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| ISBN-13: | 9780773545571 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | McGill-Queens University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2015 |
| Pages: | 380 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
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Fatal Glamour
The Life of Rupert Brooke
By Paul Delany
McGill-Queen's University Press
Copyright © 2015 McGill-Queen's University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7735-4557-1
CHAPTER 1
Rugby
August 1887–September 1906
The child may be father to the man, but most of the time the child's inner life is beyond a biographer's reach. We know the social class and the institution that Rupert Brooke was born into; we know something of his parents and their rather odd marriage. Rupert wrote letters and school exercises from an early age, but he was writing to satisfy someone else's requirements. For his whole life he would write compulsively yet hardly ever, it seems, straight from the heart. Like an actor, he would put on a mask – many masks – to hide his true face. As he pours out his soul in a flood of letters, some of them thousands of word long, something crucial is always held back; or else what he says to one doesn't fit with what he says to another.
One of the things that Rupert almost never wrote about was his childhood. He does mention a few things that happened when he was at school, including his clandestine love affairs. But we are never told how it felt to be small, what he cared about or feared, which grown-ups he loved and which he disliked. There seems to be a kind of defensive amnesia in this silence about his early years. So what might Rupert have been defending against? We know that the baby sister who came before him died, that his mother longed for another girl and resented Rupert when he came along instead. He was made aware that he was the wrong sex, and perhaps should not be there at all. He formed a lifelong habit of appeasing his mother, trying to satisfy whatever expectations she had for him, and giving her as much of his company as he could spare. At the same time, he had a secret life of rebellion against "The Ranee," as he called her – that is, the oriental despot who ruled over her husband and three sons at School Field house, Rugby School.
Rupert's father, William Parker Brooke, was born in 1850. The son of a parson, he had taken a First in Classics at King's College, Cambridge, and been elected to a fellowship. But no one became rich as a fellow, so Brooke shortly left to teach for six years at Fettes, near Edinburgh. In 1879 he married Ruth Cotterill, who was a matron in one of the houses and the sister of a fellow teacher. She was more handsome than pretty, and was two years older than her husband (though he may not have known this). She could certainly take over the social duties that her shy, scholarly husband found hard to manage. But she was also domineering and fiercely moralistic, as one might expect of a clergyman's daughter and a niece of the bishop of Edinburgh. Parker Brooke, who was only five foot three, soon acquired a look of hiding behind his moustache; nor was it hard to see from whom he was hiding.
Fettes was a recently founded offshoot of Rugby, so it was a step up the ladder for Brooke to move to the parent school in 1880. Once established there, he never tried to rise further. He taught at Rugby for thirty years, gaining fame for such exploits as giving marks from zero downwards, or bringing his dog to class and making it sit in the wastepaper basket. He had a habit of nervously fiddling with keys in his trouser pocket while teaching. His pupils unkindly suspected him of fiddling with something else; they gave him the nickname of "Tooler," and "Ma Tooler" for his wife. True or not, the story went round that Mrs Brooke sent her husband out after dark to gather horse droppings for her garden.
The hunt for droppings was hardly necessary because public school masters were very well paid in Victorian times. The headmaster of Rugby earned nearly £3,000 per year in 1862; a senior housemaster about £1,600. Parker Brooke also had some inherited capital, so he was comfortably off from the beginning of his career. In 1891 he became housemaster of School Field. This was a crucial promotion, since he could now pad out his salary with a handsome profit on the food and accommodation supplied to the fifty boys in his house. Mrs Brooke now became a combination of matron, lodging-house keeper, and substitute mother to the boys. She kept one sharp eye on their morals and the other, equally sharp, on the cost of their food.
Rupert was a product of Rugby School, in every sense of the word. His father had been there for seven years when Rupert was born on 3 August 1887. He was the second of his parents' three sons, after Richard and before Alfred. His first name came from the Cavalier general Prince Rupert, whom his father admired. His middle name, Chawner, came from one of his mother's ancestors who had been a fanatical Roundhead. The combination proved to be a good index of his divided soul – long hair on the outside, puritan disposition within. As Rupert grew up, Mrs Brooke was frightened by his delicate health. She was reluctant to let him get too far out of sight and when he was ten sent him to a prep school, Hillbrow, that was only a hundred yards down the road.
Hillbrow
Rupert started at Hillbrow in the autumn of 1897. His brother Richard was already a pupil there, and Alfred would follow in due course. Such schools were a Victorian invention – Hillbrow was founded in 1859 – designed to help the upper-middle class to consolidate their position in a changing social order. They took in boys at an earlier, more vulnerable age than the public schools, and had even greater influence in shaping their characters. Prep schools were good at getting boys ready for the battle of life, which satisfied the parents who paid through the nose for sending them there. But not every boy was pleased with his treatment and one of them, George Orwell, did more than anyone else to give them a bad name. He called them "those (on the whole) nasty little schools at which small boys are prepared for the public school entrance examination. Incidentally these schools with their money-grubbing proprietors and their staffs of underpaid hacks, are responsible for a lot of the harm that it is usual to blame on the public schools. A majority of middle-class boys have their minds permanently lamed by them before they are thirteen years old."
Still, neither Orwell himself nor his schoolmate Cyril Connolly were permanently lamed by "Flip" and "Sambo," the husband and wife proprietors of St Cyprian's. At Hillbrow three of Rupert's near-contemporaries became notable writers or artists: James Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Robert Graves. Rupert was more of a conformist than those three, though he was a real poet and had no trouble thinking for himself. Nonetheless, the English prep school system was designed to "make men" of a particular kind, and with Rupert it largely succeeded.
In his critique of St Cyprian's, Orwell focused on money and the snobbery that went with it. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 proposed that entry into the upper ranks of the civil service should be by competitive examination. To join the administrative elite (which was still very small) now required being stuffed with knowledge at a public school. That knowledge was primarily of Latin and classical Greek, starting from about the age of ten. Prep schools had to grind into their boys enough acquaintance with ancient languages to prepare them for the more intensive grinding when they continued to public school. This was a labour-intensive process for which the schools charged very high fees. When Orwell entered St Cyprian's in 1911, the fees were £180 per year, nearly twice the income of a skilled worker. Parents accepted this as the price of getting their sons into a public school, and from there into universities and professions.
On a straightforward economic calculus, prep school fees were an investment that was expected to pay off in future income and social status. Northcote and Trevelyan had taken a wider view, though. They wanted to entrust Britain's future to a meritocratic elite, rather than to a corrupt aristocracy and its hangers-on. This went further than just requiring intelligence and administrative skill in the country's rulers. A consultant to the report was Benjamin Jowett, the great Platonist and future master of Balliol. His dream was to create something like a modern corps of guardians, as described in the Republic. Boarding schools would separate boys from their families to make them into a disciplined and unselfish ruling class. Cutting them off from female influence was part of the design (Jowett spent his entire adult life at Balliol, and never married).
Like the guardians, prep and public school boys lived in something equivalent to barracks. They were under discipline every hour of the day; they lived in fear of their masters and older boys; they had drill sergeants to give them military values. They had to learn how to endure, without the physical or emotional comforts of home. Today, we have organisations like "Boarding School Survivors," who condemn the system as institutional child abuse, producing adults with lifelong posttraumatic damage. Therapist Nick Duffell has described a "strategic survival personality," the result of boarders "cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives."
Even if we agree with Duffell, we have to recognise two kinds of exceptions. Some boys, Rupert Brooke among them, believed that their school days were indeed the happiest days of their lives. Rupert told his beloved, Noel Olivier, that she should read St John Lucas's The First Round "if you want to know what boys feel like and are like." The hero is much happier at school than when he is home with his overbearing father. Other boys become creative rebels, like Orwell or Graves, though they may still retain large parts of the public school character. And family life has its own kinds of damage, so that a child might find at school a refuge from worse things at home.
It remains moot who Rupert might have become if the public school system had not held him so firmly in its grip. That grip may have been loosened by his starting Hillbrow as a day boy. But by April 1901, the census records him as a boarder. Probably his parents wanted him to have some experience of boarding before he entered Rugby in the autumn of that year (though he would be living in their own house). It is possible that Rupert himself wanted to board because day boys, at most schools, were looked down on. By the age of thirteen, then, Rupert was entirely in the hands of Thomas Bainbridge Eden, headmaster of Hillbrow, and of his wife Horatia Katherine, who was the power behind the throne.
Who were the Edens, and what kind of distinctive atmosphere did they create at Hillbrow? Mr Eden was forty-one in 1897, when Rupert arrived at the school. He was an Oxford graduate who had gone to Rugby as a boy, and Hillbrow's first priority was to be a feeder school for its greater neighbour. Eden had been married for seven years to Katherine Gatty, who was eleven years older than him. They had no children. Their marriage was partly one of convenience, because a schoolmaster was greatly helped by having a wife to share his duties, especially if he aspired to be a head of house. The Eden marriage seems to have had a good deal in common with that of the Brookes. Both wives were the daughters of clergymen, and treated their younger husbands with condescension, verging on contempt. Eden was a magistrate, but it was his wife who wielded the gavel. Mr Eden and Mr Brooke even looked alike, with bristling moustaches under receding foreheads above and receding chins below.
James Strachey remembered Mrs Eden as "an embittered martinet who intimidated her husband and the four assistant masters quite as much as the boys." Her sister Juliana Ewing was a successful writer of children's books, and her mother had founded Aunt Judy's Magazine, the first magazine for children. Katherine became the editor when her mother died, giving it up before she married Mr Eden. He was "apologetic and easy-going," according to Strachey. "Nothing that the boys could perpetrate was so vexing to Mrs Eden as her husband's mildness of temper." Orwell portrayed Mrs Wilkes as a similar termagant in "Such, Such Were the Joys," though she could also be seductive with her favourites.
Hillbrow inflicted on Rupert the usual discomforts of drafty corridors and dubious food; but the emotional discomforts had a more lasting effect. Being bullied by Mrs Eden probably contributed to his later misogyny, and his conviction that if he married he would expect to be the absolute ruler of his household. Yet he also absorbed the double standard that men were weak and willful, women the guardians of proper behaviour. His nickname at Hillbrow was "the Oyster"; he was a silent observer of the schoolboy world, but not a heretic or a rebel. He emerged from his shell enough to pass his exams with credit and excel on the playing field. When Rupert was thirteen, at the end of his Hillbrow career, he wrote in an album that his ambition was "to be top of the tree in everything," and that his idea of misery was "Ignorance, poverty, obscurity." The twig was bent, and the tree would grow accordingly.
The great consolation of school life was friendship, all the more intense for the cutting off of family ties. Rupert's great chum for his first two years at Hillbrow was James Strachey, younger brother of Lytton. James left to go to St Paul's. He and Rupert were both clever, a bit out of the common run, and inclined to make fun of school routines. At this time Rupert was still chubby-faced and wore his hair cut straight across in a fringe. James summed him up as "friendly and amusing but as yet decidedly not glamorous." Six years later, at Cambridge, things changed. Rupert had become startlingly good-looking; James fell abjectly in love with him, but had to settle for only friendship in return. They broke off irrevocably in 1912, when Rupert declared war on everyone and everything connected to Bloomsbury. Between 1905 and 1912, though, Rupert was closer to James than to anyone else. The deep structure of his character was to be a poser and a manipulator, without any firm sense of identity. James was the only person for whom he was willing to lay all his emotional cards on the table.
The intense bond between Rupert and James was really a design feature of the prep school system. Removing a boy from his family did not remove his need for affection; it just displaced it onto others who were suffering in the same way. Orwell claimed that at St Cyprian's he was "in an almost sexless state, which is normal, or at least common, in boys of that age." This may have been the case if puberty did not begin until age thirteen, just when boys were going on to a public school. Still, prep school boys certainly had intense friendships that were precursors to a later gay identification. At Hillbrow this was true of all four sensitive and artistic boys with whom we are concerned: Brooke, Strachey, Grant, and Graves. The first three all became actively, though not exclusively gay as adults. Graves fell in love with other boys or young men, but felt it wrong to give his love a physical expression. He believed that all-male schooling was bound to have this effect: "In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. For every one born homosexual, at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals are made by the public school system: nine of these ten as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was."
If sexuality remained latent for Rupert at Hillbrow, it was not so for its headmaster, Mr Eden. Graves arrived at the school around the time that Rupert was going on from Rugby to Cambridge. He learned that "there was a secret about the headmaster which some of the older boys shared – a somehow sinister secret." Eden, it turned out, was in the habit of fondling his favorite pupils when they were having their baths. One day in 1906 or 1907, Eden "came into class beating his head with his fists and moaning, 'Would to God I hadn't done it! Would to God I hadn't done it!'" He fled to Liverpool where, according to Duncan Grant, Rupert "tracked him down; told him he must not be in this state of mind; he must go back to the school, pack up quietly and leave in decent order. Rupert saved him."
Why would Rupert, a second-year student at Cambridge, come forward to save Mr Eden from disgrace and possible arrest? If his secret was known by the older boys, he must have been following his pedophile inclinations for some years. He broke down in public, one assumes, because some boy told his parents, or another teacher, what had been going on. Either Rupert wanted to show loyalty to his former teacher and family friend, or he did not see that Eden had done anything particularly wrong. Had Rupert himself been one of Eden's targets? Whatever his motives, he did his bit to make sure that Eden's misdemeanors would be hushed up, rather than punished. By the 1911 census, Eden was living in West Hampstead with his wife and a servant, and describing himself as a "Retired Tutor." He lived to be eighty-eight, dying in 1944.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany. Copyright © 2015 McGill-Queen's University Press. Excerpted by permission of McGill-Queen's University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Illustrations following viii
Introduction 3
1 Rugby, August 1887-September 1906 10
2 Cambridge: Friendship and Love, October 1906-May 1909 30
3 The Fabian Basis, October 1906-December 1910 50
4 Apostles, and Others, October 1906-October 1909 66
5 Grantchester, June-December 1909 78
6 Ten to Three, January-September 1910 100
7 Couples, October 1910-May 1911 115
8 Combined Operations, January-December 1911 130
9 Hungry Hands, December 1911-January 1912 153
10 To Germany with Love, January-April 1912 167
11 The Funeral of Youth, May-August 1912 183
12 Raymond Buildings, August 1912-May 1913 201
13 Stepping Westwards, May 1913-May 1914 225
14 The Soldier, June-December 1914 247
15 Gallipoli, January-April 1915 274
Notes 293
Bibliography 319
Index 327