Fatal Glamour (4 page)

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.”
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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.

That incongruity is particularly evident in Rupert's sexual fluidity, where bisexuality is only the beginning of his curious history. A beautiful woman would be left in no doubt about how she was valued, and what was expected of her. For a beautiful man, his looks were more likely to produce confusion, and even be felt as a stigma. A pretty boy was nice enough, but could there be a pretty man? This was a good part of Rupert's troubles, and the contrast between his career and Bloomsbury values is striking. Bloomsbury accepted the variability in people's dispositions, expressed in varying objects of desire and sexual acts.
Rupert had a continuous gay life, relatively consistent and satisfying, and rooted in public school homoeroticism. In his twenties, he embarked on a series of turbulent affairs with women. Only two of these affairs – in Tahiti, on the other side of the world – ran smoothly. For most women Rupert was a disastrous lover: unreliable, misogynist, without respect or empathy. For him, as for many young men like him, going to war was a welcome escape from heterosexual obligations. It becomes painfully clear from Rupert's letters that he was not afraid of death, but was afraid of marriage.

We may admire the relentless hedonism of Duncan Grant, or the rationality of Lytton Strachey, but Rupert's case is more intriguing because it was so erratic. By today's standards, he behaved shamefully in his relations with women. Part of the time, this behaviour was a deliberate revolt against the Bloomsbury code of relationships (which has become the dominant code for the Western middle class of today). In his early twenties, Rupert seemed to be pioneering a new and enlightened post-Victorian way of life. His neo-pagan and Fabian friends were “children of the sun,” their eyes turned to a radiant future. Then came the crack-up of 1912, which gave birth to the nasty Rupert: blimpish, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. This can be seen as a reversion to public school orthodoxy, or as a psychic break, in which Rupert needed to repudiate parts of himself that he could no longer tolerate. Like a barstool drunk, he needed someone to quarrel with – Bloomsbury in this case – whether or not they wanted to quarrel with him. In 1915 they would mourn his death, despite his hateful campaign against them.

If Bloomsbury was ready to make its peace with Rupert, his biographers have not always been so forgiving. As we learn more about our subjects, do we end up liking them, or despising them? In
Jacob's Room
, Virginia Woolf tried to understand the young men of her class who sacrificed themselves in Flanders or Gallipoli. She had no sympathy for any crisis of masculinity that might be resolved by the war. Yet she was deeply curious about the separate, hidden lives of her male friends. After
Jacob's Room
she turned, in
Mrs Dalloway
, to the post-traumatic injuries of those who survived.
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We can say that Rupert's bad behaviour to women and foreigners was just a return to what was typical of his class. The fault then lies with the public school system, and Rupert can even be seen as a victim of it. Yet a biography is hardly worth writing without an assumption of its subject's
personal accountability. In the Second World War there was a general system of occupation in France, but individual Frenchmen responded to German rule in radically different ways. Rupert made his own choices, and there is an immense body of evidence about why he made them. We are well placed to understand him, if not to pardon him. Further, the understanding can be applied on many different levels, from national attitudes towards Germany to ideas of mental illness that were applied to his 1912 breakdown. A biography should present its evidence to its readers for them to judge, rather than delivering an already determined verdict.

Evidence, however, needs to be summed up, into a consistent pattern of action and character. For Rupert, trying to reach that consistency turned out to be a dangerous task. Before 1911 he managed his emotional life by dividing it into separate compartments, keeping his various friends and lovers in the dark about what he was up to with others. His gay circle was shielded from his heterosexual partners (who were also kept ignorant of each other). Politics was another distinct sphere of action. In the background, always, was his formidable mother: at once the most important person in his life, and the one who knew least about his intimate affairs.

During 1911 Rupert could no longer keep intact the barriers between his different worlds, and the result was the emotional breakdown of the first half of 1912. This coincided with the wreck of the
Titanic
(15 April 1912), and happened for a similar reason: water began to spill over the top of the ship's watertight compartments, flooding from one to the next until the ship went down. Rupert recovered by cutting troublesome people out of his life, and by constructing a simpler and coarser identity. Thus stripped of the past – cleansed, as he saw it – he was happy to merge his fate with that of the Hood Battalion and to write to Ka Cox his own epitaph: “It's a good thing I die.”

The child may be father to the man, but most of the time the child's inner life is beyond a biographer's reach. We know the social class and the institution that Rupert Brooke was born into; we know something of his parents and their rather odd marriage. Rupert wrote letters and school exercises from an early age, but he was writing to satisfy someone else's requirements. For his whole life he would write compulsively yet hardly ever, it seems, straight from the heart. Like an actor, he would put on a mask – many masks – to hide his true face. As he pours out his soul in a flood of letters, some of them thousands of word long, something crucial is always held back; or else what he says to one doesn't fit with what he says to another.

One of the things that Rupert almost never wrote about was his childhood. He does mention a few things that happened when he was at school, including his clandestine love affairs. But we are never told how it felt to be small, what he cared about or feared, which grown-ups he loved and which he disliked. There seems to be a kind of defensive amnesia in this silence about his early years. So what might Rupert have been defending against? We know that the baby sister who came before him died, that his mother longed for another girl and resented Rupert when he came along instead. He was made aware that he was the wrong sex, and perhaps should not be there at all. He formed a lifelong habit of appeasing his mother, trying to satisfy whatever expectations she had for him, and giving her as much of his company as he could spare. At the same time, he had a secret life of rebellion against “The Ranee,” as he called her – that is, the oriental despot who ruled over her husband and three sons at School Field house, Rugby School.
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Rupert's father, William Parker Brooke, was born in 1850. The son of a parson, he had taken a First in Classics at King's College, Cambridge, and been elected to a fellowship. But no one became rich as a fellow, so Brooke shortly left to teach for six years at Fettes, near Edinburgh. In 1879 he married Ruth Cotterill, who was a matron in one of the houses and the sister of a fellow teacher. She was more handsome than pretty, and was two years older than her husband (though he may not have known this). She could certainly take over the social duties that her shy, scholarly husband found hard to manage. But she was also domineering and fiercely moralistic, as one might expect of a clergyman's daughter and a niece of the bishop of Edinburgh. Parker Brooke, who was only five foot three, soon acquired a look of hiding behind his moustache; nor was it hard to see from whom he was hiding.

Fettes was a recently founded offshoot of Rugby, so it was a step up the ladder for Brooke to move to the parent school in 1880. Once established there, he never tried to rise further. He taught at Rugby for thirty years, gaining fame for such exploits as giving marks from zero downwards, or bringing his dog to class and making it sit in the wastepaper basket. He had a habit of nervously fiddling with keys in his trouser pocket while teaching. His pupils unkindly suspected him of fiddling with something else; they gave him the nickname of “Tooler,” and “Ma Tooler” for his wife. True or not, the story went round that Mrs Brooke sent her husband out after dark to gather horse droppings for her garden.

The hunt for droppings was hardly necessary because public school masters were very well paid in Victorian times. The headmaster of Rugby earned nearly £3,000 per year in 1862; a senior housemaster about £1,600.
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Parker Brooke also had some inherited capital, so he was comfortably off from the beginning of his career. In 1891 he became housemaster of School Field. This was a crucial promotion, since he could now pad out his salary with a handsome profit on the food and accommodation supplied to the fifty boys in his house. Mrs Brooke now became a combination of matron, lodging-house keeper, and substitute mother to the boys. She kept one sharp eye on their morals and the other, equally sharp, on the cost of their food.

Rupert was a product of Rugby School, in every sense of the word. His father had been there for seven years when Rupert was born on 3 August 1887. He was the second of his parents' three sons, after Richard and
before Alfred. His first name came from the Cavalier general Prince Rupert, whom his father admired. His middle name, Chawner, came from one of his mother's ancestors who had been a fanatical Roundhead. The combination proved to be a good index of his divided soul – long hair on the outside, puritan disposition within. As Rupert grew up, Mrs Brooke was frightened by his delicate health. She was reluctant to let him get too far out of sight and when he was ten sent him to a prep school, Hillbrow, that was only a hundred yards down the road.

Rupert started at Hillbrow in the autumn of 1897. His brother Richard was already a pupil there, and Alfred would follow in due course. Such schools were a Victorian invention – Hillbrow was founded in 1859 – designed to help the upper-middle class to consolidate their position in a changing social order. They took in boys at an earlier, more vulnerable age than the public schools, and had even greater influence in shaping their characters. Prep schools were good at getting boys ready for the battle of life, which satisfied the parents who paid through the nose for sending them there. But not every boy was pleased with his treatment and one of them, George Orwell, did more than anyone else to give them a bad name. He called them “those (on the whole) nasty little schools at which small boys are prepared for the public school entrance examination. Incidentally these schools with their money-grubbing proprietors and their staffs of underpaid hacks, are responsible for a lot of the harm that it is usual to blame on the public schools. A majority of middle-class boys have their minds permanently lamed by them before they are thirteen years old.”
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Still, neither Orwell himself nor his schoolmate Cyril Connolly were permanently lamed by “Flip” and “Sambo,” the husband and wife proprietors of St Cyprian's. At Hillbrow three of Rupert's near-contemporaries became notable writers or artists: James Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Robert Graves. Rupert was more of a conformist than those three, though he was a real poet and had no trouble thinking for himself. Nonetheless, the English prep school system was designed to “make men” of a particular kind, and with Rupert it largely succeeded.

In his critique of St Cyprian's, Orwell focused on money and the snobbery that went with it. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 proposed that entry into the upper ranks of the civil service should be by competitive examination. To join the administrative elite (which was still very small) now required being stuffed with knowledge at a public school. That knowledge was primarily of Latin and classical Greek, starting from about the age of ten. Prep schools had to grind into their boys enough acquaintance with ancient languages to prepare them for the more intensive grinding when they continued to public school. This was a labour-intensive process for which the schools charged very high fees. When Orwell entered St Cyprian's in 1911, the fees were £180 per year, nearly twice the income of a skilled worker.
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Parents accepted this as the price of getting their sons into a public school, and from there into universities and professions.