world the gloomy days of war dragged heavily.

“I am sure to get something good out of the war unless I die in it,” he wrote to Noel Olivier.
⁴⁴
The cavalry had its own form of fatal glamour – and fatal illusion, as the painter Oskar Kokoschka discovered:

Our uniforms, red, blue and white, stood out only too well, and as I rode out, I felt spied upon by an unseen enemy in the dense, dark foliage of the forests.

The first dead that I encountered were young comrades-in-arms of my own, men with whom, only a few nights earlier, I had been sitting round the camp-fire in those Ukrainian forests, playing cards and joking. Not much more than boys they were, squatting there on the moss in their bright-coloured trousers, a group of them round a tree trunk.

From a branch a few paces further on a cap dangled, and on the next tree a dragoon's fur-lined blue cloak. He who had worn these things himself, hung naked, head downward, from a third tree.
⁴⁵

Békássy was killed four days after he arrived at the front. He and Rupert made the poetry of innocence; the poetry of experience was yet to come.

1
Lawrence,
Collected Letters
1:456; Brittain,
Testament of Youth
, quoted in Caesar,
Taking It Like a Man
, 3.

2
Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” 117.

3
Egremont,
Some Desperate Glory
.

4
Bond,
The Unquiet Western Front
, 1.

5
Clark,
The Sleepwalkers
, 359–61.

6
Clarissa Dalloway feels a kinship with Septimus, the shell-shocked veteran of the trenches, more than with her society friends. The model for Clarissa, Kitty Maxse, was the sister-in-law of Ivor Maxse, the general in Siegfried Sassoon's poem:

“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack

. . . .

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Maxse was also an Old Rugbeian. Small world.

1
Calling Mrs Brooke “The Ranee” began as one of Lytton Strachey's jokes in 1905. Sarawak, which was part of the island of Borneo, had been ruled by a dynasty of Brookes since 1842, known as the “White Rajahs.” Charles Brooke (no relation) was the rajah during Rupert's lifetime; his wife was the Ranee of Sarawak, equivalent to queen. Rupert picked up the joke, and called his mother “The Ranee” behind her back from then on.

2
Simpson,
Rugby since Arnold
, 36–7. £1,600 would be at least sixteen times the average Victorian wage. Average earnings in the UK in 2014 were about £26,000, so Rugby housemasters earned the rough equivalent of £400,000 now. They also had free housing and paid almost no income tax.

3
Orwell, review of
The Backward Son
by Stephen Spender, quoted in Crick,
George Orwell
, 67. Orwell considered his memoir of St Cyprian's, “Such, Such were the Joys,” to be “too libellous to print.” It appeared after his death, in 1968. Orwell,
Collected Essays
4:330.

4
One hundred and eighty pounds is equivalent to about £75,000 today. Fees at Eton in 2014–15 are about £34,000. Orwell had a scholarship at St Cyprian's, which reduced his fees to £90, though this was a shameful secret, to be kept from his classmates. His father's pension from the Indian Opium Department was £438 per year.

5
Before the 1870s, masters of colleges could marry, but not fellows. Plato's guardians were drawn from both genders, but Jowett ignored that.

6
Nick Duffell, “Why Boarding Schools Produce Bad Leaders,”
The Guardian
, 9 June 2014.

7
Brooke,
Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, 1909–1915
[hereafter
SOL
], 21. Lucas had gone to Haileybury, and the novel shows the public school system from the point of view of a boy who is a sensitive outsider.

8
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 29.

9
Ibid.

10
Ibid., 159.

11
Ibid., 33.

12
Ibid., 30.

13
Crick,
George Orwell
, 51.

14
Graves,
Goodbye to All That
, 23.

15
Ibid.

16
Seymour-Smith,
Robert Graves
, 13. Eden is still there in a 1906 school photo, but his disgrace must have come soon after.

17
Roche,
With Duncan Grant in Southern Turkey
, 47. Grant had left the school long before Eden's disgrace.

18
An English “public school,” in the nineteenth century, meant a school to which anyone could be admitted if they passed the entrance exam, and which was not run for profit by its proprietors. There was also an implied contrast with the usual schooling of the aristocracy by private tutors. The nine major public schools, as identified by the Clarendon Commission in 1861, were Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester, St Paul's, and Merchant Taylors'.

19
Connolly,
Enemies of Promise
, 260.

20
Honey,
Tom Brown's Universe
, 3.

21
Simpson,
Rugby since Arnold
, 5–6.

22
Quoted in Honey,
Tom Brown's Universe
, 17–18.

23
Eckersley,
Odds and Ends
, ix.

24
Lehmann,
Rupert Brooke
.

25
Caesar,
Taking It Like a Man
, 6.

26
Sedgwick,
Between Men
, 173.

27
Woolf,
Letters
, 3:155.

28
Hickson,
The Poisoned Bowl
, 20.

29
One of them, Edwin Dyett, served in Rupert Brooke's unit, the Royal Naval Division. See Herbert,
The Secret Battle
.

30
Hickson,
The Poisoned Bowl
, 35, citing Peter Ustinov's memoir (though Ustinov did not go to Rugby, and may not be a reliable source).

31
Hughes,
Tom Brown's Schooldays
, 169–70.

32
Brooke,
Letters of Rupert Brooke
[hereafter
LRB
], 23 Feb. 1906, 41. Sadler later changed his name to Sadleir to avoid being confused with his father, Sir Michael Sadler.

33
LRB
, 43, 46. Rupert's letters to Sadler have not survived. They were probably destroyed by Sadler himself, or by Geoffrey Keynes (who suppressed Sadler's name in his edition of Brooke's letters). Sadler married in 1914 and had a distinguished career as a bibliographer and book collector.

34
Ibid., 52.

35
Ibid., 46.

36
Ibid., 49.

37
Rupert Brooke to Ka Cox, “Friday evening,” [1 March 1912],
BA
.

38
“The Beginning,”
Poetical Works
, 166. This poem is dated “January 1907” in the
Poetical Works
, but it was enclosed in a letter of July 1906.
LRB
, 58.

39
LRB
, 60; Hale,
Friends and Apostles
, 250.

40
The high point in Lascelles's theatre career was a part as Prince Giglio in
The Rose and the Ring
at Wyndham's Theatre, in December 1923.

41
Rupert had lunch with Lascelles in London on 9 July 1909 (Hale,
Friends and Apostles
, 67–8). He wrote to Geoffrey Keynes on 26 April
1913, asking for Lascelles's London address; presumably he wanted to see Lascelles before leaving for the United States a month later.

42
Rupert Brooke to St John Lucas,
LRB
, 77.

43
LRB
, 258.

44
J.M. Keynes to Duncan Grant, 8 Feb. 1909,
BL
. Could this master have been the “lewd and bearded Jove” of p. 24 above?

45
Cotterill, an aspiring playwright, is remembered now for her infatuation with George Bernard Shaw.

46
LRB
, 81.

47
Quoted in Hastings,
Handsomest Young Man in England
, 71.

1
Demolins's work was translated into English,
Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due
, in 1898.

2
Raverat, Memoir, 3:2, my translation.

3
Gwen Raverat, Novel, 1.1.3.

4
Raverat, Memoir, 2:7.

5
LRB
, 73.

6
Ibid., 576.

7
Keynes,
The Gates of Memory
, 87.

8
LRB
, 116–17.

9
Mary Newbery Sturrock, interview with the author, June 1980.

10
LRB
, 118.

11
Olivier,
Letters
, 9.

12
Garnett,
Golden Echo
, 100.

13
Ibid., 17.

14
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 175.

15
The Pye sisters were a few years older than the Oliviers but constant companions for Neo-pagan camping and boating trips. Sybil, the elder, became a bookbinder of some renown; Ethel was an artist. Neither of them married. Their brother David, another Neo-pagan, studied engineering at Trinity College, where he became a fellow and a fellow of the Royal Society. Later he was Provost of University College, London.

16
Such vows drive the plot in
Much Ado about Nothing
and in
Love's Labours Lost
. They end up being broken, naturally.

17
Cornford, “Youth,” in
Collected Poems
, 15.

18
Cornford, Memoir, 31.

19
LRB
, 136; Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 163.

20
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 165.

21
LRB
, 339.

22
Lupton also built the Bedales School library, now a Grade I listed building.

23
Jacques Raverat to Ka Cox, 4 June 1908, in possession of Val Arnold-Forster, Ka Cox's daughter-in-law.

24
Jacques Raverat to Ka Cox, 20 Nov. 1908, in possession of Val Arnold-Forster.

25
LRB
, 142.

26
Rupert Brooke to James Strachey, 7 Jan. 1909, Berg.

27
Hale,
Friends and Apostles
, 246.

28
Angela Harris, daughter of Noel Olivier, interview with the author, 1980.

29
LRB
, 159.

30
Ibid., 164. Dowson was a decadent poet, known for the phrase “days of wine and roses.”

31
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 169.

1
Rupert Brooke to Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, 3–5 Jan 1912, private collection.

2
Speaight,
The Life of Hilaire Belloc
, 110.

3
Until 1906, membership was limited to seven hundred. This clause was repealed at the urging of H.G. Wells.

4
LRB
, 116.

5
Its founder was the daughter of the Oxford historian S.R. Gardiner.

6
F.M. Wilson, “Friendships,” in Phillips,
A Newnham Anthology
, 67;
LRB
, 308.

7
LRB
, 117.

8
Its younger members included two future prime ministers: Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee.

9
Wells,
New Worlds for Old
, 242–3, 303, quoted in N. and J. MacKenzie,
The Time-Traveller
, 228.