- Hardcover: 450 pages
- Publisher: Richard Cohen Books; 1st Edition edition (30 Sep 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1860661718
- ISBN-13: 978-1860661716
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.8 x 4.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 541,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Since his death in the First World War, Brooke has been identified with a romantic myth of a lost world where church clocks stood still and there was eternal honey for tea. But, as this book shows, the truth about Brooke was both more shocking and a lot more interesting. Drawing on a mass of documentation, much of it unpublished, this new biography brings out the full story behind one of the century's most enduring literary legends. This book conclusively demolishes the myth of the untarnished golden boy of English poetry. Using original documentation - much from Rupert Brooke's own hand - this biography shows that the poet hailed by Churchill as one of "England's noblest sons" was in reality sexually ambivalent, paranoiac, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and sometimes plain mad. He was also one of the most gifted spirits of his age who charmed (almost) all who met him. Overturning the carefully crafted image erected by his friends, this is a biography that will change forever one of our most cherished national legends.
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
‘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.
Inside This Book
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good read for non-poetry persons...,
By
This review is from: Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (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.
13 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Very detailed but not well written or proof-read,
By A Customer
This review is from: Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (Hardcover)
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:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Full of friendship, love, and personal demons.,
By truth99@gateway.net (Atlanta, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (Hardcover)
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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