[소설 소재] Rupert Brooke/케임브리지-페이비언 협회-블룸스버리-사도회, 버트런트 러셀, 버지니아 울프, E.M. 포터, 메이너드 케인즈, 동성애/양성애/페미니즘/평화주의/사회주의 커넥션
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Brooke
Rupert Chawner Brooke (3 August 1887 – 23 April 1915[1]) was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier". He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England".[2][3]
In October 1906 he went up to King's College, Cambridge to study classics. There he became a member of the Apostles, was elected as president of the university Fabian Society, helped found the Marlowe Society drama club and acted, including in the Cambridge Greek Play. The friendships he made at school and university set the course for his adult life, and many of the people he met—including George Mallory—fell under his spell.[10] Virginia Woolf told Vita Sackville-West that she had gone skinny-dipping with Brooke in a moonlit pool when they were in Cambridge together.[11] In 1907, his older brother Dick died of pneumonia at age 26. Brooke planned to put his studies on hold to help his parents cope with the loss of his brother, but they insisted he return to university.[12]
There is a blue plaque at The Orchard, Grantchester, where he lived and wrote. The words read thus « Rupert Brooke Poet & Soldier 1887-1915 Lived and wrote at The Orchard 1909–1911, and at The Old Vicarage 1911-1912 »
Life and career[edit]
Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent while others were more impressed by his good looks. He also belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets and was one of the most important of the Dymock poets, associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock where he spent some time before the war. This group included both Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. He also lived at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, which stimulated one of his best-known poems, named after the house, written with homesickness while in Berlin in 1912. While travelling in Europe he prepared a thesis, entitled "John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama", which earned him a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, in March 1913.
https://www.theotherpages.org/poems/faces.html
So who were these people who wrote the words archived at Poets' Corner? What were they like? This page links to images of many of the poets - paintings, sketches, photographs - and the stylized digital artwork I have created for the collection.
I think the "picture is worth a thousand words" concept applies more to prose than to poetry (good poetry, "the best words in the best order", says much with litttle), but pictures still say a great deal. While some of these images are heavily posed publicity photos or formal portraits, others are quite candid, and offer an insight as the character of the poet or at least how they were viewed in their time.
For example, every picture I have ever seen of Poe appears a little bit skewed in an appropriately unsettling way. One painting of Jonson looks as if all it would take is another beer to get him to pen another song. Pound's stare seems almost as pointed as his satire, though not as pointed as Dame Edith's features. Thanks to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an artist as well as a poet, we have portraits of his sister Christina as well as Swinburn and his own self-portraits. Early portraits of Wordsworth or Millay or Tennyson look almost unrelated to their portraits in later life, and some, such as Rupert Brooke, lived so briefly that their images have an almost otherworldly quality.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/29/secret-memoir-real-life-loves-war-poet-rupert-brooke
On 23 April a bundle of neglected love letters and a devastating, secret memoir, released by the British Library after almost a century, will open a window on to one of the enduring mysteries of 20th-century English literature: the life and loves of the first world war poet Rupert Brooke.
Throughout his short career, the precocious author of The Soldier was an elfin figure of fascination, once described by WB Yeats as “the handsomest young man in England”. In our own time, Brooke has become the haunting symbol of a doomed generation, flitting across the pages of novels by Alan Hollinghurst and AS Byatt like a volatile and irreverent Peter Pan. Androgynous in fact and fiction, his true character has been tantalisingly elusive.
Not any more. The Observer has had exclusive access to a cache of letters and photographs that establishes the truth about Brooke. It is now clear that, in the aftermath of Oscar Wilde’s trial and for reasons that he never understood himself, Brooke was unable to acknowledge his sexual nature. The British Library’s publication of the embargoed Phyllis Gardner memoir transforms an Edwardian hero into a neurasthenic, prewar nightmare.
The Brooke myth begins with his premature death – coincidentally, on Shakespeare’s birthday in April 1915. When the 27-year-old author of “If I should die, think only this of me” eerily fulfilled his own epitaph and succumbed to septicaemia as he waited to join the invasion of the Dardanelles, the poet was made a Byronic figure of enchantment. He became the golden boy of Edwardian England whose life had been cut short “at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime”, wrote Winston Churchill in the first obituary.
A media frenzy ensued. “Not since Sir Philip Sydney’s heroic death,” exclaimed fellow-poet Lascelles Abercrombie, “have we lost such a gallant and joyous type of the poet soldier”. The great classical scholar Gilbert Murray added the apt prediction that Brooke would “live in fame as an almost mythical figure”.
His circle recognised the propaganda element. One friend feared Brooke’s “memory being brought to the poster-grade”. Virginia Woolf confided to her diary that she “couldn’t say much about Rupert, save that he was jealous, moody, ill-balanced”. He was, she added later, potentially a prime minister, “a very powerful, ambitious man, but not a poet”.
Others knew a spoilt, intense and disturbed young man who once confessed that “my subconscious is angry with every dreary young woman I meet, if she doesn’t fall in love with me: and my consciousness is furious with her if she does”. On top of his repressed sexual identity, there was Brooke’s near-reactionary conservatism. He was enraged by the suffragette movement and troubled by the idea of women having equal rights. None of this seems to have discouraged platoons of young women (and men) from falling for his boyish ebullience, animal magnetism and romantic good looks, drawn to a radiance that scorched those who flew too close.
Phyllis Gardner, a Slade school art student and suffragette with flaming red hair, fell in love with Brooke while sitting opposite him on the Great Northern train to Cambridge. She was 22; he was 25. Neither spoke. “I drew him steadily all the way to Cambridge,” wrote Gardner, “and the more I drew him the better I liked him.”
Her mother, Mary Gardner, a don’s wife, was a would-be poet who longed to be part of the literary world and encouraged her love-struck daughter. The Gardner family was hooked. Rupert, wrote Phyllis, was “the Alpha and Omega of my life”. On his side, Brooke was deeply conflicted.
However, in the hot summer of 1912 an initially chaste and awkward relationship, punctuated with readings of Housman poems and stilted conversations about Eros, swiftly took wing. Miss Gardner, unchaperoned, was soon visiting the poet at home in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and getting the famous Brooke treatment: invitations to go skinny-dipping under the moonlight in Byron’s Pool. The affair was naive and ecstatic.
Cavorting in Grantchester’s meadows, Brooke told the naked Gardner: “You’ve rather a beautiful body.”
Gardner, letting her hair down, offered to dry him with her tresses, with “why shouldn’t we be primitive, now?” Her desires were obvious, but his were tormented. In this folie à deux, she was entranced by his rhetorical ardour. “I could not believe that real life could be like this,” she wrote later.
After the repressions of the Victorian century, Edwardian England seethed with romantic and inarticulate feelings. The striking feature of the Brooke-Gardner correspondence is how much, by modern standards, remains unexplored. When almost nothing has been exchanged, Gardner writes that “it seems good to have got so swiftly and well down to things that matter”. Brooke, more deeply confused than ever, composed a poem, Beauty on Beauty, celebrating their moonlit frolics, but when he was alone with Gardner, his compliments were at best ambiguous. “You’ve got nice legs,” she reports him saying, “just like a rather pretty boy.”
Gardner’s passion for Brooke became a frustrated, post-adolescent quest for sexual experience in which she describes “wandering hand-in-hand like children”. In bed, her lover was tactful, chivalrous – and boring. “I wouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t like,” he told her.
As the strain of this unconsummated relationship told on both parties, Brooke’s true feelings began to surface. “All women are beasts,” he declared. “And they want a vote.” In the crisis that followed this exchange, Brooke finally managed to express a kind of sexual credo. “There are two ways of loving,” he told Gardner, “the normal and the wandering. The normal is to love and marry one person, the wandering is to take what one wants where one finds it, to be friends here, lovers there, married there, to spend a day with one, a week with others ...”
She replied: “This is my share of hell, even as the beginning was of heaven.”
Finally, Victorian convention trumped Edwardian indiscretion: her mother intervened to break off relations. In a neurotic fever, Brooke took off for Tahiti and the South Seas. He never saw Gardner again, though they corresponded fitfully. Within two years he was dead. She completed an anguished memoir in 1918 and died from breast cancer in 1939, when her family deposited her secrets with the British Museum.
The Second I Saw You: The True Love Story of Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner (British Library, £16.99)
https://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/gaybears/brooke/
The most famous of the British “war poets” rising to prominence during the First World War, Rupert Brooke combined literary talent with legendary good looks. That he died as a young soldier at the height of his beauty and popularity assured his fame in a way that his poetry alone could not. By the time he was graduated from Cambridge he had earned the sobriquet of “the Handsomest Man in England”, and it is difficult now to disentangle his literary merit from his dazzling celebrity.
While an undergraduate he attracted the amorous attentions of both men and women, but it was not until 1909, at the age of twenty-two, that he had his first sexual encounter. It was with a man. He described his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith (a former fellow student at Rugby) in some detail. (“My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to and fro over each other, in the excitement.”)
James Strachey, brother of Lytton Strachey of the Bloomsbury Group, fell deeply in love with Brooke, and while the poet did not return the intensity of feeling, he did hold Strachey in high regard. The two men exchanged correspondence for the last decade of Brooke’s life. While on a trip to America in 1913, Brooke made a brief visit to Berkeley, staying at the Carleton Hotel on the corner of Telegraph and Durant. He wrote to Strachey from the hotel:
2 October 1913
Hotel Carlton
Berkeley, CaliforniaMy dear James,
Thank you for your birthday letter: my only one. It blew in sometime in the middle of September — at Nanaimo [British Columbia], was it? or way back at Field? I forget.I hope you got my enclosures from T’ronto. They weren’t meant to distress you. Only to show you how frightfully life’s everywhere the same.
I hope you’re fairly well, fairly good, & fairly happy.
Rupert
Brooke had been staying in San Francisco for a few days. He makes no mention of what he was doing in Berkeley, but it is possible that he made the ferry trip over from the City in order to witness an annual all-male Cal tradition being re-enacted that very evening: the Pajamarino. For many years, on one night in October male undergraduates gathered for an evening of skits and stunts wearing only their pajamas. The tradition is believed to have originated in a male nightgown parade first held in October of 1901.
Read More About It
- Rupert Brooke. Friends and Apostles: the Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 / edited by Keith Hale (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998)
- Paul Delany. The Neo-pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth (New York : The Free Press, 1987)
- “Rupert Brooke,” in Gay & Lesbian Literature (Detroit, MI : St. James, 1994-1998)
The Beginning
The Gay Love Letters of Rupert Brooke
Excerpts from My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries (1998), Edited by Rictor Norton
Henry James met Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) in Cambridge in 1909, when Brooke acknowledged "I pulled my fresh, boyish stunt" and bewitched the novelist. James's last published writing, in response to Brooke's death in the Great War, and shortly before his own, celebrated Brooke's "wondrous, heroic legend." Brooke's war poems were already famous even before he died at Skyros in April 1915, of an infection rather than in battle. Winston Churchill consolidated the icon: "Joyous, fearless, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered." His war poetry was popularized precisely because its rosy images denied the realities of war, and ironically drew many young men to join up and go to their own deaths. He was widely celebrated as a golden-haired Apollo – his photograph at age twenty-five is the first modern icon of beauty – and was desired by everyone, male and female, who came within the Bloomsbury magic circle. The following letter describes the weekend of October 29, 1909 when he decided to lose his virginity, with a friend of the same age from Rugby school, Denham Russell-Smith (the more attractive younger brother of his closer friend Hugh Denham-Smith). But Brooke, as he later described himself, was one-half outright heterosexual, one-quarter outright homosexual and one-quarter sentimental homosexual (i.e. his idealized homoerotic longing for young men is a longing for his own youth at public school). In the same year that he bedded Russell-Smith, he was determined to marry Noel Oliver, who resisted his advances. By 1911 he was in a passionate relationship with Ka Cox, who herself was having an affair with Henry Lamb, the bisexual "wife" of Lytton Strachey, and he also had a brief fling with Arthur Hobhouse, former boyfriend of both Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. The first half of his Poems published in 1911, are implicitly homosexual and explicitly neo-pagan. The Bloomsberries prided themselves on their freedom from conventions, but Brooke felt trapped by the double standards of society, and could not live out his hidden desires without guilt. Sexual confusion drove him to a nervous breakdown in 1912 and six weeks of psychiatric care. It was during his convalescence that he wrote this letter to James Strachey, Lytton's brother, also gay, as a therapeutic exorcism of his sexual identity. He decided, in effect, that he was a golden boy with a rotten core, and he came to reject Bloomsbury out of shame, and to seek purification through death in war. He was commissioned in August 1914, and his "1914" sonnet sequence shows a desire for death as the only resolution to his inner conflict.
RUPERT BROOKE TO JAMES STRACHEY
10 July 1912
How things shelve back! History takes you to January 1912 – Archaeology to the end of 1910 – Anthropology to, perhaps, the autumn of 1909. –
The autumn of 1909! We had hugged & kissed & strained, Denham and I, on and off for years – ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two small dorms. An abortive affair, as I told you. But in the summer holidays of 1906 and 1907 he had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there. – He had vaguely hoped, I fancy, – – – But I lay always thinking Charlie [Lascelles].
Denham was though, to my taste, attractive. So honestly and friendlily lascivious. Charm, not beauty, was his forte. He was not unlike Ka [Ka Cox, with whom Brooke had an affair], in the allurement of vitality and of physical magic – oh, but Ka has beauty too. – He was lustful, immoral, affectionate, and delightful. As romance faded in me, I began, all unacknowledgedly, to cherish a hope – – – But I was never in the slightest degree in love with him.
In the early autumn of 1909, then, I was glad to get him to come and stay with me, at the Orchard. I came back late that Saturday night. Nothing was formulated in my mind. I found him asleep in front of the fire, at 1.45. I took him up to his bed, – he was very like a child when he was sleepy – and lay down on it. We hugged, and my fingers wandered a little. His skin was always very smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my room: and lay in bed thinking – my head full of tiredness and my mouth of the taste of tea and whales, as usual. I decided, almost quite consciously, I would put the thing through the next night. You see, I didn't at all know how he would take it. But I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like, and to do away with the shame (as I thought it was) of being a virgin. At length, I thought, I shall know something of all that James and Harry] Norton and Maynard [Keynes] and Lytton [Strachey] know and hold over me.
Of course, I said nothing.
Next evening, we talked long in front of the sitting room fire. My head was on his knees, after a bit. We discussed sodomy. He said he, finally, thought it was wrong . . . We got undressed there, as it was warm. Flesh is exciting, in firelight. You must remember that openly we were nothing to each other – less even than in 1906. About what one is with Bunny (who so resembles Denham). Oh, quite distant!
Again we went up to his room. He got into bed. I sat on it and talked. Then I lay on it. Then we put the light out and talked in the dark. I complained of the cold: and so got under the eiderdown. My brain was, I remember, almost all through, absolutely calm and indifferent, observing progress, and mapping out the next step. Of course, I planned the general scheme beforehand.
I was still cold. He wasn't. "Of course not, you're in bed!" "Well then, you get right in, too." – I made him ask me – oh! without difficulty! I got right in. Our arms were round each other. "An adventure!" I kept thinking: and was horribly detached.
We stirred and pressed. The tides seemed to wax. At the right moment I, as planned, said "come into my room, it's better there . . ." I suppose he knew what I meant. Anyhow he followed me. In the large bed it was cold; we clung together. Intentions became plain; but still nothing was said. I broke away a second, as the dance began, to slip my pyjamas. His was the woman's part throughout. I had to make him take his off – do it for him. Then it was purely body to body – my first, you know! I was still a little frightened of his, at any sudden step, bolting; and he, I suppose, was shy. We kissed very little, as far as I can remember, face to face. And I only rarely handled his penis. Mine he touched once with his fingers; and that made me shiver so much that I think he was frightened. But with alternate stirrings, and still pressures, we mounted. My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of the sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to and fro over each other, in the excitement. Quite calm things, I remember, were passing through my brain. "The Elizabethan joke `The Dance of the Sheets' has, then, something in it." "I hope his erection is all right" – and so on. I thought of him entirely in the third person. At length the waves grew more terrific; my control of the situation was over; I treated him with the utmost violence, to which he more quietly, but incessantly, responded. Half under him and half over, I came off. I think he came off at the same time, but of that I have never been sure. A silent moment: and then he slipped away to his room, carrying his pyjamas. We wished each other "Good-night." It was between 4 and 5 in the morning. I lit a candle after he had gone. There was a dreadful mess on the bed. I wiped it clear as I could, and left the place exposed in the air, to dry. I sat on the lower part of the bed, a blanket round me, and stared at the wall, and thought. I thought of innumerable things, that this was all; that the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge seemed a very tiny affair, after all; that I hoped Denham, for whom I felt great tenderness, was sleeping. My thoughts went backward and forward. I unexcitedly reviewed my whole life, and indeed the whole universe. I was tired, and rather pleased with myself, and a little bleak. About six it was grayly daylight; I blew the candle out and slept till 8. At 8 Denham had to bicycle in to breakfast [in Cambridge] with Mr Benians [his tutor], before catching his train. I bicycled with him, and turned off at the corner of –, is it Grange Road? –. We said scarcely anything to each other. I felt sad at the thought he was perhaps hurt and angry, and wouldn't ever want to see me again. – He did, of course, and was exactly as ever. Only we never referred to it. But that night I looked with some awe at the room – fifty yards away to the West from the bed I'm writing in – in which I Began; in which I "copulated with" Denham; and I felt a curious private tie with Denham himself. So you'll understand it was –p not with a shock, for I am far too dead for that, but with a sort of dreary wonder and dizzy discomfort – that I heard Mr Benians inform me, after we'd greeted, that Denham died at one o'clock on Wednesday morning, – just twenty-four hours ago now.
SOURCE: Paul Delany, The Neo-pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (London: Macmillan, 1987).
https://www.canadiangay.org/GHist/Aug/03.html
1887 – Rupert Brooke was an English poet (d.1915), known for his idealistic War Sonnets written during WWI (especially The Soldier), as well as for his poetry written outside of war, especially The Old Vicarage, Grantchester and The Great Lover. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which prompted W.B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England".
Brooke fell heavily in love several times with both men and women, although his bisexuality was edited out of his life by his first literary executor. Many more people were in love with him
As a war poet came Brooke to public attention when The Times Literary Supplement quoted two of his five sonnets (IV: The Dead and V: The Soldier) in full on 11 March 1915 and subsequently his sonnet V: The Soldier was read from the pulpit of St.Paul's on Easter Sunday. Brooke's most famous collection of poetry containing all five sonnets, 1914 & Other Poems, was first published in May 1915, and in testament to his popularity ran through 11 further impressions that year, and by June 1918 had reached its 24th impression; a process undoubtedly fuelled through posthumous interest and the continuing war against Germany.
When he died at the age of twenty-seven while on his way to fight at Gallipoli, he became inextricably linked in the public mind with his sonnets glorifying war, and a national hero was born—one bearing little resemblance to the actual man. To maintain the patriotic legend, Brooke's first literary executor, Geoffrey Keynes, spent a lifetime trying to downplay Brooke's attraction to men. However, until December 1907, when Brooke was twenty years old, he never—in his personal relationships or in his letters—exhibited any attraction to the opposite sex.
When Keynes edited a collection of Brooke's letters, even he felt compelled to allow into print some of them from Brooke's schoolboy days describing crushes on other boys—two in particular—although their names (Charles Lascelles and Michael Sadleir) were deleted by Keynes. Brooke's love for these two boys was deeply felt (particularly in the case of Lascelles), but it was not until the age of twenty-two that he engaged in sex with another man, Denham Russell Smith, the younger brother of a friend. In July 1912, a few days following Smith's death from an infection, Brooke described his seduction of Smith in surprising detail in a letter to James Strachey. It is the only account that Brooke ever wrote detailing his own sex act with another person, although he did acknowledge in another letter to Strachey that he had consummated an affair with their mutual friend Katherine Cox.
There is considerable evidence in Brooke's writing of his attraction to men aside from his declarations of affection for Lascelles and Sadleir and his seduction of Denham Russell Smith. He once, for example, referred to his friend Jacques Raverat as one of the few men in England with whom he had never been in love. In another instance, as he was training for war Brooke wrote in a letter, "Occasionally I'm faintly shaken by a suspicion that I might find incredible beauty in the washing place, with rows of naked, superb men, bathing in a September sun."
Brooke was apparently bisexual, however, rather than homosexual, for his torturous relationships with women have been well documented. In one of his personal notebooks he shows a strong identification with Shakespeare because of the latter's love of both sexes: "The truth is that some great men are sodomites and womanizers."
Throughout his life, Brooke had close friends who were homosexual, and usually in love with him. As a schoolboy at Rugby, he was befriended by the aesthetic poet John Lucas-Lucas. At Cambridge, his best friend was James Strachey, who worshiped him. His best friend at the end of his life was Edward Marsh, who was as much in love with him as Strachey had been.
After the war, Brooke's friends complained that the heroic myth of Brooke's patriotic self-sacrifice was deliberately exaggerated to encourage more young men to enlist. Generations of schoolchildren were taught the opening lines of his most famous poem The Soldier:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
Brooke's death was caused not by the bullet or bomb, but from septic pneumonia caused by an infected mosquito bite . Due to the hurry to get to Gallipoli, he was buried and remains on the Greek island of Skyros - perfectly encapsulating the sentiment of his famous poem.
https://www.vqronline.org/brooke-and-strachey-such-dear-friends
This book of letters records a moving love story. Rupert Brooke and James Strachey first met as boys of ten at Hillbrow School. Brooke was the son of a housemaster at Rugby, while Strachey was a member of one of England’s most illustrious literary families. Strachey’s older brother Lytton became a leading figure in the Bloomsbury group. Both Brooke, who attended King’s College, and Strachey, a member of Trinity College, were elected to Cambridge’s famous society called the “Apostles.” I can still remember my shock at discovering that the Apostles, described so eloquently in moral and intellectual terms in one of the volumes of Leonard Woolf’ s autobiography, were programmatically homosexual. Brooke and Strachey were 18-years-old when they renewed their acquaintance at Cambridge, which marks the beginning of this collection of letters. Shortly after Strachey’s death in 1967 his wife Alix sold the correspondence to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
Brooke, who died of blood poisoning in 1915 on his way to fight for the British at Gallipoli, is known mainly for his patriotic poetry. I would have called him a minor poet except for a talk Brooke gave in 1906: “People who speak disparagingly of minor poetry are either stockbrokers and lawyers and rich practical people who don’t understand, or reviewers in the Press, who are always young men fresh from a university with souls so stuffed with intellectual pride that they might as lightly speak of minor roses or minor sunsets.” My central interest in the Brooke-Strachey letters was elicited by Strachey’s having become Freud’s main translator into English; Freud had picked him as one of his translators during the time when Freud was analyzing both James and Alix in Vienna following their marriage in 1920.(One reliable-sounding story I heard dated the occasion for the marriage by the way it eased the Stracheys getting a visa to Austria after World War I.) Following World War II, at a time when a committee might have been struck in London to undertake translating The Standard Edition of Freud’s works, Anna Freud and others were relieved when Strachey volunteered to take charge of the whole project himself. No one has so far explained how or even whether he was paid, but that set of translations remains Strachey’s real claim to fame. The editorial apparatus he constructed has been taken over by the Germans for their own edition. In France, despite more interest in Paris about Freud than almost any place else in the world, a committee is still in the beginning stages of bringing out its edition of Freud’s writings.
We have known for some time that Strachey could be an unusually pithy writer, although of course his brother Lytton is the one who wrote the justifiably famous books. When James saw the results of the biography of Lytton that James had authorized Michael Holroyd to undertake, James was unhappy, and Holroyd made the brilliant decision to publish James’s acid-sounding comments as footnotes on the pages of the text. It should not detract from all that Holroyd succeeded in accomplishing if I say that James’s testy objections helped liven up the text. Then a volume of the letters exchanged between James and Alix, while they were temporarily separated during 1924—25 when Alix went for a second analysis in Berlin, came out as The Bloomsbury Freud in 1985.
Although James and Alix were obviously deeply attached to one another, there was plenty of suspicion about the extent of their heterosexuality. Alix Strachey put some restrictions on the early appearance of these letters, and Brooke’s literary trustee Geofrey Keynes (John Maynard’s brother) not only dragged his heels about the release of these letters to Strachey but tried to deny the homosexuality of Brooke.
Although I decided to read this book primarily for what light it shed on James Strachey, nothing prepared me for the immensely touching human encounter to be found in Friends and Apostles. Until about 1912 the letters do make for some difficult going. At least I found all the studied archness on the part of both Brooke and Strachey difficult to take. Of course they had some fascinating friends and acquaintances. Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest of them, wrote about the Strachey family in her diary that she found “an air, a vapour, an indescribable taste of dust in the throat, something tickling & irritating as well as tingling & stimulating.” But all the cultivated cleverness, especially on James Strachey’s part, seemed to me off-putting. He was so cerebral about sex that it is hard to imagine that he could have enjoyed it much; he kept using the word “copulating” as if he were writing about another species, and I can almost see the wry smirk on his face. These letters give a picture, I hope, not of homosexual attachments so much as those specific to the British upper classes at the turn of the 20th century. I could not help being reminded of the way that D.H. Lawrence had loathed the whole Bloomsbury set.
After Brooke has some sort of nervous breakdown in 1912, the letters change. For years Strachey had been the adoring pursuer, and Brooke standoffish. But with Brooke’s collapse his letters grow almost out of control in length, and Brooke comes to doubt his own sanity. In a note to Virginia Stephen (not yet married to Leonard Woolf) Brooke wrote about how he hated “the healthy unimaginative hard shelled dilettanti” like James. Strachey stuck by Brooke, and financed at least one trip to the continent. Brooke wrote a letter to Strachey concerned with an acquaintance of theirs (Denham Russell-Smith) who had just died, and whom Brooke had seduced in 1909; Brooke provides all the details of the night’s encounter in which he lost his virginity, which reminds us just how inexperienced these people were. James, in the midst of Brooke’s collapse, was still trying to encourage Brooke’s writing talent; but also Strachey revealed something of his own sort of thinking when he wrote to congratulate Brooke on the letter: “It seemed to give the whole of that sort of copulation so completely. They say there’s another sort, that I know nothing about, —with people one’s in love with. Is that really quite different? I’ve always thought it must be . . . . Well, one way or another you’ve immortalized Denham.” For some reason the editor, Keith Hale, who has done an extraordinary amount of conscientious work identifying the people in Friends and Apostles and providing an editorial apparatus that would have pleased Strachey’s own exacting standards, finds this letter about Denham “in many ways the most fascinating . . .written by Brooke.”
Yet within weeks of Strachey’s own response to this letter Brooke is acknowledging his own “dreary flippancy” toward Strachey. Two days later Brooke lowers the boom on Strachey. “Listen. Men & women neither “copulate” nor want to “copulate”: men have women: women are had by men. Listen. There is between men & women, sometimes, a thing called love: unknown to you. It has its laws & demands. It can be defiled: poisoned: & killed. . . . All these sentences—there’s the point—are entirely meaningless to you. I might as well write in Assyrian. You’d just twitter on . . . .” The next day Brooke continues: “I’ve changed, not you. I suppose if I got better; or if you grew up; we could manage it again.”
After that Hale tells us that “Brooke all but disappeared from Strachey’s life . . . .” Brooke started to refer to the Stracheys “in the plural, as a disease.” To a friend Brooke acknowledged that James was “less dirty” than Lytton, and “so defenceless that it is no sport kicking him.” To Brooke James did not “understand about the only important things.” “He’s far too selfish & minor to be hurt ever. He’s precisely as he always was: with his brilliant sense of humour, & his liking for contemptuous criticism; which keeps him happy.” Brooke, as one of their friends commented, “yearned for marriage but not a wife.” Brooke was romantically interested in several women, one of whom would later have a long extra-marital liasion with Strachey. Brooke wrote her: “Really the unrelieved sordidness of that man’s career—loving me for nine years and you for the rest of his life! I sometimes think God has been a little too hard on him, dreadful as he is.” Yet Brooke could also write of Strachey: “he’s a very fine person extraordinarily honest and trustworthy, very intelligent, and meaning well (which is important).”
In 1913 Brooke wrote James that he had “no sense of what are to me the most important things in the world. Perhaps one day you’ll grow up; or I shall have got down to your level. No doubt, both motions are in process. But I wish you well.” Brooke had been responding to a note of James’s in which he had written “I hated you, dear, a good deal a few months ago. . . . But that’s gone now, I think, I love you (and don’t care if you laugh at me for saying so) and I believe I’ve loved you all the time.” Brooke found this note “dreadful,” and Strachey did mind Brooke’s sharp response. Strachey defended himself: “It seems rather a pity that your sorrows should have turned you into prig. And aren’t you a bit uncharitable too? But I suppose that usually goes with self-righteousness.” The mood, Strachey serpentinely wrote, of Brooke’s last letter made Strachey “foam a good deal. But like all the troubles of babyhood, ça passe, ça passe. I feel, and always felt, infinitely benevolent towards the mysterious worries of these perplexed grown ups at whose feet I crawl—I’m placid even when they tread on my fingers. My good Rupert, I’ve got one great advantage over you. You can’t prevent my being fonder of you than of—well, of almost anyone else in the world.”
Brooke and Strachey stayed in touch until Brooke’s death in 1915. Brooke enlisted in the war effort, while Strachey stayed a pacifist. In one of his war sonnets Brooke was probably referring to Lytton Strachey among the “half-men.” W.B. Yeats had considered Brooke “the handsomest man in England,” and thanks to Brooke’s poetry he became at his death a national hero. Henry James, on hearing of Brooke’s death, was reported to have wept. Strachey had been fired from his position at the Spectator because of his position on the war. After James and Alix Strachey married, they honeymooned in Vienna. Hale suggests that “it is likely that Strachey’s desire to understand both his own sexuality and Brooke’s strange behavior partially accounts for his being drawn to Freud.” Strachey’s last quoted comments on Brooke came in someone else’s 1964 review of a Brooke biography: “Rupert wasn’t as nice as people now imagine; but he was a great deal cleverer.” (But Brooke had been unable to follow a 1909 reference of James’s to Middlemarch, and thought that the world of Chekhov was one of “tired children.”)
Brooke had actively sought the oblivion of death in the great campaign of World War I; Strachey had the common sense, however unrequited his adoration of Brooke, to be a survivor. Strachey did not set out, like Brooke, to destroy his closest friendships. One wonders whether the poetic intensity of Brooke was not too much for the commonplace world to endure. Strachey never did, in Brooke’s terms grow up, but he lived to have the last word.(Lytton Strachey had written to Virginia Woolf about James that he was “either incredibly young or inconceivably old.” One of my friends once commented about James that in his old age he had “grown into” himself.) The publication of the letters in Friends and Apostles may lead us to wonder again about the nature of love, and how it struggles to fulfill itself. Especially because of the exchanges between Brooke and Strachey dating from 1912—13, Friends and Apostles becomes a poignant record of the tragedy of unfulfillable human affection. Intellectual historians do not usually come across in non-fiction the makings of poetry and fiction. I cannot speak for experts on modern British literature or Brooke, but I am certain that students of the history of psychoanalysis will now have a fresh picture of James Strachey.
https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/04/23/rupert-brooke-bisexual-first-world-war-poet-winston-churchill-bloomsbury-group-wb-yeats-death/
It is 105 years today since Rupert Brooke, the bisexual poet who was described by WB Yeats as “the handsomest young man in England”, died.
Today, Brooke is remembered as one of a group of war poets who chronicled the First World War in Britain. While poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are remembered for their unflinchingly grim portrayal of life on the front line, Brooke is best remembered for his idealistic war sonnets such as The Soldier.
Brooke was already a revered poet by the time he died at just 27-years-old in 1915 – two of his war poems were published by The Times Literary Supplement that same year – but he also had a fascinating personal life, in which he struggled to understand his own sexuality.
After studying at the University of Cambridge, Brooke became involved with the legendary Bloomsbury Group, which included a number of historic gay writers such as EM Forster, Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes. Virginia Woolf, who was bisexual, was one of the group’s most influential members.
Rupert Brooke had sexual relationships with both men and women, but he struggled to accept that he was bisexual.
Surviving letters suggest that Rupert Brooke was attracted to men and women, and had sex with both during his lifetime. However, they also show that he struggled enormously to understand and accept his bisexuality.
In 1912, Brooke suffered an emotional crisis as he became increasingly confused and dismayed by his attraction to men and women. This crisis brought about an end to his relationship with Katherine Laird Cox. While he had a number of other romantic relationships with women, he was never able to reconcile himself with his bisexuality.
Writing in Taking It Like a Man, Adrian Caeser says Brooke considered “the bisexual position to be impossible” and believed his sexuality would prevent him from loving anyone wholeheartedly.
Brooke was “deeply uncertain as to his sexual identity, but seems to have wished to choose either homosexuality or heterosexuality”, Caesar writes.
“The bisexual option seems either not to have been available to him, or if it was, it does not seem to have impinged upon Brooke’s consciousness.”
Some of Brooke’s confusion came from the fact that he operated in social circles that were gay or straight – but he knew nobody else who inhabited an in-between space as he did.
His struggle was exacerbated by living in a society in which harsh, puritanical views around sexuality were common. People in early 20th century Britain were expected to adhere to strict social expectations around sexuality and sexual expression. Bisexuality was, quite simply, invisible.
The bisexual option seems either not to have been available to him, or if it was, it does not seem to have impinged upon Brooke’s consciousness.
“In choosing either one or the other he was denying himself, but the pressure was clearly very great to make this choice,” Caesar wrote.
In 1914, the First World War broke out, and Brooke soon enlisted, paving the way for him to become a war poet. Tragically, Brooke did not live long. He contracted sepsis from a mosquito bite while sailing with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February 1915. On April 23, he died aboard a French hospital ship.
One month later, his most famous poetry collection 1914 and Other Poems was published, and went on to become a bestseller in Britain.
Winston Churchill described him as ‘joyous, fearless, versatile’ in an obituary.
Brooke was held in such high esteem that Winston Churchill wrote an obituary for him in The Times newspaper. Churchill said Brooke’s life had “closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime”.
“A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watch them so intently from afar.
He continued: “The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.”
“Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, ruled by high undoubting purpose, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in the days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered,” he concluded.
105 years after his death, Brooke is still held in high esteem by literary critics – and his sexuality has remained a talking point for much of that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Strachey
Early life[edit]
He was a son of Lt-Gen Sir Richard Strachey and Lady (Jane) Strachey, called the enfant miracle as his father was 70 and his mother 47. Some of his nieces and nephews, who were considerably older than James, called him Jembeau or Uncle Baby. His parents had thirteen children, of whom ten lived to adulthood.
He was educated at Hillbrow preparatory school in Rugby and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took over the rooms used by his older brother Lytton Strachey, and was known as "the Little Strachey"; Lytton was now "the Great Strachey". At Cambridge, Strachey fell deeply in love with the poet Rupert Brooke, who answered his correspondence but did not return his affections. He was himself pursued by mountaineer George Mallory, by Harry Norton and by economist John Maynard Keynes, with whom he also had an affair. His love of Brooke was a constant, however, until the latter's death in 1915, which left Strachey "shattered".
On the imposition of military conscription in 1916, during World War I, Strachey became a conscientious objector.
Strachey was assistant editor of The Spectator, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group or "Bloomsberries" when he became familiar with Alix Sargant Florence, though they first met in 1910. They moved in together in 1919 and married in 1920.
Soon afterwards they moved to Vienna, where Strachey began a psychoanalysis with Freud, of whom he was a great admirer. He would claim to Lytton that his analysis "provided 'a complete undercurrent for life' ".[2] Freud asked the couple to translate some of his works into English, and this became their lives' work: they became “my excellent English translators, Mr and Mrs James Strachey”.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsbury_Group
The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century,[1] including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts."[2] Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.[3]
Origins[edit]
All male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant, were educated at Cambridge (either at Trinity or King's College). Most of them, except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers, were members of "the exclusive Cambridge society, the 'Apostles'".[4][5] At Trinity in 1899 Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen, and it was through Thoby and Adrian Stephen's sisters Vanessa and Virginia that the men met the women of Bloomsbury when they came down to London.[4][5]
In 1905 Vanessa began the "Friday Club" and Thoby ran "Thursday Evenings", which became the basis for the Bloomsbury Group,[6] which to some was really "Cambridge in London".[4] Thoby's premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together[5] and they became what is now known as the "Old Bloomsbury" group who met in earnest beginning in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s the group shifted when the original members died and the next generation had reached adulthood.[7]
The Bloomsbury Group, mostly from upper middle-class professional families, formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back to the Clapham Sect".[4] It was an informal network[8][9] of an influential group of artists, art critics, writers and an economist, many of whom lived in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury.[10] They were "spiritually" similar to the Clapham group who supported its members' careers: "The Bloomsberries promoted one another's work and careers just as the original Claphamites did, as well as the intervening generations of their grandparents and parents."[11]
A historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all pre-dated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers.[12]
[edit]
The lives and works of the group members show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives together, reflecting in large part the influence of G. E. Moore: "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge'".[4]
Philosophy and ethics[edit]
Through the Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Distinguishing between ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) so important for the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value. As with the distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and monogamy (a behavior, i.e. instrumental), Moore's differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without reference to, the consequences of their actions. For Moore, intrinsic value depended on an indeterminable intuition of good and a concept of complex states of mind whose worth as a whole was not proportionate to the sum of its parts. For both Moore and Bloomsbury, the greatest ethic goods were "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation: "art for art's sake".[20]
Rejection of bourgeois habits[edit]
Bloomsbury reacted against current social rituals, "the bourgeois habits ... the conventions of Victorian life"[21] with their emphasis on public achievement, in favour of a more informal and private focus on personal relationships and individual pleasure. E. M. Forster for example approved of "the decay of smartness and fashion as factors, and the growth of the idea of enjoyment",[22] and asserted that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country".[23]
The Group "believed in pleasure ... They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometric figures, well then, one accepted that too".[24] Yet at the same time, they shared a sophisticated, civilized, and highly articulated ideal of pleasure. As Virginia Woolf put it, their "triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years".[25]
Politics[edit]
Politically, Bloomsbury held mainly left-liberal stances (opposed to militarism, for example); but its "clubs and meetings were not activist, like the political organisations to which many of Bloomsbury's members also belonged", and they would be criticised for that by their 1930s successors, who by contrast were "heavily touched by the politics which Bloomsbury had rejected".[26]
The campaign for women's suffrage added to the controversial nature of Bloomsbury, as Virginia Woolf represented the group in the fictional The Years and Night and Day works about the suffrage movement.[27]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_(novel)
Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays through university and beyond. It was written in 1913–1914 and revised in 1932 as well as 1952–1960 (each version differs from one another in the novel's last part).[1][2] Forster was an admirer of the poet, philosopher, socialist, and early gay rights activist Edward Carpenter and, following a visit to Carpenter's home at Millthorpe, Derbyshire in 1913, was inspired to write Maurice. The cross-class relationship between Carpenter and his working-class partner, George Merrill, presented a real-life model for that of Maurice and Alec Scudder.[3][4]
Although Forster showed different versions of the novel to a select few of his trusted friends (among them Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, Edward Carpenter, Christopher Isherwood, Xiao Qian and Forrest Reid) throughout the decades,[5][6] it was published only posthumously, in 1971. Forster did not seek to publish it during his lifetime, believing it to have been unpublishable during that period owing to public and legal attitudes to same-sex love. A note found on the manuscript read: "Publishable, but worth it?" Forster was determined that his novel should have a happy ending, but also feared that this would make the book liable to prosecution while male homosexuality remained illegal in the UK.[7]
There has been speculation that Forster's unpublished manuscript may have been seen by D. H. Lawrence and influenced his 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which also involves a gamekeeper becoming the lover of a member of the upper classes.[8]
The novel has been adapted by James Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey as the 1987 Merchant Ivory Productions film Maurice, for the stage, and as a 2007 BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial by Philip Osment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_Strachey
Cambridge[edit]
Strachey was admitted as a Pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 30 September 1899.[12] He became an Exhibitioner in 1900 and a Scholar in 1902. He won the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse in 1902[13] and was given a B.A. degree after he had won a second class in the History Tripos in June 1903. He did not however take leave of Trinity, but remained until October 1905 to work on a thesis that he hoped would gain him a fellowship.[2] Strachey was often ill and had to leave Cambridge repeatedly to recover from the palpitations that affected him.[14]
Strachey's years at Cambridge were happy and productive. Among the freshers at Trinity there were three with whom Strachey soon became closely associated: Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner. With another undergraduate, A. J. Robertson, these students formed a group called the Midnight Society, which, in the opinion of Bell, was the source of the Bloomsbury Group.[15] Other close friends at Cambridge were Thoby Stephen and his sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen (later Bell and Woolf respectively).
Strachey also belonged to the Conversazione Society, the Cambridge Apostles to which Tennyson, Hallam, Maurice, and Sterling had once belonged. The Apostles formulated an elitist doctrine of "Higher Sodomy" which differentiated the homosexual acts of the intelligent from those of "ordinary" men.[16]: 20–23 In these years Strachey was highly prolific in writing verse, much of which has been preserved and some of which was published at the time. Strachey also became acquainted with other men who greatly influenced him, including G. Lowes Dickinson, John Maynard Keynes, Walter Lamb (brother of the painter Henry Lamb), George Mallory, Bertrand Russell[17] and G. E. Moore. Moore's philosophy, with its assumption that the summum bonum lies in achieving a high quality of humanity, in experiencing delectable states of mind and in intensifying experience by contemplating great works of art, was a particularly important influence.[2]
In the summer of 1903 Strachey applied for a position in the Education Department of the Civil Service. Even though the letters of recommendation written for him by those under whom he had studied showed that he was held in high esteem at Cambridge, he failed to get the appointment and decided to try for a fellowship at Trinity College.[2] From 1903 through 1905 he wrote a 400-page dissertation on Warren Hastings, the eighteenth-century Indian Imperialist, but the work failed to secure Strachey the fellowship and led to his return to London.[2]
Personal life and sexuality[edit]
Though Strachey spoke openly about his homosexuality with his Bloomsbury friends, and had relationships with a variety of men including Ralph Partridge, details of Strachey's sexuality were not widely known until the publication of a biography by Michael Holroyd in the late 1960s.[dubious ]
The painter Dora Carrington and Strachey had a lifelong, open, loving but platonic relationship. They eventually established a permanent home together at Ham Spray House, where Carrington would paint and Strachey would educate her in literature.[22] In 1921, Carrington agreed to marry Ralph Partridge, not for love but to secure a three-way relationship. Partridge eventually formed a relationship with Frances Marshall, another Bloomsbury member.[23] Shortly after Strachey died, Carrington took her own life. Partridge married Frances Marshall in 1933. Strachey was mainly interested sexually in Partridge, as well as in various other young men,[24] including a secret sadomasochistic relationship with Roger Senhouse (later the head of the publishing house Secker & Warburg).[25] Strachey's letters, edited by Paul Levy, were published in 2005.[26]
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