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.

Red Doc> by Anne Carson (2013)

The predecessor to this, Autobiography of Red, was by turns fun and irritating. The irritation lay mainly in a lot of "posy" appendices and supporting paraphernalia, and occasionally in encountering gloopy approximation or overly knowing reference in the work itself, a kind of loose late 20th century poet-speak which lacks impact, or turns the reader off. I'm pretty sure a good quantity of the easily impressed are very taken with these dips to 'profundity' couched in pseudo-Beat language. Carson is capable in different areas; those I've just mentioned are her weakest mode. All these tropes are repeated here, with one exception: the crappy apparatus is gone - hooray for that. This takes Geryon from the first book forward to a period where he is known by the poet simply as G. I'm not sure, but the feeling I get is that his friend here, Sad But Great ('SBG' or mainly just Sad) is his old flame from the first book. They catch up with each other, and with a wild friend, Ida, and also later connect with an army survivor, 4NO, who may be a development of Sad's character, or may be a separate individual. This indicates quite how fluid and impressionistic this piece is. The journey starts with G and Sad and the road north, on and on, into icy territory - Alaska? The Rockies of the northwest? A territory of the frosted mind? They turn up at what is revealed as their destination - a kind of mental health facility, where they re-encounter Ida and meet 4NO. This is the locus of the second half of the book, where their encounters with one another, re-enacting scenes from the past, playing out their traumas, giving one another impressions, realisations of healing and blockedness, interactions with the staff and the program, form the narrative. Carson is occasionally luminous, pulling out an impression which really speaks, and occasionally drab and limited, seemingly just writing in a kind of common 'literary' automatism. This mixed impression is the key. Her intention seems both cool and serious and individual in the best moments, fussed and posy and over-referential in her worst, and often thinly middling. The more she can clear out the need for the latter and embrace the former, the more powerful she'll get. I wonder whether an illustrator would have helped; the transformation into a graphic novel may have assisted in bringing this piece more to life, in making its effect more memorable. As it is we're left with a piece with striking images and moments whose impact is destrung by many more of self-absorbed 'cleverness' or waffly indistinction.

Commonplace Book

'It is a circumstance never to be enough deplored by the female world that marriages and drawing-rooms are broad daylight ceremonies. Mature necks and faces, that the great bold sun makes look as yellow as old law deeds or as the love letters of twenty years ago, would gleam creamily, waxily white, if illumined only by benevolent candles, that seem to see and make seen only beauties and slur over defects. Even the lilies and roses of youth - unlike the smooth perfection of their garden types - are conscious of little pits and specks and flaws when day holds his great searching lamp right into their faces. Day repudiates tulle and tarletane; they are none of his; and as he cannot rid himself of them he retaliates by behaving as glaringly and unhandsomely as he can to them...'

from "Good-Bye, Sweetheart!" by Rhoda Broughton (Part II, Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'...I must just write and tell you about Mumps. I had them when I was 16. Of course it's infinitely worse at 23.[...] It's not so much the pain, - though that's incredible, - as the Disgrace, - and the madness.[...] At first they just swell and swell and swell, till they're tight and shiny and cracking, two monstrous red balloons. Then, all of a sudden, they go hard, - hard as a rock. You lie and stare at the mountain under the bed-clothes, and pretend it's your knees. The doctor strips you and eyes them till you have an erection, and then thinks you're a bad lot. You cannot pumpship and your semen turns green. And night and day the thought and torment of these vast twin scarlet bleeding pineapples is with you. It lasts for months. I suppose the fatal cases are when they grow too far and explode...'

from a letter from Rupert Brooke to James Strachey, dated April 27, 1911, in Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914

Commonplace Book

'...A man feels a secret satisfaction in seeing his neighbour treated as a rascal. If he be a knave himself (which ten to one is the case), he rejoices to see a character brought down to the level of his own, and a new member added to his society...'

from The Adventures of an Atom by Tobias Smollett

The Snow Man by George Sand (1858)

What a splendid thing this book is. Set in Dalecarlia, a region of central Sweden nestled next to the Norwegian border, in around 1770, the action takes place in a frozen landscape. The centre of it is a lake in which there is a rocky island topped with an old castle. The lake is a plane of white, its upper part frozen solid, so the island is very accessible. On the edge of the lake the new replacement castle has been built, much more in the modern style. All in view is swathed in snow. It is the story initially of a strolling puppeteer, up from Italy, the famed Christian Waldo, an orphan who was raised by gentle loving Italian adoptive parents. He is Ronald Colmanishly handsome: stylish, gentlemanly, capable. He takes up illicit accomodation in the Stollborg, the old castle on the island, and starts to prepare for at least two performances for the huge assembly of young aristos in the new castle. The plot is incredibly, satisfyingly intricate. It involves a local lawyer who also ends up at the Stollborg, the garrison of young local army officers, a young countess of the new castle party who falls for Christian, the ancient, evil and disturbed baronial owner of the whole estate, his crafty servants, and so on and so on...It takes place via hidden doors, concealed and mistaken identity and lots of guessing. The history behind it is one of inheritance, whereby in the past the brother of the evil baron has been murdered, his wife ostracised for her religion and exiled, a child born to her spirited away. What marks this novel out is Sand's dedication to the points of view of the characters: there are many, and they all know some things for sure about others, other things they assume or guess (some of which are wrong and actually attributable to others), while many actions which are taken are hidden or misinterpreted. There is a fantastic establishing scene of great length early on, where Christian attends a ball at the new castle as someone else, in order to gauge his surroundings before he announces his arrival. At this stage the darkness of the plot has not been established and he goes in this way as a piece of fun, causing fascination in some circles, puzzlement about who he is in others, as well as getting his foot forward in understanding the potentially sinister reputation of the place. This long scene, set across a suite of bright rooms in the new castle, with cross-hatched intrigue and romance, would make a superb setpiece in a film of this work, given the exotic locale. Needless to say, Christian discovers through diligent work by the lawyer, hints from old retainers and his own suspicions, that he is much more intimately involved with the historic story than he could ever have imagined. He has come home, unwittingly. With violence, despair and nefarious complicated plots the story slowly unwinds, uncoiling colour after colour in this supposedly monotonal domain. All ends well for him, of course, but not without having gone a scintillating journey. Sand proves yet again what a mistress of prismatic plot she is, when writing at length.

Despoiling Venus by Jack Lindsay (1935)

It's strange that Lindsay's first three novels of ancient Rome are regarded popularly as a trilogy, when this one, his fourth, is just as related to the other three as they are amongst themselves. No answer for that. Anyway, he has now developed a very toothsome prose style, having left off the poetic riffing so prevalent in the previous instalment, where short stabs of sentence were used in an attempt to build up a very immediate semblance of the feel of events. One of the other major pillars of his modus is his insistence on psychology - following an individual's mind through its many changes and tensions as events pull it into and out of shape. Here that is again key, as Marcus Caelius Rufus details the topography of his affair with, and love of, Clodia. It starts with fascination and flirtation, and then develops into strong obsession, all fairly faithfully recorded by Lindsay's passionate, muscular style. Then a point is reached where Marcus is drunkenly forced into an odd action by Clodia, then reacts to having done what he's done in hindsight quite strangely, then teams up with her previously despised brother Clodius in a not quite believable way, and then nervously and unaccountably commits a murder: an extraordinary string of events where Lindsay's insistence on psychology completely undoes him. The hoops through which he has had to jump unbalance his story terribly. What I'm not sure about is how much of this is recorded history; in which case, has he developed a theory about how this series of events unfolded on the one hand, a theory about who these people were and what moved them on the other, and desperately tried to meld the two? If so, the result is a dog's dinner from a psychological point of view. His muscularity and passion keep up, which kept this reader involved, but of course my appreciation of the plot was fatally compromised. At the end, he seems aware of this, and has Marcus break from Clodia and Clodius very finally, as if coming up for air. In his meditation on what happened he puts the whole thing down to the frustration he and the already married Clodia felt at not being able to commit themselves in wedlock. It's a feeble reasoning, and a mismatch for the character of Marcus, and indeed Clodia, as they have been built up. In much that it attempts this book is successful, but ultimately it's a case of a vital element failing.