Just finished [Julian Grenfell] in its Persephone edition: not so much a biography of the World War One ‘poet’ as a long series of personal letters between members of a family who collectively slaughtered thousands of pheasants and wild animals (including tigers and elephants) before themselves walking into the gunfire at Ypres. No spoilers here – Grenfell’s death is listed by date in the title of the book and - unless you are hoping he was kicked to death by a marauding bull elephant - logic has to point you to a death in the trenches. Indeed, the author tells us that Julian 'loved war' and even wrote to his doting mother from France... 'Isn't it luck for me to have been born so as to be just the right age and just in the right place?'

The death of a son is a terrible blow for any mother and yet Ettie Grenfell was not ‘any’ mother. Not content with ‘her unrivalled position in the Edwardian worlds of wit and fashion’, she had always insisted on first place in her sons’ affections while, at the same time, indulging in a series of ‘open affinities’ with their male contemporaries, most of whom also died in the war. And yet even after the loss of a second son Ettie refused to succumb to grief. Deciding that ‘life is a series of farewells’, she instead used their deaths ‘to provide the context of her living’ and even to ‘accentuate her brio’.

What brio? I ask myself. For, her sexual availability aside, Ettie Grenfell had nothing to offer the world and, along with Julian Grenfell, no staying power in history. So why an ill-written 400 page biography of such an odious pair? And why, given the fact that I disliked almost everyone in the book, did I slog through it to the bitter end? ( )

http://www.lonelymountain.net/books/sep08.html#mosleyjg ( )