Rupert Brooke of Rugby

© 2021 Keith Hale

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Portions of The Bowdlerization of Rupert Brooke first appeared in ANQ  21.2, Spring 2008.

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BISAC: Biography & Autobiography / LGBT

BISAC: Poetry / LGBT

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Contents

Brooke photo

9  The Bowdlerization of Rupert Brooke by Keith Hale

The Memoir

The Biographies

The Letters of Rupert Brooke

Early Romance

A Welcome War

The Bisexual Brooke

Poems for Boys

76  The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke

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Preface

Brooke: A Biographical Note by Margaret Lavington

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Introduction by George Edward Woodberry

101  1905-1908

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Second Best

Day That I Have Loved

Sleeping Out: Full Moon

In Examination

Pine Trees and the Sky: Evening

Wagner

The Vision of the Archangels

Seaside

On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess

The Song of the Pilgrims

The Song of the Beasts

Failure

Ante Aram

Dawn

The Call

The Wayfarers

The Beginning

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127  1908-1911

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Sonnet: Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire

Sonnet: I said I splendidly love you; it’s not true

Success

Dust

Kindliness

Mummia

The Fish

Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body

Flight

The Hill

The One Before the Last

The Jolly Company

The Life Beyond

Lines Written in the Belief that the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead was Called Ambarvalia

Dead Men’s Love

Town and Country

Paralysis

Menelaus and Helen

Lust (Libido)

Jealousy

Blue Evening

The Charm

Finding

Song

The Voice

Dining-Room Tea

The Goddess in the Wood

A Channel Passage

Victory

Day and Night

176  Experiments

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Choriambics—I

Choriambics—II

Desertion

183  1914

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I Peace

II Safety

III The Dead

IV The Dead

V The Soldier

The Treasure

191  The South Seas

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Tiare Tahiti

Retrospect

The Great Lover

Heaven

Doubts

There’s Wisdom in Women

He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her

A Memory (From a sonnet sequence)

One Day

Waikiki

Hauntings

Sonnet (Suggested by Some of the Proceedings of the Society for Physical Research

Clouds

Mutability

213  Other Poems

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The Busy Heart

Love

Unfortunate

The Chilterns

Home

The Night Journey

Song

Beauty and Beauty

The Way That Lovers Use

Mary and Gabriel

The Funeral of Youth: Threnody

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

Fafaia

236  Appendix

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Fragment

The Dance

Song

Sometimes Even Now

Sonnet: In Time of Revolt

A Letter to a Live Poet

Fragment on Painters

The True Beatitude (Bouts-Rimes)

Sonnet Reversed

It’s not Going to Happen Again

The Little Dog’s Day

152  Letters from America

Preface by Keith Hale

Note by Edward Marsh

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Rupert Brooke by Henry James

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Arrival

New York

New York, continued

Boston and Harvard

Montreal and Ottawa

Quebec and the Saguenay

Ontario

Niagara Falls

To Winnepeg

Outside

The Prairie

The Indians

The Rockies

Some Niggers

An Unusual Young Man

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The Bowdlerization of Rupert Brooke

When Rupert Brooke died of blood poisoning on his way to fight the Turkish forces at Gallipoli in 1915, his friends in England were quick to turn him into a national hero—a patriotic symbol of the many young men of England going to war. That Brooke had recently published five sonnets glorifying patriotic sacrifice did much to promote his legend. That his friends included Winston Churchill, Anthony Asquith, and General Ian Hamilton did even more. Churchill capitalized on Brooke’s most precious and most freely proferred sacrifice, painting a portrait of Brooke as an eager defender of nation and honor willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew [...] with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause (qtd. in Lehmann, Strange 151).

Brooke has since been known as a war poet, although he saw no action during the war and completed only five poems on the subject. This classification has done his reputation serious injury, for his war sonnets seem trivial and misguided when compared with those of his fellow soldier poets. Although Siegfried Sassoon and others were writing the same type of sentimental verse as Brooke in the early days of the war, they were fortunate to live long enough to provide a more realistic correction to their early verse. Brooke never had that chance.

To maintain the patriotic legend after the war, Brooke’s biography was altered beyond recognition. His mother refused his choice of literary executor, Edward Marsh, selecting instead his boyhood friend Geoffrey Keynes, who spent the rest of his life suppressing unsavory rumors about Brooke. When Keynes edited and published a collection of Brooke’s letters, he deleted much of the evidence that would have proven that Brooke the man was not the same as Brooke the legend. In selecting the letters to be published, Keynes in particular refused to include sensitive letters between Brooke and James Strachey—the brother of Lytton and translator of Freud—saying they would appear in print over my dead body (Rogers 6).

Keynes’s refusal to allow the Brooke-Strachey letters into print almost certainly was due to the strong homosexual current running through the correspondence. Even at Rugby, Keynes had tried to moderate that side of Brooke, complaining of Brooke’s decadent posing and expressing his disapproval of Brooke’s flirtation with Michael Sadleir. To his credit, Keynes did publish many of Brooke’s letters to him about Brooke’s adolescent romances, with few omissions; however, he was reluctant to print anything the adult Brooke had to say on the subject.

Keynes’s edition of the letters, as it happened, appeared over the dead body of Dudley Ward, a co-trustee of the Brooke estate, who had said Keynes’s selection completely misrepresented Brooke and who kept the edition from being published as long as he was alive. Although an avid bibliophile famous for his personal library, Keynes was easily shocked, and—at least in his younger days—had no qualms about destroying literary and historical documents. Following his brother Maynard Keynes’s death, Geoffrey was inclined to destroy the letters between Maynard and Lytton Strachey—letters filled with the details of Maynard’s love affairs with the painter Duncan Grant and other young men of Brooke’s circle. Fortunately, James Strachey and Maynard’s biographer, Roy Harrod, intervened and the letters were preserved.

It is, however, certainly possible that years earlier, when Keynes took control of much of Brooke’s correspondence, there was no such fortuitous intervention and many of Brooke’s most sensitive letters were destroyed. James Strachey, for one, refused to allow Keynes access to his letters from Brooke, and at least one person who did send letters to Keynes later received a letter from him saying they had been lost. Brooke’s mother is another individual who might have been inclined to destroy certain documents. When her husband Parker Brooke died in 1910, she destroyed all his papers unread.

We know from Brooke’s surviving letters that for several years he wrote long letters to two fellow Rugby boys—Denham Russell-Smith, whom he later seduced, and Michael Sadleir, with whom he had what he termed an affaire. Brooke also was in love with a boy named Charles Lascelles. It seems that none of the correspondence to or from any of the three boys, except for a letter written much later by Brooke to Sadleir concerning a literary matter, has survived. Letters from Brooke to Denham’s mother in which he compliments the hammock on which he and Denham liked to lie and kiss each other have survived, but no letters to the boy himself. Keynes acknowledges the letters to Sadleir existed by saying in his collection that Brooke’s early letters to Sadleir were not preserved (Brooke, Letters  35). One of Brooke’s biographers who tried to track them down, Michael Hastings, believes that The Sadleir trustees got hold of letters, via, presumably, the earlier more cautious Brooke trustees, and they have no doubt been destroyed (Letter).

The Memoir

As mentioned, before Brooke died, he appointed Edward Marsh as his literary executor; however, Brooke’s mother refused to honor the choice and instead appointed a group of four men, headed by Geoffrey Keynes, who had been a friend of Brooke at Rugby. Brooke and Keynes had maintained a distant friendship since their school days but were not close. Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary, had known Brooke well only during the last years of Brooke’s life and was unacceptable to Mrs. Brooke not only for that reason but also because he was homosexual. With the exception of John Sheppard, whom she named a Brooke Trustee, Mrs. Brooke had an uncanny knack of ferreting out this trait in Rupert’s friends, acquaintances, and aspiring biographers. She apparently did not much like it, for she was critical of all except Sheppard. James Strachey, St. John Lucas-Lucas (the Rugby poet), Edward Marsh, and Brooke biographer Richard Halliburton were but a few of those who came face to face with her scorn. Lucas was so distressed when he learned of her dislike of him and of her insistence that none of his letters from Brooke be placed in Marsh’s Memoir   that he wrote to Marsh, "I never had the faintest idea that Mrs. Brooke had any objection to my letters being used by you. Why in the world should she? I did   know that she objected to my name appearing in your memoir; [...] I am sending you the letters & Rupert’s letters too. Please keep them & tell her that I never want to see them again."

Marsh had been managing Brooke’s affairs since before Brooke’s death. It was his name on Brooke’s publishing contract with Sidgwick and Jackson, and it was he who had been representing the three poets named as heirs in Brooke’s will. Although Marsh was closeted, it was obvious to everyone that he had been in love with Brooke. Louis Menand maintains that the Georgian Poetry  anthologies compiled by Marsh from 1912 through 1922 began as an effort to promote the work of one poet, Rupert Brooke (120). In a letter to Mrs. Brooke after Rupert’s death, Marsh admitted that most things in my life depended on him for a great part of their interest and worth (qtd. in Ross 92). In any case, one cannot say with certainty that Marsh would have made a better executor than Keynes. It is logical to assume that having publicly concealed his own homosexuality, he might have been just as protective of Brooke’s reputation as was Keynes. In the Brooke Archives at Cambridge is Marsh’s transcription of one of Brooke’s poetry notebooks. Although he has carefully transcribed virtually every poem, he has left out the one with homosexual content, titled Antinous, noting that it was not worth bothering with. It is possible, however, that he had intended all along to give his transcriptions to Brooke’s mother, who eventually got them, and that the censorship might have been for her benefit.

Another Brooke biographer, Paul Delany, believes that Brooke never cared deeply about Marsh or Keynes, nor did they play any major role in his emotional history (ix). When Brooke speaks of Keynes in later life, it is generally with respect for someone important to him in his childhood and whom he believes to be a decent person. However, it is also clear that Brooke is annoyed with Keynes’ disapproval of anything beyond the pale. Brooke seems to have given up on Keynes as best friend material by 1907 when Keynes wrote to him complaining of Brooke’s tone—his nastiness, peevishness, sarcastic irony, and bad taste, and accusing Brooke of being childish. Brooke replied, I expect I was too allusive: almost, I fear, flippant. I will try to be simple. But at the end of the letter, he can’t resist some fun with Keynes: I have written in lines fairly straight & close; that you may not strain your eyes in trying to read between them (12 Sept. 1907).

Brooke likely would have been appalled at the thought of Keynes as his literary executor. However, following Rupert’s death, Mrs. Brooke appointed Keynes, Dudley Ward, Walter de la Mare, and Jack Sheppard as Brooke Trustees. This left Marsh in an odd position, as he—acting as Brooke’s appointed executor—had signed the agreements with Brooke’s publishing company and represented the three poets (including de la Mare) named in Brooke’s will as beneficiaries. Frustrated by the lack of cooperation he was getting from Mrs. Brooke and Geoffrey Keynes, both of whom clearly wanted him to relinquish his post, Marsh reluctantly concluded that he had no choice but to resign. His decision did not sit well with Brooke’s publishers, however. Sidgwick and Jackson refused to accept the resignation, insisting that Marsh’s name was on the contracts and they would deal with no one but Marsh. Keynes exchanged several hostile letters with the firm, but in the end was himself forced to call upon Marsh to intervene. Marsh did, and delicately extricated himself from all responsibilities concerning Brooke.

Still, Marsh’s troubles with Keynes and Brooke’s mother, were far from over. He was writing a memoir of Brooke to be included as an introduction to Brooke’s Collected Poems, and he soon found both Mrs. Brooke and Keynes acting as tandem obstructionists to his project. Mrs. Brooke insisted that Marsh not include anything about Brooke’s socialism, then after the Memoir  was published, she complained that it wasn’t a complete account of Rupert and didn’t even mention his socialism. She also insisted that Marsh ask Keynes to write something for the book, and when Keynes refused, she withdrew her permission to publish. Marsh wrote to her expressing dismay that, after all the trouble he had taken, he should be made to suffer because someone else, over whom I have no control, refuses to write (Hassall, Marsh 386). Eleven days later, Marsh sent an announcement to Sidgwick and Jackson of the Memoir’s postponement: ‘owing to the wishes of the family’—I should like to insert the word ‘bloody’ before ‘family’, but I won’t insist on this (391). Eventually, Marsh was allowed to publish, but even though he honored the many limitations placed on him by Mrs. Brooke and Keynes, they still were unhappy. Marsh regarded his relationship with Mrs. Brooke as the most distressing experience of his life; their dispute takes up almost seventy pages of Christopher Hassell’s biography of Marsh.

It must be said, however, that Marsh deserved some of Mrs. Brooke’s criticism concerning his over-the-top prose style. She returned his draft with applepie, applepie scribbled in the margin of one section. One biographer claims she changed Marsh’s Rupert left Rugby in a blaze of glory to Rupert left Rugby in July, but Hassall dismisses this story as apocryphal.

Another Brooke biographer, John Lehmann, says, "Marsh must not be too much blamed for [the Memoir’s] excesses of adulation; he had known Rupert at close quarters in the last years of his life, he had fallen in love with him, and his love irradiates every paragraph" (Strange 155). When the Memoir was finally published, it was prefaced with a brief introduction by Mrs. Brooke that read more like a disclaimer. In it she mentions the reasons why she "consented to the Memoir coming out now, although it is of necessity incomplete."

Keynes in his autobiography calls Marsh’s memoir "an elegantly written trifle (Gates 164) and goes on to complain:

Brooke’s unmanly physical beauty was often taken as an indication that he was probably a homosexual and therefore to be despised. [...] It had, of course, been far from Marsh’s intention to produce any such impression. He had been deeply attached to Rupert, as he was to many young men, but lived himself in a sexual no-man’s-land whose equivocal aura pervaded the memoir and contributed to the Brooke legend. Mrs. Brooke had probably sensed this even though she might not have been able to put it into words, and was quite right to feel that the pretty sketch should never have been printed. (165)

Marsh was not entirely in a sexual no-man’s land. Rupert knew that Marsh was attracted to men; the evidence can be found, among other places, in Brooke’s 13 February 1912 letter to James Strachey in which he writes of a letter from Marsh expressing pleasure at having finally met George Mallory, the handsome young friend of Brooke who became the famous mountain climber. Brooke tells Strachey that Marsh had crossed out met and replaced it with seen. Then later in the letter he reproduces Marsh’s edit with obvious admiration, telling Strachey he thinks it quite good. Nor was Marsh as prudish on the topic of sex as was Keynes. When, for instance, the Daily Mail  wrote an article on syphilis but insisted on calling it the hidden plague, an exasperated Marsh wrote to Brooke that he was considering writing a letter from the small-hidden-plague and chicken hidden plague (18 Aug. 1913). Marsh could be quite funny, as he indicated by wishing to insert the word bloody before family, and Brooke appreciated his humor.

Still, Marsh’s Memoir was a travesty, and the fault was partially Mrs. Brooke’s but partially Marsh’s own. Brooke’s Bloomsbury friend David Garnett, wrote of it to his mother:

James—who knew him better than anyone else [...] is silent—he is mentioned once as having been on a walking tour with him—Noel [Olivier] is of course not mentioned. [...] I am amazed at the underlying assumptions of the authors.

That is: We like our boys to wear their hair rather long—to dabble in Socialism, to dabble in ‘decadence’ [...] to fancy they really care about ethics—but all the time we know they are sound: sound to the core.

When the time comes they’ll go off heroically and forget their wild oats and die in a Greek island and then we can wallow in sentiment [...] but the wild oats of Mr. Marsh are really the important things in life. Rupert even though he did go to the bad some time before his death at one time cared about the important things and was able to understand them. (Brooke, Song 282)

Garnett makes a valid point. But if Brooke’s friends found the Marsh memoir distasteful, they certainly could not have appreciated what was to come.

The Biographies

The first biography of Brooke aside from Marsh’s 1918 memoir was to have been written by twenty-seven-year-old American explorer Richard Halliburton, author of The Royal Road to Romance, who drowned at sea before completing his book. A good-looking man who apparently possessed a great deal of charm as well, Halliburton considered Brooke one of his three heroes along with Richard the Lion-Hearted and Alexander the Great, and he carried a copy of Brooke’s poetry with him almost wherever he went, calling it his bible. While working on his biography of Brooke, he was disappointed to find that Mrs. Brooke and most of Rupert’s friends were reluctant to divulge information about the poet. On first meeting him, Mrs. Brooke had demanded, Ask your questions, young man, one, two, three, four (Stringer 16). Only Marsh provided any cooperation (18). Gradually, Halliburton discerned the reason. I was made aware of a peculiar subterfuge going on round me, he wrote. One Trustee of the Brooke Estate made a point of telephoning some of the families I approached to insist I be allowed to see no material they might possess (Stringer 63). Brooke’s friend Justin Brooke wrote to Halliburton, I think you may find it hard to get Mrs. Brooke’s permission to print all that you would naturally desire. St. John Lucas-Lucas, who had sent Halliburton his letters from Brooke before sending them all to Marsh, wrote, Mrs. Brooke is far from pleased with me for letting you have them. [...] Please don’t think me very dictatorial, but the rule that Rupert’s friends must make is that Mrs. Brooke’s wishes in any matter concerning him are absolute law. Noel Oliver, in politely refusing close cooperation, said she believed it was not yet possible to write a full account of his life: The spectators must wait another 50 years or so for anything like a full picture, she wrote. Dudley Ward refused cooperation for the same reason, writing to Halliburton, I do not think that the time has come for the publication of a full selection of his letters, and such partial selection by you as would be possible would only give a misleading impression. The concerns of Ward and Olivier were, of course, accurate. Keynes, who had been collecting Brooke’s letters himself, allowed Halliburton to see only a selected few.

With Halliburton’s death, no Brooke biography was published until 1948, when Arthur Stringer, using the materials Halliburton had been able to gather and conducting extensive research on his own, published Red Wine of Youth. However, the most interesting conclusions made by Stringer while writing his book—that Brooke was homosexual and had died from venereal disease—never appear in its pages. Stringer did make his opinions known to Brooke’s Canadian friend, Maurice Brown, who reported them to Keynes. Citing his friendship with Brooke and his medical training in qualifying himself to refute both points, Keynes wrote to Stringer that it was his hope Stringer would not allow your book to be even remotely coloured by the idea that Rupert was in any way abnormal (10 June 1947). But the idea of Brooke being homosexual was an increasingly touchy subject for Keynes. Robin Skelton soon added to Keynes’s concern by writing to him that my generation and all succeeding generations will continue to regard Rupert as a plaster-cast Apollo with homosexual tendencies (4 Dec. 1955). Keynes, working on his collection of Brooke letters at the time, wrote to Cathleen Nesbitt, The letters should effectively dispose of the widespread belief (particularly, I believe, in America) that Rupert was ‘queer’ (14 Jan. 1956). Given that hope, Keynes must have been dismayed when Julian Jebb’s review of the collected letters in The Times asked the question outright: Was he a suppressed homosexual or a narcissist or impotent? Or did he really have a very successful sex life, but no love life? The combination of guilt, affectation, emotional demands and condescension which fills his letters to Katherine and Cathleen only obscure the truth. Shane Leslie added to Keynes’ frustration by reporting that At one time Brooke’s false reputation was such that Fellows of Kings were doubtful of making him a Fellow (8 Aug. 1968), a particularly interesting comment since it suggests that during his years at Kings College, Cambridge, authorities thought of Brooke as excessively homosexual. Mere homosexuality would hardly have raised eyebrows in a college whose fellows seem to have been predominantly homosexual at the time.

But it was Timothy Rogers’ review in English that distressed Keynes the most. Rogers said the publication was an example of much that has gone amiss in the Brooke story: the evasiveness, the resistance to inquiry, in a word the possessiveness (80) and faulted Keynes for not including the more controversial letters (83).

The main problem with Keynes’s The Letters of Rupert Brooke and with the biographies written by Christopher Hassall, Robert Brainard Pearsall, John Frayn Turner, William E. Laskowski, and even Timothy Rogers, is censorship. Each writer is very selective in what he presents, apparently not wanting to destroy the Brooke image. Hassall’s biography was meant to be definitive, but it is too much concerned with the trivial and too little concerned with the controversial to be a true accounting. Another biographer, Paul Delany, says the essential flaw of Hassall’s work was that it had to please Sir Geoffrey [Keynes], which meant that it gave a fundamentally distorted and incomplete view of Rupert (xv). For his part, Keynes insisted that Hassall’s life of Brooke and his own collection of letters "served to discredit the Rupert Brooke legend and to establish