Some Desperate Glory Read online

  Such places of beauty and history were, for Charles Sorley, for Edward Thomas, for Siegfried Sassoon and for Edmund Blunden, what England meant – more than the empire or military glory or past victories. Wilfred Owen wrote: ‘Even the weeks at Broxton, by the Hill / Where I first felt my boyhood fill / With uncontainable movements; there was born / My poethood…’ For Sorley, patriotism didn’t become impressive until he saw some soldiers in Germany returning from a field day, singing as they marched – ‘the roar could be heard for miles … Then I understood what a glorious country it is: and who would win if war came.’ He told his old master at Marlborough how ‘I felt that perhaps I could die for Deutschland – and I have never had an inkling of that feeling for England, and never shall … It’s the first time I have had the faintest idea of what patriotism meant.’

  Any homesickness was for those long walks: ‘it is chiefly the Downs I regret’. The German ‘simple day system’ of education seemed better than an English boarding school. At Marlborough there had been too much competition over trivial matters and the confusion of ‘strength of character with petty self-assertion’. Yet Sorley slipped back, admitting that ‘there is something in Marlborough that I would not have missed for worlds…’ From Germany, he asked his parents for The Life in the Fields by Richard Jefferies; ‘in the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities – Masefield, Hardy, Goethe – I always fall back on Richard Jefferies’.

  In Germany he stayed with a family in Schwerin, had language lessons and then moved on to the university of Jena. The friendliness of the people, the much greater interest in art and poetry, the unashamed intellectualism, overwhelmed him; only gradually did the heavy bourgeois domestic life, the sultry weather, the boastful and drunken student corps and the shrill celebration of the French defeat of 1870 dull his enthusiasm. The Jews were the liveliest people; every Prussian could seem ‘a bigot and a braggart’. Germans wanted to know what England would do. Hadn’t King Edward VII ‘spent his life in attempting to bring about a German war’? During the Ulster crisis, when British officers threatened mutiny if Irish Home Rule was imposed, Germans thought it ‘inconceivable that the army should refuse to obey its government’.

  Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia that followed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination exposed a combustible alignment of great powers, with Russia on the Serbian side and Germany with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By 26 July 1914, the Jena students were shouting ‘Down with the Serbs’, a new edition of the newspapers came every half-hour ‘with wilder rumours’ so that Sorley could ‘almost hear the firing in Belgrade’. He wrote, ‘It seems that Russia must settle the question of a continental war, or no.’ A few days later he was put in a German jail, then let out to go back to a Britain that had joined the fight. Aged only nineteen, he volunteered for the army.

  Why was Charles Sorley suddenly prepared to die for his country? The outbreak of war caused even those who had rebelled at their schools to snap to attention. Robert Graves came from an exceptionally cultivated family: his literary father was a schools inspector who collected and wrote ballads and Irish folk tales; his German mother descended from the historian Ranke. Winning a scholarship to Charterhouse, the puritanical young Graves had at first loathed the school with its bullying, rampant sexuality and contempt for learning; then a reforming Head and young masters like the mountaineer George Mallory made it better, helped by the writing of poetry, a crush on another boy and the discovery that he had enough boxing skill to defend himself.

  Robert Graves had also been to Germany, for holidays with his mother’s German family in Bavaria. Here the prim young Graves wandered joyfully around the family estate, but, outside it, found riotous beer gardens, thick clouds of cigar smoke and glutinous eating; his fears of hell, instilled by his mother, were inflamed by the ‘wayside crucifixes with the realistic blood and wounds, and the ex-voto pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory, grinning with anguish in the middle of high red and yellow flames’. Family trips to France, Germany, Brussels and Switzerland made Graves’s childhood cosmopolitan – a contrast to Siegfried Sassoon’s fox-hunting, Edward Thomas’s long English walks, Edmund Blunden’s Kent villages and Ivor Gurney’s Cotswolds. His British landscape was the bare land and mountains of north Wales where the family had a holiday home.

  Graves had been a rebel. He resigned from the Officer Training Corps and spoke up for pacifism in debates. Yet when war broke out he joined up, at scarcely nineteen, incensed by the German invasion of poor little Belgium and reports of atrocities that resembled the bullying that he’d known at Charterhouse.

  Robert Nichols had also apparently not conformed to the contemporary idea of an enthusiastic patriot. The son of an atheist, from a family of successful printers, Nichols had a prosperous but awkward childhood, divided between London and a country house in Essex, with a cold father and a mother who could show a startling love, but suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. Brought up to have no belief, he became fascinated by religion although never an adherent to any one faith. The nervous Nichols – who’d inherited the family mental instability in the form of insomnia and manic depression – was unhappy at school, especially at ‘hellish’ Winchester from which he was sacked for going up to London during term time. At Oxford he became a blood, throwing mangel-wurzels and dead pheasants at the visiting Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George and getting sent down for failing exams.

  Already, however, there was a fanatical dedication to writing poetry, encouraged by a friendship with the composer Philip Heseltine who introduced him to D. H. Lawrence. The verses poured forth from Nichols – about fauns, the Virgin Mary and love, often in bits of projected poetic dramas. Over all this is the sense of a search for a great subject, worthy of so much effort and time. Might his country – and its cause in August 1914 – give new fire to his life? Nichols enlisted in September, aged twenty-one. He felt that he should stand up for England and ‘all she stood for’, even if she was wrong.

  It was Rupert Brooke, a Fabian socialist and friend of the Bloomsbury Group, who became the war’s first famous poet. Brooke saw war as a joyous simplification of his and his country’s destiny. It was as if he had come back to his childhood. Britain in 1914 was for the status quo. She was aiding France and Belgium which had been invaded by Germany, the disruptive new usurper and challenge to the empire. This was a war to defend the old world.

  Rupert Brooke was even born in a public school, growing up at Rugby (where his father was a housemaster) in an atmosphere of Puritanism and success worship. His mother, descended from a Cromwellian fanatic, was the centre of the family; it was said that Mr Brooke was sent out at night to pick up horse manure from the roads for her roses. At Rugby her adored Rupert became head of house and captain of the house rugby team, and won the poetry prize and a sonnet competition in the Westminster Gazette. In 1905, while ill at home, he announced, ‘I have read the whole of the Elizabethan Dramatists through in 3 days.’ The young Brooke admired Wilde and Housman, had adolescent homosexual passions, became a classical scholar at King’s, Cambridge (where his uncle was Dean) and a member of the exclusive intellectual society the Apostles, moving in a proudly superior clique, keen – as his correspondence shows – to exclude others.

  At Cambridge Brooke was ostensibly a rebel against the old world of Tennyson and duty, of religion and sexual repression. After losing his virginity to a man at the age of twenty-one, he wrote clinically of the love-making to James Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother; the description must have driven James, who loved Brooke, to a frenzy of frustration. Behind it there may have been an urge to torture, or at least to tease. Rupert Brooke seems to have taken up socialism while at Rugby, partly to shock what he saw as the place’s complacency and philistinism.

  But there was always the pull of public-school values, of his strong conventional mother, and also the effortless power of his looks. Edward Marsh, after seeing him in 1906 at Cambridge as the herald in a production of Eumenides,
fell in love. Even the sceptical Leonard Woolf, on meeting Brooke for the first time, thought, ‘That is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite.’ Brooke could be a wonderful companion – witty, clever, teasing, well-read, sympathetic. His taste was wide; it was he who had suggested to Marsh that Ezra Pound should be asked to contribute to Georgian Poetry. Friends, however, were surprised later when his letters were published by how different their Rupert could be when he was with others, how quickly he could switch moods.

  Rupert Brooke hated getting old. To be twenty in 1907 had filled him ‘with a hysterical despair to think of fifty dull years more. I hate myself and everyone … What I chiefly loathe and try to escape is not Cambridge nor Rugby nor London, but – Rupert Brooke.’ In 1909, he moved to digs in Grantchester, a village near Cambridge, his enthusiasm for Swinburne weakening in favour of John Donne as he embraced a revolt against materialism and hypocrisy. This ‘neo-paganism’ involved camping, diving into ponds and rivers (Brooke’s party trick was to surface with an erection, impressing Virginia Woolf), wandering barefoot or naked. Yet such a life was by no means idyllic; he found himself caught up in the jealousy and cattiness of a small, self-conscious and arrogant circle. Increasingly narcissistic and self-centred, he became petulant if challenged, especially by another man.

  In 1910, Edward Thomas, a respected critic and writer of prose, not yet a poet, stayed with Brooke at Grantchester. Later that year Brooke was with Thomas at Steep, at the Thomas’s cottage. Mrs Thomas was away, leaving the two writers together. Edward Thomas noticed how Brooke moved quickly between ‘a Shelleyan eagerness and a Shelleyan despair’: also that the man resembled his poetry with his fair hair, laughter, easy ‘indolent’ talk that suggested he could admire ‘as much as he was admired’. Thomas, weighed down by self-pity, self-loathing (particularly over his treatment of his family) and financial worry, was ostensibly very different from his brilliant guest.

  Like Sorley and Graves, Rupert Brooke went to Germany. He stayed in Munich, wanting to learn German to help him get a fellowship at King’s. Brooke thought at first that the Germans were ‘a kind people’, then decided, with swooping superficiality, that he was in favour of a larger Royal Navy as ‘German culture must never, never prevail. The Germans are nice and well-meaning and they try; but they are soft … The only good things (outside music perhaps) are the writing of Jews who live in Vienna…’ Italy appealed to him more. ‘I renounce England,’ he wrote from Florence.

  Sidgwick and Jackson published Brooke’s poems in December 1911. This coincided with the poet’s collapse, when a love affair with Ka Cox seemed to end before flaring up again. Through the maelstrom he wrote, while in temporary exile in Berlin, ‘The Old Vicarage at Grantchester’, as if taking comfort from a nostalgic, witty yearning for an ideal England. He was in London for the launch of Georgian Poetry, which he had brought about with Marsh and Wilfred Gibson, and the exhibition of post-impressionist paintings. As if to show her that he too could shock, Brooke wrote to Virginia Woolf during his breakdown, describing an assault on a choirboy by two older youths in the church vestry, when the boy’s cries were drowned ‘by the organ pealing’ and the result so severe that ‘he has been in bed ever since with a rupture’.

  Success rolled on. Having become a Fellow of King’s and had ‘The Old Vicarage’ named the best poem of the year, Brooke was sent in May 1913 by the Westminster Gazette to write about his impressions of the United States. By October he’d left America for the South Seas, to what was to be perhaps the easiest time of his life and a love-affair with a Tahitian woman that inspired the tender poem ‘Tiare Tahiti’. His thoughts on England showed confusion, anti-Semitism and harshness towards women. The problem was, Brooke thought, that it was hard to believe in a place still ‘under that irresponsible and ignorant plutocracy’, with London full of ‘lean and vicious people, dirty hermaphrodites and eunuchs, moral vagabonds, pitiable scum…’ By June 1914 he was back. Rupert Brooke’s last summer was a packed season, under Marsh’s sway.

  During the final months of peace, he went down to Dymock, to visit the poets who gathered round this village on the border of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. Wilfred Gibson was there, as were Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater, and the predominant tone was Georgian. To Brooke, Dymock was a paradise where, staying in Gibson’s cottage, ‘one drinks great mugs of cider, & looks at fields of poppies in the corn’. After 1918, the village and its poets became part of the myth of a lost England. Among those who went there were the American poet Robert Frost and the Englishman Edward Thomas.

  Edward Thomas had a sense that ‘all was foretold’, that man was ultimately helpless, even with his vast destructive power. From a large family, the son of a civil servant who had raised himself from a poor Welsh background, he grew up in south London. Educated at various schools, including briefly the private St Paul’s, before winning a scholarship to Oxford, Thomas found life with his parents hard. His domineering father was a late-Victorian and Edwardian success story. Mr Thomas pushed his children and was once furious with his son for faltering when about to win a half-mile race. Mrs Thomas was loving, but her husband ruled. The failure in the half-mile, and his father’s refusal to forgive, was etched into Edward, as would a later incident of what he saw as his cowardice in the woods near Dymock.

  A mist over Clapham Common could hint at unexplored wildness during his boyhood and there was open country to the south. When Edward Thomas stayed with his father’s mother at Swindon, he could reach a wilder landscape, stirring an early romanticism and love of solitude. Always, however, there was pressure. Mr Thomas, in spite of his success, felt thwarted; he had stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a Lloyd George Liberal and his debating skills were restricted to advocating positivism in south London. He became jingoistic and shrill.

  Edward married early; this brought escape, but the marriage had been forced upon him. Helen Noble was the daughter of a literary critic who had encouraged Edward’s first writings about landscape and walking. While Edward was still at Oxford, Helen told him she was pregnant; Mr Thomas disapproved of the marriage and of his son’s wish to be a writer rather than a civil servant. How would they provide for their children?

  It was a good question. Edward’s failure to get a First barred him from the security of an Oxford academic post. He set out as a writer, desperately seeking work, and the struggle darkened his depression and self-pity. Domestic life was hard, not made easier by platonic liaisons, one with the writer Eleanor Farjeon. But by 1914 Thomas was earning £400 a year from reviewing and writing – the equivalent today of some £30,000 to £40,000 – and had become an influential critic, particularly of poetry. The desired life, however, with his family or having the time to appreciate beauty, to write what he wanted, became impossible. ‘I was born to be a ghost,’ he wrote.

  The Thomases lived in Kent and Hampshire. Edward came to know the south of England, although he still thought himself Welsh. He liked small country churches rather than cathedrals, folk songs rather than oratorios and took Richard Jefferies to his heart. Like Sassoon, Blunden and Gurney, he saw the rural world romantically, disliking intrusions such as businessmen who bought up hop fields in Kent – and his later poem ‘Lob’ cherished what might go, as if willing it to survive. On his long walks, he found beauty and escape from a family life, but everything was blighted by his moods and financial uncertainty. Thomas saw a psychoanalyst, but the darkness remained. ‘I sat thinking about ways of killing myself,’ he wrote. There was one definite suicide attempt.

  In 1906 the Thomases moved to the village of Steep, near Petersfield. Near by was the progressive school Bedales, where boys and girls boarded together and where Helen Thomas taught, so their children could be Bedalians at a greatly reduced cost. The house at Steep was on a ridge, buffeted by winds, and he had a breakdown there in September 1911. But work had to go on. Edward Thomas needed to write a stream of books like The South Country, The Heart of England, Horae Solitari
ae and Oxford, his style becoming more natural or Georgian, less influenced by Walter Pater.

  A typical journey was that begun on Good Friday 1913, from his parents’ house in south London, where he stayed, in uneasy proximity to his father, on visits to the capital to see publishers or editors. Thomas wanted to follow the spring south-west; the account tells of another man met in inns or on the path, symbol of a more elemental self whose strong moods could bring leaden gloom or brilliant joy. This was very different to his father’s Edwardian liberal, positivist certainties. Edward Thomas’s thoughts of suicide show barely controllable desperation, not faith in progress.

  In January 1913, as an important critic, he came to the new Poetry Bookshop, near the British Museum, to a party given to celebrate Marsh’s Georgian anthology that had been published at the end of 1912. At the party too was an American, Robert Frost. But Thomas and Frost didn’t meet that night.

  Edward Thomas reviewed Georgian Poetry, teasingly mentioning its feeling for ‘the simple and the primitive’, as seen in ‘children, peasants, savages, early men, animals and Nature in general’, which was, he thought, typical of the age. The collection broke with the Victorians and the aesthetic crimson and velvety world of the 1890s. There was romance and nightingales – but they sang alongside Rupert Brooke being sick at sea or D. H. Lawrence’s frank sensuality.

  W. H. Hudson declared in 1913, ‘I believe he has taken the wrong path’, that poetry, not prose, was more suitable for Thomas’s voice; the same year, however, Thomas published another account of an English journey, The Icknield Way, which didn’t sell well enough. He considered becoming a teacher in London or leaving England. More robust types looked down on what Ezra Pound called ‘a mild fellow with no vinegar in his veins’. Then, in October 1913, he met Robert Frost.