Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death, 1888-1915 (Persephone book) [Paperback]

This is quite simply one of the best biographies I have ever read and it should be far better known as an example of brilliant 'life writing'. It is short-ish, never dull - the opposite of the laundry list kind of biography - and wonderfully written (Mosley is a superb stylist and yet a relaxed one). By the end you feel you know Julian Grenfell and his mother, and you understand a little more about the causes of WW1, and perhaps of war in general. JULIAN GRENFELL would definitely be in my list of the top ten biographies ever written.

Julian Grenfell (1888-1915) was, for the generation immediately preceding the First World War, the paradigm of excellence, nobility and self-sacrifice. Along with Rupert Brooke's `The Soldier' and Patrick Shaw-Stewart's `Achilles in the Trench', Grenfell's poem `Into Battle' is characterised by the lyric assertiveness of the aristocratic poets of the early years of the First War. This biography of the soldier poet was first published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1976: this 1999 re-issue is clearly printed on good quality paper in the chaste, silver wrapper of Persephone Books and with endpapers reproducing a gorgeous velveteen of `Poppies' from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Nicholas Mosely, a well-known biographer and experimental novelist is the grandson of George Curzon, and was married to Julian Grenfell's neice: born in 1923, Mosely met Julian Grenfell's mother in the late 1940s, and in writing this book, he enjoyed privileged access to the Grenfell family papers.

Straightforwardly interpreted, Mosley's striking subtitle may be taken to refer to the notion that death can take a variety of forms, and that a man's physical demise can sometimes be preceded by the metaphysical death of his heart, his will, or his spirit. Much of the book serves the idea that Julian Grenfell's death of a head wound received in Second Battle of Ypres was preceded by an emotional and inteelectual struggle against the ideals and conventions which governed the society into which he was born, and of which Mosley regards Julian's mother to have been, in some ways, the personification.

In his Preface to the 1999 edition, the author seems to row back somewhat from this thesis, writing that his title was meant to `convey the idea that Julian's life was circumscribed by the time into which he was born' and that `the style and attitudes of the society around him were such that the chance of death was something almost to be welcomed as a way of dealing with the predicaments that confronted him'. Mosley states that he is eager to `discountenance the idea' that the reference to `the times of' Grenfell's 'death' should be taken 'as being the responsibility of his mother': the responsibility, he says, was more that of the attitudes taken by her generation as a whole, and his attitude `on re-reading the story' was that any culpability of Lady Desborough's lay with `her scorn for Julian and his heartfelt ideas.'

To this reader, the biographer's later explanation is simply at odds with his original text. A good deal more than half of the book is concerned not with Julian Grenfell himself, but with his mother, Ethel (`Ettie') Fane. Ettie, the heiress to two great titles, married William Grenfell, later Lord Desborough, in 1887. William Grenfell was a remarkable sportsman and athlete and constantly referred to in his own time as the classic type of English gentleman. Ettie was fashionable, clever and charming - not a classic beauty, `but' (as Curzon, with refined coarseness put it) `an epicure's feast for the eye.' In the years after her marriage Lady Desborough sat at the centre of a circle of like-minded `Souls' who passed the gilded afternoon of Edwardian privilege in high-minded conversation, witty repartee, the composition of facetious verse, and after-dinner guessing games.

Writing to Ottoline Morrell of the correspondence published by Lady Desborough in a memorial volume of 1916, Lytton Strachey wrote `As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don't they? I felt when I got to the end that I'd lived for years in that set. But oh dearie me, I am glad that I am not in it! I think it is their facility that degrades them - facility of expression, facility of sentiment, facility of thought - it's really fatal to be made like that - like taps to turn on and off: very convenient, but only water comes out: if you want wine you must go down into the cellar, and find a bottle in the dark, and pull the cork out with a corkscrew.'

Reading the more personal and previously unpublished correspondence printed in the present volume underlines the essential validity of Strachey's impressions. Even in letters dealing with apparently intense emotions there is a remarkable melange of conscious artifice and unthinking conventionality: people write in exalted terms of their relations with one another, but entirely without precision as to what is involved - there are abject and humble apologies for unspecified offences; there are rapturous expressions of gratitude for undefined misbehaviour; and there are vows of eternal and apparently undeserved devotion; in these ethereal 'amities amoureuses' - some of which involved Julian's Oxford contemporaries - Lady Desborough seems to regard absolutely everything and everyone as `wonderful' `marvellous' `radiant' `darling' or `lovely'. It is Mosley himself, who suggests that at the centre of all this there was a kind of spiritual vacuum, and that it is difficult to know whether it masked real feeling and real involvement, or whether it is some kind of substitute for it - a compulsion not dictated by the uncertainties of human passion, but by the rules of a well-established game - a preference for form and fantasy over substance and reality. Ettie, the author argues, depended for her own psychological security on constant reassurance from the people around her: she needed to keep them in service and in thrall. Julian, who knew his mother as only an older son can, was determined to preserve his independence - but without giving anything up.

For all his protestations, Mosely does write of Grenfell's relationship with his mother in terms of a life and death struggle in which each sought to hurt and punish the other for the failings which each regarded as a threat to their own systems of behaviour and morality. In 1909, Ettie was telling Julian who felt unable to express himself either personally or in social terms as she would have had him do, that he had `killed his affectionateness'; and Julian was replying that, as far as personal warmth was concerned, he felt `stone-dead in himself.' When Julian wrote a set of essays in which the ideals of his mother's circle were identified as pharisaic and even stupid, the `counterattack' was 'to make out that Julian himself 'was mad.' As far as his mother is concerned, Julian is described by Mosely as a `heretic' having not just `to recant' but `to burn'; the battle between them is described as a battle to the death, and Julian is described as having lost it. In the depressive illness that followed the rejection of his book of essays, the author describes Julian, lying `on the sofa of his mother's sitting room with his loaded shot-gun beside him; of which, he wrote to Monica, he `tentatively fingered the trigger day by day.' This life, so often seen as one of wasted promise, might quite easily have been ended three years before the outbreak of the First World War.

Mosley, who is somewhat given to generalisations in the school of Freud, suggests that in this kind of depression, 'parts of people can die' and that if Julian did not actually die `something of his sensitivity may have died.' Grenfell's life between 1911-1914 is seen as restless, impatient and grimly sardonic, but not exactly experimental: Mosley suggests that the First War offered Julian an altar to the contradictory ideals of competitiveness and self-sacrifice for which he had already been richly garlanded, and towards which he moved as if towards spiritual release. This is an interesting and compellingly written thesis, and it is difficult not to conclude that Mosley, who expresses a sincere personal admiration for Grenfell, projects something of himself and of his own times into this portrait of misunderstood brilliance, contempt for convention and assertive individualism. Strachey, who could be as mean-minded as he was acute wrote that Julian had an attractivesness about him, but that it was `that of a savage. He seems to have done nothing all his life but kill animals (those extraordinary triumphant bits of Lady D! - `this week Julian killed 237 rabbits, 38 stags, 406 weasels etc, etc,really 'impayable') - until he began to kill human beings, which, of course, he found even more enjoyable.'

The truth is, that the portrait which Ettie tried to paint of her `golden boys' had precisely the opposite effect among those, like Julian himself, who were able to understand the kind of personality that her style unconsciously revealed. Raymond Asquith, who had sent Ettie an account of Julian and his brother Billy (killed a few weeks after Julian) noted that Etty had doctored his account so as to cut out any kind of humane qualification. `Ettie', he wrote, `is a snob... She meant to give her sons the best mise-en-scene from a worldly point of view which could be had and I suppose that she wants people to know that she succeeded.' By fairly noting this tendency in Lady Desborough, and by quoting so skilfully from the unedited correspondence, the Essays, and the brief, but enlightening War Diary the author substantially deepens the areas of light and shade in the mother's idealised portrait, but one wonders, at the end, if his own is not itself over-idealised, and if Mosley's hesitancy in the 1999 Preface might not reflect the biographer's doubts about his earlier accounta, which may, with its's themes of inter-generational conflict and misunderstanding reflect popular intellectual obsessions of its own period.

There was in the years leading up to the Great War a recognition that the great aristocratic houses were living through their sunset. The 'People's Budget' of 1911, and the struggle in the Lords with which it was associated, was a more profoundly revolutionary moment then even the Great Reform Act of 1830. Read more ›