Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (Hardcover)

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Synopsis
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 Drawing on a mass of documentation, much of it unpublished, this new biography brings out the full story behind one of the century's most enduring literary legends.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

"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.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover