Fatal Glamour (43 page)

Do you remember the still summer evening

When in the cosy cream-washed living-room

Of the Old Nailshop we all talked and laughed

Our neighbors from the Gallows, Catherine

And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;

Eleanor and Robert Frost, living awhile

At Little Iddens, who'd brought over with them

Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight

We talked and laughed, but for the most part listened

While Robert Frost kept on and on and on

In his slow New England fashion for our delight,

Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,

And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes.

We sat there in the lamplight while the day

Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers

Called over the low meadows till the owls

Answered them from the elms; we sat and talked

Now a quick flash from Abercrombie, now

A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas,

Now a clear laughing word from Brooke, and then

Again Frost's rich and ripe philosophy

That had the body and tang of good draught-cider

And poured as clear a stream.

Rupert had already met Frost in London, but now he came to know him more intimately, the way one can in the country rather than in the town. Gibson's poem recognises Frost's dominance. He was the oldest person there – thirteen years older than Rupert – and had made a brilliant debut on the British literary scene with
A Boy's Will
(1913) and
North of Boston
(just published, on 15 May). Abercrombie and Ezra Pound, along with many others, hailed Frost's poetic talent. But it was Edward Thomas who reviewed the volume in three different places, and best defined Frost's distinctive gift: “This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive. It speaks, and it is poetry . . . Many, if not most, of the separate lines and separate sentences are plain and, in themselves, nothing. But they are bound together and made elements of beauty by a calm eagerness of emotion.”
⁷

About half of the seventeen poems in
North of Boston
– including the seminal “Mending Wall” – had been composed in England since Frost's arrival there a year and a half before. What the Dymock poets admired in Frost was how he combined common speech with fathomless depths of irony and philosophical complexity. Frost was partly a disciple of Hardy but he used his poems to work through a problem rather than being content, as Hardy usually was, to leave the problem with no possible resolution. On long country walks together, Thomas absorbed Frost's cast of mind and was liberated to himself become a poet in a similar vein.

The effect on Rupert of the Dymock gathering is harder to define. Frost responded to Rupert's charm, but cast a cold eye on his verses. “Neither is Brooke worth bothering with,” was his comment on Rupert's contributions to
New Numbers 3
.
⁸
This was fair comment on “Retrospect,” a poem written at Mataiea. Rupert's aim was to bring his four years with Noel into perspective, but the result is an awkward mixture of condescension and sentimentality. It harks back to the time Noel had taken him to her breast at Limpsfield, and imagines her doing so again:

O mother-quiet, breasts of peace,

Where love itself would faint and cease!

O infinite deep I never knew,

I would come back, come back to you,

Find you, as a pool unstirred,

Kneel down by you, and never a word,

Lay my head, and nothing said,

In your hands, ungarlanded;

Love does not end in delight, but in the oblivion of sleep and a quasi-maternal bosom, while nothing is said about what Rupert had been up to while he was away.

Frost's dislike of the poem may also have stemmed from a misunderstanding. He had become friendly with Phyllis Gardner and her mother while Rupert was on his travels, and may have thought that the poem was a shot against Phyllis: “We know this hardly treated girl oh very well. Her beauty is her red hair. Her cleverness is in painting. She has a picture in the New English Exhibition. Her mother has written a volume of verse in which he gets his. Very funny. No one will die.”
⁹

Mrs Gardner's salvo was
Plain Themes
, with woodcuts by Phyllis, published the year before. Several poems are spoken in Phyllis's voice and directed at her faithless lover. Robert Frost said that Rupert “gets his” in the poems, but they are more rueful than resentful. “Rejected” sets the tone:

Death calls me to him, and with heart on fire,

Although I long for death, from him I fly.

Bound unto earth by this one sweet desire,

To kiss your lips again before I die.

Now Madness beckons, yet it is in vain,

My every thought is centred now in yours;

Clinging to reason is my aching brain,

The wish to meet your eyes again endures.

Despair may take my hand, her tear-stained eyes

And pale drawn face I can as yet gainsay;

For hidden in my breaking heart there lies

The hope to hold your hand again one day.
¹⁰

Elsewhere, Frost dismissed Rupert as a would-be metaphysical, trying to produce Edwardian variations on Donne.
¹¹
The real difference between them was that Frost's poems were built on conflicting points of view, while Rupert's displayed just one set of feelings: his own. Frost's judgment softened after Rupert's death: “I was struck sad for Rupert. But he chose the right way. Your letter telling of his death came right on the heels of another from Smith saying how much the war had done to make him a better poet. The war saved him only to kill him.”
¹²
The Dymock gathering showed Rupert gravitating to two likeable individuals but minor talents: Gibson and Abercrombie. Frost and Thomas could have helped his poetic development, but he was less comfortable with them and they never became mentors.

At Dymock the other poets had their entourages of wives and children; Rupert was still single and still conflicted about sex and love. He could see the appeal of the Dymock way: cheap rent in a cottage, the responsibilities of family life, husband and wife working as a team to support a steady flow of poems and reviews. Steadiness, though, was never part of Rupert's temperament. When he told Jacques that he “
must
marry soon,” he at once veered around by saying that he prayed continually: “Twelve hours a day, that I may, sometime, fall in love with somebody. Twelve hours a day that I may
never
fall in love with anybody. Either alternative seems too Hellish to bear.” Either alternative also seemed to rule out being in love with Cathleen Nesbitt. But if Rupert didn't fall in love, that left an endless round of what he called “cunt-sniffing.”
¹³
Presumably that was the right category for Agnes Capponi, and for the young woman Rupert hoped to go away with the weekend after his Dymock meeting. “One hangs hopelessly around young women one doesn't care for a scrap,” he told Jacques, “and – at this date – sees through entirely. And if one
doesn't
do that: one's too bally restless to work.”
¹⁴
He does not name the woman, but most likely it was Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, to whom he had written on 8 June and 10. He had lunch with her at Simpson's in July, but did not succeed in re-kindling their affair.

Needless to say, a rendezvous with a former lover was not, in Rupert's view, something that Cathleen Nesbitt needed to know about. They had been a couple for a year and a half now. Nominally they were in love, and they had just gone away to stay at the Pink and Lily in the Chilterns, but they had yet to kiss each other on the lips. As with Noel, chastity made Cathleen safe to love, because to make love was not required.
In spite of all, both women remained possible candidates for Rupert to marry. But a major obstacle was that they had embarked on professional careers that they had no intention of giving up. Rupert had always ignored the clause in the Fabian “Basis” that recognised equal citizenship for men and women, but over the years he had become an ever fiercer opponent of feminism in all its forms, whether personal or social. “I loathe the idea of women acting in public,” he had told Cathleen.
¹⁵
Some of this came from personal frustrations in his relations with Ka and other advanced young women; some from his dislike of the young women he had observed in the United States. All his resentments found a focus in August Strindberg, for Rupert the exemplary misogynist of the age.

Rupert had first worked on Strindberg in the summer of 1911, helped by the Newnham student Estrid Linder. In February 1913 he had given a lecture on Strindberg and Ibsen to the Heretics Society in Cambridge. Strindberg's generation, he argued, had rejected the sentimentality of their predecessors and sought refuge in its opposite: “The morbid symptom of lovelessness is that denial of sex called feminism, with its resultant shallowness of woman and degradation of man. Feminism disgusted Strindberg, who was born with a curiously high standard of emotional and intellectual morality; its accompaniments of natural and unnatural vice shocked him. We know what Shakespeare suffered through one light woman. Strindberg was plunged into a generation of light women.”
¹⁶

Rupert's aim in 1912–14 was to become an English Strindberg, if in a minor key. His one play,
Lithuania
, was about a homicidal young woman who kills her brother by mistake. Strindberg's history had points of contact with Rupert's. He also lived in the shadow of his puritanical mother, and was in his youth an enthusiast for socialism and female emancipation. He became embittered by the Swedish feminists who denounced the “immorality” of his plays, and by conflicts with his first wife, Siri von Essen. Strindberg accused von Essen of infidelity, and assaulted a woman he suspected of being her lesbian lover. Years of paranoia and nervous breakdowns followed. Ever consistent, he was a hysterical anti-Semite to match his other hysterical hatreds.

The crux, for both Strindberg and Rupert, was that feminism revealed women's desire to be like men, to compete with them, and to neglect their traditional roles of nurturing their mates and children. Once the historic polarity between the sexes was broken, there would be a chaotic
loss of identity for both men and women. Homosexuality and lesbianism were sure to be part of this. Rupert tried to explain his fears to Frances Cornford, a woman who was safely married and with a new baby: “I am not insulting women. There
was
a period when I despised them a little, perceiving what fourthrate men they made. But lately I've cheered up, noticing what supreme women they make . . . Think of Gwen.”
¹⁷
Gwen was safe too, in her marriage to Jacques where she did not challenge his prejudices. That was another of Rupert's fixed ideas: that women could never be trusted unless they had a man who guided and protected them. When Geoffrey Keynes accused Rupert of being cynical about women, he replied, “It's about as cynical to hold my views about females, as it is to put fire-guards in front of a nursery fire.”
¹⁸

Rupert's obsessions about women did not manage to be consistent. He feared the hordes of New Women, so militant that they would even be willing to die for equality, as Emily Davison did when she ran onto the Derby course in June 1913. But he also feared the vulnerability of young women, exposed as they were to a corrupt milieu full of intellectuals, perverts, and Jews. Did he fear women because they were strong, or because they were weak? And what could he do about his own desire and need for women? He admitted, to Cathleen, that there was no consistency in his views: “I've been dodging the young ladies who are in love with me. I wish I were a decent man. I suppose no unmarried man is decent and only 50 per cent of the married ones. My subconscious is angry with every dreary young woman I meet if she doesn't fall in love with me; and my consciousness is furious with her if she does.”
¹⁹

The most important of the young ladies that Rupert was dodging in August was Lady Eileen Wellesley, a daughter of the 4th Duke of Wellington; except that he didn't always dodge. Eddie took Rupert to dine with the Duchess of Leeds on 24 July, where he sat between Eileen and the duchess's daughter Gwendoline. Both had been debutantes nine years before, when a society column described Eileen as “very good-looking in a somewhat picturesque style, with her fair hair loosely dressed, and a slight, elegant figure. Like her mother, Lady Eileen is literary in her tastes, and has greatly enjoyed the months she has spent abroad in study.” Patrick Shaw-Stewart found her “nice though spoilt and exacting.”
²⁰
Eileen was the same age as Rupert, and had some resemblance to Cathleen Nesbitt in looks. She had been “finished” at Dresden with a group of young aristocrats that included Violet Asquith, Cynthia Charteris (who
would marry Violet's brother Herbert), and Mary Vesey (who married Aubrey Herbert). Later, Eileen studied art, and worked in watercolours. Nigel Nicolson reports that she was “half-engaged” to Harold Nicolson before he met Vita Sackville-West.
²¹
Eileen and Violet were still in that somewhat aimless time, for women of their class, between debut and marriage. Both were attracted to Rupert, while recognising the obstacles to marrying a middle-class young man with no money, poet or not.

After the dinner at the Duchess of Leeds, Eileen sent Rupert a Tahitian-style note: “Dear Mr Brooke, I'm afraid you left your cigarette-case behind the other day. Would you care to come to tea to collect it?” He did go to tea, though he didn't smoke.
²²
A few days later they went out for the day to Richmond Park, where they seem to have found a secluded corner to make love. Cathleen had gone away, touring in a play called “A Butterfly on a Wheel.” It was a tiresome society drama, but she needed the money. Rupert did not approve, and that may have fuelled his readiness to fall into bed, or into the long grass, with Eileen. A further attraction, probably, was that this was like going to bed with a piece of English history. Eileen's blood was deepest blue, and she lived at 1 Hyde Park Corner in Apsley House, acquired by the Iron Duke after Waterloo. But we need hardly speculate about Rupert's motives. He slept with Eileen because she was present and willing, and because he saw no need for Cathleen to know about it. After his death, Cynthia Asquith summed it up: “Mary Herbert . . . told me Eileen Wellesley claims very serious love affair with Rupert Brooke saying that quite unsuspected of everyone else they used to meet in Richmond Park and in Eddie's flat. No doubt Rupert Brooke had the thoroughly polygamous instincts of most poets.”
²³