Rupert Brooke’s return to Cambridge

 

By MICHAEL CAINES

Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire
Of watching you; and swing me suddenly
Into the shade and loneliness and mire
Of the last land . . . .

*

I said I splendidly loved you; it’s not true.
Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea. . . .

*

Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done . . . .

Rupert Brooke, the poet responsible for these effusions, died one hundred years ago, on April 23, 1915; on his way to war, he was killed not by sunstroke (as initially reported) or syphilis (as later theorized) but septicaemia, and was buried on the Aegean island of Skyros. And with his death, the myth of the doomed soldier-poet was born. Perhaps it had already begun, as far as the wider public was concerned, with the quotation of “The Soldier” in the Easter sermon given by William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, on April 4, 1915. As William Wootten notes in this week’s TLS, it was a poem the Dean must have first come across in a review by Walter de la Mare in this paper . . .

A century on, Wootten revisits Brooke’s poetry, considering what might have been, had the poet lived into the age of The Waste Land, or even through more of the First World War, and what he really did achieve, mythological status aside. Are there signs of a “mature war poet”, one to be ranked with the other witnesses of the Western Front, anywhere to be found in his extant works? Seeing what he did write, Wootten asks, “Could Brooke have moved on?”

What he did write was enough for many. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and instigator of the Gallipoli disaster that Brooke’s death en route spared him from seeing, wrote:

“The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets . . . will be shared by many thousands of young men marching resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all wars that men have fought.”

(It was also Churchill who had secured Brooke his commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division.)

Friends and admirers returned to Skyros long after the war was over, in 1931, to commemorate him with a monument, by which time the myth-making about this young Apollo – this “King David, or Lord Byron, or Sophocles”, as Gwen Raverat mockingly put it – had thoroughly obscured the more dubious aspects of his character and secured excellent sales for his posthumously published poems. (My 1934 copy of the Complete Poems shows that demand called for a fifth impression within two years of the first; for some reason, a bookmark seems to have found a permanent home here, next to “The Hill” and its simply but effectively delayed volta.) From the TLS archives, you can also find on our website Elizabeth Lowry’s account of Brooke hagiography and the subsequent biographical turn towards iconoclasm.

Could that trend go any further? Would-be debunkers will undoubtedly find today’s announcement from Cambridge of interest: the “last great collection of Rupert Brooke manuscripts in private hands” is destined to go to King’s College, of which Brooke was a Fellow. Destined, that is, assuming the asking price can be met for this, the John Schroder collection, which includes some 170 items by Brooke himself: the college is seeking a further £70,000 to add to the grant of £430,000 from National Heritage Memorial Fund. Anybody who wishes to contribute is invited to contact the college library.

There is a substantial collection of Brooke papers in the New York Public Library, and a good scattering elsewhere (a parody of his much-loved Swinburne can be found at Cambridge University Library, for example). For those who like the idea of literary archives staying in places associated with their authors, however, the Schroder collection will seem to have found the right home when (let’s hope “when” rather than “if”) it does go to King’s: the history of the college’s modern archives began with a gift of Brooke papers. That gift was one outcome of the disagreements over Brooke’s legacy between his literary executor Edward Marsh and his mother Mary, and subsequently between Marsh and the literary trustees whom Mrs Brooke appointed, including De la Mare and Geoffrey Keynes.

Now the existing collection of Brooke papers is to be joined by what looks to be an extraordinary range of manuscripts and other materials – letters from Brooke to Eric Gill, David Garnett and Lascelles Abercrombie, others’ reminiscences, even theatre programmes from his student days. The bookbinder Sybil Pye’s last letter to him mentions that St Paul’s sermon: “does it lift up the heart to be made the text of an Easter sermon? I think my ambition would be satisfied”. Brooke warns a close friend, meanwhile, that “America is no place for a gentleman”; and his close friends in turn talk about him, up to and after his death at sea.

The Maggs catalogue of Schroder’s collection also shows how Keynes, after Marsh, was not adverse to a spot of airbrushing when it came to editing Brooke’s letters. A rather too frank reflection such as “I think I’ve been doing too much fucking”, about his sojourn in Tahiti, obviously had to go.

Skyros sees another Brooke-commemorating ceremony today, among the other celebrations promised over the next few days. Perhaps somebody will echo Churchill echoing Hamlet, after he heard of Brooke's death: “We shall not see his like again”. Such sentiments are said to have their times and places; but the Schroder collection, like William Wootten’s essay in this week’s TLS, tells a more complex story. The weary myth probably doesn't require debunking all over again – what will emerge in its place?