The outing of Rupert Brooke; Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914. Edited by Keith Hale (Yale: pounds 19.95). Reviewed by Richard Edmonds.

"Outing" gay people seems regrettably to be the flavour of the month. But members of Parliament can take some comfort from the fact that they are not alone in this unpleasant social development.

This month, one of Britain's best loved war poets has also been given the "outing" treatment.

Rupert Brooke's homoerotic letters which he wrote to James Strachey, brother of the Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey, are notably affectionate and reflect the life of the times he was living in.

Brooke was a representative of both a social class and a carefree generation that was destroyed by the First World War.

These letters, beautifully presented here by Yale, were suppressed for 80 years after Brooke's death in order to sustain the pure image of the golden-haired icon of patriotic but doomed youth. The sexual side of Brooke is something his executors tried to suppress in order that the image most of us had always accepted should survive.

In one letter, the one most people will read avidly, Brooke writes of an attempted seduction of a young boy encountered at boarding school. Seduction was and is a rite of passage for so many boys in that closeted environment.

This young man was called Denham. There is a graphic description of the processes of what now would be called sexual assault.

But the point has to be made that the deflowering of virgins (of either sex) has its associated traumas for both parties and Brooke, in this instance, compares to heterosexual encounters of the same nature.

Brooke's world was sexually blurred. Strachey's brother, Lytton, was given to entering the bedrooms of young men in the dawn for reasons other than conversation.

And Duncan Grant - another member of the Bloomsbury Group - would have been welnown to Brooke. Grant also pursued male affairs although he lived with and loved Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister. And did not Woolf herself have a lesbian relationship w ith Vita Sackville West?

The bowdlerising that went on after Brooke's death in the war from blood poisoning (not combat fighting) knew no limits.

The old boy network quickly stepped up its defences to support his reputation. And when Geoffrey Keynes (who Brooke had known as a friend at Rugby School) published the "collected letters" - they were not collected at all - they were a travesty, since al l the Brooke-Strachey letters were zealously removed, along with any references to homosexual sex.

Presumably, Keynes thought that he alone could take the strain of these revelations but not the general public.

Therefore, these letters will be welcome by scholars since they complete the picture of the Brooke one had always suspected of being beautiful, talented and bisexual (since some of the letters concern affairs with women).

Brooke's most famous adventure in that direction was with the actress Cathleen Nesbit, who was once in Birmingham in the play, The Aspern Papers, when I met her at the Alexandra Theatre. She was old and she was not prepared to talk about Brooke.

But above all the letters, as one might expect in this elegant book, are wonderfully written, lucid, evocative of that golden time and also immensely emotional with views on many iconographic figures of the Brooke world including EM Forster, Virginia Woo l Bertrand Russell and many others.

On August 28, 1912 Brooke wrote to a woman friend Noel Olivier: "You are enabled, by years of careful practice to despise me... But I know what I am and can be like. I know how superb my body is and how great my bodily strength. I know that with my mind I can be the greatest poet and writer in England!"

Later, to Jacques Raverat, he wrote: "I approve of marriage ... for the world. But not for me - I'm too old . I know what things are good, friendship and work and conversation. And there is no man who has had such friends as I... their faces are beautifu l and I love them."

This romantic Brooke has come down the generations as the writer of magnificent poetry. If we are inhibited enough to judge him negatively on sexual grounds then many of us should look within our own hearts. "Use every man after his desserts," said Hamle t, "and who should 'scape whipping."

Amen to that.

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Author:	Edmondson, Richard
Publication:	The Birmingham Post (England)
Date:	Nov 28, 1998
Words:	712
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