Henry James met Rupert Brooke on a visit to Cambridge in June 1909, having been invited there by some young admirers who made him feel, he wrote in a letter, ‘rather like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting his Circassian Hareem’. Brooke, in a white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam. ‘Oh yes,’ he said later, ‘I did the fresh, boyish stunt, and it was a great success.’ James sent thanks to all concerned, ‘with a definite stretch towards the Rupert’, and after the poet’s death in 1915 he agreed to write a preface to Brooke’s Letters from America. He didn’t get completely carried away – one sentence worries about Brooke seeming a ‘spoiled child of history’ – but he was old and ill, queasily supportive of the war effort and moved by his memory of the young man on the river ‘with his felicities all most promptly divinable’. Under the circumstances, he told Edward Marsh, the poet’s literary executor, he had read Brooke’s war sonnets ‘with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure’.

LRB 28 July 2011 | PDF Download