47. Rupert Brooke and Taatamata

Photo by French born Lucien Gauthier who opened a portrait studio in Tahiti in 1904

In 1985 I spent time some time in Tonga staying in the one European house in 'Utulei, a village in Vava'u just across the water from Neiafu. The house had been built by a Scottish carpenter, John Galloway, who had jumped ship in Vava'u, and was bought from him by another Scotsman, the local doctor Farquahar Mathieson who died in 1967. (Patricia Ledyard, an American on a one-year teaching appointment in the early 1950s, fell in love with the place, married the doctor and owned the property until her death in 2000 - see her book 'Utulei My Tongan Home, 1974).

The house had a remarkable library of Pacific history, including a biography of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915). Like many other Cambridge undergraduates I had cycled out to Grantchester to see the church clock and have honey for tea*. I had accepted the image of the fabled golden boy of beauty and charm, the first world war poet struck down in his youth. But I never knew Rupert Brooke had visited the mythical ‘South Seas’ - Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti - and New Zealand. (He wasn’t rapt with New Zealand, observing that all the women smoked and dressed badly and everybody seemed rather ugly.)

Rupert Brooke stayed in a village in Tahiti in 1913 and fell in love with Taatamata, ‘a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a goddess, and the heart of an angel, who is, luckily, devoted to me.' She bore him a child that he subsequently neglected. After he left Tahiti he dreamt that she’d committed suicide but later, back in England, he received a letter from her that had been recovered from a shipwreck. Brooke took ill and died in the Gallipoli campaign (of an infection from a mosquito bite) – he was only twenty-seven – and shortly before his death asked a friend to write to Taatamata, tell her of his death and give her his love. One sentence in particular stood out for me in Brooke’s letters from these travels. ‘One only finds in the South Seas’, he wrote, ‘what one brings there.’

What is the attraction of Polynesia to intellectuals from colder climes? The myth grew up that in Brooke's case, Paul Gaughin's too, European men looked for and found the colour, warmth and sensuality of the islands irresistible. Brought up within a romantic literature with a long-standing tradition of chivalry, of a formal, constrained and chaste sensibility, of hopelessly unfulfilled and suicidal pining (eg the lovelorn romance of Sorrows of Werther), the expectation of love and romance that was passionate and erotic was hugely attractive, if rarely found.**

Later in 1985 I was working at the East-West Centre in Hawaii. There was a blond twenty-year-old Norwegian girl in our office who was living with a Tongan guy of my age (I was in my forties). She fell in love with him when she was an exchange student in Nuku’alofa - she would have been sixteen or seventeen at the time. So it’s not just older European men who fall for the warmth, the beauty, the sensuousness of the South Pacific.


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*
The final lines of Brooke's nostalgic poem 'The Old Vicarage' written in Berlin in 1912 are:

'...yet

Stands the clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?'

Other best known lines of his are the opening of his 1914 poem 'The Soldier':

'If I should die think only this of me

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever Engalnd.'

**
The reality in Brooke's case was quite different. Ambivalent about his sexuality, he was travelling after a mental breakdown brought on in part it would seem by his girlfriend Ka Cox dumping him for another man. He in his turn had a passionate affair with a Cambridge art student, Phyllis Gardner, and then cruelly dumped her, leaving her deeply distressed for many years.