Fatal Glamour (54 page)

56
Gauguin,
Noa Noa
, X.

57
Maugham sold it at auction in 1962 for $48,000.

58
LRB
, 570, 653. Taatamata did console herself with festivities set off by the arrival of an Argentinian training ship,
El Presidente Sarmiento
, with a hundred cadets on board. See O'Brien,
Mystic Isles of the South Seas
, 72–3.

59
LRB
, 653–4. With conjectural emendations to Taatamata's French, “my dear sweetheart I'll always love you . . . I always remember your slender little body and the little mouth that kisses me nicely you have pierced my heart and I love always.”

60
O'Brien,
Mystic Isles of the South Seas
, 390;
LRB
, 653–4.

61
Read,
Forever England
, 278.

62
In 1915 the ship was converted to carry Anzac troops to Gallipoli.

63
LRB
, 573.

64
Rupert Brook to Jacques Raverat c. 23 April 1914. Cut from
LRB
, 581.

65
LRB
, 583.

66
Rupert had a letter of introduction to them from Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop.

67
After Rupert's death, Browne and his wife mounted a production of
Lithuania
in Chicago, which was not a commercial or artistic success.

68
In
This Side of Paradise
, the hero Amory is said to “look a good deal like the picture of Rupert Brooke” (presumably one by Sherrill Schell). “To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knew Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman's literary moods. Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grantchester to Waikiki” (248).

1
When Cathleen Nesbitt and Mrs Brooke did meet, as mourners, they became good friends.

2
Gardner, Memoir, 12.

3
Marsh dedicated
Georgian Poetry (IV) 1918–19
to Hardy. However, D.H. Lawrence welcomed the first volume of
Georgian Poetry
as a reaction against “the nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless people – Ibsen, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy.”
Phoenix
, 304.

4
The first installment of royalties, in 1915, was £500, and a steady flow continued for at least fifteen years. The three poets also shared the capital that had supported Rupert's annual income – probably about £4,000. Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 519.

5
Edward Thomas had gone to Oxford, but in June 1914 he had not yet started to write poetry.

6
John Drinkwater was absent. On the way to Dymock, Edward Thomas's train stopped at the hamlet Adlestrop. Six months later this inspired his classic “train window poem” of the same title.

7
Edward Thomas,
Daily News
, 22 July 1914. When Thomas was killed, Frost called it “the loss of the best friend I ever had.” Frost,
Letters
, 1:592.

8
Hollis,
Now All Roads Lead to France
, 166.

9
Robert Frost to John Bartlett, in Frost,
Selected Letters
, 104.

10
Mary Gardner,
Plain Themes
.

11
Frost,
Selected Letters
, 104.

12
Robert Frost to John Haines, 15 May 1915, in Frost,
Letters
, 1:292–3.

13
LRB
, 597 [misdated; ?20 June 1914]; 595, passage omitted by Keynes in
LRB
.

14
Ibid., 595 [misdated; 23 June 1914?].

15
Ibid., 449.

16
Brooke,
Prose of Rupert Brooke
, 176.

17
LRB
, 592.

18
Ibid., 424.

19
Rupert Brooke to Cathleen Nesbitt, Aug? 1914, in Nesbitt
A Little Love
, 81.

20
Quoted in Jebb,
Patrick Shaw-Stewart
, 125.

21
Nicolson,
Portrait of a Marriage
, 141. Harold met Vita in June 1910.

22
Angus Macindoe (Eileen's grandson), personal communication with the author (email), April 2014.

23
Asquith,
Diary
, 50, 3 July 1915.

24
Hassall,
Edward Marsh
, 602. The other possible candidate would be Phyllis Gardner, but her style was more restrained.

25
LRB
, 600, misdated; should be 2 August.

26
Ibid., 599.

27
Ibid., 608, 616.

28
Rupert Brooke to Eileen Wellesley, 23 Oct. 1914,
BA
.

29
Rupert Brooke to Eileen Wellesley, 5 Sept. 1914,
BA
.

30
SOL
, 269.

31
Ibid., 273.

32
LRB
, 613.

33
James Strachey to Noel Olivier, 20 July 1916, private collection. In the end, though, James married the Bedalian Alix Sargent-Florence and Noel her medical colleague Arthur Richards. Years after that, James and Noel had a long-running adulterous affair.

34
Hale,
Friends and Apostles
, 279.

35
See Nirenberg,
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
.

36
LRB
, 614.

37
Cathleen's mother was a suffragette who had gone to prison for breaking windows at a post office. Rupert may have been kept in the dark about this episode.

38
Lawrence,
Letters of D.H. Lawrence
, 2:611.

39
Hughes,
Tom Brown's Schooldays
, 206. Hughes uses “Russians” because the novel was composed during the Crimean War. “Border-ruffians” presumably refers to the tribal warriors of the North West Frontier, in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.

40
On the collective outlook of the war poets, see Caesar,
Taking It Like a Man
; and Egremont,
Some Desperate Glory
.

41
These survival odds are accepted by Lewis-Stempel,
Six Weeks
.

42
LRB
, 621.

43
Beckett,
Making of the First World War
, 21.

44
Churchill was a major in the Reserves, but had never commanded a unit larger than two hundred men. He had also managed to send his own family regiment, the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars, to Dunkirk, though they never reached Antwerp.

45
Churchill,
World Crisis
, 319.

46
Ibid., 328.

47
LRB
, 624–5, 632–3.

48
Ibid., 627.

49
Nehls,
D.H. Lawrence
, 1:289.

50
A third argument, often made by pacifists, was that international conflicts should always be resolved by diplomacy rather than force of arms. But Germany had not given Belgium anything to negotiate.

51
LRB
633, 636.

52
Dent, a fellow of King's in music, was deeply attached to Clive Carey, another of Rupert's contemporaries.

53
LRB
, 636.

54
Ibid., 637, omitted in
LRB
.

55
Ibid., 635–6. Keynes printed “X” for Cornwallis-West.

56
Times
, 12 January 1915. Cornwallis-West did not return to active service; he went bankrupt in 1916 and died by his own hand in 1951.

57
The Times
reviewed it on 11 March 1915.

58
Lawrence,
Letters
3:38; Bristow, “Rupert Brooke's Poetic Deaths,” 669.

59
LRB
, 631.

60
Julian Grenfell's poem “Into Battle” was written six days after Rupert's death, and reads like a pastiche of his themes.

61
Quoted in Wilson,
The Myriad Faces of War
, 111.

62
Byron died in April 1824 and probably, like Brooke, of sepsis.

1
Wilson,
Myriad Faces of War
, 110.

2
Churchill,
World Crisis
, 339.

3
Wilson,
The Myriad Faces of War
, 130. Venetia Stanley was Asquith's mistress. The “gorgeous East” is a phrase from Wordsworth's sonnet on Venice.

4
LRB
, 652.

5
Ibid., 663.

6
However, he also asked if Albert Rothenstein – about his only Jewish friend – would nominate him for the Savile Club. In 1916 Rothenstein changed his German-sounding name to Rutherston.

7
LRB
, 639.

8
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 438.

9
LRB
, 658.

10
Henry James in Brooke,
Letters from America
, xxxviii.

11
Ibid., xiii, xxv, xl.

12
Brooke,
Prose of Rupert Brooke
, 199. “A” is the beloved of Rupert's semi-autobiographical protagonist – perhaps a blend of Noel and Cathleen?

13
James, in
Letters from America
, xl. James spoke informally of his admiration for Rupert in a letter to Eddie Marsh, 6 June 1915. James,
Life in Letters
, 547.

14
LRB
, 660, 662–3.

15
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 489.

16
LRB
, 665.

17
Ibid., 668.

18
Rupert was unsure about James Strachey's letters, which he called “rather a pestilential heap.” Dudley returned them to James, who held on to both sides of the correspondence. Geoffrey Keynes was eager to get them; James feared he might destroy ones that showed Rupert in a bad light, so he sold them to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Rupert made no mention of Geoffrey in planning his literary legacy, beyond saying that he might like a keepsake. Geoffrey had never been part of Rupert's inner circle. He made himself a favourite with Mrs Brooke after Rupert's death, and she appointed him one of the estate's four trustees in 1930, when she cut Eddie Marsh out of her will.

19
LRB
, 669–70.

20
Carlyon,
Gallipoli
, 320. The argument of the bitter-enders was that the Turks had lost many of their shore guns to naval bombardment and were running low on ammunition. But it was never likely that an entire battle fleet could be passed through the eye of the needle at Canakkale.

21
Hamilton,
Gallipoli Diary
, v.

22
LRB
, 678.

23
Ibid., 662.

24
Kum Kale, where the French landed, was three miles from the ruins of Troy. They were withdrawn, and later fought next to the
RND
at Cape Helles.

25
LRB
, 680. A threnody is a poem on the death of someone or something.

26
Philoctetes had been the lover of Heracles, and received his bow after his death.

27
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 503.

28
Ibid., 502. Inge was an expert on Christian Platonism, but he objected to Rupert's claim that he would survive as “a pulse in the eternal mind.”

29
Streptococcus pneumoniae
was the proximate cause of death for many
AIDS
patients in the 1980s and 1990s. In this context, there seems little plausibility in the rumour that Rupert's fatal illness was connected with a bout of venereal disease when he was in Tahiti. There is no evidence for this, though the coral poisoning he suffered there probably weakened his constitution.

30
Browne died on 7 June. His body was never recovered for burial; his name is among the twenty-one thousand “missing in action” on the Helles Memorial.

31
Bonham-Carter,
Champion Redoubtable
, 2:42.

32
Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, 513.

33
On the night of 24 April Freyberg made a one-man diversion, swimming ashore to set flares to deceive the Turks about the invasion point. He received the Distinguished Service Order for this feat. On 13 November 1916 he won a Victoria Cross at Beaucourt on the Somme. F.S. Kelly was killed there on the same day.

34
Bonham-Carter,
Champion Redoubtable
, 2:69.

35
His younger brother Hamo Sassoon was fatally wounded at Gallipoli. He died on a hospital ship on 1 November 1915, and was buried at sea.

36
One of them was Edwin Dyett, from the Nelson Battalion of the
RND
. See A.P. Herbert,
The Secret Battle
.

37
Lawrence,
Collected Letters
, 1:337.

38
Asquith,
Diaries
, 94, 28 Oct. 1915.

39
The Times
, 26 April 1915.

40
Labour Party resolution, 1916. Bonham-Carter,
Champion Redoubtable
, 78

41
In July 1916 the
RND
was reformed as the 63rd Division, a regular infantry unit. In the attack on Beaucourt in November the Hood battalion again lost most of its officers. By 1917 Oc Asquith was commander of the Hood, which was mauled again in the second battle of Passchendaele.

42
After the death of his three beneficiaries, income from Rupert's literary estate has been distributed to other deserving poets by the Brooke trustees.