Authors: Mike Read
Marsh finished his memoir in eight days, in a little room at the top of the house, before suggesting to Henry James that he write a preface to Brooke’s
Westminster Gazette
articles that Marsh was also preparing for publication. Ironically, Marsh’s fear that Mrs Brooke might not like the memoir and his paving the way with unnecessarily mollifying notes made her worry far more than she would have otherwise. He glossed over love affairs, referred to Cathleen Nesbitt as ‘X’ and insisted that he wanted only to do justice and honour to Rupert and to
use only material with which Mrs Brooke would be happy. She hated feeling that the Rupert publicity machine was happening in spite of her feelings, and feared that a memoir at that moment, while so many were still dying, was not in the best taste. Marsh felt it important that the memoir should appeal to the youth of the country. She blocked it, insisted that it be postponed for at least a year, as well as being reworked: ‘It is too evidently written by someone who knew him for a comparatively short time and even for that time quite a small part of him.’ She was right, but even as his mother, she knew very little of major parts of his life. So who would be best qualified to write a memoir? The simple answer was no one person. There were so many different aspects to his make-up that friends and acquaintances were shown different faces, moods, character traits and displays of temperament, and any truly well-balanced account of him would have to include contributions from everyone who knew him. While Mrs Brooke acknowledged that Marsh meant well, she must have felt that the memoir turned the son she had known into a son she did not know, with even the intimacy of his memory being taken away from her.
However, there was much she did not know. Rupert’s romance with Eileen Wellesley had been conducted with a high degree of discretion. There were two main clues to its actual depths. Several months earlier, Marsh’s housekeeper, Mrs Elgy, had discovered Eileen’s hairpins in Rupert’s bed at Raymond Buildings, and an entry in Cynthia Asquith’s diary for 3 July 1915 added fuel to the fire:
Mary Herbert [a close friend of Eileen Wellesley] disobeyed her mother and came to see me in the afternoon. She 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 Eddie’s flat. No doubt Rupert Brooke had the thoroughly polygamous instincts of most poets.
John Masefield, who was now undertaking a lot of work for the British Red Cross, was working with its motor boat ambulance service, which involved, among other things, taking small craft out to the Dardenelles. It was his intention,
en route
, to land on Skyros and visit Rupert’s grave, but by early September heavy weather had set in, making it impossible to go ashore. Instead he painted three small watercolours of the island from different angles, and later presented them to Eddie Marsh. On returning home, he wrote his vivid and moving impression of the island, and his memory of Rupert.
Here, we stood together, we three men,
Before the war had swept us to the East
Three thousand miles away, I stand again
And hear the bells, and breathe, and go to feast.
We trod the same path, to the selfsame place,
Yet here I stand, having beheld their graves,
Skyros whose shadows the great seas erase,
And Seddul Bahr that ever more blood craves.
So, since we communed here, our bones have been
Nearer, perhaps, than they again will be,
Earth and the worldwide battle lie between,
Death lies between, and friend-destroying sea.
Yet here, a year ago, we talked and stood
As I stand now, with pulses beating blood.
I saw her like a shadow on the sky
In the last light, a blur upon the sea,
Then the gale’s darkness put the shadow by,
But from one grave that island talked to me;
And, in the midnight, in the breaking storm,
I saw its blackness and a blinking light,
And thought, ‘So death obscures your gentle form,
So memory strives to make the darkness bright;
And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies,
Part of this crag this bitter surge offends,
While I, who pass, a little obscure thing,
War with this force, and breathe, and am its king.’
In Rupert’s last letter to Noel Olivier dated 10 January 1915 he commented on the fact that another of her suitors, and fellow King’s man, Ferenc Bekassy, had also enlisted: ‘Dreadful if you lost all your lovers at once,’ adding rather cryptically – ‘Ah, but you won’t lose all!’ Bekassy was killed not long after Rupert. Noel was distraught at both deaths, declaring that there was no chance now that she’d ever marry for love. She did marry, though. In 1919, two years after qualifying as a doctor, she married a Welsh colleague, Arthur Richards, and bore him a son and four daughters. Bizarrely, in 1932 she began a ten-year love affair with James Strachey. James’s overtures to Rupert having been rejected as had Rupert’s to Noel, the irony would surely have affected Brooke’s delicate nervous system had he lived.
In October 1915, six months after Brooke’s death, his American friends at the Chicago Little Theatre, Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg, produced his play
Lithuania
, in conjunction with Andreyev’s
Pretty Sabine Women
. In Rupert’s play, Ellen portrayed the daughter, the father being played by Browne, who also directed the piece. In having his play performed at the Little Theatre, Brooke’s name was added to the list of illustrious playwrights whose works had been performed there, among them Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw and Yeats. The cover for the slim volume of the published play
was designed by C. Raymond Johnson, who also staged the play. The production ran for three weeks, but was a financial disaster, failing to appeal to its rapidly dwindling audiences. Notwithstanding the work’s lack of success, Brookes increasing popularity in the States caused a rapid escalation of the price of the published play. Initially selling for 35 cents, it soon became so sought after that the Chicago
cognoscenti
were paying $20 for a single copy within the decade.
Rupert’s play would be performed again two years later at the Social Theatre, by the Varsity Players, with Van Volkenburg again taking the role of the daughter and Adolph Axelrad playing the father. The programme notes talk up what is really quite an ordinary play:
A small edition of the play was printed and published by the Chicago Little Theatre: this edition has long been out of print and is now one of the rarities of modern literature. The play itself is extraordinarily grim and powerful, avoiding melodrama only by the skill with which it’s handled; its terrible intensity recalls the murder scene in
Macbeth
and indicates the dramatic heights to which Rupert Brooke might have risen.
In Wilfred Gibson’s 1916 collection of poetry entitled
Friends
, the opening poem was called simply ‘Rupert Brooke’.
I
Your face was lifted to the golden sky
Ablaze beyond the black roofs of the square,
As flame on flame leapt, flourishing in air
Its tumult of red stars exultantly,
To the cold constellations dim and high;
And as we neared, the roaring ruddy flare
Kindled to gold your throat and brow and hair
Until you burned, a flame of ecstasy.
The golden head goes down into the night
Quenched in cold gloom – and yet again you stand
Beside me now with lifted face alight,
As, flame to flame, and fire to fire you burn…
Then, recollecting, laughingly you turn,
And look into my eyes and take my hand.
II
Once in my garret – you being far away
Tramping the hills and breathing upland air,
Or so I fancied – brooding in my chair,
I watched the London sunshine feeble and grey
Dapple my desk, too tired to labour more,
When, looking up, I saw you standing there,
Although I’d caught no footstep on the stair,
Like sudden April at my open door.
Though now beyond earth’s farthest hills you fare,
Song-crowded, immortal, sometimes it seems to me
That, if I listen very quietly,
Perhaps I’ll hear a light foot on the stair,
And see you, standing with your angel air,
Fresh from the uplands of eternity.
III
Your eyes rejoiced in colour’s ecstasy
Fulfilling even their uttermost desire,
When, over a great sunlit field afire
With windy poppies, streaming like a sea
Of scarlet flame that flaunted riotously
Among green orchards of that western shire,
You gazed as though your heart could never tire
Of life’s red flood in summer revelry.
And as I watched you little thought had I
How soon beneath the dim low-drifting sky
Your soul should wander down the darkling way,
With eyes that peer a little wistfully,
Half-glad, half-sad, remembering, as they see
Lethean poppies, shrivelling ashen grey.
IV
October chestnuts showered their perishing gold
Over us as beside the stream we lay
In the Old Vicarage garden that blue day,
Talking of verse and all the manifold
Delights a little net of words may hold,
While in the sunlight water-voles at play
Dived under a trailing crimson bramble-spray,
And walnuts thudded ripe on soft black mould.
Your soul goes down unto a darker stream
Alone, O friend, yet even in death’s deep night
Your eyes may grow accustomed to the dark,
And Styx for you may have the ripple and gleam
Of your familiar river, and Charon’s bark
Tarry by that old garden of your delight.
In February 1916, Eddie Marsh submitted a revised version of his memoir, which met with Mrs Brooke’s approval. It carried with it a proposal that others such as Dudley Ward, Geoffrey Keynes and Brooke’s godfather Robert Whitlaw should contribute to the Cambridge section. They declined, with the result that Mrs Brooke promptly withdrew her permission to publish, as Keynes was not involved. She had a point. Geoffrey had known Rupert throughout his schooldays at Rugby and then Cambridge. In later years he was to prove as jealous a guardian of Brooke’s memory as Marsh.
Rupert’s articles for the
Westminster Gazette
were published on 8 March as
Letters from America
, with a lengthy preface by Henry James. Within weeks, the American novelist suffered a stroke and was unable to write again. His introduction mentioned Marsh’s impending memoir, which succeeded only in antagonising Mrs Brooke even more, as she felt she was being pushed into its publication. To Marsh she wrote, ‘You couldn’t bear me taking my stand as his mother … you have never recognised my position in it all.’ One of the first women to be made a magistrate, she was not only capable of making clear and balanced judgements, but was also known for her concern for those she tried. Her great-niece Winifred spoke of Mrs Brooke’s ‘remarkable courage’, and of her being a ‘remarkable woman’. She was clearly not someone to be crossed, as Marsh discovered. The rift between them was now great. Brooke himself would have been distraught at the thought of two people for whom he cared so much arguing so vehemently over his memory. The preface to
Letters of America
was Henry James’s last work, for he died soon after its publication.
In April, Brooke was posthumously awarded the Howland Prize from Yale University, Charles Howland himself being a subscriber to
New Numbers
. Despite Rupert’s growing reputation, Eddie became resigned to putting the memoir on hold indefinitely.
On 9 May, under the direction of John Drinkwater, Brooke’s
Lithuania
, starring Martin Harvey, was performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, on a bill with Wilfred Gibson’s
Hoops
and the main item,
King Lear’s Wife
, with Viola Tree in the title role. Edward Thomas was in the audience and commented favourably to Robert Frost about the play.
Brooke’s royalties were being distributed, as he had directed, to de la Mare, Abercrombie and Gibson, and were making a substantial difference to their lives. Even Robert Graves, who had never met Brooke, was affected by him. Lying in hospital at Rouen, wounded, he dreamed of Brooke:
[T]his afternoon I had a sort of waking dream about meeting and making friends with Rupert: it was absolutely vivid and I feel I know him ten times better than before. We talked poetry most of the time and he said among other things that it wasn’t so bad being dead as you got such splendid opportunities of watching what was happening.
In a letter to Robert Frost, Edward Thomas put down some of his thoughts on Rupert: ‘I think he succeeded in being youthful and yet intelligible and interesting (not only pathologically) more than most poets since Shelley … Radically, I think he lacked power of expression. He was a rhetorician, dressing things up better than they needed.’
It was not only his friends who sang his praises in verse. Eden Phillpotts, the novelist, poet and sometime collaborator with one of Brooke’s favourite writers, Arnold Bennett, included his thoughts on Rupert in his
Plain Song, 1914–1916
.