Rupert Brooke. Letters from America. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd, 1931; repr. 1947
Mamua, when our laughter ends,
And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
Are dust about the doors of friends,
Or scent ablowing down the night,
Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
Comes our immortality.
From ‘Tiare tahiti’
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It’s natural to imagine how the life of the poet Rupert Brooke would have played out had he not contracted malaria, and died, aboard a French hospital ship moored off the Aegean island of Skyros on 23rd April 1915. And yet, it seemed inevitable that Brooke would be immortalized for this sad, unmartial death. He died in Byronic quietude, a victim to the ungainly war for which he was headed.
His poems, which had been published to great acclaim in the Times Literary Supplement, had boosted him to the status of a celebrity. Handsome, elite, cultured. More importantly still (wagging, hatted heads; parasols dipped just so) he was a soldier, a soldier who gave the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ - his life - for the ‘cause’. Brooke’s life and education leading up to his death are not unusual for one of his ‘set’. Born in Rugby in 1887 to a schoolmaster father, Brooke went on to attend Rugby and, later, King’s College, Cambridge, an avid classicist.
From the outset Brooke was surrounded by literary activity; he was close friends with Virginia Woolf, who later claimed she had skinny-dipped with Brooke in a moonlit pool. Later, still, Brooke was affiliated with the Gloucestershire village poetic group, the Dymocks. Brooke’s star seemed to be in a hackneyed ascendant. It is unsettling to read, then, in a love letter penned aboard RMS Tahiti in January 1914; “let’s all be successful when we’re 50 - at least that is what we (the great poets) are going to be, we think it a little hasty, a little previous, a little undignified to be successful at 24”. Putting his tongue in cheek aside, it would come about that Brooke would find success at a young age.
But what happens next will always be unknown. And yet, immortality always shimmers there at the edges of his poetry; in ‘The soldier’, in ‘Tiare tahiti’; two poems at opposite ends of the world, of sentiment and idea. On one side the dapper, languorous traveller (we can imagine, his neck braced with flowers, warm wind stirring his hair), and on the other the stiff-backed soldier, khaki green, leather gloves and a pacing stick. But this essay isn’t about Brooke the war poet, the Homeric martyr.
But what is more interesting, to me, is Brooke’s pre-life, in the war’s sickly, shuddering shadow. It might come to a shock to know that Brooke’s reaction to the war was not a martial lunge for the Dardanelles (where that old war had been fought, long before), but something more complex, more uncertain: “He didn’t know whether he was glad or sad. It was a new feeling”. Brooke, here, is writing obliquely about himself, casting himself as “an unusual young man” in an essay later collected in his travel writing, collected after his death. In the typical slant of comfortable journalism today, there is a certain ghoulish enjoyment in ‘denting’ the supposed reputation of such hallowed heroes. In a typical example Fiachra Gibbons, writing in the Guardian, takes a strange pleasure in depicting Brooke as “cruel, sadistic and unbearable”. Sure, nobody is debating that people living lives - long dead - in the past could be less than perfect (of course!). What grates with Gibbons’ ‘criticism’ is her apparent sickly surprise in Brooke’s “complexity” (saying this as if it were a slur). We can breathe a sigh of relief about his “complexity” without condoning the conduct of his relationships.
And despite all of this, his poems are taught in school classrooms, and his name is invariably recited at the feet of the cenotaph. These are statuesque poems, glorious poems, martial poems. What this emphasis, this blind-sided obsession does is kill the man twice, denying his strange wit, his bubbling prose and keen observation. As Edward Marsh, Brooke’s mentor and friend, put it in the forward to Brooke’s Letters from America: “the author started in May 1913 on a journey to the United States, Canada, and the South Seas, from which he returned next year at the beginning of June”. This is the journey, in my mind, that reflects the man as much as it does the poet. Indeed, Marsh was certain that Brooke, had he lived, would have published “his travels” in longer form. What we are left with is the strange fruit, the unusual bounty, of his published ‘letters’, private correspondence and the poetry inspired by his journeys. But what do they say?
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For Brooke, like any European of his class and time, travel was a natural curiosity, a thing to uncover, to understand. In his first letter, before he even sets foot on American soil, Brooke’s head is filled with pre-impressions, slabs of conversation, testy suggestions thrown (we can imagine) over central London lunch tables; “the pilgrim who is crossing the Atlantic for the first time cannot approach Sandy Hook Bar with so completely blank a mind as he would wish”. America instantly leaps out, folds out as something different, something big and unscrupulous and warm; like Fitzgerald, not so many years apart, Brooke is touched by the “very definite taste of a jerking, vital, bizarre ‘rag time’ civilisation”. There’s also the unmissable American taste for music, so keen in London, which “has bitten into one’s brain”. At the end of all this, a bemused footnote, Brooke lets an American speak: “Wal! It’s a great country!”.
Brooke’s letters are, throughout, edged with a certain melancholy and a forced, stretched-smile joyfulness. When describing feelings of dispossession, of loss, he is eloquent and observant. He turns out to be a keen observer of nature and men’s relationship with the world around them:
“There was perceptible, even here, though less urgent than elsewhere, the strangeness I had noticed in woods by the St Lawrence, and on the banks of the Delaware (where are red-haired girls who sing at dawn), and in British Columbia, and afterwards among the brown hills and colossal trees of California, but especially by that lonely golden beach in Manitoba, where the high-stepping little brown deer run down to drink, and the wild geese through the evening go flying and crying. 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 air is too thin to breathe. He requires haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts. The immaterial soil of England is heavy and fertile with the decaying stuff of past seasons and generations. Here is the floor of a new wood, yet uncumbered by one year's autumn fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale and too luxuriantly fetid by reason of the multitude of bygone lives and thoughts, oppressive with the crowded presence of the dead, both men and gods. So, I imagine, a Canadian would feel our woods and fields heavy with the past and the invisible, and suffer claustrophobia in an English countryside beneath the dreadful pressure of immortals. For his own forests and wild places are windswept and empty. That is their charm, and their terror” (Letter XIII)
What Brooke craves is the sense of past, cluttered, clustered lives; the pleasant claustrophobia of “haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts”. In earlier, private letters to James Strachey, Brooke’s melancholia brews up; “I came back last term feeling hopeless about everything”, “I dwelt, if you like, in a rather useless and petty self-pity”. Brooke is honest to admit the apparent self-centeredness of his feelings, and hopes that Strachey can at least accommodate them a little. What stands out from Brooke's correspondence is his unobtrusive, even his meek attitude to America. In a recent article on foreigners abroad - on British visitors who 'speak for' the continent (or, at least presume to do so) - Carlin Romano argues that they "become know it alls [throwing] slingshots from the prestigious literary scholar on a lark, unburdening his prejudices in any bloody way he pleases, with cheeks frequently stuffed of tongue". Brooke, in contrast, readily appreciates the broadness of America, its variability, its hugeness. Rather than climbing to the vantage of height and 'seeing all and everything', Brooke is coy, halting:
"At Calgary, if you can spare a minute from more important matters, slip beyond the hurrying white city, climb the golf links, and gaze west. A low bank of dark clouds disturbs you by the fixity of its outline. It is the Rockies, seventy miles away. On a good day, it is said, they are visible twice as far, so clear and serene is this air. Five hundred miles west is the coast of British Columbia, a region with a different climate, different country, and different problems"
Climbing to the head of the Rockies (whether he climbed them or not), he sees difference, not, in a god-like swipe, everything. Unlike the orientalising traveler of Edward Said's criticism, Brooke admits the delimitations inherent in his own perspective.
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"Oh, Eddie, it's all true about the South Seas! I get a little tired of it at moments, because I am just too old for Romance. But there it is: there it wonderfully is: heaven on earth, the ideal life, little work, dancing and singing and eating, naked people of incredible loveliness, perfect manners, and immense kindliness, a divine tropic climate, and intoxicating beauty of scenery." Letter to Edward Marsh, near Fiji, November 15th (?) 1913
If Brooke had been charmed by America's openness (albeit uncomfortable in its sheer ghostless vastness), he was doubly so in Fiji's warmth - singing, dancing, eating. It doesn't take long to pick up on the sensuousness of the young poet's experience, yet also his lack of judgement - something we might find a little surprising from a Cambridge-educated classicist.
If Brooke's account sounds very slanted, an orientalising emphasis on mystery, romance, and the exotic (as if the Samoans he encounters, and others, truly had no cares, no three dimensional depth), then we also have to acknowledge that Brooke is writing self-consciously; he wryly admits to its strangeness, the way in which his travels hinge a little on the image of the European abroad; Life, Eddie, is what you get in the bars of the hotels in 'Frisco, or Honolulu, or Suva, or Apia, and in the smoking-rooms in these steamers. It is incredibly like a Kipling story, and all the people are very self-consciously Kiplingesque. Yesterday, for instance, I sat in the Chief Engineer's cabin, with the first officer and a successful beach-comber lawyer from the white-man's town in Samoa, drinking Australian champagne from breakfast to lunch. "To-day I am not well." The beach-comber matriculated at Wadham, and was sent down. Also, he rode with the Pytchley, quotes you Virgil, and discusses the ins and outs of the Peninsular campaign. And his repertoire of smut is enormous. Mere Kipling, you see, but one gets some good stories. Verses, of a school-boy kind, too... Sehr primitiv. The whole thing makes a funny world. Kipling; Wadham college; Virgil; cards and alcohol on a south seas steamer.
At the same time Brooke's image, really his self-conscious identification with the South Seas, folds out to layer up images not only of "goddess" like, bare-chested Samoan women, but sent-down Oxbridgers, and smoky underlit bars in San Francisco. Brooke revels in the image, the impression, not only of the exotic southern seas, but the entire difference inhabited in America, in this other world (so unlike Grantchester, King's College, London). Brooke's imaginary of 'west' (both America and the south seas combined) is then a widely encompassing and partly unstable set of impressions, but also one in which Brooke happily dons the language and the swagger of the European traveller - such a careful observer as Brooke is means that he can happily pick up cliches and run with them, such as the swagger of not being able to write "on the trail", implying that his correspondence, his published impressions, are not the polished and carefully articulated things that they are.
The attraction of Polynesia seemed, then, to be its sensuality, its openness. Brooke had only recently experienced a mental breakdown brought about by the ending of his affair with Ka Kox. It is widely known that Brooke had a relationship in Tahiti with a woman called Taatamata while staying in a village in 1913, "a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a goddess, and the heart of an angel, who is, luckily, devoted to me". She had a child with him, which he neglected. From his letters to Edward Marsh, Brooke seems to acknowledge his own emotional fragility, fearing that, despite the South Sea's separation from Cambridge and London, he will suffer the same inescapable feelings: "Can't you imagine how shattered and fragmentary a heart I'm bearing away to Fiji and Tahiti? And, oh dear! I'm afraid they'll be just as bad". Another writer has suggested that, for Rupert Brooke, the expectation of a love that was both romantic and erotic was a great - and yet sorrow-tinged - expectation.
On his death bed in the Aegean, Brooke asked a friend to write to Taatamata, to notify her of his death - which he knew was not far away - and to send his love. In the end, despite his desire to create a blankness of mind (something he achieved, fleetingly, in America), "one only finds in the South Seas what one brings there". Brooke's journeys could be seen both as an escape from the cloying emotional experience that had been Cambridge - and his relationship with Ka Kox - as well as an opportunity to embrace fully his extremities of emotion, to exist as himself - as an accepted self - within a place where 'Rupert Brooke' - the Brooke of tripos exams, poetry and tea at Grantchester - did not, could not, exist. In his most famous South Seas poem, Brooke delights in the simplicity, the freshness of his emotions.
Down the dark, the flowered way,
Along the whiteness of the sand,
And in the water's soft caress,
Wash the mind of foolishness,
Mamua, until the day
We can speculate, but that "foolishness" could be many things. It could be the entire project of western civilisation, with all of its strictures, its rules and expectations. It could also be Brooke himself - the ties and frustrations in which he found himself caught 'back home'. Ultimately, as he says - we can imagine, a throwing up of the hands: Well this side of Paradise! ... There's little comfort in the wise The wise, the strictured, the ruled and structured - all of these things wash away, or seem to, "this side of paradise", even if he cannot finally separate himself from the things he brought with him. If Brooke's journey to the south seas was an attempt to wash away his old life - his world of 'foolishness' - then it was not successful. Brooke's ultimate finding was that he could not pull himself away from his old, sensual life; the "wise" - who see that "our immortality" comes at the end of life, when we are "dust" - are worth nothing "this side of paradise". It is in "soft caress", in the "flowered way" that life will be found. Undeniable, unquenchable.
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