Fatal Glamour Read online

  Fatal Glamour

  Fatal

  Glamour

  THE LIFE OF RUPERT BROOKE

  PAUL DELANY

  © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015

  ISBN 978-0-7735-4557-1 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-8277-4 (ePDF)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-8278-1 (ePUB)

  Legal deposit first quarter 2015

  Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

  Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

  McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Delany, Paul, author

  Fatal glamour : the life of Rupert Brooke / Paul Delany.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-7735-4557-1 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8277-4 (ePDF).

  – ISBN 978-0-7735-8278-1 (ePUB)

  1. Brooke, Rupert, 1887–1915. 2. Poets, English – 20th century – Biography. I. Title.

  PR6003.R4Z628 2015821'.912c2014-907647-9

  c2014-907648-7

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  1Rugby, August 1887–September 1906

  2Cambridge: Friendship and Love, October 1906–May 1909

  3The Fabian Basis, October 1906–December 1910

  4Apostles, and Others, October 1906–October 1909

  5Grantchester, June–December 1909

  6Ten to Three, January–September 1910

  7Couples, October 1910–May 1911

  8Combined Operations, January–December 1911

  9Hungry Hands, December 1911–January 1912

  10To Germany with Love, January–April 1912

  11The Funeral of Youth, May–August 1912

  12Raymond Buildings, August 1912–May 1913

  13Stepping Westwards, May 1913–May 1914

  14The Soldier, June–December 1914

  15Gallipoli, January–April 1915

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  My first debt is to those members of the Rupert Brooke generation, or their children, who have now passed away: Quentin Bell, Bob Best, Christopher Cornford, David Garnett, Richard Garnett, Catherine Gide, Sophie Gurney, Angela Harris, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Cathleen Nesbitt, Frances Partridge, Dr Benedict Richards, and Mary Newbery Sturrock. For access to family archives I am specially grateful to Val Arnold-Forster, daughter-in-law of Ka Cox, and to Pippa Harris and Tamsin Majerus, granddaughters of Noel Olivier.

  I thank those who provided invaluable insights through personal reminiscences, private documents, or other help: Val Arnold-Forster, Anne Olivier Bell, Michael Hastings, Elizabeth Hollingsworth, Lucilla Shand, Michael Holroyd, H.A. Popham, Sophia Popham, and Julia Rendall. Many others have added pieces to the story, whether in letters or conversation: Peter Ackroyd, Anna Anrep, Nicholas Barker, Lorna Beckett of the Rupert Brooke Society, Alan Bell, Justin Brooke, Keith Clements, Sophia Crawford, Jenny Dereham, Helen Duffy, George Gomori, Keith Hale, Dr Tony Harris, Paul Levy, Ann Radford MacEwan, Angus Macindoe, Perry Meisel, Howard Moseley, Lois Olivier, Peggy Packwood, Tristram Popham, David Pye, Mark Ramage, S.P. Rosenbaum, the Laird of Rothiemurchus, John Schroder, Frederick Schroder, Robert Skidelsky, David Steel, and James L. West III. For archival sources, I am specially indebted to Peter Monteith at the Modern Archive, King’s College, Cambridge.

  Stephane Roumilhac provided a memorable lunch and tour of the Château de Prunoy, Yonne; Mr and Mrs J. Finlinson showed me their home, formerly The Champions, at Limpsfield; Mary Archer invited me to the Old Vicarage, Grantchester. The librarians of Rugby and Bedales, and the housemaster of School Field, Rugby, took me over their ground.

  In Tahiti I should thank Mareva Poole at the Mairie de Teravao, Moorea; Tipari Gooding; John Taroanui of the Académie Tahitienne; and my partner in detective work, Colette Colligan.

  For ideal surroundings in which to work, I am grateful for residencies at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and Playa Summer Lake, Oregon.

  For permission to quote from copyright materials, I am indebted to the Trustees of the Rupert Brooke Estate, Jon Stallworthy, and Andrew Motion.

  At Simon Fraser University, Dean John Craig gave financial support to my research. Helen Wussow helped with the Virginia Woolf connection. My agents, Georges Borchardt and Andrew Gordon, kept the book on course with their confidence and sound advice. Jonathan Crago and Joanne Muzak at McGill-Queen’s University Press recognised the need for speed.

  In these times we are reminded constantly of the nightmare of 1914–18, and especially what it meant for British civilians and combatants alike. All living memory of those times has now gone, and it is disappearing daily for those who came after them in the Second World War. In memoriam Paul Lawton, 4th Battalion, Coldstream Guards, 1944–45.

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  October 2014

  Mrs Brooke with Rupert (left) and Alfred, 1898. (Modern Archive, King’s College, Cambridge)

  Hillbrow School, c. 1901. Mr Thomas Eden, the pedophile headmaster, at centre. Rupert in fourth row, second from right; James Strachey in third row, sixth from right. (Hillbrow School)

  Rupert at Rugby School in 1903, hair still cut short. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Rupert in the Rugby Cadet Corps, 1906, at age eighteen. The antelope badge belongs to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. (National Portrait Gallery)

  School Field House, Rugby, autumn 1906 (detail). Denham Russell-Smith, fifth from right in top row. Alfred Brooke, second from right, top. Charles Lascelles may be below Denham to right, with broad collar. (Rugby School Archives)

  Olivier sisters, c. 1912. From left: Margery, Brynhild, Daphne, Noel. (Private collection)

  Brynhild Olivier, 1909. (George Bernard Shaw collection, London School of Economics)

  Ka Cox as a Young Fabian – a model for Mary Datchet in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day. (Private collection)

  Camp at Clifford Bridge, Dartmoor, summer 1911. From left: Noel Olivier, Maitland Radford, Virginia Woolf in gypsy headscarf, Rupert. (National Portrait Gallery)

  Noel Olivier at Rothiemurchus, 1913. (Private collection)

  Justin Brooke in Bedales fashion, around 1914. (Private collection)

  Lytton Strachey, 1913. (National Portrait Gallery)

  Henry Lamb, self-portrait, 1914. (National Portrait Gallery)

  Jeune Fille au Fox Terrier, 1910. Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, painted by her father. (Private collection)

  James Strachey, becoming a Freudian, around 1918. (National Portrait Gallery)

  Cathleen Nesbitt, 1913. (National Portrait Gallery)

  Rupert with Duncan Campbell Scott, Ottawa, 1913. (National Portrait Gallery)

  A young friend of Chief Tetuanui, Mataeia, 1914. Rupert’s Mamua? (From Frederick O’Brien, Mystic Isles of the South Seas, 1921)

  Group in front of the guesthouse at Mataeia, March 1914. Tataamata at left, Rupert at right. (Modern Archive, King’s College, Cambridge)

  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 l
eft: Margery, Brynhild, Noel, Daphne. (Private collection)

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

  Fatal Glamour

  Introduction

  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.

  The Latin Club may have been an obnoxious little clique, poisonously arrogant and spouting ancient Greek over the dinner table. But integral to their pose was contempt for death. More than contempt, even: an eagerness for it, and five of the seven would be in their graves by 1918. Here, the biography of the individual Rupert Brooke contributes to the great question of why the European war began, and how it unfolded. Whether the initial spark was kindled by chance or by necessity, once the war was under way young men of all countries were desperate to take part in it. Michael Adams has gathered some of the evidence in The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I. Rupert was speaking for innumerable other young men when he compared enlistment to taking the plunge, “like swimmers into cleanness leaping.” Nothing less than war could wash away the sins of the previous years of civilian life.

  Such sins, real or imaginary, formed part of what Christopher Clark has called a “crisis of masculinity.”5 The positive side of this crisis was defined by Virginia Woolf as a specifically male propensity for rivalry, aggression, and militarism. But Rupert’s trouble was more on the negative side: feelings of guilt and failure that could only be purged through comradeship and violence. Whatever the broad causes of male eagerness for war, the special value of Rupert’s case is that we know more about his inner life before 1914 than just about any other Englishman. Endowed with the sublime egotism of a poet, Rupert could distill his feelings into a few memorable lines, or let them overflow into the hundreds of thousands of words of his intimate letters. These letters contain every conceivable mood: euphoria, nervous exhaustion, romantic idealisation, misogyny, socialist universalism, crude chauvinism. If Rupert had any kind of coherent self, it was assembled from radically incongruous parts.