Rupert Brooke

"Lay down your Swinburne and attend!" So Brooke begins a letter to Noel Olivier, youngest daughter of the Fabian reformer Sydney Olivier and cousin of Sir Laurence. It is 1909: Brooke is about to take his Tripos at the end of an academically average undergraduate career, Noel is sixteen and frequently more mature about the nature of her relationship with the dashing poet than he is, despite his being several years older. Theirs will be a tempestuous yet unconsummated relationship, at times ferocious and possessive, at others, barely existent. It is traced through its ups, downs and plateaus in Pippa Harris's Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier (OP), and is a fascinating insight into one of English literature's most charismatic poets.

To look at Brooke with a modern understanding of psychology, then in its infancy, reveals a deeply obsessive character, sexually frustrated and at times almost bi-polar in his mood swings, which ranged from egotistical and manipulative ranting to deep, possibly even suicidal, depression and a crippling lack of confidence. In many ways, he comes across as a young man out of his time, born too early; the personal and literary freedoms he craved are simply not those of Edwardian society. Take, for example, his poem The Voice; this is an accomplished piece of romantic pastoral, which, re-examined in light of the ending, becomes biting satire. The poem very much sums up Brooke's complicated attitude to his art - poetry was, to him, the highest pinnacle, the greatest form of expression, the weight of its history both inspiring and oppressing... and yet at the same time the canon is something to played with, turned on its head, even mocked; see also The Great Lover.

Love, indeed, seems to have presented him with a similar dichotomy; he both yearned for it and despised it. When he wasn't in love, he forced himself to be so, playing the courtly lover much as Romeo does before he meets Juliet. Yet when real love (hetero- or homosexual), or at least its potential, reared its head, he ran a mile!

What his letters show, however, is a complex boy who grows into an even more complex man. He is intellectual, yes, but also surreal, witty, even silly:

"I am writing a Book. There will only be one copy. It will be inscribed in crimson ink on green paper. It will consist of thirteen small poems; each as beautiful, and as meaningless as a rose-petal, or a dew-drop. (These are not yet written, however.) When the book is prepared, I shall read it once a day for seven days. Then I shall burn the book: and die."

Surely, had he ever realised it, a contender for the Turner Prize?

His legendary "dateless" beauty ("he was tall and well built, loosely put together, with a careless animal grace..." "eyes not grey or bluish white, but of living blue, really like the sky..." "the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful.") is set off by the intense passion with which he sometimes imbued his letters: "You go burning through every vein and inch of me till I'm all [you]", he wrote to Ka Cox, with whom he lost his heterosexual virginity.

But he was also, as Virginia Woolf was often quick to point out, cruel. He knew how and when to hurt his friends, and did so with calculated precision. His letters demonstrate occasional remorse, but it was often a long time coming. Indeed, due to his early death, in some cases apologies never came.

And then, we can - and better men than I have spent much time doing so - deliberate on what he would have become had he lived longer. He is known in many circles simply as one of the 'war poets', and criticised just as often for the heroic tone those few war sonnets take, but one must remember that in 1915, when Brooke died, even Sassoon's poems were patriotic, and Brooke, though on his way to Gallipolli, never saw frontline action. I have read speculations that he might have made Prime Minister - he moved in the right circles (friends included Churchill and Violet Asquith, the latter, naturally, being in love with him) and was always vaguely interested in politics. But he was a strange mix, as many were at that time, of latent racism and outright sexism (he hated suffragettes), combined with liberal Fabian ideals. (Indeed, he is indirectly responsible for the Arts Council - his friend, the great economist Maynard Keynes, proposed a fund for artists based on an appeal made by Brooke). Brooke was in fact so utterly contrary in virtually every aspect of his life that it is hard to say whether he would have, had he lived into the 1930s, sided with Hitler or Stalin.

But contradiction is perhaps what lies at the heart of our infatuation with so many artists, writers and musicians. After all, isn't complexity the essence of creativity?

(All references from Song of Love by Pippa Harris, Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey by Keith Hale, and Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth by Nigel Jones)

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters

I love an Edwardian evening... Coal fire spitting softly in the grate, snowflakes catching in the light of the streetlamp outside, the whole house quiet and warm and comforting. I curled up on the sofa in an old loose cardigan and read the first 100 pages of The Mitfords.

I love a good letter writer, too. Rupert Brooke is a particular favourite, by turn sweetheart and caustic rat, imbued with exactly my sense of humour. And I am delighted to be able to say that the Mitford girls live up to my high epistolary standards. Deborah and Nancy are far and away my favourites, each snappy and funny with, frequently, hints of surrealism. But it is only in reading her letters, in hearing her own personal voice, that I am for the first time able to get some kind of feeling for Unity, always the hardest sister to generate empathy for. She is a giddy schoolgirl, letter after letter simply babble about how many times she has met Hitler and where and for how long and what he said and what he did when she replied and how many times he touched her on the arm and how many times on the shoulder... it becomes quite wearing, whilst at the same time being a real insight into her extraordinary, and perhaps slightly frightening, psyche. The pre-war correspondence between her and Diana is, of course, of the greatest historical significance of all the letters, but is also the most tedious, and I find myself skipping paragraphs in order to get to the next cheering 5 line missive from Nancy. This in no way belittles the weight of the horror that Unity and Diana both refused to attach to their beloved Fascism, but in fact adds to the complicated strands that made up the Mitford family tapestry.

The Children's Book (1)

I had wanted to read all the 2009 Booker shortlist. Before the winner was announced, I managed only two, The Glass Room and The Little Stranger, both of which I loved. There was a stretch in the middle of the Sarah Waters' where I felt some tighter editing might have moved things along a little more pleasingly, but this minor fault was more than made up for by the novel's chilling last line. She is truly a mistress of storytelling - I still haven't forgiven her for the twist that comes halfway through Fingersmith, a shock so great that when I read it, I had to put the book down and lie silently for an hour before I was able to continue with my life!

The Children's Book was too large, as was Wolf Hall, to carry around, and with some misgiving I determined to leave them both until their paperback counterparts were available. Wolf Hall comes at the beginning of March, but I am delighted to say that I am now happily ensconced in the lightweight version of The Children's Book. And it was worth the wait.

Beginning in 1895, this vast opus, part novel, part social history, bridges for me a fascinating gap. Last summer's guilty pleasure was the watching of Desperate Romantics, and subsequent reading about the pre-Raphaelites and their influence on the Arts and Crafts movement and indeed, the social reform it spawned. In addition to this, I have long held a crush on Rupert Brooke, and find the late Edwardian era and First World War a compellingly interesting time. Class issues and the rights and standing of women were at the forefront of reform, and the budding of the world we now live in began in that bloodied soil. These two eras are joined by The Children's Book; one character is a Rossetti 'Stunner', others are related to major players in Brooke's short and turbulent life. It is immensely satisfying to be able to identify people and places as real, and to know already something of the world immediately preceding that of AS Byatt's creation, and the one that follows.

I would add that this is a book entirely suited to the title of this blog; I find myself curled up and reading by candlelight night after night, frustrated only that I am too exhausted during the week to dedicate more of my time to it. It is an enthralling story, filled with characters with whom I am already, after only 200 pages, very much in love. It is real, and yet part dark fairytale, and ultimately deeply satisfying; true literary porridge.