ON 22 MAY, the train carrying Rupert pulled out of London’s Euston station with its stunning, now long-demolished booking hall. At Liverpool docks he boarded the SS Cedric, where he gave a local ragamuffin named William sixpence to wave him goodbye. Ensconced in Cabin 50, selected because that was his phone number at Rugby, he set off on a voyage that was to be of an indeterminable length and produce far more than a series of articles. Angry that he had left all his letters of introduction at Thurloe Square, he had time to dwell upon the conversation he had had the previous day with Denis Browne about the possibility of collaborating on a musical show the following year. He set out to explore the ship and study his fellow passengers.

On board, he wrote a long rambling missive to Cathleen, which included a reference to Ka:

He mentioned the presence on board of the Liverpudlian poet Richard le Gallienne – a topic he also raised in a letter written from the SS Cedric to Eddie Marsh:

Brooke and le Gallienne weren’t acquainted, but were undoubtedly aware of each other’s presence and would almost certainly have met on the journey. His disparaging comments about le Gallienne to Marsh didn’t touch on the ever-present urn containing the ashes of his great love and first wife Mildred, which le Gallienne took with him everywhere. Brooke’s keen eye would not have failed to notice this bizarre behaviour by the Liverpool poet; and it was clearly the inspiration for what could be construed as Rupert’s cruellest piece of satire. But was it a deliberate attempt at satire? The poem certainly reads as if Brooke were writing with genuine compassion, but his reference to ‘a ballade, an imitation of Villon’ is a possible clue to the style of poem that was really in Brooke’s mind. The fifteenth-century French poet was not only famous for his satiric humour, but also gifted in the field of lyrical pathos. It seems that ‘For Mildred’s Urn’ was one of a batch of poems that Rupert was to mislay while travelling through Canada, and has remained unpublished until now.

On docking he checked into New York’s Broadway Central Hotel, and, feeling sorry for himself, was overwhelmed by feelings of loneliness and homesickness:

Subsequently, though, he began to perk up a little and to look to his task of committing his observations to paper and arranging them into digestible parcels for the Westminster Gazette. His second article began: ‘In fine things America excels modern England – fish, architecture, jokes, drinks and children’s clothes.’ He also noticed that ‘the American by race walks better than we; more freely, with a taking swing, and almost with grace. How much of this is due to living in a democracy, and how much to wearing no braces, it is very difficult to determine.’ Another interesting observation was the scope of educational facilities, much broader than the British system, not academically, but in terms of opportunity.

During much of his time in New York, he was looked after by Russell H. Loines, a New York lawyer, through an introduction from his former tutor Lowes Dickinson. Loines showed Brooke the sights and took him canoeing in the rapids on the Delaware river. Loines made many young Englishmen welcome at his house on Staten Island. Rupert took time out to write to Ka: ‘[Y]ou must get clear of me, cease to love me, love and marry somebody – and somebody worthy of you.’

To Cathleen his tone was decidedly warmer and more descriptive: ‘The little white wisps of mist are creeping and curling along the face of the great wide river.’

Back in work mode, Brooke also captured the noise and bustle of the city. ‘Theatres and “movies” are aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the elevated train clangs and curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their obscure challenges to one another, “I should worry!” or “She’s some daisy!” or “Goodnight nurse!”.’ He wrote to Marsh on different topics, including the candidates in the running for the Poet Laureateship following the death of Alfred Austin: ‘All the papers have immense articles, with pictures of Masefield and Noyes. They mention everybody except me and Wilfred. Even Will Davies…’

From New York he travelled to Boston, where a middle-aged lady told him, ‘What is wrong with America is this democracy. They ought to take the votes away from these people, who don’t know how to use them, and give them only to us, the educated.’

After Boston he attended the Harvard–Yale baseball match across the river in Cambridge, where he witnessed cheerleaders raising the crowd to new heights. At Harvard he noted a march by graduates from the class of 1912 stretching back to the veterans of the 1850s: ‘It seems to bring the passage of time very presently and vividly to the mind. To see, with such emphatic regularity, one’s coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after summer!’ At Harvard one octogenarian asked Rupert, ‘So you come from Rugby, tell me, do you know that curious creature Matthew Arnold?’ Brooke noted, ‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that even in Rugby, we had forgiven that brilliant youth his iconoclastic tendencies some time since, and that, as a matter of fact, he had died when I was eight months old.’

But it was time to put the United States behind him.

Brooke took leave of Harvard and headed north to Canada on the Montreal Express, from where he wrote to Eddie Marsh:

Marsh’s mischievous reply included a newspaper cutting stuck on to the letter: ‘BROOKE – On 9 July, at Ashford Hill, Newbury the wife of R. C. Brooke, of a daughter’, adding, ‘Evidently the fat lady seen in the train has nipped over to England and is foisting her bastard on you – so beware.’

The American and Canadian magazines were still full of talk of an imminent appointment of a Poet Laureate. In a letter to Marsh, Brooke wrote: ‘Laureateship is discussed ardently and continually. They think le Gallienne is in the running otherwise they’re fairly sane. Except that everybody here thinks Noyes a big poet; bigger than Yeats or Bridges for instance … why not Bridges? … Kipling’d be fine too…’

Masefield, however, seemed to be quite candid about his chances: ‘I haven’t got a ghost of a chance, and never had. I can’t possibly be in the six most likely names. As far as one can see, the appointment lies between the following: Robert Bridges, Edmund Gosse, Henry Newbolt, Austin Dobson, Thomas Hardy and Sir Quiller Couch.’ Masefield would become Laureate, but not for another seventeen years after the death of the man who would be named as Laureate, Robert Bridges.

The younger poets were able to make their voices heard in several literary organs including John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm, which became the Blue Review in the spring of 1913. The magazine also encompassed articles on other aspects of the arts as well as featuring literary contributions from such writers and poets as Lascelles Abercrombie, Gilbert Cannan, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, W. H. Davies and Brooke. Vol. 1 no. 3, which was eventually published in July 1913, contained two of Brooke’s poems, ‘Love’ and ‘The Busy Heart’.

Of all the contributors to that edition, Rupert seemed most impressed with the work of Katherine Mansfield: ‘She can write, damn her.’ The Blue Review collapsed after that particular edition, with Murry moving to Paris in an attempt to escape his creditors. His problems had begun when the publisher of Rhythm absconded in October 1912 leaving a printing debt of £400. Murry would be made bankrupt in February 1914, and another outlet for Brooke’s poems was sealed off.

Occasional bursts of homesickness saw Brooke making up ‘minor painful songs’:

In Canada, Brooke visited Quebec, from where he sailed up the St Lawrence Seaway, 18 miles across at the point where his boat turned up the Saguenay, which flows beneath massive cliffs of black granite, to Chicotimi.

In Montreal, he noted how the British sector was dominated by the Scots; and after its ‘strain and lightness’ considered Ottawa a relief. ‘The streets of Ottawa are very quiet, and shaded with trees. The houses are mostly of that cool, homely, wooden kind. With verandahs, on which, or on the steps, the whole family may sit in the evening and observe the passers-by.’

In Ottawa, he stayed with the poet Duncan Campbell Scott and his family. He wrote to Wilfred Gibson about Scott, ‘Poor devil, he’s so lonely and dried there: no one to talk to. They had a child – daughter – who died in 1908 or so. And it knocked them out … Their house is queerily desolate, it rather went to my heart.’ Scott had been an introduction from John Masefield.

During Brooke’s Canadian travels, Wilfred Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie had come up with a bright publishing idea for publishing their poems from the Gallows, the Abercrombies’ house in Dymock, Gloucestershire. Gibson wrote to Rupert about it in a letter that caught up with him on the banks of Lake Ontario. Rupert passed the exciting information on to his mother in a letter from the King Edward Hotel, Toronto, dated 21 July 1913.

The working title was to be ‘Gallows Garlands’.

The first of the literary circle that was to become known as the ‘Dymock Poets’ to move to the area ‘did a Dymoke’ (a phrase meaning to have extricated oneself from a tricky situation or accomplished a difficult task) was Lascelles Abercrombie. Abercrombie had successfully liberated himself from being a trainee quantity surveyor to enter the world of literature on a full-time basis, as a reviewer for various newspapers in Manchester and Liverpool. In 1910 he came temporarily to Much Marcle, Herefordshire, where his married sister had settled, before moving to the Gallows, a pair of cottages on Lord Beauchamp’s estate, just to the south-east of Much Marcle, at Ryton. His writing flourished and he published ‘Emblems of Love’, ‘The Sale of St Thomas’ and ‘Ryton Firs’:

Wilfed Gibson moved to the area in 1913, taking the Old Nailshop at Greenway Cross, the former house of the Sadlers, the local nail-makers, having initially stayed close by with the Abercrombies. Some three years older than Lascelles, Gibson turned thirty-five in 1913 and Abercrombie thirty-two. The former’s reputation was rapidly growing via his volume of verses Daily Bread, by then in its third edition, and The Stonefolds. Gibson, like Abercrombie, was also moved by the beauty of this remote part of England, as he expressed in poems such as ‘In the Meadow’, ‘The Elm’ and ‘Trees’.

Rupert and Wilfred Gibson, whom Brooke nicknamed ‘Wibson’, had been introduced by Eddie Marsh in London in September 1912, when they had gone to watch a fire blazing at King’s Cross. The two became friends, and Gibson visited Rupert at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and attended the farewell gathering in May 1913 in London’s Regent Street.

A year younger than Abercrombie and five years older than Brooke, John Drinkwater was a professional actor with the Birmingham Company, the Pilgrim Players, becoming the first manager of the newly built Birmingham Repertory Theatre in February 1913, directing countless production and increasing his reputation as a dramatist. Brooke was excited about the scheme, without doubt being delighted at the prospect of working with Gibson, to whom he would refer in August 1913 as ‘the most loveable and simple person in the world’.

From Toronto, Rupert was scribbling snatches of nostalgic verse, to his friends in England:

and

At the Niagara Falls, Brooke saw the commercial and vulgar face of tourism.

From the Niagara Falls and Toronto he went to Sarnia, at the southern tip of Lake Huron, taking a boat north through its waters to Lake Superior, before travelling overland to Winnipeg, Manitoba. He found the local architecture displeasing. ‘It is hideous, of course, even more hideous than Toronto or Montreal; but cheerily and windily so. There is no scheme in the city, and no beauty, but it is at least preferable to Birmingham, less dingy, less directly depressing.’

He wrote to Cathleen on 3 August: ‘Today, O my heart, I am twenty-six years old. And I’ve done so little. I’m very much ashamed. By God I’m going to make things hum, though. – But that’s all so far away. I’m lying quite naked on a beach of golden sand.’

He wrote again from Edmonton, a town that had ballooned from a population of 200 in 1901 to 50,000 by 1913. Rupert was not only communicating with Cathleen; he had had a disturbing letter from Noel, in which she revealed that one of her other suitors, either Ferenc Bekassy or James Strachey, had told her that Brooke had complained that he was becoming bored with her. The tone of her letter hints at her feeling sorry for herself as well as being cynical. He replied: ‘You’re a devil. By God you’re a DEVIL. What a bloody letter to write to me! … Bekassy and James, who you say, tell you I’m bored, lie, on the whole. Certainly they can’t know.’ Then came the flash of the dagger as he plunged in with bravado: ‘I’m practically engaged to a girl you don’t know to whom I’m devoted and who is in love with me. And if I don’t marry her, I shall very swiftly marry one of two or three others, and be very happy.’ She didn’t rise to his taunts but did admit that it was Rupert’s unpleasant sense of humour that finally killed off any love she had for him.

From Winnipeg he crossed the Prairies, visited Regina, Edmonton, Calgary and the Rockies and mourned the passing of the days of the old west; ‘Hordes of people – who mostly seem to come from the great neighbouring Commonwealth, and are inspired with the national hunger for getting rich quickly without deserving it – prey on the community by their dealings in what they call “Real Estate”. For them our fathers died.’

At Calgary, photographs arrived from Duncan Campbell Scott, taken during his stay with him. In his thank-you letter Rupert commented, ‘I don’t know why the one of me alone should have caught me at a moment when I was trying to look like Arnold Bennett.’ He wrote to Eddie Marsh from Calgary, about the number of interviews he was undertaking and how various towns saw him differently. Some considered him an expert politician, others a poet and others a thinker. ‘When I come back, though, I shall demand a knighthood from Winston. I’ve been delivering immense speeches on his naval policy.’

At Lake Louise, 100 miles north-west of Calgary, Brooke met a young American widow, the Marchesa Mannucci Capponi. They were obviously attracted to one another and were to keep in touch. Rupert was captivated by the scenery:

From Vancouver he dashed off many missives, including one to his mother, before visiting Victoria and Vancouver Island. Having completed the cross-Canada route through Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, Brooke took a train to San Francisco, from where he bemoaned to the Marchesa Capponi the loss of his work: ‘That notebook which contained two months’ notes on my travels, and unfinished sonnets, and all sorts of wealth I lost in British Columbia – yessir isn’t it too bloody. I’ve been prostrated with grief ever since. And God knows how I shall get through my articles on Canada.’ He reported to Eddie Marsh that the Californians were friendly people and that mention of the name of Masefield opened many doors, and that he was upset to learn that the series of articles for the Westminster Gazette would probably be limited to six and that there was little hope for a second series.