There is also a veritable fly-past of every Bloomsbury writer and intellectual one could think of but little about them
Posted in General on 05. Aug, 2010
There is also a veritable fly-past of every Bloomsbury writer and intellectual one could think of, but little about them that is memorable or significant.It is James Strachey who emerges as the true hero of this book. There is much talk of “sodomy”, much gossiping and giggling about who fancies whom, and there is the full text of the by now infamous letter (first referred to by Paul Delany, over a decade ago, in his excellent study of love and friendship in Brooke’s circle, The Neo-Pagans) in which Brooke titillates Strachey with a description of his seduction of an old Rugby flame, Denham Russell-Smith. And all for the fear that Rupert might be revealed as “queer”.So what, after all, does the Strachey correspondence reveal? Nothing, it must be said, that will surprise anyone acquainted with the salient facts of Brooke’s life. From Hale’s introduction it is clear that Geoffrey Keynes deserves posterity’s disapproval for the way in which he shamelessly bowdlerised Brooke’s letters in the collected edition of 1968, harassed biographers, and blocked publication of the Strachey letters, even after most individuals mentioned in them were dead.
Brooke’s mother, “the Ranee”, and a succession of memoirists, executors, and trustees – chiefly Eddie Marsh, Dudley Ward, and Geoffrey Keynes – were so intent on preserving the image of the “man in marble” that Brooke’s 1914 war sonnets had created, that they resisted with a tenacity that at times bordered on the hysterical, any attempt to dismantle the myth. Pleading with Brooke to continue writing to him, Strachey comments. “Are your letters perhaps generally dull for you because you’re dishonest in them?”As is often the case, the background to these letters is, if anything, more fascinating than the letters themselves. It was part of his appeal, and it was also, ultimately, to be his undoing.
As with those love letters, so with the letters from this tortured friendship. James Strachey, whose last recorded word on Brooke, after years of psychoanalytical work, was that Brooke wasn’t nearly as nice as people imagined, but a good deal cleverer, puts his finger on this aspect of his old friend’s character in a letter to him from 1909. Brooke – and this is perhaps at the root of his very peculiar kind of early stardom – was adept at refusing to reveal himself, at posing as one thing or the other, at presenting contradictory and diverse sides of his character to different friends. We are all practised at this sort of deception, but Brooke went to extraordinary lengths to achieve it. Certainly, after Brooke’s mother, Strachey received more letters from this most prolific of letter writers than anyone else in his circle.