Fatal Glamour

April 15, 2015
Initially the star among Britain's WWI poets, Rupert Brooke (18871915) died of infection during the Gallipoli campaign, never having seen combat. He had published some war sonnets, however, and, dubbed the handsomest man in England by W. B. Yeats, was a celebrity. His circle of Cambridge men mingled with the barely older Bloomsbury Group; Virginia Woolf called them neopagans. But while he put on the front of a free-lover, his, his friends', and his lovers' massive correspondencewithout which Delany's book would be a sketchreveals a man tormented by sex chiefly because he rarely got any and, except, perhaps, for a fling with an American widow, didn't like what he did get. It was souring himchanging his outlook from Fabian socialist to jingoist, anti-Semitic, and antifeministbefore the war gave him something to die for and Delany something to relieve the longueurs of recording Brooke's fading from golden boy into Colonel Blimp. This is ultimately a celebrity biography, with scant attention paid to Brooke's poetry. Deep-dyed Bloomsburians will, however, revel in it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)