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 Their letters sometimes discuss aspects of homosexuality, which kept them unpublished for many decades.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.


The New York Times Book Review, Perry Meisel
It will no longer be possible to speak of either one separately.


From Kirkus Reviews
An intimate correspondence whose references to friends and acquaintances reads like a sexually explicit Who's Who of Cambridge and Bloomsbury before WWI. Hale (English/Univ. of Guam) has undertaken the publication of Rupert Brooke's correspondence with his friend James Strachey in an effort to correct common misconceptions caused by the withholding of information about Brooke's personal lifeincluding and especially his homosexuality. In short, he aims to prove that ``Brooke the man was not the same as Brooke the legend.'' If, as some critics assert, Brooke represented a time and a generation of Englishmen before WWI, his wide-ranging letters provide a full cast of players and the topics that occupied them. Strachey, translator of Freud's work into English and younger brother of Lytton Strachey, knew Brooke from boyhood and later fell in love with the handsome, golden boy when the two met up at Cambridge. Both members of the exclusive Cambridge group, the Apostles, Brooke and Strachey wrote of their most intimate feelings, as well as their impressions of mutual friends. It was an illustrious group, with members such as Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, George Mallory, matched only in their position in British society and culture by the other subjects of these honest, cruel, and frequently funny exchanges: Bloomsbury friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell, author Henry James, and Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb. Hale deftly guides us through the correspondence from 1905 to Brooke's death on his way to Gallipoli. What begins as a youthful exchange between the seriously in-love Strachey and the teasing and distant Brooke gradually shifts its focus to Brooke the man and writer, as he continues to tease and torment his old friend with all manner of news about explicit sexual relations with both men and women and about his increasingly dismal view of life (and women). A lively introduction to Brooke the man and artist (Strachey, too) and the Edwardian culture from which they emerged. (24 illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Choice
These intimate, learned letters concern gossip, health matters, friends both male and female, social engagements, literary and theatrical interests, and, of course, their affection for each other. . . . Hale's chapter introductions and extraordinarily detailed footnotes provide an overview of the lives of both men.


Book Description
The correspondence between the English poet Rupert Brooke and his close friend James Strachey here appears in print for the first time. The letters reveal much about the lives and interests of these two gifted young men, the nature of their relationship, and the activities of many illustrious friends such as Lytton Strachey (James's brother), J.M. Keynes, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The correspondence between the poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) and his friend James Strachey, later the primary English translator of the works of Sigmund Freud, appears in print here for the first time. As well as their shared interest in politics, literature, art and theatre, the letters deal often and explicitly with the subject of homosexuality and with the sometimes scandalous activities of many of their close circle. Brooke and Strachey compare observations of fellow members of the exclusive Cambridge 'Apostles' (which included James' brother Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Bertrand Russell), of mutual 'Bloomsbury' friends (such as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and George Mallory) and of such fellow Fabian Socialists as Hugh Dalton and Beatrice Webb. The correspondence provides important new biographical, psychological and cultural insights into Rupert Brooke and his poetry, and reveals the complexities of the man behind the heroic legend that his early death inspired.

FROM THE CRITICS

Perry Meisel - New York Times Book Review

These are love letters as well as missives of two apostolic friends...and they flesh out, often in rough-and-tumble detail, what was regarded as a perfectly open way of life, even when both turned to the pursuit of women.

Virginia Quarterly Review

This book may lead us to wonder again about the nature of love, and how it struggles to fulfill itself.

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. (Nov.)

Perry Meisel

These are love letters as well as missives of two apostolic friends...and they flesh out, often in rough-and-tumble detail, what was regarded as a perfectly open way of life, even when both turned to the pursuit of women. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

An intimate correspondence whose references to friends and acquaintances reads like a sexually explicit Who's Who of Cambridge and Bloomsbury before WWI. Hale (English/Univ. of Guam) has undertaken the publication of Rupert Brooke's correspondence with his friend James Strachey in an effort to correct common misconceptions caused by the withholding of information about Brooke's personal life—including and especially his homosexuality. In short, he aims to prove that "Brooke the man was not the same as Brooke the legend." If, as some critics assert, Brooke represented a time and a generation of Englishmen before WWI, his wide-ranging letters provide a full cast of players and the topics that occupied them. Strachey, translator of Freud's work into English and younger brother of Lytton Strachey, knew Brooke from boyhood and later fell in love with the handsome, golden boy when the two met up at Cambridge. Both members of the exclusive Cambridge group, the Apostles, Brooke and Strachey wrote of their most intimate feelings, as well as their impressions of mutual friends. It was an illustrious group, with members such as Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, George Mallory, matched only in their position in British society and culture by the other subjects of these honest, cruel, and frequently funny exchanges: Bloomsbury friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell, author Henry James, and Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb. Hale deftly guides us through the correspondence from 1905 to Brooke's death on his way to Gallipoli. What begins as a youthful exchange between the seriously in-love Strachey and the teasing and distant Brooke gradually shifts its focus to Brooke the man andwriter, as he continues to tease and torment his old friend with all manner of news about explicit sexual relations with both men and women and about his increasingly dismal view of life (and women). A lively introduction to Brooke the man and artist (Strachey, too) and the Edwardian culture from which they emerged.