Fatal Glamour (3 page)

Fairy Gold
, Phyllis Gardner's self-portrait, 1913, now at King's College, Cambridge. (By kind permission of the Provost and Scholars of King's College, Cambridge)

Eileen (Wellesley) Orde, 1921. (© Reserved; collection of National Portrait Gallery, London)

Rupert Brooke by Sherrill Schell, 1913.

Olivier sisters on the beach in Cornwall, c. 1914. From left: Margery, Brynhild, Noel, Daphne. (Private collection)

Officers of the Hood Battalion, 1914. Rupert in front of the window.

Fatal Glamour

In writing a life, the biographer lives with two questions: Why does this person matter to the world? And, why does this person matter to me? In April 1915, a hundred years before this book, Rupert Brooke was probably more admired and more widely read than any other young Englishman. W.B. Yeats had called him “the handsomest man in England.” Beauty might be dismissed as merely the luck of birth, but it added another dimension to the soldier-poet – the quality of glamour. Not only that, but the fatal glamour of the hero who sacrifices himself for the lesser beings who live in his shadow. D.H. Lawrence would write of “the terrible glamour . . . of Homer, and of all militarism,” and Vera Brittain saw that glamour as the “real problem” for pacifists:

The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure . . . The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.
¹

No young Englishman could have mattered more when, on Easter Sunday 1915, the Dean of St Paul's read out “The Soldier” from his pulpit. The opening line of the sonnet was “If I should die, think only this
of me”; and within three weeks the poet was dead. Early reports said he had died of sunstroke, not far from Troy, as if the god Apollo had struck down his rival. First comes the myth, then the biographer – to despoil the corpse. Rupert was not killed by a god, or even by the enemy, but by a mosquito; and his beautiful exterior covered much ugliness within.

In 1987, the centennial of his birth, I started to uncover Rupert's inner life in
The Neo-Pagans
. The twenty-seven years between that book and
Fatal Glamour
correspond to the number of years that Rupert lived. Over such a span, times will change, and authors will change with them.
The Neo-Pagans
was a work of horizontal biography, focusing on relationships between a small group of friends from 1908 to 1912. I tried to do equal justice to all members of the group, not just to Brooke as their charismatic leader. In any case, the Brooke estate would not allow me to write a comprehensive and sequential biography (they had contracted with someone else for such a work, though he never delivered). In the aftermath of the 1960s, one of my interests was in the utopian ideals of young people who were trying, however fitfully, to build together an Edwardian counterculture. Today, a counterculture is nowhere in sight, and bohemia of any kind seems to have perished. In a world that seems even more threatening than it did in the summer of 1914, what lessons can we draw from the collapse of the European bourgeois order? Our focus necessarily shifts to the forces of disintegration in Britain, and in Europe generally, as the utopian dreams of Edwardian summer were blown away by war and nascent totalitarianism.

Historians approach the Great War with comprehensive ambitions to explain high politics, imperialism, arms races, mass movements, and the like. A biographer who tells the story of a single junior officer has far more modest aims. Still, a personal history has its own value, giving us an inward sense of how and why young England marched away in August 1914. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) was a creator, but a wayward and difficult personality. He was a poet – in a war that, more than any other since the siege of Troy, has been defined by its poets. And his individual story gains a deeper significance as part of the collective tragedy of Britain's public school elite as infantry subalterns in the Great War. How much was particular to Rupert, how much typical of his class and generation?

Rupert left a huge and revealing mass of private correspondence, and a small body of poetry. George Orwell put his finger on the “Rupert
Brooke problem” when he wrote, “Considered as a poem ‘Grantchester' is something worse than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period
felt
it is a valuable document.”
²
But Orwell wrote in ignorance of the document's origins. We now know a great deal about Rupert's emotional history, and how the poem offered a coded solution to the crisis he had lived through in the previous six months. It is an intensely personal document, not just a bundle of public school clichés. Orwell did not look beyond the institutions in which Brooke's life was embedded, to the distinctiveness of his personal history (and Orwell himself was scarcely a “typical” Etonian!).

Orwell also recognised that popular art deserved respect just because it
was
popular, and that the qualities that made it popular were not always obvious. John Lewis-Stempel's
Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War
has a footnote listing the soldier poets of the Great War. It runs to three and a half pages in double-column. Rupert's poems stood out, even though their sentiments and their form were entirely conventional. He was following in the footsteps of A.E. Housman, and why do lines like these enter into the canon?

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows.

It would be hard for a non-native speaker to grasp the condensed power of such a couplet, where almost all the effect comes not even from Housman's twelve simple words, but just from the order in which he says them. Rupert's voice was lush, rather than minimalist:

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

This may be kitsch, but it found its audience – first because Rupert expressed common feelings, but also because of the words and rhythms in which he expressed them.

After Venus, Mars; and the two poems that set the tone for the early months of the war were Rupert's “The Soldier” and John McCrae's “In Flanders Fields.” Both came to be seen as lies; the truth tellers would be Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and their comrades in disillusion. But this is too stark an opposition. The dark poets of 1916–18 were themselves
formed by the establishment that had made the war. They were content to use traditional poetic forms, and many subalterns took Rupert's
1914 and Other Poems
into their dugouts at the Somme or Passchendaele. Robert Graves's war poems resembled Rupert's in everything except their content.

Whether to extol the war or to condemn it, almost the only poetic voice to be heard was that coming from the public school. Even at Rupert's centennial, the British system of elites persists, in ways unlike any other country. Whether on the Left or the Right, at Fettes or at Eton, political and cultural power still rests with the 7 percent of the population that is privately educated, and beyond that with the less than 1 percent from the ancient public schools and from Oxbridge. Rupert's battalion of the Royal Naval Division sailed for Gallipoli with about a thousand enlisted men and thirty officers. Of those thirty, seven were in the “Latin Club,” who ate together and looked down on their colleagues. One of the seven, Johnnie Dodge, was an American whose prep school had been St Mark's. The other six were all from the nine Clarendon Commission schools: three from Eton, two from Rugby, one from Winchester.

Today, inevitably, there is in England an organisation whose aim is to heal the wounds of “Boarding School Survivors.” But I do not judge the public school system (of which I am myself a “survivor”) quite so harshly. It was the European system of rival states that was responsible for the Great War, not the schooling of the English upper-middle class. Lewis-Stempel's
Six Weeks
pays tribute to the spectacular bravery, generosity, and self-discipline of the English infantry subalterns, many of whom were not yet twenty-one years old, and for whom school was almost the only world they had known. As the voice of their doomed ideals, Brooke's war sonnets are not “worthless” in Orwell's sense, but have their place in a body of poetry unmatched by any of Britain's other wars. Max Egremont has reminded us that the war poets were not pacifists: they may have hated everything they experienced in the trenches, but still they fought.
³
Brian Bond has gone further in reconsidering the war's “literary myth,” arguing that the war was “necessary and successful,” and well fought by the British and Allied armies.
⁴
Bond's judgment implies that Brooke's war poems should not simply be written off as sentimental and misguided. If the war
was
a success, then the spirit revealed in the poems did much to make it so.