Rupert Brooke is best known for his good looks and his First World War poetry. “The war sonnets,” says Paul Delany, author of a new Brooke biography, “were the most powerful statement, in their time, of the eternal message that death and suffering are noble, meaningful, and redemptive.” The publication of those poems came in 1915, only a month before Brooke, a 27-year-old English soldier, died of a mysterious infection en route to battle in Gallipoli. Brooke has endured like a Greek god, the very personification, according to his friend Winston Churchill, of “the nobility of our youth in arms.”

There is a surprising lack of discussion of Brooke’s poetry in Fatal Glamour. Instead, we learn in mind-numbing detail of Brooke’s numerous relationships, most of them unconsummated. There were many affairs, in part because Brooke did not seem to know what kind of woman he wanted, or whether he preferred men. Delany refuses to assign Brooke a sexual orientation, saying that “it would be presumptuous for a biographer
to choose for him.” But the author is presumptuous enough to label Brooke both misogynistic and anti-Semitic. Brooke emerges hazily from Delany’s plodding prose as immature, narcissistic, and unappealing, except for his physical appearance, which prompted fellow poet W.B. Yeats to call him “the handsomest man in England.”

Fatal Glamour’s strength is in dissecting the social milieu Brooke inhabited, rather than the man himself. And so we are told about various trendy movements of the early 1900s: the socialist Fabians, the literary Bloomsbury group, and the Neo-Pagans, who encouraged the unmarried to frolic naked in the countryside but remain chaste. Authors such as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, and D.H. Lawrence moved in some of the same circles as Brooke. They all lived longer than he did  and all are remembered more for their talent than their “fatal glamour.”