25 July (1909): Rupert Brooke to Noël Olivier

English poet Rupert Brooke and Noël Olivier met two years prior to the writing of this letter, at which point Olivier, who was to become a respected physician, was fifteen years old. Brooke, five years her senior, was captivated by the young woman. They would exchange letters even after Olivier rejected Brooke’s proposal of marriage. He continued to write to her until his death in 1915; she served as the muse for many of his early love poems.

The Orchard, Grantchester near Cambridge
25 July 1909

My dear Noël

He, the Outsider having impudently, offensively and unpardonably come, — disguised, however, as a gentleman, and unridiculous, in a stiff straw hat and very uncomfortable fashionable clothes (it was his poor best) — and having seen that rather admirable place for hours, and for seconds, a glimpsed whiteness in the shadowed profundity of a boot-hole — you — stumped off, quite unreasonably snorting, head-in-air, to the gloomy station. He wanted to go to the right, and was furious with the surprised Jacques for insisting on an entirely improbable road to the left. Turning a still gentlemanly but sloping back upon the vile spot, I (for I can’t keep up the third person; it’s too mad) exactly then relinquished, with a C-Curse, the last vestige of the hope that had persisted even till then; and then, quite surprisingly, we were justified in taking that silly road, and met you, illogically coming into Bedales from the horizon. It was just like one of those terrible plays, in which nothing happens for hours and then, just as the curtain is beginning to creak down, they all die hurriedly. Then, of course, I was seized by the horror, my recurrent disease, which makes me talk very quickly about nothing in a high voice for a long time. I’m sorry. I can be nice you know at times — at least, not exactly nice but much more intelligent. I was just ill. Also I’m sorry I had to be dragging Jacques with me. (Did you recognize him from my drawing?) So of course, I didn’t say about a thousand things I meant to; and I’ve quite forgotten everything — every fact, such as I wanted to know, — that you said. I can’t make out, e.g. whether you’re going to stay on at the school or not, and if not, what — I didn’t see you very long. I hope I didn’t waste your time in leading you to search for us. There are several things I think I didn’t tell you; and I can’t remember having written since.

For an instance, you must have heard, having been home, that Margery and somebody are coming to a Vicarage in Somerset in August, at my Mother’s request; and the appendages of this plan, such as my Mother’s rather plaintive remark…”we needn’t have that youngest one? she’s quite a school-girl, isn’t she?—” I imagined you laughing. You may imagine me speech-making to the cart, to the cows, or — in the absence of those more intelligent auditors — to Dudley Ward. It would have been very delightful if you’d been invited to come to Somerset, and come: at the dullest moments an exquisite High Comedy. Yet there are compensations in the situation. Before this it was so lopsided, so unfair, the hideosity: merely, I was the Evil Influence, you the Misguidable Young. We have retaliated. You are a Devil, the Leader Astray, the Unmannerly. I the lamb protected from you (a much saner view). My family think (I feel) that your horrible influence may end in my interrupting the conversation of my Elders, eating potatoes with my fingers, or being otherwise—what can I say? — School Childish — Yah!

Oh, well, anyhow, I shan’t see you there — this year — (unless you’re going to pass through that part of Somerset anytime in August? I wish you were) (Where are you going to be at Christmas?) — and I am writing to apologize for my poor Mother. So that part of this letter’s over.

As a kind of entr’acte I shall tell you where I am, and what I do. You needn’t read it. But I like writing jokes about it. I am in The Country in Arcadia; a rustic. It is a village two miles from Cambridge, up the river. You know the place; it is near all picnicking grounds. And here I work at Shakespeare and see few people. Shakespeare’s rather nice. Antony and Cleopatra is a very good play. In the intervals I wander about bare foot and almost naked, surveying Nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand Nature, but I get on very well with her, in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we’re both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together. I don’t know the names of things (like the tramp in Mr Masefield’s poem), but I get on very well by addressing all flowers “Hello, Buttercup!” and all animals “Puss! Puss!” I live on honey, eggs, and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple (especially in face) and sit all day in a rose garden to work. Of a morning Dudley Ward and a shifting crowd come out from Cambridge and bathe with me, have breakfast (out in the garden, as all meals) and depart. Dudley and I have spent the summer learning to DIVE. I can generally do it now: he rarely. He goes in fantastically; quite flat, one leg pathetically waving, his pince-nez generally on. But O, at 10 pm (unless it’s too horribly cold), alone, very alone and (though I boast of it next day) greatly frightened, I steal out, down an empty road, across emptier fields, through a wood packed with beings and again into the ominous open, and bathe by night. Have you ever done it? Oh but you have, no doubt. I, never before. I am in deadly terror of the darkness in the woods. I steal through it very silently. Once I frightened two cows there, and they me. Two dim whitenesses surged up the haunted pathway and horribly charged on me…And once, returning bare foot through the wood, I trod on a large worm, whose dying form clung to the sole of my foot for many minutes. O Noël, have you ever trodden on a worm with your bare left foot, on a moonless night, in a Dreadful Wood, alone? But when one, beginning to bathe, throws off one’s two garments, — then all is surprisingly well. You no longer feel disliked, an outsider. (It’s always a question of clothes, you see). You become, part of it all; and bathe. The only terror left is of plunging head foremost into blackness; a moderate terror. I have always had a lurking suspicion that the river may have run dry, after all, and that there is, as there seems, no water in it. (I once knew a man who never dared to dive, because he always feared there might be a corpse floating just below the surface into which he’d go headlong). For the rest I live in Arcadian existence. There are, indeed, no sheep to pipe to. But I sing a little to the hens.

The second important thing is that you must read E.M. Forster’s story in the English Review for July. It is very good. Perhaps you never even read his last novel “A Room with a View”. (He is a young man).

The second pleasant irrelevancy is that Augustus John (the greatest painter) (of whom I have told you) with two wives and seven children (all male, all between 3 and 7 years) with their two caravans and a gypsy tent, are encamped by the river, a few hundred years from here. I go and see them sometimes, and they come here to meals…And the children are lovely brown wild bare people dressed, if at all, in lovely yellow, red or brown tattered garments of John’s own choosing. Yesterday Donald Robertson,* Dudley Ward, and I took them all up the river in punts, gave them tea and played with them. They talked to us of an imaginary world of theirs, where the river was milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake, the leaves of the trees (that was odd) ladies’ hats, and the sky Robin’s blue pinafore. Robin was the smallest. The sun was a spot of honey on Robin’s blue pinafore: which, indeed, duly appeared… “What would happen”, said the imaginative Dudley, early in the afternoon, “if you were all in a tree, and at the bottom a big bear sat and waited, so that you couldn’t come down?” “The bear” they told him calmly would die after a little.” It was unanswerable: the end of Dudley’s romance. This Sunday morning I was invaded by Gwen Darwin, Hellen Verrall, Gilbert Murray and his daughter,* who made me take them to visit John. The Professor of Greek was rather nervous at visiting the gypsey Artist: but they all were happy. It was an odd scene. To live with five wild children in a caravan would really be a very good life. I shall take to it one day.

The third and greatest purpose of my writing this letter has, by this morning’s post, vanished, or at least got fuzzy. I was going to be taken by Justin [Brooke] to your play on Bank Holiday: and I timorously wanted to find out if you were going to be there at the time. But oh! everything is unsettled, the play’s on Saturday, and I doubt if I go to it. If I do will you be at Bedale’s on Saturday? if not, where are you going to be, where that week-end, and where on Bank Holiday? For I’m going through London about that time, and going to be wandering on foot westward. So tell me if you’re going to be at Bedale’s for that play.

Life is splendid: but I wish I could write poetry. I write very beautiful stories. One I am accomplishing is about a young man who, for various reasons, felt his bookish life vain: and wanted to get in touch with Nature. He began by learning to climb trees, but in clambering up an easy fir tree, fell off a low branch six feet above the ground and broke his neck. A short, simple story.

I have been Living since I saw you last. I went to a Masked Ball in London, and a reception of Eminent Scientists of the World in the Fitzwilliam, here. Tra! la!

Rupert

From Song of Love: the Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noël Olivier, 1909-1915. Edited by Pippa Harris. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991. pp 12-15.

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