Feeling Modernist Patronage: Edward Marsh, Rupert Brooke, and Modernism's Intimate Ecologies

Abstract

Feeling Modernist Patronage:Edward Marsh, Rupert Brooke, and Modernism's Intimate Ecologies Jodie Medd (bio) On April 24, 1915, the day after Henry James learned that Rupert Brooke, the World War I poet and naval officer, had succumbed to septicemia on the Aegean en route to Gallipoli, he sent a letter of condolence. "This is too horrible and heartbreaking," James begins, "If there was a stupid and hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved, and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for making one just stare through one's tears." As he continues to lament this loss, James issues a pause that is as empathetic as it is rhetorical: "But why do I speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in presence of yours?—which makes me think of you with the last tenderness of understanding. I value extraordinarily having seen him here in the happiest way (in Downing St., &c.) two or three times before he left England, and I measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the dead weight of your own loss." He advises his bereft correspondent "to entertain the pang and taste the bitterness for all they are 'worth'—to know to the fullest extent what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it will come home. You won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't know again that mixture of the elements that made him." The only consolation he can offer: that this loss gives a greater "price and a refinement of beauty and poetry" to Brooke's last "splendid" war sonnets, "which will enrich our whole collective consciousness," and that "his legend and his image will hold."1 [End Page 785] This reads as a letter to a bereaved mother, a devastated brother, a mourning widow. And in a way, it is a letter to all three—and more—for it is addressed to Edward Marsh (1872–1953), Brooke's patron, supporter and, in James's own words, "intimate and devoted friend."2 This devoted friendship first took root while Brooke was at King's College Cambridge and, like Marsh nearly fifteen years before him, a member of the Apostles. That James could claim the "last tenderness of understanding" for Marsh's loss attests not only to James's extraordinary capacity for eloquent feeling, but also to his unique capability to empathize with this particular loss, of a beautiful, young, glamorous, semi-talented young man, whom Marsh had supported, admired, housed, and promoted. James's depth of attachments to artistically ambitious younger men, particularly later in his life—attachments that have informed and enriched queer considerations of James's life and work—uniquely qualified him in identifying with Marsh's wartime loss.3 Certainly, Marsh received an outpouring of consolation letters, particularly from the other poets and artists he had supported, many of whom had been published with Brooke in the Georgian Poetry anthologies, which Marsh and Brooke had masterminded together. But few, if any, could come close to James in appreciating the particular "pang" of this loss. At the same time, the only comfort that James's letter can offer—the value of Brooke's sonnets and the persistence of "his legend and image"—were not yet guaranteed resources at Marsh's disposal; in fact, they are phenomena that Marsh would actively produce and promote as his own means of mourning. The public endurance of Brooke's work, legend, and image were the direct result of Marsh's efforts, not only in his support of Brooke's early career, but most powerfully through his elegiac efforts in Brooke's posthumous memorialization. Theirs was a patronage relation extending far beyond death. Just how are we to understand this relation, its peculiar strain of intimacy that James intuitively recognized and honored, and its place within the cultural economy of modernist production and patronage? Approaching it requires rethinking the terms of the production and promotion of modernist literature and authors, structures of patronage, and their intersection with the...