The Honey Trap

RUPERT BROOKE by Christopher Hassall. 557 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $8.75.

"Why," he wondered as a boy, "do we always know someone everywhere?" The answer was simple. Rupert Brooke grew up among Top People in an era when no other kind counted in England. As a kid he built sandcastles with Virginia Woolf. Other adoring contemporaries included Darwin's granddaughters, Keyneses, Stracheys and most of the other young Britons who were to leave their mark on the times. As the late Christopher Hassall makes clear in this massive, kindly biography, Rupert Brooke had everything: chirm, grace, Grecian good looks, precocious brilliance. That was his tragedy. For Rupert, everything from schoolboy success to a celebrated death came too quickly, too easily.

Everything, that is, but emotional maturity. Mother was part of his problem. The wife of a housemaster at Rugby, she was a proper, pre-Freudian Victorian to the last glove button. Young Rupert, who arrived after his mother had lost a daughter in infancy, was often told that she had terribly hoped he would be a girl.

After King's College, Cambridge (Uncle Alan was Dean), the other golden lads and lasses fell in love, married, got jobs. Not Rupert. Dawdling on at Grantchester, a sleepy village near Cambridge ("Yet stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?"), he floundered through one infatuation after another. But with the only girl who really wanted a serious relationship, Rupert backed and filled, made himself sick and finally fled to the South Seas. He admitted, says Hassall, that "he was, most regrettably, a Victorian at heart." At 27, only a few months before his death, he confessed in a letter to Cathleen Nesbitt, then a struggling young actress, that he was "a cripple, incomplete. . . . I seemed to have missed everything."

It was in World War I, of course, that Brooke found completion in every sense, and he seemingly anticipated his fate years ahead of time. It was not a heroic death. The war poet, as he is remembered, was a victim of blood poisoning aboard a ship in the Aegean. His grave on the island of Skyros attracts almost as many tourists as Shelley's grave in the English Protestant Cemetery in Rome. In Brooke's memory, Grantchester's clock for many years was stopped at ten to three.

The 95 poems that comprise Brooke's collected works still sell, in an age when there is hardly any corner of a foreign field that calls itself English. If Rupert Brooke had survived, or had he even been exposed to the soul-shredding savagery of trench warfare that distilled the bitter poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, he might have become a different, and possibly better, writer. As it was, he became an anthological Immortal, trapped forever in the honey of post-adolescent nostalgia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.