The Great Lover (38 page)

About the book

The First Tiny Throb

How a Novel Begins

I
T WAS SEVERAL SUMMERS AGO.
A sultry day in Grantchester, Cambridge, England. I fancied iced lemonade in the lovely Orchard café, where you take your drink and sit in a deck chair under branches drooping with apples and daydream.

I picked up a leaflet about the famous writers who had once visited the Orchard or lodged there and found a photo of the young poet Rupert Brooke. Twenty-two at the time, he was described by W. B. Yeats as “the handsomest young man in England.” Did I find him handsome? He had a beautiful jawline, yes, and a broad brow, yes, and a floppy Hugh Grant quality to his fringe. But it was the gaze that hooked me. Direct. Staring down a hundred years and challenging me. Okay then.
Write about me, if you dare.

I think I’ve always been a sucker for a sexy, brilliant,
impossible
man.

I didn’t know much about him. I knew the poem about Grantchester, “The Old Vicarage” (which is next door to the Orchard café and now home to author Jeffrey Archer and his wife, Mary), and I knew the lines: “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England….” I’d heard that Brooke and his friends loved swimming naked in nearby Byron’s Pool and that he had a trick of emerging from the icy water with a “steaming erection.” His letters revealed a playful sense of humor, a subversive wit, a passion for nature, and a paranoid, jealous, and unhappy side, too.

“But wasn’t he gay?” people asked whenever I mentioned Brooke’s various girlfriends and his love affair with Phyllis Gardner. It seems that his relationships with women have been forgotten next to the more salacious details of his relationships with men. I read a startlingly modern-sounding account, written by Rupert, of his first sexual experience with a man, which had taken place in his little bedroom in Orchard cottage.

Intrigued, I got myself an invitation to the Orchard cottage to be shown into that same bedroom. My heart was beating like a schoolgirl’s as I took the steps to Rupert’s floor of the house. Of course the furniture wasn’t original, but the door, window frames, floorboards, and fireplace were. The owner of the cottage (a huge Brooke fan) went downstairs, saying mysteriously that he would fetch “something you might like to see.” I was relieved to be left alone. I sat on the bed, staring at the wooden boards, and thinking, Rupert Brooke’s bare sole stepped over that, a hundred years ago.

My mobile phone went off, and I jumped. “I’m in Rupert Brooke’s bedroom!” I whispered.

The owner appeared with the treasured object, presenting it with a flourish. Precious documents in libraries are usually brought out with strict instructions not to touch. Here I was being handed Rupert Brooke’s pocket diary from the time he lived at the Orchard, 1909. Buff-colored. Small enough to pop in his shirt pocket.
Right next to his heart.

I held it in my palm, and wondered.

This Side of Paradise

W
HAT DO PEOPLE KNOW
of the poet Rupert Brooke?

That he was part of a circle that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, the painter Augustus John, and James and Lytton Strachey? That he died young, on his way to Gallipoli, and was thereafter taken up as a national icon, the golden boy poet of the First World War? Or possibly only that he wrote the lines: “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England….”

That he fell deliriously in love with the South Seas and with a young Tahitian woman, Taatamata, is not well known. (Brooke is an inconsistent speller, and her name is sometimes Tata-maata, sometimes just Taata). That he possibly had a child with her—a girl called Arlice Rapoto, who lived until she was ninety and died only a few years ago—is a fact that, when I tried pursuing it in Tahiti, was greeted with surprise and silence. It was the DJ Mike Read who first raised this possibility in his book about Brooke,
Forever England,
and who unearthed a photo of Arlice, which, though grainy, does bear some resemblance to Brooke.

In 1913, the young poet was twenty-six, restless, and horny. He’d had a recent nervous breakdown, brought about partly through overwork but mainly by the rupture in his finely wrought love life. He had been balancing two, probably more, relationships for several years, and now one of them—with the motherly, safe one, the one he thought he could rely on, Katharine Cox—has abruptly ended. So he did what countless young men from similar backgrounds—Rugby School, Cambridge University—have done. He spent a year traveling by boat to North America and the South Seas. It produced the best writing of his life.

Plenty is known of Brooke’s predecessor in
the French Polynesian islands, the painter Paul Gauguin, whose lonely death from syphilis happened ten years before Brooke arrived. Colonial attitudes toward the sexuality of Tahitian women—renowned for their sexy, bare-breasted dancing—did not escape Rupert Brooke. In a travel article, he mocks the mix of Puritan disapproval and slavering lust. For him, the battle between his mind and body was easily won. He writes: “The intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute.”

Little is known of Taatamata. (“What does her name mean in Tahitian?” I ask a guide. “Nothing,” he replies. “It must have been made up.”) In some accounts, she worked at the hotel where Brooke stayed and was virtually a prostitute. In others, she was highborn, the daughter of a village chief or even a mythic princess, protector of the sacred turtles of Tahiti. Surviving photographs show a shy, elegant young woman staring wistfully into the distance beneath a straw hat. She wears the long unflattering dresses the missionaries introduced and stands smiling at a discreet distance from Brooke. He wrote in a letter that she was “a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a Goddess, & the heart of an angel, who is luckily, devoted to me. She gives her time to ministering to me, I mine to probing her queer mind. I think I shall write a book about her—only I fear I am too fond of her.”

In poems written in Tahiti, Brooke’s passion pulses off the page, but the affair was fleeting: he had to leave the islands after three months. Traveling there myself—following the route that he took from the sweltering capital, Papeete, to the cooler, rainier Mataiea—I find that little is known of the famous English poet the Tahitians affectionately nicknamed Pupure, meaning “fair.”

It is possible to spend hours, as Brooke did, floating in warm lagoons the color of “all the buds of spring” (his words), staring at the radiant, butterfly-colored fish. The coconut palms, the
dawns of pearl and gold and red, the Tahitian habit of wearing single white tiare flowers behind their ears—everything mentioned by Brooke in his poem “Tiare Tahiti” is available to anyone chasing his story here, but I find nothing more, no record of his daughter, no traces of his life. This is deeply frustrating and yet enticing.

Novelists thrive on the gaps in a story, the murky places that only imagination can illuminate. I’m guided by Brooke’s own words. His love for Tahiti quickly infects me: “And after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell of the wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist, the lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance…That alone is life; all else is death.”

That alone is life
—not a bad claim for a place, a way of life, or a girl. That is where I will start.

Read on

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

by Rupert Brooke