Fatal Glamour (40 page)

How much did it matter that Agnes was almost old enough to be Rupert's mother? She had been twice married and had given birth, so it would be pointless for Rupert to tee up his obsessions about “dirtiness,” female vulnerability, or woman-as-child. Yet his interlude with Agnes did not change the deep structure of his feelings about women. If she tried to deflect his puritanism, she failed. Still, they succeeded in becoming friends as well as lovers, the first time Rupert had managed that.

Rupert and Agnes left Lake Louise in different directions: he westward to Vancouver, she eastward to her home and later to England. While there, around March 1914, she went to visit Mrs Brooke in Rugby. An occasion, probably, where everything important remained unsaid. Yet how much had Rupert
encouraged
Agnes to go and see his mother, with motives we can only guess at? He waited to write to Cathleen Nesbitt until Agnes had left Lake Louise, and then his report was a masterpiece of omission: “I've been ‘down' for a week and a half – submerged – but oh! Very happy. Just lounging and staring at the lake and the mountains and the snow. It is the most beautiful place in the world . . . So I eat and chatter and roam and look.”
²²

When Rupert arrived in Vancouver, a letter from Eddie suggested that Cathleen expected him to marry her on his return. Under the heading “
PRIVATE
,” he tried to sum up the state of play:

Then, am I engaged to Cathleen? Well, one's always being engaged to
someone
you know. And I recollect saying a lot about marrying her, to her . . . My dear, I don't know if we shall marry. I might die.
WE
might feel differently . . .

My general position, you know, is queer. I've had enough and too much of love. I've come to the conclusion that marriage is the best cure for love. If I married, perhaps I could settle down, be at peace, and
WORK
 . . . Cathleen's character is very good, and I'm very fond of her. Why not her? – On the other hand, she's an actress . . .

(This is the sort of letter that doesn't look well in a Biography.)
²³

Eddie was the only person that Rupert really confided in at this time – someone gay, and an Apostle, like James Strachey (who had now been
discarded). Still, Rupert held back from Eddie whatever he had learned from his just-concluded episode with Agnes Capponi. Writing to her in November, he asked, “When, as these months and years clatter on, shall I be able to spend some months in peace with you, working and seeing you?” On Christmas Day, his message was, “I'm writing now – I always do, to you – in one place and one condition. I wonder if you know what it is?”
²⁴
Reading between the lines, we can guess that sexual frustration was agony for Rupert, except that living with a woman provoked agonies of another kind.

In his piece on “The Rockies” Rupert included two lyrical pages on the beauty of Lake Louise. But the beauty did not make up for the size and desolation of the North American landscape: “It is an empty land. To love the country here – mountains are worshipped, not loved – is like embracing a wraith. A European can find nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart . . . The land is virginal, the wind cleaner than elsewhere, and every lake new-born, and each day is the first day.”
²⁵
There were no “ghosts of lovers in Canadian lanes,” Rupert lamented. There were lovers in flesh and blood at the hotel, but that was not to be shared with his readers. The chapter on “The Rockies” in the
Westminster Gazette
marked the most westerly point for Rupert's travel writings. He did not write about Vancouver, nor about San Francisco or Tahiti. When he went to Lake Louise he had some half-finished poems but, he told Eddie, he had “an Episode with a Widow” instead of finishing them. They may have been in the notebook he lost somewhere in British Columbia, never recovered. One poem was to be called “Aeterna Corpora,” probably linked to what he later wrote to Agnes: “There are only two things in the world I think beautiful. One is a woman's head and body, and the other is goodness.”
²⁶
Two different things, we note.

Rupert told Eddie that Vancouver was “a wicked city,” but he gave no reason. He may have objected to the dens of vice downtown or to the presence of so many Asians whom, like a good Fabian, he blamed for driving down the wages of the “white man.” In all, he was happy to leave Canada behind. Despite their faults, the Americans had more vitality, while Canadians had no interest in anything beyond making the most money in the shortest time. He arrived in San Francisco around 15 September, and at once found it more agreeable than the north, and also more interested in
him
. “Their wide-mouthed awe at England is so
touching,” he reported to Eddie, “they really are merely a colony of ours still.”
²⁷
After a couple of weeks Rupert went across the bay to Berkeley where Charles Mills Gayley, the chairman of the English Department, took him in as a house guest. He arranged for Rupert to read at both Berkeley and Stanford, and encouraged undergraduates to come and see the visitor at his house on Piedmont Avenue. One of them was John Schoolcraft, who set down his impressions of this shy and unknown young poet:

I have seen some handsome Englishmen, particularly through service with the British army, but none who could come up to Brooke. Actually, he was a combination of the perfect English school boy, and the perfect English man, with a real overlay of beautiful girl . . . The best comparison I can think of is the young Garbo. His skin was like that of a girl, his coloring pink and white. He wore his dark-gold hair long, parted in the middle and flowing over the ears, but not offensively. Yet there was no effeminacy in speech or manner or in the management of his tall, strongly-built body.
²⁸

On his way back from Tahiti Rupert stayed in Berkeley again, and read some of his new poems to great effect – though, Schoolcraft notes, “Nor was anyone moved to tears, as Scott Fitzgerald was when Brooke read from his earlier verse to a group of undergraduates at Princeton in the fall of 1913.”
²⁹
Rupert was in San Francisco and Hawaii in September and October 1913, so he cannot have been at Princeton that fall. If Fitzgerald did hear him read, it was more likely in May 1914, when Rupert was staying with Russell Loines in New York. But there is no record of such an occasion at Princeton. Fitzgerald certainly went through an intense Rupert Brooke phase, writing imitative poems as an undergraduate and taking the title of his first novel,
This Side of Paradise
, from “Tiare Tahiti.” Was the phase so intense that he convinced himself he had seen Rupert in the flesh?

Rupert would later grumble about California, as he did about most things American, though the “young Apollo” side of his personality should have been a good fit with the emerging culture of Berkeley, Stanford, and Marin County (where he went hiking on Mt Tamalpais). He
lingered in the Bay Area, uncertain whether to set a return course for England or continue further west. “How perfectly imbecile I am to wander over here,” he told Eddie, “when Europe is infinitely more romantic!”
³⁰
Nonetheless, he tossed a coin, which pointed towards the South Seas. A few days later, he got a cautionary letter from Naomi Royde-Smith. The
Westminster Gazette
never printed more than six articles in a travel series, she said, and they were just printing Rupert's first one. The fee of four guineas was paid on publication, not on delivery, so only now would money start to trickle into Rupert's account in Rugby.
³¹
They had paid his fare to New York and, presumably, a substantial travel advance. There was not going to be a lot more coming from that quarter.

Even with his £150 from Mrs Brooke and £120 from King's, Rupert did not have cash on hand to keep going. Nothing daunted, he got Russell Loines to send him a loan, covered by a check on Rupert's bank (where the manager was an accommodating sort). His puritanical streak did not extend to financial affairs, where he never seems to have worried about running short or not having a job. Staying on the road was better than facing the complications he had left behind in England, including the tricky question of whether he could or should marry Cathleen. So he would take his cue from Robert Louis Stevenson and Gauguin. The South Seas were not a solution to his problems; they were a way of making his problems irrelevant. If myths could be believed, in the South Seas there
were
no problems.

Rupert sailed for Hawaii on the
ss
Sierra
on 7 October. He had told Eddie that he found it impossible to write poetry while travelling, but on the ship he started again. He thought of composing two sonnet-sequences; only seven sonnets made it into the
Collected Poems
. Most of them tried to deal with the failure of his love for Noel. His model may have been George Meredith's
Modern Love
, though Rupert could not match that sequence in scale or intensity. One sonnet, “Mutability,” may have been addressed to Agnes Capponi rather than Noel:

Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile;

Each kiss lasts but the kissing, . . .

Poor straws! On the dark flood we catch awhile,

Cling, and are borne into the night apart.

The laugh dies with the lips, “Love” with the lover.

That was an argument for snatching kisses when offered, knowing they could not last. But the other sonnets added up to an argument
against
consummation. Rupert explained to Cathleen how he had come to realise this with Noel, probably when he was staying at her house in Limpsfield:

I crept along . . . to her room, some little while before dawn . . . I knelt down by her, . . . and put my head on her hand; and she woke, and felt fond of me I suppose, and pulled my head against her heart and held me a minute. And I thought I had found heaven . . . [But] she was too wise, and something in her heart too strong, for her to give herself to me, because she loved and pitied me in that way; nor did I love her little enough to want it given – in that way. Else it would have been a thousand times worse; as I know from later things.
³²

Love, for this side of Rupert, was all about a woman taking pity on some needy and troubled man. Or not even that because, as Rupert went on to say, “a man is a child.” The trouble was, “a woman is a child too.” One needed comfort; the other needed protection, when her longing to give herself led her astray. What followed, though Rupert could not consciously express it, was that the primal relationship was between woman/mother and man/child. A few months on, Rupert started to read D.H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers
, which he found “hectic” but impressive. Did the novel's message ever sink in? Paul Morel must either break his attachment to his mother or die. Rupert never really tried to make the break. Concealment and cunning were his strategies in the oedipal wars.

Rupert arrived in Hawaii on 15 October, and stayed at Waikiki. He went over to Kauai for four days, where he had an introduction to a plantation owner, and enjoyed a trek to Wailua falls.
³³
The warmth and tropical vegetation made their usual impact, but Hawaii was too tourist-infested for a long stay. On 27 October Rupert sailed for islands where his longing for romance had a better chance of being satisfied. He arrived at Samoa on 2 November, and immediately recognised that this was
what he had been looking for. He wandered through villages, living among “naked people of incredible loveliness, perfect manners, and immense kindliness.”
³⁴
The women, especially, were staggeringly attractive: “Samoan girls have extraordinarily beautiful bodies, and walk like goddesses . . . in carriage and face they remind me continually and vividly of my incomparable heartless and ever-loved Clotilde. Fancy moving among a tribe of Clotildes!” That was Dudley Ward's sister-in-law, Clotilde van Derp, a pioneer of modern dance. But Rupert told Edmund Gosse that sex remained in the background: “The idea of the South Seas as a place of passion and a Mohammedan's paradise is but a sailor's yarn. It is nothing near so disturbing. It is rather the opposite to alcohol, according to the Porter's definition; for it promotes performance but takes away desire.”
³⁵

In the last of his travel pieces, he called the Samoans the happiest and healthiest of God's children:

If you live the South Sea life, the intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute . . . It is part of the charm of these people that, while they are not so foolish as to “think,” their intelligence is incredibly lively and subtle, their sense of humour and their intuitions of other people's feelings are very keen and living . . . A white man living with them soon feels his mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those glorious golden-brown bodies. But even he soon learns to
be
his body (and so his true mind), instead of using it as a stupid convenience for his personality, a moment's umbrella against this world. He is perpetually and intensely aware of the subtleties of taste in food, of every tint and line of the incomparable glories of those dawns and evenings, of each shade of intercourse in fishing or swimming or dancing with the best companions in the world. That alone is life; all else is death.
³⁶

Western Samoa was a German colony when Rupert arrived there, but on 29 August 1914 the New Zealanders invaded to reclaim it for the British Empire. As soon as he heard the news Rupert wrote about his stay there for the
New Statesman
, which printed his piece on 19 September.
³⁷
The chronology counts because by then Rupert had both read
Sons and Lovers
and recently met D.H. Lawrence (on 27 June and 30 July). It seems likely that they discussed the primacy of body over mind – what Lawrence later defined as “blood consciousness.”
³⁸
Yet whatever they had in common, their responses to the war were diametrically opposed. Lawrence hated it from the first, and refused to participate in any way. Rupert, just as he was writing in praise of the only true life – in Samoa – was choosing its alternative: “all else is death.”