Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 (1998)

This does resoundingly what books like this should do best - provides a widescreen viewing into the background of a previously lesser-known relationship. I came to this not having read any of Brooke's letters, and knowing nothing of Strachey except his Freud-translation credentials. This book was the first to print a good number of letters, revealing the true extent of the homosexual underpinning of their friendship - which materials had been prohibited in the past due to the prejudices of the main players in the 'Brooke industry' and to the long lives of some surrounding people whose feelings had to be considered. The correspondence begins with the two of them at the end of their school lives and just about to embark upon the adventure of Cambridge. They are quickly established as exemplars of Edwardian decadence, both in its male-fascinated and its intellectual determinors. They were not only a tight-knit small group in themselves, but had in their enemies and rivals similarly-nuanced individuals. Brooke came from a pretty well-connected upper middle class background, Strachey from a slightly dissolute, particularly outre coterie, an upper middle class family with introductions into and familiarities with aristocratic echelons. The two of them had, seemingly, very different moods and effects - Brooke's much-vaunted beauty with windswept light hair and serious charm; Strachey's darker, bright-eyed impishness with intellectual strength beneath. It becomes clear that Strachey, like so many, was bowled over by Brooke, who, in his turn, thought Strachey well worth cultivating. Brooke seems best summarised as a fluid egotist, who had become habituated to adoration and attention of all kinds, which made him skilful in corralling it to his needs, in both its sexual and non-sexual manifestations. They both join the most notable intellectual 'secret society' of the time, the Apostles, and enjoy for a good few years their mainly homoerotic adventures and life of the mind, as well as a fair swathe of gossip and infighting. Every now and then in the first half of this compilation I was aware of a sense of a stumble in the verbal rhythm, where I think perhaps something had been mistranscribed - sentences just not reading right: Brooke's script does look undecipherable in the visual examples given, so that is forgivable. The change comes in the last couple of years of their correspondence. Brooke has slowly adventured into female relationships as well as male, and Strachey is thinking of following suit, I guess in what would be considered in that time as a natural progression - several women of their acquaintance come under consideration. Brooke at a particular point gets ill, and appears to have a kind of breakdown. This triggers not only a reappreciation of much of the tenor of his life to date, but probably also latent mental illness associated with anxiety and jealous paranoia. So, with emerging heterosexuality, distrust of former friends and associates, a sizeable ego, and also what many a man will recognize as a typical stage that many go through, one of 'cleansing' and visions of what constitutes a 'right' life, Brooke made a strong break. His particular angles meant that this had an egotistical element, a superemphasis on masculinity, a hounding dislike of 'half-men' like Strachey's brother Lytton and even Strachey himself (and, I guess, of Brooke himself as he formerly was). This led him, in 1914, to an embrace of war and death in it as glorious, which great fate he of course fulfilled. Strachey continues in an extraordinarily loyal way trying to support his beloved friend, whilst being thoroughly honest about hating him from time to time. We are left in no doubt that he was highly critical of the later Brooke, and conversely that he was one of the great loves of his life. A brilliantly stimulating record, not only of a relationship, but of an era of intellect and behaviour whose fascinating development was utterly halted by conflagration.