Nigel Jones: Rupert Brooke - Life, Death And Myth (Head of Zeus)

Even that meagre claim does not explain the continuing fascination with, as Nigel Jones puts it, the ??Life, Death and Myth?? of Brooke. Among the conscripted company still called ??the War Poets??, he did not come close to the best. As an emblem of golden youth laid waste, he was not even the youngest. Wilfred Owen was just 25 when he was killed a week before the Armistice. Little Isaac Rosenberg, greatest of them all, was no older than Brooke when he was slung into a mass grave.

But then Private Rosenberg was working-class, Jewish and horrified by the war from the start. He had not excited the interest of the great and good, from EM Foster to Henry James to Churchill, with his beauty and his calculated charm during the last bright years before the guns began to speak. Above all, Rosenberg had not claimed that a corner of a foreign field would be ??for ever England??.

Ewart??s estimate was generous: one handful would do for Brooke. The Old Vicarage, Grantchester still appeals to those who enjoy heritage-industry ??proper verse??. Historians, especially the revisionist sort, will still call on Peace and its thanks to God. The pair of sonnets each titled The Dead serve to illustrate the attitudes of the officer class in the war??s first moments. But Brooke is remembered always for The Soldier.

It is an odd, pernicious thing. First, it is an absolutely sincere expression of the poet??s belief in the racial superiority of anyone lucky enough to be English and die in England??s name (??In hearts at peace, under an English heaven??). Secondly, though the poem was taught for decades as an exquisite Georgian invocation of resolve and yearning in some hellish Flanders quagmire, it had nothing whatever to do with Brooke??s brief, mundane military career.

That was brought to a close on April 23, 1915, not by an enemy action, but by a mosquito whose bite gave the poet a lethal dose of blood poisoning. Brooke did not die in a trench at Gallipoli, but in a hospital ship moored off the island of Skyros in the Aegean. There was no dishonour in that, of course. The fact remains that this war poet did not see much action. His role was to provide a good-looking propaganda corpse, one whose sonnet to that soldier perishing in a foreign field would be read from the pulpit in St Paul??s just weeks after the fatal sepsis.

Jones might have obvious reasons for revising his 1999 biography in this of all years, but his book is more than another contribution to the Great War centenary industry. Seeing Brooke as he was, with a beauty that was scarcely skin deep, is as important an aid to understanding those who took Britain into the charnel house in 1914 as any conventional history. If Rugby school and the University of Cambridge produced their idea of the heroic, quintessential Englishman ?? and they did, with floods of manly tears ?? much is explained.

This is a big book about a short life that has a good deal to say about those who ran the Empire and shaped its culture, but the author is impelled to give summations of his subject, this glamorous Peter Pan who supposedly ?? said Churchill ?? personified ??the nobility of our youth in arms??. Jones has not got beyond his introduction before he informs us that Brooke was ??at times cold, cruel, pettish, weak, a poseur, anti-Semitic, anti-women, paranoid and childish??.

Jones makes abundantly clear that Brooke was not an oddity in his time and class. Some spotted his essential coldness; some ?? like Maynard Keynes ?? could see that he was shallow. Brooke himself knew his looks and his ability to charm were his weapons. He manipulated and bullied those around him ruthlessly, yet few said the fop was a fake. He was the personification of a type, the product of the best education money could buy at the heart of the greatest empire the world had seen.

At times, while bachelor dons lust over the youth, or while Brooke is convalescing in Downing Street, or while those who surely knew better are overstating his minor talent, the narrative feels like a satire of old Britain. Here??s the weak, Rugby housemaster of a father, the ever-domineering mother, the sub-Brideshead homo-eroticism of school and college, the foppery, the snobbery, the flirtation with ??socialism??, the self-absorption and the ??sexual confusion??.

Brooke left behind a trove of mostly fey and tiresome letters that are more revealing than his verses. Invariably, they have one subject. From these we learn that he was an entirely devious character ?? for fear of fearsome mother ?? who struck poses as if by instinct. But if Jones has a sub-text, there it is: that??s what public school, money, an ancient university and a weird obsession with class will do to a boy.

In one sense, this is unfair. Brooke was hellishly young when he died. The myth constructed around the writer of The Soldier was not of Brooke??s doing. Had he lived he might ?? though I doubt it ?? have given Robert Graves a run for the post-Georgian prize.

Brooke was keen on death, even as an adolescent. The possibility spared him the horrors of age, decay and responsibility. Charles Hamilton Sorley, the Aberdonian who died shot in the head at Loos in 1915, a better poet by far than the gilded boy, said Brooke was ??far too obsessed with his own sacrifice??. That was precisely why, no doubt, ??Rupert Brooke is Dead?? was worth an item in the Times on April 26, 1915, one celebrating ??all that one would wish England??s noblest sons to be??. Churchill, predictably, wrote the piece.

Sometimes the biography of a person becomes the portrait of a period. This, with a winning lack of deference, a good deal of mockery and a justified degree of honest respect, is just such a book. Understand Brooke, understand what was made of his corpse, and you understand more than The Soldier could convey. Something ugly was made from the vainglorious beautiful youth.