Books: All One Could Wish …

RED WINE OF YOUTH (287 pp.)—Arthur Stringer—Bobbs-Merrill ($4).

When the phrase “flower of England” was used to describe the young English dead in World War I, the name of Rupert Brooke was one of the first that usually came to mind. Headed for the Dardanelles assault in 1915, Brooke got septicemia from a lip infection, drowsed off in a fever on shipboard and was buried on the Aegean island of Skyros. He was 27. His generation, bred in formal beauty and ancient peace, numbered many gallant young men; but by all accounts Brooke had the best looks and the greatest charm. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote at his death: “Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all one could wish England’s noblest sons to be.”

To hardbitten or tired English tempers in later years, that felicitous pre-1914 age came to seem almost mythical; and Rupert Brooke, its golden lad, became himself a myth, romantic, heartbreaking, and also a little flimsy. He had written, when the war began,

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England . . .

and few people any longer felt that such boyish fervor would quite do as good “war poetry.” So, between wars, Brooke and his little sheaf of verses remained objects of piety rather than admiration.

Arthur Stringer’s biography is the first major work on Brooke since the Memoir Sir Edward Marsh wrote to go with Brooke’s collected poems in 1918. Canadian Poet Stringer had the use of a bundle of material on Brooke collected by the late Richard Halliburton (The Royal Road to Romance), who was lost at sea in 1939 before he could make it into a book. Though sometimes heavyhanded, Red Wine of Youth is neither too reticent nor too worshipful to present Brooke as a human being.

Euphoria & Rebuffs. At Rugby Brooke was noted for his prehensile toes, with which he could shoot marbles; at Cambridge he tried to act, but was poor at it; and he paid for his remarkable euphoria in fits of nervous depression. He was not always irresistible. Amy Lowell stood up and shouted “Speak up, speak up” at one of his readings; Ford Madox Ford elegantly rebuffed him.

Brooke enjoyed his short life too much to bear down often with sustained intensity on any writing, artistic or critical. Poverty and illness and ambition drove his poetic progenitor John Keats; but early success, doting friends and romantic passions distracted Brooke. He was almost at his best in his letters. From a Munich boardinghouse he described a “monstrous, tired-faced, screeching, pouchy creature, of infinite age and horror, who screams opposite me at dinner and talks with great crags of food projecting from her mouth.” Musing on Niagara Falls, Poet Brooke wrote: “The river, with its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens itself to a life . . . And as incessant, as inevitable and as unavailing as the spray that hangs over the falls, is the white cloud of human crying.”

The Game Is Up. To Cathleen Nesbitt, the pretty Irish actress with whom he fell —and stayed—deeply in love, Brooke wrote: “Why do you look like that? Have you any idea what you look like? I didn’t know that human beings could look like that . . . I ADORE YOU.” To Edward Marsh, his closest friend and wisest promoter, he wrote from Papeete of his inadequacy as a poet: “The Game is Up, Eddie. If I’ve gained facts through knocking about with Conrad characters in a Gauguin entourage, I’ve lost a dream or two. I tried to be a poet. And because I’m a clever writer and because I was 40 times as sensitive as anybody else, I succeeded a little.”

Nobody has ever determined how much succeeding is necessary to success. Stimulated by this book, readers may turn again to Brooke’s poems and get much pleasure from the miscellany that to his friend Walter de la Mare seemed “as if a boy had turned out the astonishing contents of his pockets just before going to bed.” His high-hearted Heaven and The Old Vicarage, Grantchester are permanent poems, and many other passages attest to his true gift, to the iron that was entering into it and might have made him a first-rate English poet had he lived.