What I remember about Rupert Brooke

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, 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.

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

         I’m
afraid I no longer remember what Mrs Strachey (who was homophile – a word we can
surely use if we allow the expression “homophobe”) told me about whether James
and Rupert had had a sexual relationship. I incline to thinking they did, but
can no longer remember enough about the circumstances to produce any evidence.

         Despite
the offer of a £25,000 advance from Jonathan Cape – in the 70s, when this was
real money – I gave up the project of editing the Rupert/James correspondence
(I happily handed the job over to Keith Hale, Yale University Press, 1998),
mostly because I was bored with Bloomsbury, too lazy to do the further research
needed, and demoralized by the pirating of the crucial letter in the late 80s
in a book about Brooke and his friends.

         I
did do a little of the preliminary research. For example, I had a drink with
the splendid actress, Cathleen Nesbitt (b.1888), in her Kensington flat, a year
of two before her death in 1982. She told me that the Rupert she knew from
1912, was sexually confused and that, though they considered themselves engaged
to be married, never had sexual relations. She knew he was, at the least,
bisexual; but his concern at the time was very definitely heterosexual. He’d
got Ka Cox pregnant (Katherine Laird Cox, 1887-1938; in 1918 she married Will
Arnold-Forster). Ms Nesbitt told me Ka had had an “abortion,” but I’m fairly
sure she meant a spontaneous abortion, a miscarriage. Rupert was tied in knots
about this. He’d finally succeeded in having sex with a woman, but a child was
not a cheerful prospect. He fancied himself in love with Ka, but then also with
Nesbitt; and in March, 2000, the British Library release a cache of letters
that showed he was simultaneously having an 18-month affair with an art
student, Phyllis Gardner, whom he finally dumped in 1913. In 1914 he made another
woman pregnant in Tahiti – she was named Taatamata, and is reported to have had
a child by Rupert.

         And
then there was Noël
Olivier (1893-1969). When Rupert (and James Strachey) met her in 1903, she was
still a schoolgirl at Bedales. I believe Rupert was “engaged” to her as well
when he died in April, 1915, of septicemia from a mosquito or fly bite. (Rupert
never saw an action at all. His battle-hungry post-mortem reputation was puffed
by his very gay patron Eddie Marsh, in cahoots with his own boss, Winston
Churchill – who wrote the Times
obituary that made Rupert famous.)

         The Hon. Noël Olivier was one of the
four daughters of the first Lord Olivier (Noël’s daughter told me that Laurence
Olivier had to ask his cousins’ permission to take the title), and became a
medical doctor. At one point, Rupert thought himself in love with to or three
of the Olivier girls. James and Noël comforted each other when Rupert died, and
were a bit in love, though James then considered himself exclusively homosexual
– encouraged in this by big brother Lytton, who thought that the more natural
state – and certainly it was the more prevalent sexuality in that stage of the
Bloomsbury Group.

         But then in 1920, James and Noël each
married someone else. Noël married another doctor, William Arthur Richards; and
James married the American-born Alix Sargant-Florence, and the pair went to
Vienna for a couple of years, to be analysed by Freud himself (and became his
translators). I was told, though, that James and Noël resumed their affair
sometime after they married, and that it continued until James died in 1967.

         There of course needs to be a biography
of James, who was also an outstanding musicologist, and contributed the
original programme noted to Glyndebourne. Michael Holroyd and I were appointed
(by Alix Strachey) the literary executors for James’ non-psychoanalytic
copyrights (along with Lytton’s and her own), but I don’t think either of us is
going to get around to do doing this; and I am certain that at least some of
those psychoanalysts who study James Strachey are ill-qualified to write his
life. A pity.

         I’m not confident that any of this
sheds new light on the diverting enigmas contained in Alan Hollinghurst’s book,
but it might provide some moderately entertaining footnotes to those writing
dissertations on various subjects – and I thought I ought to write down the
little I know and remember.