A buried love: Flecker and Beazley

A. L. Rowse

Oxford — and in particular the Ashmolean Museum, to which Sir John Beazley left his wonderful collection of Greek objets d'art, painted vases, figur- ines, gems, sherds, fragments of 'the glory that was Greece' — did well to mount an exhibition this summer for the centenary of her greatest scholar in this century. Con- sider: he not only put the vast subject of Greek vase-painting on a firm scientific and aesthetic basis, but virtually rounded it up and completed it in his own lifetime.

His obituary in the British Academy Proceedings tells us that

the master plan was nothing less than the identification of all the painters of Attic red-figured vases, great and humble alike. To that and to the parallel study of painters using the black-figured technique Beazley devoted his whole life; although he found time for other fields and produced there enough to have been the lifework of any other scholar.

His achievement is indeed hardly credi- ble. The second edition of his Attic Red- Figure Vase-Painters dealt with more than 700 painters he had identified. His parallel work on the black-figured identified 500 potters and painters, of some 10,000 vases from collections all over the world. Coin- cidentally he made Oxford the world- centre for the study of Greek art, while his collections there continue the work.

He had a unique combination of scho- larship with aesthetic sensibility which en- abled him to recognise and piece together a work of craftsmanship from sherds in half-a-dozen places. His linguistic ability was phenomenal — he knew a dozen languages, and regarded learning a new one as recreation. Behind the single- minded devotion and determination there was something stranger: he gave his life to his work, he sacrificed the living of life to it — as his friend, the poet Flecker, observed that he was going to do.

In this he was like A. E. Housman, inspiration and mentor to them both. Housman has comparable figures in his field of scholarship; not so Beazley, who had no equal in his, and — it is fair to say — never will have. Nor is Beazley's perso- nality known to the public: no less with- drawn than Housman's, Beazley was much more successful in concealing it, and des- troyed as much of the evidence of his early life as he could lay hands on.

In my old age I am probably the last man to have been in touch with something of it; and I owe this man of genius a great debt, for it was he who elected me in my working-class youth to a scholarship in English Literature at Christ Church. Thus it was that I learned of his relationship with Flecker, buried with Flecker's early death at 30; the inner nature of that relationship is fully revealed only in Flecker's poetry.

The external story is well told in John Sherwood's sympathetic biography of Flecker, No Golden Journey. He describes the relationship as 'a highly charged emo- tional friendship' — which it was, and more; though it has not been told from Beazley's point of view, Flecker's poetry blurts out the truth in the way poets have — for in verse one can say anything; most people won't know what is being said.

What is stranger than the fact of sexual love is the degree of intellectual inter- penetration. For Beazley, too, began as a poet. Though he destroyed as much as he could get hold of later, from what is left we see that he had more ideas and images than Flecker; they worked so closely together that often Flecker would take up an idea of Beazley's and re-work it into a poem of his own.

I know nothing so intimate in the history of literature — I don't think that even Verlaine re-wrote Rimbaud's verse. Nor is it that Flecker's early poetry is superior to his friend's; Flecker's is more personal and revealing, Beazley's more impersonal and scholarly. From this unparalleled co- operation Flecker saved from destruction a score or so of Beazley's poems — some of them transferred and re-worked — while I have tracked down three that were pub- lished, in the English Review, in which Flecker's early verse appears too.

Beazley gives nothing away; by this time, 1911, it is -

I have made myself the master of the horse Desire -

as Housman never did. Or,

The secret of happy days - Would you know it?

Suck the juice out of things, then away, and forget them.

Who sips and never is drunken, wise is he: Though I fade, and my eyes are sunken, look at me.

Still, we have:

A rose-wreath for your rustling hair, The trembling rubies for your ears. But since the faces of the gods Are shadowy now as long ago, Let's cover up, and hide away All knowledge and desire to know.

He managed to cover up very well in that long lifetime of 85 years, world-renown in his sphere, a closed, walled-up heart. Until now — when we have the key.

Beazley, a year younger and scholar of Balliol, winning all the classical pots and prizes, was intellectually more mature than Flecker next door at Trinity. Jack was already a critic, going through Flecker's poems line by line with detailed criticisms of words and images. He was sure that Flecker had genius — which meant every- thing to him, constantly criticised and questioned by his conventional parents, the Headmaster of Dean Close School at Cheltenham and his formidable wife, who wanted a safe, scholastic career for their wayward, passionate son.

Jack saw that scholarship was not for Roy, with his Second and Third in the Schools — even the Newdigate did not Come his way, though he expected it. Beazley's intuition told him that one day Flecker would make a dramatic poet, as he did with Hassan, a stage success — after his death, alas. Meanwhile the two shared everything, including Nellie, the Carfax tart — though Jack had to pretend that she was a boy to get any enjoyment out of it.

It is clear that the bisexual Flecker was the masculine partner, Jack the feminine. When young he had a markedly feminine beauty — as Flecker wrote:

He reminds me of Shelley, especially when he lies on the hearth-rug, with his long light hair, slight frame and pensive face. Indeed such a fellow is not often to be met with outside of a novel or romance.

Certainly the friendship, with its Greek overtones, was the romance, and the in- spiration, of Flecker's all-too-short life. Jack remained youthful-looking so long that it became 'embarrassing': 'tired of being a bloody Peter Pan', he wrote.

Jack already had no conventional reli- gious belief; shortly we find Flecker writ- ing, 'I have at length definitely become an agnostic', and he wrote a one-act, anti- religious play. This was anathema at Dean Close School — so appropriately named where Flecker's parents were all the more strenuously Christian for being Jewish con- verts. So the friendship was deeply dis- approved of, and Flecker forbidden to bring Beazley home to the house. Flecker's mother was a dragon, and later did every- thing she could to suppress the story of the relationship to keep Beazley's name out of her son's biography.

The parents were unable to keep them apart; together in Oxford, we find them together on cross-country jaunts in Wales, in Italy, sharing a room in Paris or Bonn Flecker learning the languages for the Consular service, while Beazley pursued his addiction to Greek pots wherever he went. Here they are in Venice:

The town whose quiet veins are dark green sea, The town whose flowers and forests are bright stone: There it was the God came to you and me In the signless depth of summer. All alone We lay . .

There was a good deal of lying about, not only on the hearth-rug but out of doors, to judge from the few photographs that re- main. They had 'too good a time in Italy', but — 'Curse it, father heard Jack was with me.' Then:

Life stood still a moment, mists came swinging Blindly before us: suddenly we passed The boundaries of joy: our hearts were ringing

True to the trembling world: we stood at last Beyond the golden gate,

And knew the tune that sun and stars were singing.

And again:

We that were friends tonight have found

A fear, a secret, and a shame: I am on fire with that soft sound You make, in uttering my name.

We know little of those lyrical jaunts all over northern Italy, except that once the couple were stranded penniless in Flor- ence. Jack's circumstances were even more straitened than his friend's, while Flecker was dependent upon the conditional doles he received from his parents. Beazley gives nothing away in his verses. T. E. Lawr- ence, who was one of the circle, had a perhaps exaggerated opinion of them:

Beazley is a very wonderful fellow, who has written almost the best poems that ever came out of Oxford; but his shell was always hard, and with time he seems to curl himself tighter and tighter into it.

This was what Flecker found, as the early ardour cooled off, though as late as 1911 we find him writing excitedly from

abroad: 'if Beazley's poems are in the English Review do send me a copy.' People

found that it was not possible 'to discover how much he had written or why he had abandoned it.' It is clear that he had decided that his vocation was for scho- larship, not poetry — or, rather, the decision was made for him by his passion for pots, which survived everything. This is the theme of one of Flecker's best-known poems, 'Invitation to a Young but Learned Friend to abandon Archaelogy and play once more with his neglected Muse':

Has Fancy died? The Morning Star gone cold?

Why are you silent? Have we grown so old? May summer keep his maids and meadows glad: They hear no more the pipe of the Shropshire Lad!

Here is something of what Housman meant to this esoteric circle, himself buried in scholarship until overwhelmed by the experience — death of his early friend that led to his Last Poems. Flecker re- proached his friend:

Lover of Greece, is this the richest store You bring us — withered leaves and dusty lore, And broken vases widowed of their wine, To brand you pedant, while you stand divine?

He can have had no idea of the summit of world renown his friend would ultimately reach in his chosen field:

You who would ever strive to pierce beyond Love's ecstasy, Life's vision, is it well We should not know the tales you have to tell?

Beazley was never to tell them, he resolved

to keep silent all his life — and to put his life into his scholarship. That was where his genius lay. There were few people at Oxford at that time who realised what lay

behind Flecker's poems.

In fact Flecker and Beazley were leading rather risque lives, if less openly and less audaciously than the Cambridge Apostles whom they knew, There was a good deal of coming and going between them. Maynard Keynes came over to see Beazley, and found him 'quite unspoilt'. In 1908 Flecker moved to Cambridge to prepare for the Consular service; Beazley, visiting him there, found Strachey and Keynes the cleverest men he had ever met. Keynes had a typically supercilious view of Flecker, who for his part was not much impressed by Rupert Brooke's poetry. (Before 1914, Flecker and Brooke were regarded as the rising hopes of English poetry: next year both were dead.) In January 1910 Flecker and Beazley were sharing a cheap room in Paris together, while Jack was studying Greek vases in the Louvre. Here the previously athletic Flecker — given to the sport of roof-climbing at Oxford — developed the throat trouble which announced the tuber- culosis (hence his feverish activity) which killed him in a few years. When writing his verse play, Don Juan, he returned to Oxford for Jack's judgment. It was rather cool, and this cast its shadow. Herbert Trench of All Souls, who was at this time managing the Haymarket theatre, was distinctly encouraging; he believed in Flecker's future as a dramatic poet — to be justified, if all too briefly, by the subse- quent theatrical success of Hassan. Posted abroad to Constantinople, the ambivalent Flecker found himself a de- voted wife in the Greek world to look after him in his recurring illnesses. Beazley had now got a niche as a classics don at Christ Church. When Flecker invited himself to stay, Beazley replied with a drawing of himself as an effigy on a tomb in the cathedral, and 'I shall be delighted to see you. I will put you up in a neighbouring tomb.' In a way, this gives a clue to Beazley's later life: he gave up life for scholarship — a reason why his scholarship was so wonderful. The visit was not a success, the old glad days were over: Flecker found Jack plunged in melancholy.

From the Middle East, in `Gravis Dulcis Immutabilis', it is still:

Come, let me kiss your wistful face

Where sorrow curves her bow of pain, And live sweet days and bitter days With you, or wanting you again . . .

There had evidently been ups and downs between them, as usual in such intense relationships.

And listen, while that slow and grave Immutable sweet voice of yours Rises and falls, as falls a wave In summer on forsaken shores.

Those shores were now of Asia Minor, where Rupert Brooke was to find a grave. In 1910 Flccker was seconded to Constanti- nople, where

There lies a photograph of you Deep in a box of broken things. This was the face I loved and knew Five years ago, when life had wings: Five years ago, when through a town Of bright and soft and shadowy bowers We walked and talked and trailed our gown Regardless of the cinctured hours.

Now I go East and you stay West And when between us Europe lies I shall forget what I loved best, Away from lips and hands and eyes.

There was only one more encounter. Flecker and his wife were in Paris at the turn of the year 1912-13. Beazley was there independently, using the Christmas vaca- tion to work at the Louvre.

Flecker would still be writing up a poem, in 'The Oak and the Olive', on a theme from Jack's old black notebook — that of their nostalgia for Greece, and Flecker's home-sickness for England now that he was abroad. Then, ill in a sanatorium in Switzerland, he was dying for news of Oxford; 'Is Jack in his coffin yet?' is his last word.

This was the Beazley whom I knew — if that is the word for it — in my young years at Oxford.

Flecker died in L915. J. C. Squire, in editing his poetry, wrote 'I cannot help remembering that I first heard the news over the telephone, and that the voice which spoke was Rupert Brooke's.'

Beazley did not marry until after Fleck- er's death, when again he made a Jewish choice. Marie Bloomfield, whose husband had been killed by the Germans in their war — so that, a gifted linguist, she would not speak German — was a remarkable woman, a talented photographer whose slides were a great help to Beazley's work. She subordinated herself to serving him in every way, guarding him with iiiaternal possessiveness — 'my Jacky' constantly on her lips.

She made an exotic figure against the ecclesiastical desert of Tom Quad, not much appreciated by the staid Dean and Canons. Regarding herself as some kind of classical goddess, she had a tame goose that waddled after her, recognising her by her unmistakably loud check skirt.

Jack's colleague in teaching Mods was the Latin scholar, S. G. Owen, whose chief interest in life was the food and drink at high table. No love was lost between Beazley and Owen, who, purple-faced and with a curious pine-shaped head like Wil- liam IV, had no sense of beauty or the distinction of his junior. One weekend, while Jacky was away at Cambridge, the pet goose ate the Daily Mail, and died of it. Owen teased Beazley with `So Goosey's dead'; to this he replied glumly, 'Yes, and many worse men are alive.'

I found Marie Beazley extremely flirta- tious — I don't think she got much change out of her Jacky, I always thought it a marriage blanche. A Spanish refugee artist who drew Oxford figures with their speak- ing characteristics — Gerald Berners, for instance, fondling a lobster (he lunched off lobster every day) — drew a good likeness of Beazley, with a beautiful Greek youth in the background. Has that portrait ever been reproduced?

Marie took particular notice of me, and would ask me to a light lunch in their rooms — Jacky silent as ever, and the moment lunch was over he vanished into his inner sanctum. In St Giles's they shared the exquisite Judge's Lodgings — built as a town house for the Marlboroughs — with a fellow exotic, 'Wee Pricie'. One evening when I was bidden up to dinner, Marie appeared extremely decolletee, black vel- vet with a yard of beautiful old lace. Her daughter let the cat out of the bag with '0 Mummy, you told us not to dress!'

That evening after dinner there turned up one of Jacky's men friends from Flecker days. They disappeared into another room — a distinct gene in the atmosphere; Marie was out of it, put out, and I left early.

When I got to All Souls — where Marie first met her Jacky, at lunch with T. E. Lawrence — I found a faith for myself in Marxism. I became a fanatic, though not a communist — and asked Marie to lunch alone to tell her that here was my vocation, and gave her her conge. She must have found that funny and told of it, for I afterwards heard of it from a mutual friend.

But that is part of my story; and now they are all dead, and I an old man.