Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth: Amazon.co.uk: Nigel Jones: Books

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"Rupert Brooke, isn't it a romantic name?" wrote Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf, after first meeting the man who became the "star" of an exceptionally brilliant generation. But behind the facade of the stunning looks and the golden-boy image a very different Brooke was concealed that was far from romantic - and is now revealed in this utterly candid biography. After cutting a swathe through his contemporaries at Rugby and Cambridge, Brooke became the central figure in two distinct coteries - the homosexual Cambridge secret society "the Apostles" and the "Neo-Pagans", a group of free-thinking young people sworn to a carefree outdoor life of gypsy camps, nude swimming and the great outdoors. This compartmentalism was typical of Brooke - addicted to secrecy, he was loved by both men and women, and was himself highly sexually ambivalent. His boyish charm bowled over (almost) all those who met him - including the contemporary great and good like Asquith, Churchill, H.G. Wells and Henry James. But the surface self-confidence and the effortless literary and social success hid a darker Brooke - revealed in this book. At the height of his promise, a seemingly trivial setback in love propelled Brooke into a complete mental and physical collapse, which stripped him of his defences and brought his inner complexes seething to the surface.

From the Publisher

The full story behind Englands most enduring literary legend
‘Intelligent, witty and definitive: this is literary biography at its best.’ Andrew Roberts

"Rupert Brooke - isn’t it a romantic name?" wrote Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf after his first meeting with the up and coming blue-eyed boy of English poetry. The stunning looks and charm that so entranced Strachey lasted through Brooke’s meteoric life - and long outlived the life that ended en route to the bloody beaches of Gallipoli in World War One. The image of Brooke as "one of England’s noblest sons", in Churchill’s obituary tribute, was fostered by his surviving friends, but served to obscure and mask a darker reality. For the fresh and boyish Brooke was in reality a man possessed by private demons and terrors that at one point took him to the brink of madness and suicide. Nigel Jones’s new biography lifts the mask and plants warts on the face that W.B. Yeats called "the handsomest in England".

The distorted picture of Brooke is the work of Christopher Hassall, his official biographer, who, writing in the early Sixties, was forced to be discreet to the point of dishonesty about his subject’s private life and loves; and Geoffrey Keynes, Rupert’s loyal friend, literary executor and the editor of his "Collected letters". Keynes wished to preserve a picture of Brooke that made no mention of the major facts that shaped his path through life. These included - · His early homosexuality. · His many heterosexual love affairs. · His mental and physical breakdown, which prostrated him for a year and led to the brink of madness and suicide. · His anti- Semitism, extreme even by the standards of his time. · His love-child, born during an idyllic affair with a Tahitan woman.

Since the deaths of Hassall and Keynes several writers have drawn attention to one or more of these aspects of Brooke’s troubled life; and collections of letters to friends and/or lovers have gradually become available. Now, for the first time, Nigel Jones, historian and acclaimed biographer of the alcoholic author Patrick Hamilton, draws out these secrets in the first full biography for more than thirty years. It presents a man for our times: complex, moody, changeable, extreme, unstable - yet gifted and brilliant too.

Drawing on Brooke’s vast correspondence, much of it suppressed by his heirs and never before published, it presents a picture of Brooke in the round that is less hero-worshipping but altogether more human. At a time when notions of patriotism, gender, media hype and war are once more in the melting pot it gives us the full story behind one of England’s enduring literary legends and the 20th century’s first and most brilliant literary star. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Good read for non-poetry persons... 21 Oct 2010

By D. C. Gowans

Format:Hardcover

I do not read a great deal of poetry, but I do like biography and this is a good one in my opinion. A good one for me is compelling and authentic, sensitive to the period but not afraid to give us the 'whole' story and not a cleaned-up and over-reverent one. The reader will find out more than they bargained for in this biog - Rupert was no angel and had some unpleasant ideas about many things, women in particular. James Strachey summed him up: "Rupert Brooke was not as nice as people think, but a lot more clever", and after reading this latest version of his life I would have to agree.

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13 of 20 people found the following review helpful

Very detailed but not well written or proof-read 26 July 2001

By A Customer

Rupert Brooke was a wonderful prose stylist, so it is surprising that a modern biographer has not taken more care over his own writing (grammar, proof-reading, etc.). For example:

P. 66: "he would never grew old" P. 74: "Brooke's own lack of stage skills were all too apparent" P. 142: "He no longer hopes, he says to make a new world" P. 255: "what passed between he and Ka" P. 267: "A much more serious portent for his future then green semen came in a letter from Noel" P. 305: "he had 'unluckily ran into...'." P. 343: "the future fates of both he and Jacques" P. 348: "the combination beguiled an entranced a Brooke only too ready, at last, for real physical romance and uninhibited love". P. 415: "two British and one French battleship were sunk" P. 428: "as much from a deep desire to escape the complexities and compromises of existence than to lay down his life for others"

We really are entitled to better than this in a literary biography.

9 of 20 people found the following review helpful

Full of friendship, love, and personal demons. 3 May 2000

By truth99@gateway.net

I have read, lived, and loved Rupert Brooke, and it's amazing to think that I had had no knowledge of the poet before I read this biography. Befitting the poet's short life, this biography by Nigel Jones is full of friendship, love, unrequited at most times, homosexuality, heady with intelligentsia which included the wicked Strachey brothers, and Cambridge. I, for one, have at many times started reading a biography only to give it up as hopeless after the subject passed the age of 25 or so. Sadly, life just doesn't seem very interesting after youth. Not so with Rupert Brooke. He never had a chance to reach an age where his life could have seemed uninteresting. And short lives make up the best biographies. The leitmotiv of this biography is innocence. The innocence of the poet, his world, and the outside world at the time of the poet's short life. I thank both the poet himself and Mr. Jones for giving me a glimpse of the time and place where one could afford to be innocent and romantic with one's whole self.

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Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth [Paperback]

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