James Cummins Bookseller

London: Thursday [January 1913].

Price: $12,500.00

About the item

1-1/2 pages. 4to. Old folds, a couple of annotations in pencil. Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh (1959), 207-11 et passim.

Item #375888

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) developed his talents for poetry at Rugby school and Kings College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles. He lived chiefly at Grantchester from 1909 to 1912, writing a paper on John Webster and the Elizabethan drama, which won him a fellowship to King's in 1913. Brooke’s “reputation as a poet stood high in a small circle of friends and acquaintances before the publication of his Poems in 1911, but his name was unknown to the reading public at large” (Keynes). In 1912 he helped Edward Marsh to plan the first Georgian Poetry anthology (in this letter Brooke is somewhat coy about his connection to the anthology).
Eddie Marsh (1872–1953), civil servant and patron of the arts, was an Apostle of an earlier generation at Cambridge along with Bertrand Russell, and knew everyone in politics and the arts. He served for many years as Winston Churchill’s private secretary, and “his apartments had become the rendezvous of poets as well as painters and, from 1913, a virtual second home for Rupert Brooke” (ODNB). Marsh was a steadfast friend to Brooke, and later proved instrumental in promoting poet’s posthumous reputation. This letter discusses social ties and plans to attend a debate between the ubiquitous George Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc, whose current book was The Servile State (1912).
Christopher Hassall gives details of the whirlwind nature of Brooke’s stay in London in early 1913: Cathleen Nesbitt had introduced Brooke to St. John Ervine; after the Belloc-Shaw debate and “supper at Gray’s Inn Brooke read aloud his play Lithuania”; on another occasion Brooke and Marsh dined with Ervine, and late at night they walked the long way back from Golders Green on either side of Yeats, who was in particularly expansive mood.”
St. John Greer Ervine was a Belfast-born playwright and Fabian whose dramas were being produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and in Manchester around the time of this letter.

Dear Ervine,
Many thanks. I'll come today week at 6.30. I wonder how you like me to clothe myself. By God’s help I shall find my way —
About the Shaw-Belloc debate: the situation – for me – is complex. I have already a ticket; then Marsh, with whom I am staying, experienced a desire to come with me. Then your letter . . . . Will you have dinner with us in some restaurant & come on to the debate? I'll very gratefully take your other ticket & hand mine over to Marsh. And will go so, and hope that we will be able to exchange his ticket for one near us? Time and place we’ll arrange on Thursday.
Marsh is a charming creature – the editor of that anthology "Georgian Poetry" you may have seen; also Winston's private secretary –
yours sincerely
Rupert Brooke

AN EXCELLENT LETTER PLACING BROOKE AT THE BEATING HEART OF THE LONDON LITERARY SCENE, JUST BEFORE THE WAR.