Amazon.com Review
Rupert Brooke is one of the 20th century's best examples of image management. After he died of blood poisoning en route to Gallipoli in 1915, the poet's valor and godlike good looks were soon immortalized. He never had the chance to prove the former save in a handful of verses that are far from his finest, but photographic proof of the latter was unassailable. When Brooke's letters were originally published in 1968, his executor and editor, Geoffrey Keynes, kept well clear of his extensive correspondence with James Strachey (brother of
Lytton and now best remembered for his translations of Freud). Keynes went so far as to claim that they would appear in print "over my dead body." Nothing less than homosexual panic was at the heart of such hysteria: Brooke was to be forever deified, not damned as a sodomite.
Now Keith Hale has whittled down Brooke and Strachey's letters and postcards between 1905 and 1914 into a volume in which the inconsequential ("Thursday lunch will be admirably suitable") bumps up against history, emotion, and desire. The last few years of their friendship were decidedly rocky, and Strachey's final words on his complex friend are apposite: "Rupert wasn't nearly so nice as people now imagine; but he was a great deal cleverer." Whether you read their correspondence as proof positive of Brooke's bi- or homosexuality will depend on your views of the construction of sexual identity. But it must be said that the poet's account of one schoolboy seduction is written with an icy objectivity that even Edmund White would envy. These letters remain a fascinating record of longtime companionship--no matter how you use that term. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Hale, a professor of English at the University of Guam, assembles here a long overdue compilation of the correspondence between two Bloomsbury figures: the poet and WWI martyr Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, brother of the more famous writer Lytton but important on his own as Freud's main English translator. As a Cambridge undergraduate, James Strachey fell in love (unrequited) with the golden Brooke. Their letters sometimes discuss aspects of homosexuality, which kept them unpublished for many decades. Now they seem tame, and indeed, the collection may be appearing too late; few take Brooke very seriously as a poet anymore, and many readers may be sated by the glut of books about the Bloomsbury set. In addition, neither man was a born letter writer. Still, the letters provide an essential and frank documentation of the Cambridge goings-on of a powerful generation of intellectuals and artists, including Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. As anyone who has waded through the numerous lives of these people knows, among them categories of sexual desire and conduct could be rather free-flowing and difficult to define. Brooke, despite enjoying a number of girlfriends, also nursed romantic passions for male schoolfellows; he wrote to a lady friend, "Do you understand about loving people of the same sex?... Of course most sensible people would permit." Until now, none of his editors would permit it, so readers owe thanks to Hale for his labors in compiling and thoroughly annotating this correspondence.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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