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This book of letters records a moving love story. Rupert Brooke and James Strachey first met as boys of ten at Hillbrow School. Brooke was the son of a housemaster at Rugby, while Strachey was a member of one of England's most illustrious literary families. Strachey's older brother Lytton became a leading figure in the Bloomsbury group. Both Brooke, who attended King's College, and Strachey, a member of Trinity College, were elected to Cambridge's famous society called the “Apostles.” I can still remember my shock at discovering that the Apostles, described so eloquently in moral and intellectual terms in one of the volumes of Leonard Woolfs autobiography, were programmatically homosexual. Brooke and Strachey were eighteen years old when they renewed their acquaintance at Cambridge, which marks the beginning of this collection of letters. Shortly after Strachey's death in 1967, his wife Alix sold the correspondence to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
Brooke, who died of blood poisoning in 1915 on his way to fight for the British at Gallipoli, is known mainly for his patriotic poetry. I would have called him a minor poet except for a talk Brooke gave in 1906: “People who speak disparagingly of minor poetry are either stockbrokers and lawyers and rich practical people who don't understand, or reviewers in the Press, who are always young men fresh from a university with souls so stuffed with intellectual pride that they might as lightly speak of minor roses or minor sunsets.” My central interest in the Brooke-Strachey letters was elicited because Strachey became Freud's main translator into English; Freud had picked him as one of his translators during the time when Freud was analyzing both James and Alix Strachey in Vienna following their marriage in 1920. One reliable-sounding story I heard from Geoffrey Gorer attributed the marriage to the way it improved the Stracheys' chance of getting a visa to Austria after World War I. Following World War II,