Armageddon and Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke’s posthumous Letters from America (1916) has an unusual epilogue, entitled ‘An Unusual Young Man’. Is it an essay in the form of a short story, or a short story disguised as an essay? Whichever, its first-person narrator recalls a younger friend of his who, on a walking holiday in Cornwall in the summer of 1914, only learned on his return that war had been declared. The setting is certainly fictional, for Brooke was actually staying with at Cley-next-the-sea on August 3^rd and 4^th; but the young friend is Brooke himself. So the older man, explaining the thoughts and feelings of his younger friend, is a device enabling Brooke to reflect, with apparent detachment, on his own anxious and contradictory reactions to the war.

His puzzlement comes because he loves Germany – Bavaria and Munich especially – almost as much as he loves England, and certainly more than France. He has good friends there, of whom he cannot help thinking ‘heavily … all the time’. But when he tries to refocus, replacing old memories of his new enemy with appropriately patriotic thoughts –

– he kept remembering, unwillingly, a midnight in Carnival-time in Munich, when he had seen a clown, a Pierrot, and a Columbine tip-toe delicately round a deserted corner of Theresienstrasse, and vanish into the darkness. Then he thought of the lights on the pavement in Trafalgar Square. It seemed to him the most desirable thing in the world to mingle and talk with a great many English people. Also, he kept saying to himself – for he felt vaguely jealous of the young men in Germany and France – “Well, if Armageddon’s on, I suppose one should be there.”

It’s as well the narrator admits that the young man kept saying this, for Brooke himself had evidently used these same words before. Shortly after the declaration of war, Brooke had wondered, with impeccable Fabian logic, about getting to France not by joining up, but by going over to help bring in the harvest. After all, France had compulsory military service; its reservists had already been called up; most of its farms were now short-handed. Less altruistically, he had also toyed with becoming a war correspondent. However, Christopher Hassall, whose biography of Brooke (though fifty years old this year) remains the best, records that

His first idea, to go over and help the French garner their crops, was now dropped, as also was the idea of reporting for a newspaper. But it wasn’t easy to enlist. He was amazed by Harold Monroe’s experience, who turned up on a motor-bicycle to volunteer, was rejected because his engine was of the wrong kind, reappeared next day with another engine, and was told there was no room. Meeting J.C. Squire in the street, ‘Well, if Armageddon’s on,” Brooke said, “I suppose one should be there.”

I’m not a fan of biographies whose notes and bibliographies at the back of the book threaten to swamp the narrative at the front, so I’m glad that Hassall wrote his book before citation and referencing ad tedium became the norm for all serious biography; but I should like to know who heard (and recorded or reported) Brooke saying this to the poet and editor J C Squire. Was it Squire, or Brooke himself, pleased enough with this apocalyptic utterance to recycle it in ‘An Unusual Young Man’? Edward Marsh, Brooke’s close friend, literary executor and author of the foundational ‘Memoir’  (1918), makes no mention of the meeting or Brooke’s Armageddon remark. True, other biographers have repeated the story, but again without reference, so I begin to wonder if they’re simply rehashing Hassall. Here, for instance, is Nigel Jones:

Brooke toyed with various half-baked ideas to be of use: did the French need hands to gather in the harvest now that so many peasant-soldiers had been mobilized, he wondered. He also made a half-hearted attempt to get a war-correspondent’s job, but there seemed to be no interest. Back in London on August 10^th, and hurrying from office to office, he met the poet and journalist J.C. Squire in the street. Squire asked him what all the rushing was for. ‘Well, if Armageddon is on,’ replied Brooke, I suppose one should be there.’

‘Hurrying … rushing …’ These are reasonable adjectives for a biographer to use in creating a sense of Brooke’s mood of the time. But if his attempt to become a war reporter was only ‘half-baked’, was Brooke really in that much of a hurry? At least Jones is more specific than Hassall in providing a date – August 10^th – though Brooke was already in London the previous day: in a letter quoted (but again not cited) by Marsh, he describes going to a music hall show. After a few sketches and songs, the next item displeases Brooke, though he describes it, and its aftermath, in detail:

“Then a dreadful cinematographic reproduction of a hand drawing patriotic things – Harry Furniss it was, funny pictures of a soldier and a sailor (at the time I suppose dying in Belgium), a caricature of the Kaiser, greeted with a perfunctory hiss – nearly everyone sat silent. Then a scribbled message was shown: ‘War declared with Austria 11.9.’ There was a volley of quick, low hand-clapping – more a signal of recognition than anything else. Then we dispersed into Trafalgar Square and bought midnight War editions …. In all these days I haven’t been so near tears; there was such tragedy and dignity in the people.”

Britain formally declared war on Austria on 9^th August. The film Brooke had disliked was Peace and War Pencillings by Harry Furniss, a cartoonist and illustrator for magazines such as Punch and the Illustrated London News. It had premièred at the Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane – hence the audience had spilled out into Trafalgar Square. Was this, then, why the unusual young man’s thoughts had turned from Theresienstrasse to Trafalgar Square?

In the end, Brooke found a way of getting to Armageddon. Let Richard Aldington have the last, touching (but still not necessarily reliable) word:

I had a last glimpse of Rupert Brooke when Flint [FS Flint, Aldington’s friend and fellow Imagist poet] and I bumped into him in Piccadilly, not long after the outbreak of war. He was dressed in a shabby macintosh, and looked a little sallow and less handsome than his pictures. He at once informed us that he had a commission, and was about to join the Naval Division at Antwerp. We wished him luck – a gallant but pathetic figure, the last English poet who really believed in the romance and chivalry of war.

Adrian Barlow

[Illustration: photograph of Rupert Brooke by Sherril Schell; frontispiece to Letters from America.

References:

·      Extract (i) from ‘An Unusual Young Man’ in Edward Marsh (ed.) Letters from America (London Sidgwick and Jackson, 1916) pp. 179-80 

·      Extract (ii) from Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke, a biography, (London: Faber, 1964) pp. 458-9

·      Extract (iii) from Nigel Jones, Rupert Brooke  (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999) p.375

·      Extract (iv) letter from Brooke; quoted in Edward Marsh, ‘Memoir’, in Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1918) pp. cxxiv-cxxv

·      Extract (v) from Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (London: Cassell, 1941; 1968) p.135.

Reading Stained Glass (iv): a war memorial window

Today, 11^th November 2014, seems a good day to reflect on a complicated type of memorial: war memorial stained glass. After the Armistice in 1918 the windows paid for and installed in churches and cathedrals by families, communities, schools and regiments no doubt gave consolation and a sense of pride at the sacrifice of those whom the glass commemorated, and at having done something fitting. I’m not sure they are quite so comforting today. Here’s why.

The parish church of St Peter and St Paul, at Clare in Suffolk, is stately and light: most of the windows are clear glass. Some heraldic panels and other fragments in the East window are all that remain of the medieval glass, most of which was smashed by the Puritan iconoclast, William Dowsing, in 1643. But there is heraldic glass, too, in the tracery of a window in the North aisle, and indeed these heraldic signatures may offer a clue to the donor: alongside shields representing the diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, those of an early Earl of Norfolk buried in the Abbey of Bury St Edmund, and the arms of England itself, one of the shields displays the arms of the Haberdashers’ Company. No hint of the donor is given where you’d normally expect to find it: in the inscription at the bottom. Instead the window, by the distinguished stained glass artist FC Eden (1864-1944), has an austere, academic Latin dedication:

In honore[m] pretiosissimi Sanguinis D[o]m[ini] N[ost]ri Je[s]u Chr[isti] et in piam memoriam eorum qui vitam pro patria obtulerunt.

In honour of the most precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in pious memory of those who offered their life for their country.

So it is a Great War memorial window. At first sight this is simply a stylised Crucifixion scene, with Mary and St John on either side of the Cross, but the design is significantly elaborated: at the top of the central light sits God surrounded by six-winged cherubim, and with the Dove as it were on his lap. Pale beams of light radiate downwards from this highly schematized representation of the Throne of Heaven. Then, at the top of the Cross, there is a kneeling angel immediately above the Pelican in her Piety, that moving emblem of the sacrificial nature of Corpus Christi and the Crucifixion. At each end of the cross bar sit images of the sun and the moon, conventionally seen in crucifixion windows of both medieval and modern design and representing the eclipse, the darkness that covered the earth at the third hour, when Christ died.

On either side, in the two outer lights, are two figures who further help to identify this as a war memorial window: St Michael (left) and St George (right). Dressed in full armour and holding a sword by his side, St Michael carries in his hands the scales with which, at the Last Judgement, he will weigh the souls of the righteous and the unrighteous. He stands upon an almost inconspicuous snake, (the Serpent – i.e. Satan) whom he has defeated. Opposite him is St George, who would usually be depicted in such a window having just slain the dragon at his feet, but here he’s shown simply in an attitude of devotion before the Cross. It’s as if this window deliberately resists any triumphalism. The emphasis is all on sacrifice rather than on victory. Texts appear above both saints: one text in fact, the Vulgate rendering of Hebrews 10.14:

‘Una enim oblatione consummavit’ + ‘In sempiternum sanctificatos’

For by one offering he hath perfected forever them that are sanctified.

An important detail: the Latin word ‘oblatio’ – here referring to Christ’s self-sacrifice, his offering of himself – comes from the same root (obferre > offere) as the word ‘obtulerunt’ used in the window’s inscription to refer to the soldiers’ offering of their own lives pro patria. The self-offering of the soldiers is thus semantically associated with the self-offering of Christ.

And now the most startling feature of all: from the hands and side of the crucified Christ blood streams into an oblong basin or tank out of which the Cross has sprouted. Sprouted seems the right word for, like a tree, it has produced branches which provide the pedestals on which stand the statue-like figures of the Virgin and St John; and from one of these branches a new shoot has begun to sprout.  Actually, what I have called a basin or tank is a bath full almost to the brim: visibly and literally, a crimson blood-bath. Nowhere else have I seen this extraordinary, ironic image in a war memorial window. Indeed, I have only ever seen it in one other window – a tiny 16^th century silver-stained roundel in an interior window of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. And in that particular roundel naked figures are shown washing themselves in the bath itself.

Given then that Eden's window is to be understood as a memorial to The Fallen, it appears to invite us to identify the dead of the war as ‘they which’ (to quote from the Book of Revelation) ‘came through the great tribulation’ and have ‘washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb’? For just as the blood spilt in 1914-18 is transmuted here into the sacrificial blood spilt on the Cross, so the bath in this window is transformed into the tomb in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea. This is where Mary Magdalene, seen kneeling on the grass among the flowers, has come with her precious ointment, to embalm the corpse that is no longer there.

One final link connects the scene above to the dedication at the base of window: a small medallion with a shield depicting the Instruments of the Passion – crown of thorns, nails, spear and sponge of vinegar. The shield is surrounded by a wreath studded by five white flowers, a wreath at once of victory and of mourning. I have to repeat here that I find this window moving but discomforting. The visual pun (for that is what it amounts to) on a blood-bath almost disgusts me: is it really  theologically and historically acceptable to imply that the English dead of the Great War –  this window’s heraldry is wholly English and Anglican – have become Christian martyrs, exchanging the blood-bath of Passchendaele for the blood-bath of Passion-tide? To admit that millions of lives were sacrificed in France and Flanders a century ago is one thing; to suggest, however, that the lucky winners, and presumably they alone, were making a Christ-like ‘sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction’ is surely another.

[Illustrations: the war memorial window, N aisle of Clare Parish Church, Suffolk, Artist: FC Eden

Text and photographs © Adrian Barlow

My previous posts in this ‘Reading Stained Glass’ series can be found here:

(iii) ‘Ab Fab’ in Fairford

(ii) Wittersham in the Isle of Oxney

(i)  Rouen

‘Crucible 2’ at Gloucester Cathedral

‘You must see Crucible 2,’ people have been saying to us for the last few weeks, and now we have done. Crucible 2 is not a film, it’s an exhibition of 20^th and 21^st century sculpture; the second to be held in, around and even underneath Gloucester Cathedral.

Underneath? Yes, in the crypt, and in the slype below the Lady Chapel at the East end of the building. There are one hundred exhibits, from the monumental – a giant mobile called ‘Constellation 2014’: the stars in their courses high above the nave altar – to the less-than-lifesize (a Henry Moore maquette), displayed in the Close or in the Cloister, and in all parts of the cathedral itself. Where we see sculpture has a lot to do with how we see it, as I have tried to explain in Big Heads, discussing three large sculpted heads seen in public places in Paris, Dorset, Dusseldorf. And putting sculpture in a cathedral creates a very particular context, shaping the way we view each piece.

It has taken us two visits to see the entire show. Second time around, I warmed more to the pair of Lyn Chadwick figures greeting visitors at the main south porch; but I found Damien Hirst’s two angels, when seen again, even more disturbing than at first. ‘Anatomy of an Angel (Black)’, is placed in the north aisle, provocatively in front of a large wall monument, by Flaxman, depicting a mother escorted heavenwards by three winged angels. Hirst’s black angel is likewise winged but definitely earthbound. Seen from a distance or from behind, she –Hirst’s angels are uncompromisingly naked and feminine – looks sleek and demure; full-frontal, however, it’s clear she has been partially dissected, an artist’s model repurposed as an anatomical specimen. It’s as if the sculptor has remembered Lear’s injunction, ‘Let them anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart’. The right side of her face has been stripped back to the skull; her breast is flayed, her belly betrays her guts, and a segment of muscle from her left thigh has been excised to reveal her femur. What might from a distance have been a graceful Canova-like angel becomes, in focus, an appalling embodiment of Milton’s definition of Hell, ‘darkness visible’.

Antonio Canova is the starting point for Hirst’s second exhibit. ‘Fallen Angel’, the pose explicitly borrowed from Canova’s sculpture The Repentant Magdalene, is perhaps the most arresting piece in Gloucester Cathedral. Again, no suggestion of sexlessness here: this stunning golden image with huge wings presents a young woman kneeling back against the stump of a tree, her long hair falling, as Mary Magdalene’s conventionally does, over her shoulders and back. The gold is so highly polished that it is not easy to see at first the harm she has done herself. Scratched across her stomach are the words LOVE ME x, and her arms are scarred with cuts.

Come closer (she is placed in the Sanctuary, near to the High Altar): all but hidden from view in her left hand is a folded packet; syringe, spoon and lighter beside her right knee explain the packet’s contents, and above her left elbow a tight-knotted tourniquet is already in place. Hirst has never exhibited ‘Fallen Angel’ before. One day it will have become among his best-remembered works.

But it isn’t ‘Fallen Angel’ that has made the deepest impression on me. Alone in a tiny chantry chapel on the south side of the nave is a hand, the smallest exhibit in the entire show, and I cannot forget it. It is made of bread. The artist, Marc Quinn, has been exhibiting bread hands since 1991, but this is the first time I have seen one in the flesh – as one cannot quite say. To be clear: he has not carved the hand from a loaf of bread, but shaped it from proven dough and then baked it, the final result as much the effect of yeast and heat as of the sculptor’s in(ter)vention. But you can make out, just, the knuckles of its fingers, the lines on its palm.

So here it lies, on an altar: an open but a mutilated hand. What meaning can I give it?  As I try to absorb what I am seeing, words, not images, help me out: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning,” or, more expressly, “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” Then, more insistent still, Seamus Heaney’s memory of his

                                                  … once capable

Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift

And lag in yours.

Chanson d’Aventure, from which these lines come, describes the poet’s anguished journey by ambulance to hospital following a stroke, accompanied by his wife, Marie. The poem appears in his valedictory Human Chain (2010), the lines themselves appropriated from an untitled, uncollected poem by Keats:

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood …. (1819)

Unlike Keats’s ‘living hand’, Heaney’s has lost its cunning. Without sensation in his hand the poet is in danger of losing touch, literally, with all that’s most precious; sense and connection are denied him. Moved by Marc Quinn’s ‘Bread Hand’ and by this poem of Heaney’s – about which I’ve written elsewhere – I have been re-reading Human Chain, and now see that in these last poems, the significance of hands is an ever-present trope.  In poems after poem hands feel, hold, experience pain, transmit tenderness, acknowledge acceptance. Twice indeed Heaney coins new hand words: ‘emptyhandedness’ to describe human loss, and ‘steadyhandedness’ for that fragile sense of human equilibrium he so tenaciously championed. ‘Bread Hand’ at Gloucester Cathedral sums up for me Heaney’s openness to life in its simplicity, fragility, cruelty and complexity. So perhaps the word to describe this sense is one Heaney himself might have smiled at, then accepted – ‘breadhandedness’.

[illustrations: (i) ‘Anatomy of an Angel (Black)’, 2008, by Damian Hirst, in the N aisle of Gloucester Cathedral; (ii) ‘Fallen Angel’ (2014), by Damian Hirst, in front of the High Altar, Gloucester Cathedral; ‘Bread Hand’ by Marc Quinn, in the Chantry Chapel, S aisle of Gloucester Cathedral.

[References: all quotations from Heaney’s poetry come from Human Chain, (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). The word ‘emptyhandedness’ appears in ‘The Butts’, p.12; the lines from ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ are on p. 15, and the word ‘steadyhandedness’ occurs in ‘Hermit Songs ix’ on p.79.

Text and photographs © Adrian Barlow

You can read my discussion of sculpture in public spaces, Big Heads, here.

I have written about Gloucester Cathedral before:

Tom Denny and Ivor Gurney in Gloucester Cathedral.

My previous posts about Seamus Heaney include the following:

History, Heaney and Hilary Mantel

World and Time: Heaney’s penwork

World and time: Heaney's Human Chain

Heaney and the conversation of poetry

Seamus Heaney full face

Venice Inscribed (iv): Henry James

If you happen to be caught in an autumn storm in Venice, you know all about it. Late September is, however, in many ways an ideal time to visit the city: the high-summer crowds have dwindled; the frenzy of the Film Festival is over; there are no longer any queues at the Biennale. Even locals dislike excitements such as the recent wedding of a human rights lawyer to a coffee-machine salesman: the Clooney cortège and its accompanying charivari* aroused the wrath of gondoliers and everyone else. Venice doesn’t care to be treated as if it were Sunset Boulevard.

Our arrival in Venice, earlier that same week, had been rather different. We’d installed ourselves in a quiet apartment behind the Arsenale, before heading back to Marco Polo airport to meet friends coming to share our holiday. We had brought them to Piazzale Roma, and were now sitting on the open seats at the back of a Number 1 vaporetto, heading down the Grand Canal. It was nearly 7pm, and the sun was setting. We’d been lucky with the weather all day: the forecast had threatened rain.

By the time we reached Ca’ d’Oro, the last of the sun had gone, and the sky was getting rapidly darker. When we emerged from under the Rialto Bridge, it was clear a storm was approaching. First, though, we were treated to a remarkable son et lumière: spectacular lightning and thunder far away over the Alps. Wherever the storm was, it didn’t seem to be overhead. We thought we’d get away with it: if rain was coming, we told our friends, they’d be safely in our apartment before it started. We were wrong. We should have noticed the gondolas and water-taxis scurrying for cover, for as we left Santa Maria della Salute, the tempest began, the vaporetto bucked, and we were soaked in an instant.

How we got home, I hardly know. The boat battled against the wind but eventually made it to Arsenale; we got off and found the water on the Riva degli Schiavoni already ankle-deep. There was nowhere to shelter, so we ran against nearly horizontal rain towards the nearest passageway, stumbled left into the Calle della Pegola, then splashed our way towards Campo San Martino, staggering with our friends’ sodden suitcases across the little iron bridge over the canal to reach, at last, our front door. What I had planned as a gentle early-evening stroll though one of the quaintest, quietest corners of Venice had turned into a nightmare worthy of the film Don’t Look Now.

Henry James describes a storm like this in The Wings of the Dove, his novel about Milly Theale, a beautiful young American in Venice pursued by two predatory suitors: the aristocratic Lord Mark and the penniless Merton Densher. ‘It was,’ says James’s narrator, ‘a Venice all of evil that had broken out.’ This storm fits the mood of Densher who, to his dismay and after weeks of being an intimate guest, has been turned away from Milly’s palazzo by a common gondolier.  Failing to discover why Milly won’t see him, he heads into

… a Venice of cold lashing rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest and interruption …. He had to walk in spite of weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the Piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the high arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the limit of the expanse, the old columns of St Theodore and of the Lion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. (pp.403-4)

Henry James is not my favourite writer, but when he allows himself to observe and record without wrestling lexis and syntax into submission, I warm to him at once. Having reached St Mark’s Square, Densher surveys the chaotic scene; and, in a fine example of free indirect style, James famously writes that

The whole place, in its huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. (p.404)

I enjoy the touch that James adds next: the café tables have been moved out of the rain and crammed under the arcade, ‘and here and there a spectacled German, with his coat-collar up, partook publicly of food and philosophy’. Mocking the manners of Germans abroad is evidently an old sport.

But the philosophical German is a distraction, and this whole description of the crowd sheltering from the storm a deft piece of indirection on James’s part. We, reading, are busy establishing the confused scene in our mind’s eye, and we are even told that ‘These were impressions for Densher too’, who needed to walk three times round the ‘whole circuit’ of the piazza  to recover himself – a walk that in reality would take at least twenty five minutes but which James describes in seven words. Yet before we have caught up with him, he has already stopped dead, having spotted a man he recognizes, sitting (as an English gentleman evidently should) inside, not outside, the café Florian.   Densher is appalled: his rival, Lord Mark, has returned to Venice. For a moment, the two men face each each other through the window; and in that instant Densher realizes, ‘as if he had caught his answer to the riddle of the day’, why he has been turned away by Milly Theale’s servant.

This is what Mikhail Bakhtin called a chronotope**: an unexpected conjunction of time and place, a chance meeting in a crowded place that creates a crisis in the plot, leading the reader forward towards the resolution of the story. I’m pleased to say that, after our storm, we woke to clear skies and bright sun. Venice doesn’t disappoint. Merton Densher was less lucky: for him the storm signalled the beginning of the end.

*Charivari: a raucous procession accompanying an ill-matched couple to their wedding.

**Chronotope: “The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belong the meaning that shapes narrative.” MM Bakhtin, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, 1981, p.250

All quotations from The Wings of the Dove, Oxford World’s Classics paperback, 1984, pp.403-405

[illustration: Santa Maria della Salute, seconds before the storm, 22 September 2014

Here are links to my earlier posts about Venice:

Venice at the Edges

Venice Inscribed (i): Donna Leon

Venice Inscribed (ii): Joseph Brodsky

Venice Inscribed (iii): Ruskin and E.M. Forster

World and time: In Venice - La Biennale

World and time: (still) in Venice

Text and illustration © Adrian Barlow