{"id":739,"date":"2011-08-11T15:20:49","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T15:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/2011\/08\/what_i_remember_about_rupert_b.html"},"modified":"2011-08-11T15:20:49","modified_gmt":"2011-08-11T15:20:49","slug":"what_i_remember_about_rupert_b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2011\/08\/what_i_remember_about_rupert_b.html","title":{"rendered":"What I remember about Rupert Brooke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan  <\/span>Hollinghurst is on the 2011 Man Booker Prize longlist for The Stranger’s Child<\/i>, having – deservedly – won some years ago for The Line of Beauty<\/i>. The Stranger’s Child<\/i> involves a Rupert Brooke-like poet, essentially gay, who might have fathered a child in this complex plot, which takes in several generations. I’m now trying to read the entire longlist, in preparation for my annual Man Booker feature in the Wall Street Journal Europe, and do not have anything yet to say about the merits of this novel, except that I have seldom enjoyed any work so much as reading it. <\/p>\n

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         <\/span>But
\nI want to note a few things about Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) – while I can still
\nremember the broad outlines, as I’ve already forgotten many of the details. In
\nabout 1969, the late Alix Strachey (Mrs James Strachey, 1892-1973), engaged me
\nto edit the letters between her late husband, James, Lytton’s youngest brother,
\na psychoanalyst who was the editor of the Standard Edition of the Works of
\nFreud, and Rupert Brooke. I subsequently got permission from the Brooke Trust,
\nRupert’s copyright holder, or at least from the man who ran it, Sir Geoffrey
\nKeynes, the younger brother of Maynard Keynes, who was a distinguished surgeon
\nand bibliophile. When Sir Geoffrey gave me his blessing, I suspected that he
\ndid not know of the existence of one long letter, which was in the Berg
\nCollection  <\/span>of the New York Public
\nLibrary. This contained a graphic account of Rupert losing his virginity, to
\nanother boy – not James (1887-1967), though James Strachey was, at that time,
\nboth gay and desperately in love with Rupert. On this occasion, at least,
\nRupert was taking James into his confidence, but not into his bed.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>I’m
\nafraid I no longer remember what Mrs Strachey (who was homophile – a word we can
\nsurely use if we allow the expression “homophobe”) told me about whether James
\nand Rupert had had a sexual relationship. I incline to thinking they did, but
\ncan no longer remember enough about the circumstances to produce any evidence. <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>Despite
\nthe offer of a \u00a325,000 advance from Jonathan Cape – in the 70s, when this was
\nreal money – I gave up the project of editing the Rupert\/James correspondence
\n(I happily handed the job over to Keith Hale, Yale University Press, 1998),
\nmostly because I was bored with Bloomsbury, too lazy to do the further research
\nneeded, and demoralized by the pirating of the crucial letter in the late 80s
\nin a book about Brooke and his friends.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>I
\ndid do a little of the preliminary research. For example, I had a drink with
\nthe splendid actress, Cathleen Nesbitt (b.1888), in her Kensington flat, a year
\nof two before her death in 1982. She told me that the Rupert she knew from
\n1912, was sexually confused and that, though they considered themselves engaged
\nto be married, never had sexual relations. She knew he was, at the least,
\nbisexual; but his concern at the time was very definitely heterosexual. He’d
\ngot Ka Cox pregnant (Katherine Laird Cox, 1887-1938; in 1918 she married Will
\nArnold-Forster). Ms Nesbitt told me Ka had had an “abortion,” but I’m fairly
\nsure she meant a spontaneous abortion, a miscarriage. Rupert was tied in knots
\nabout this. He’d finally succeeded in having sex with a woman, but a child was
\nnot a cheerful prospect. He fancied himself in love with Ka, but then also with
\nNesbitt; and in March, 2000, the British Library release a cache of letters
\nthat showed he was simultaneously having an 18-month affair with an art
\nstudent, Phyllis Gardner, whom he finally dumped in 1913. In 1914 he made another
\nwoman pregnant in Tahiti – she was named Taatamata, and is reported to have had
\na child by Rupert.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>And
\nthen there was No<\/span>\u00ebl
\nOlivier (1893-1969). When Rupert (and James Strachey) met her in 1903, she was
\nstill a schoolgirl at Bedales. I believe Rupert was “engaged” to her as well
\nwhen he died in April, 1915, of septicemia from a mosquito or fly bite. (Rupert
\nnever saw an action at all. His battle-hungry post-mortem reputation was puffed
\nby his very gay patron Eddie Marsh, in cahoots with his own boss, Winston
\nChurchill – who wrote the Times<\/i>
\nobituary that made Rupert famous.)<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>The Hon. No\u00ebl Olivier was one of the
\nfour daughters of the first Lord Olivier (No\u00ebl’s daughter told me that Laurence
\nOlivier had to ask his cousins’ permission to take the title), and became a
\nmedical doctor. At one point, Rupert thought himself in love with to or three
\nof the Olivier girls. James and No\u00ebl comforted each other when Rupert died, and
\nwere a bit in love, though James then considered himself exclusively homosexual
\n– encouraged in this by big brother Lytton, who thought that the more natural
\nstate – and certainly it was the more prevalent sexuality in that stage of the
\nBloomsbury Group.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>But then in 1920, James and No\u00ebl each
\nmarried someone else. No\u00ebl married another doctor, William Arthur Richards; and
\nJames married the American-born Alix Sargant-Florence, and the pair went to
\nVienna for a couple of years, to be analysed by Freud himself (and became his
\ntranslators). I was told, though, that James and No\u00ebl resumed their affair
\nsometime after they married, and that it continued until James died in 1967. <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>There of course needs to be a biography
\nof James, who was also an outstanding musicologist, and contributed the
\noriginal programme noted to Glyndebourne. Michael Holroyd and I were appointed
\n(by Alix Strachey) the literary executors for James’ non-psychoanalytic
\ncopyrights (along with Lytton’s and her own), but I don’t think either of us is
\ngoing to get around to do doing this; and I am certain that at least some of
\nthose psychoanalysts who study James Strachey are ill-qualified to write his
\nlife. A pity.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>I’m not confident that any of this
\nsheds new light on the diverting enigmas contained in Alan Hollinghurst’s book,
\nbut it might provide some moderately entertaining footnotes to those writing
\ndissertations on various subjects – and I thought I ought to write down the
\nlittle I know and remember.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan  Hollinghurst is on the 2011 Man Booker Prize longlist for The Stranger’s Child, having – deservedly – won some years ago for The Line of Beauty. The Stranger’s Child involves a Rupert Brooke-like poet, essentially gay, who might have fathered a child in this complex plot, which takes in several generations. I’m now trying to read the entire longlist, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-bV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}