Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Rupert Brooke, one of the 20th century’s most famous poets and the “handsomest young man in England”, according to W.B. Yeats.
Rupert Brooke (b. 1887) died on April 23, 1915, two days before the start of the Battle of Gallipoli, and three weeks after his poem “The Soldier” was read from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday. Thus began the myth of a man whose poetry crystallizes the sentiments that drove so many to enlist and assured those who remained in England that their beloved sons had been absolved of their sins and made perfect by going to war.
Our new book Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke, by Paul Delany, is a detailed biography of the real person behind the myth, revealing that Brooke was a conflicted, but magnetic figure.
READ: Toronto Star Review for Fatal Glamour
In Fatal Glamour, Delany details Brooke’s travels, first in North America as a correspondent for the Westminster Gazette, and later to Tahiti and the South Seas. The following excerpt offers a glimpse into the poet’s time in Tahiti, a unique and less-documented period of peace and intimacy before his return to England and the onset of the First World War.
Robert Louis Stevenson had died in Samoa, and Rupert made his pilgrimage to the grave on the hill above Vailima. Its epitaph, “This Be the Verse,” was another boast about embracing death:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will.
After following in Stevenson’s footprints, Rupert wanted to follow Gauguin’s, having seen an exhibition of his paintings in London in December 1911. One of them, Manao Tupapau, shows Gauguin’s thirteen year-old mistress lying nude on a bed as an evil spirit watches her. Rupert might have liked the idea of re-enacting the picture, though his ostensible motive for the voyage to Tahiti was to snap up any of Gauguin’s art that might still be lying around.
(…)
Practical Fabianism mattered little to Rupert when he was eager for the climax of his travels, Tahiti. He left New Zealand on 7 January, arriving in Papeete a week later. There was one obvious place for a European to stay, the Hotel Tiare Tahiti (Tiare was the Tahitian gardenia flower). It was a ramshackle bungalow with a large veranda and various outbuildings. The rooms had curtains rather than doors, the better to pay visits without knocking. The proprietress was a well-known and loved figure, Lovaina Chapman. Her ancestry was one-quarter Tahitian, three-quarters American. She weighed three hundred pounds, and ran the hotel with a set of strict rules that were often broken. She would die in the 1918 flu epidemic. After a few days at Lovaina’s hotel, Rupert wanted to live more freely in the countryside, away from the beachcombers of Papeete. In Auckland, he had heard that someone had just found some Gauguin paintings on glass and carried them off. Why not go to Gauguin’s old haunts, and see if there was anything left, whether of the paintings or the way of life?
Gauguin’s account of his life at Mataiea, Noa Noa, was published in Paris in 1901, but Rupert probably never saw it. He was following the same impulse, though: to flee the half-European capital and live in a purely Tahitian culture. Gauguin had rented a thatched hut between the sea and the mountain. For Rupert there was a substantial guesthouse belonging to the village chief, Tetuanui, and his wife Haamoeura. They were childless but had adopted twenty-five children from local families who hoped to benefit from the chief’s patronage. Tetuanui spoke French fluently and was in favour with the authorities, who had rewarded him with a trip to Paris in 1889. He had met Gauguin in Papeete and invited him to Mataiea, where he stayed for two years from 1891 to 1893. The chief lived in another house nearby, and the guesthouse was run by a local man who had married an Australian woman. Rupert would sit on the broad veranda overlooking the turquoise lagoon, with the surf breaking on the distant reef. Behind were the mountains, in their endless different shades of green. On the veranda Rupert wrote “The Great Lover” and “Retrospect,” both nostalgic poems about England, on the other side of the globe. But he spent most of his time with the locals, swimming in the lagoon, fishing, gathering fruit.
Frederick O’Brien was there too, and wrote about it in Mystic Isles of the South Seas. He and Rupert would paddle a canoe out to the reef to fish or just watch the creatures that lived in the coral:
Brooke and I swam every day off the wharf … The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant blond, gleamed in the violet radiancy like a dream figure of ivory. We dived into schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the sun … We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met.
Both men and women wore the pareu around their loins at all times. When Gauguin was there, the local gendarme had threatened to arrest him for swimming nude in the river.
O’Brien and Brooke went to a wedding where the bride had a dress from Paris and the groom a frock-coat. After a Christian ceremony, everyone went to a traditional feast that ended in a pagan orgy of drinking and sex. “We are on Mount Parnassus,” Rupert whispered to O’Brien, “The women in faun skins will enter in a moment, swinging the thyrsus and beating the cymbals.” Another day, O’Brien and Rupert went back towards Papeete to see the Marae, the ruins of a great pyramid that had been visited by Captain Cook. Once a place of human sacrifice, now it was fallen and overgrown. The chosen victims were killed, but not eaten. When the first white men came and asked the Tahitians if they ate people, they replied, “Do you?”
(…)
In early February, when he was at Mataiea, Rupert told Eddie that he was having “astonishing medieval adventures with Tahitian beauties.” The plural is significant, and has created confusion for biographers. Rupert’s great love poem, “Tiare Tahiti,” is addressed to “Mamua.” This is not a recognised word or proper name in Tahitian; most likely it was Rupert’s transcription of “Maimoa,” which means the favourite or chosen one. Robert Keable went to Mataiea in 1923 and said that Mamua’s correct name was Maaua, and that she was an adopted or illegitimate daughter of the local chief, Tetuanui. But Maaua is not a recognised name either. In any case, by the time Keable arrived, she and her father were both dead, Tetuanui in 1916 and Mamua probably in the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 20 percent of the Tahitian population. Eight people died at Mataiea in 1917 and thirteen in 1919. In 1918 there were 199. More people died of disease from 1914 to 1918 than in battle, so both Mamua and Rupert could be thought of as indirect casualties of the war.
Gauguin left the world his paintings; Rupert’s “Tiare Tahiti” gives us the best of his poetic legacy. It follows the greatest carpe diem poem in English, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: first the philosophical statement, then the demand to seize the day of sensual fulfillment. But Marvell’s poem attacks the beloved’s reluctance head-on, while in Rupert’s we know that Mamua won’t need persuasion to plunge into the lagoon. The poem first describes the Platonic paradise that the “ungainly wise” believe in:
Songs in Song shall disappear;
Instead of lovers, Love shall be;
For hearts, Immutability.
Everything particular to the here and now will fade into the eternal types of Plato’s dream. Part of the poem’s humour is the impossibility of explaining Plato to Tahitians, for whom the world of the senses is the only one that counts. Mamua never left that world, and it is the poet who is seduced at the end into abandoning his search for the ideal:
Tau here, Mamua,
Crown the hair, and come away! …
Hasten, hand in human hand,
Down the dark, the flowered way,
Along the whiteness of the sand,
And in the water’s soft caress,
Wash the mind of foolishness,
Mamua, until the day …
Well this side of Paradise! …
There’s little comfort in the wise.
The poem succeeds wonderfully in refuting Plato, or Platonic love at least, and it leaves behind the puritanism and misogyny that had poisoned Rupert’s relations with Noel, Ka, Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, and Phyllis Gardner. With Mamua he was able to live in the moment, and make fun of Western philosophy; what he could not do, though, was reconsider the values that caused his string of erotic disasters before he came to the flowered way of Mataiea. The sensual lagoon of Mataiea had been left behind when, ten months later, Rupert wrote his most famous poem about the cleansing leap into war.
To learn more about this book, click here.
For media requests, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.