"Doesn't it occur to you that I could be ludicrously flippant & hideously serious & sincere in both"
Ah how the thought of a Conservative government upsets me.
I really hope my minute faith in mankind is rewarded by and people thwart the bunch of cunts, but somehow faith has only ever led to disappointment for me.
It's just that David Cameron is as vile as vile can be.
:(
Lol Rupert Brooke is too fucking ridiculous to take.
I've just spent a glorious afternoon in the sun reading the book of Strachey letters. I became by turns revolted and then deeply amused at the determined way Brooke's end of the communication, breaks down into immature attempts to sting people in revenge for their affection. He hated himself such a lot that he felt he had to punish anyone with a high opinion of him in the end. I mean his attempts to wound were never terribly acute, when taken alongside his customary habit of mellowing out and being equally as affectionate the next minute as he was spiteful to someone, but still.
He does seem to have been hateful.
When writing to Strachey, who as I've discussed was in love with him in a determinedly sexual sense, (despite his own attempts to downplay his own lust what with constant sarcastic talk of rape) It is his hatred of his own tendency towards homosexuality that comes to the fore and in the end he fills his letters with homophobic taunts in Strachey's direction.
It's so disturbing how his attitudes on the topic seem to shift and how it shows his mental health explicitly breaking down. It's like Lord Alfred Douglas in miniature.
For at first Brooke seems to delight in homosexuality. Not only is he candid regarding it, gloating before James about the men who have formed some attraction to him (such as the university man, who adored him so much that he apparently bought a picture of him from someone, which he used to keep under his pillow) and those who he has formed a physical attraction to, but there is constant reference to these exchanges being explicitly sexual, in a way that usually seems the product of Brooke's lusty over imagination.
"Mr D'Acucaste nods opposite. He has followed me like a dog, ever since he got over the shock of those first few minutes when, entering late and finding me in my bed, my hair only visible, he thought he'd got into the lady's quarters.
Charming, sterling fellow. He brushed my forehead lightly with his dreamy brown mustache once, and twice, and then skipped along to the upper birth (sic). Uninterestedly and with a brown bag he spent those throbbing dreadful hours in abusing himself. Lucky fellow."
You know, as opposed to abusing him, as Rupert would have rather. Lol he so wants to be bummed.
All this almost flirtatious, taunting, flaunting of some level of homosexual availiability to men other than James who could only impotently desire him, culminates in a rather long and in the end rather poignant description of how he had lost his virginity to a man. Aged 20, Brooke tells Strachey, he had invited a former schoolfriend, Denham Russell-Smith, for whom he had always harboured a loose infatuation and who he hadn't seen in a long time, to come visit him, and then seduced the young man.
"I found him asleep in front of the fire, at 1:45. I took him to his bed - he was very like a child when he was sleepy - and lay down upon it. We hugged, and my fingers wandered a little. His skin was always so smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my own room: and lay in bed thinking...I decided almost consciously, I would put the thing through the next night. You see, I didn't at all know how he would take it. But I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like."
The letter describes the following encounter in it's entireity, and it's sad because Brooke is clearly trying to pretend as if he didn't care about the guy and reveals at the end of it, that he'd just found out that this person had died of blood poisoning - (which was the very thing that Brooke himself was later to expire of).
From here though the letters really begin to turn sour from his end and although his attitude toward James brightens and he is far more affectionate towards him.
"Write dear. I'm so sorry I'm so meagre and grey in trying to mitigate your loneliness. I should so like to - if indulging in your necrophilistic (earlier in the letter Brooke has described himself as dead) leaning would do it. What can I do? I feel...as though I could support you through anything and love you through most things. But I daresay I'm as useless to other people as I am to myself. Schade (sorry). Oh, I love you alright, if that's anything. -On the diminished scale, you know: but that's the scale's fault.'''
Lol amusing how offering to have sex with someone is what passes as affection from Brooke.
His letters have already by this time though become increasingly punctuated with instances of spite and misogyny. An early indicator of his mental illness and breakdown and his subsequent swing towards the sexism and conservatism that he so abhored in his youth.
"'Two of the others are in the carriage now - the skirty lower ones. They bend their bodies and souls in vague meek inferiority....Oh!Oh! I am touched almost to tears for them: because they never quite know whats up. Women aren't quite animals, alas! They have twilight souls, like a cat behind a hedge...But how dreadful that the whole world's a cunt for one."'
More than once he writes James letters pretending to be one of their female friends, using the opportunity to unleash spite about the person he is imitating. Or writes about the affectionate letters they have sent him with disgust and disapproval of them for what he considers their feminine weakness and inanity. He is immature and dickish and takes great delight in writing women he has met, romantic, letters of affection and proposal, to then laugh at them for taking him seriously.
There is really something of the idiotically juvenile, EURGH GIRLS ARE ICKY vibe to his dismissal of them.
....
This sexist bent to his expression is sparked off partly by the fact I think, that James, a great feminist, is also becoming interested in sex with women and thus writes to him informing him that he is less in love with him than he was. But he was mainly stirred this way by his emotional entanglement with one of his friends, Katherine "Ka" Cox.
Brooke, much like Strachey, had a tendency to enjoy unrequited love. That is to say that he pursued only the most elusive of people and was a mixture of turned off and even disgusted whenever a target of his, responded to his desire.
Ka and Brooke had a long history of apparently friendly affection - kept so by Brooke, for it seems that Ka was captivated by him. Then she decided to hook up with someone else, which caused Brooke to irrationally attack her, calling her a traitor and a whore. He then did an unthinkably erratic and peculiar thing and proposed to her.
In the depths of sado-masochism and the patriachy this somehow forced Ka's arm and as she believed that Brooke had affection for her.
Not only did she accept to marry him, but they also had sex.
Of course this led Brooke to desert her not long after, then to write letters to several people including James, expressing disgust for her character, her body, everything. Then when she continued the relationship that Booke's come on had interrupted, he appeared fantastically hurt and resumed his abuse of her in letters.
Horribly the poor woman was still trading letters with him when he died.
It's so horrible how intensely abusive he was to her.
James Strachey was as much a friend of Ka's as Rupert was, and upset with him for how he treated her and chided him for it in person - although I somehow doubt it was extensive. Which led Rupert to unleash a furious letter, the gist of which seems to be, that James wouldn't understand the deep rightness of his decision to abuse Ka because he is a "bugger".
"Listen. Men and women neither "copulate" nor want to "copulate": men have women: women are had by men.
Listen. There is between men and women, sometimes a thing called love: unknown to you. It has it's laws and demands. It can be defiled: poisoned and killed.
...I have loved Ka: I love her still in a way: I know what she's like...You find her as useful as a sleeping-draught: you have a dim little facitious respect for her as an impossible sexless thing and on those feelings you have the impudence to... base disapproval of me?"
Basically I think he is suggesting that it's manly to totally wreck the life of the woman who cares the most about you in the world, under the guise of caring about her, because that is what one does with women when one is a man. Especially when one is a v v v v v heterosexual manly man who knows tons about wimmin like Rupert Brooke, therefore how could a bugger like Strachey have the audacity to question him?
???
Seriously, I didn't know whether to remain angy at the stupid or just to lol at it's scarce logic. I did both. It's a litle too demented to take seriously, for him to rant about how men and women when you've just read a book where it seems he has just about avoided almost every legitimate relationship with a woman and almost every piece of sex with them that he was offered too.
Batshit insane.
From here on the sentiment never veers from it's course. He remains markedly homophobic towards James, irrationally blaming his gay brother Lytton for Ka's marriage to someone else, eventually severing all ties with him and denouncing him to all their friends.
"(I)"Try to hurt you" (you say) - I'd like to hurt anybody with the ideas you have. There is a fault in me: but my disapproval of (your sexuality), isn't."
Which just left me incredulous, because at the same time as this, although he was apparently going through the motions of these very literary, overly romanticised and very much platonic/not actually serious or physical, romances with various women, he was at the same time desperately trying to contact Charlie Lascelles, another person, like Denham Russell-Smith, who he'd been to school with and been desperately in love with.
Now given that the last time he did that he ended up shagging the person in question, forgive me for not really thinking he was just trying to contact Charlie (who he never did manage to see) to talk about old times. Instead it seems to me like he was playacting all the while at being a very heterosexual manly, man, (because if you alienate anyone who knows otherwise then who will question you) and yet all the while trying to arrange someone male to fuck.
The sheer immense swell of the hypocrisy.
...
It's like insanity.
A lot like insanity.
Also a lot like being a cunt of course but a lolarious cunt. Reflective of a lot of very problematic issues around the patriachy and what it does to men who feel themselves to be effeminate - as Brooke seems to have done.
Lol and then, after a period of time where they didn't talk, he starts to wade in on Ka Cox about James, along the whole line of.
I LOVED JAMES RATHER A LOT YOU KNOW, IT HURTS ME THAT HE'S TOO MUCH OF A BUGGER FOR ME TO EVER SEE AGAIN, BUT HE DOESN'T MISS ME, BECAUSE HE'S FAR TOO MUCH OF A BUGGER AND THEY ARE ALL SHALLOW AND INCAPABLE OF BEING SERIOUS ABOUT THINGS.
"He's far too trivial to be upset by anything ever."
Hahahah Brooke you old classic.
Because you see, in many ways, his deciding to turn on his oldest friend, hurt him most of all.
Rite? Rite?
...???
Still at least I'm not sad that Brooke died so young anymore.
He deserved it and very much sought it, apparently.
I think the best thing I can say about him is that at least I believe that he always found himself utterly revolting.
I really hope my minute faith in mankind is rewarded by and people thwart the bunch of cunts, but somehow faith has only ever led to disappointment for me.
It's just that David Cameron is as vile as vile can be.
:(
Lol Rupert Brooke is too fucking ridiculous to take.
I've just spent a glorious afternoon in the sun reading the book of Strachey letters. I became by turns revolted and then deeply amused at the determined way Brooke's end of the communication, breaks down into immature attempts to sting people in revenge for their affection. He hated himself such a lot that he felt he had to punish anyone with a high opinion of him in the end. I mean his attempts to wound were never terribly acute, when taken alongside his customary habit of mellowing out and being equally as affectionate the next minute as he was spiteful to someone, but still.
He does seem to have been hateful.
When writing to Strachey, who as I've discussed was in love with him in a determinedly sexual sense, (despite his own attempts to downplay his own lust what with constant sarcastic talk of rape) It is his hatred of his own tendency towards homosexuality that comes to the fore and in the end he fills his letters with homophobic taunts in Strachey's direction.
It's so disturbing how his attitudes on the topic seem to shift and how it shows his mental health explicitly breaking down. It's like Lord Alfred Douglas in miniature.
For at first Brooke seems to delight in homosexuality. Not only is he candid regarding it, gloating before James about the men who have formed some attraction to him (such as the university man, who adored him so much that he apparently bought a picture of him from someone, which he used to keep under his pillow) and those who he has formed a physical attraction to, but there is constant reference to these exchanges being explicitly sexual, in a way that usually seems the product of Brooke's lusty over imagination.
"Mr D'Acucaste nods opposite. He has followed me like a dog, ever since he got over the shock of those first few minutes when, entering late and finding me in my bed, my hair only visible, he thought he'd got into the lady's quarters.
Charming, sterling fellow. He brushed my forehead lightly with his dreamy brown mustache once, and twice, and then skipped along to the upper birth (sic). Uninterestedly and with a brown bag he spent those throbbing dreadful hours in abusing himself. Lucky fellow."
You know, as opposed to abusing him, as Rupert would have rather. Lol he so wants to be bummed.
All this almost flirtatious, taunting, flaunting of some level of homosexual availiability to men other than James who could only impotently desire him, culminates in a rather long and in the end rather poignant description of how he had lost his virginity to a man. Aged 20, Brooke tells Strachey, he had invited a former schoolfriend, Denham Russell-Smith, for whom he had always harboured a loose infatuation and who he hadn't seen in a long time, to come visit him, and then seduced the young man.
"I found him asleep in front of the fire, at 1:45. I took him to his bed - he was very like a child when he was sleepy - and lay down upon it. We hugged, and my fingers wandered a little. His skin was always so smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my own room: and lay in bed thinking...I decided almost consciously, I would put the thing through the next night. You see, I didn't at all know how he would take it. But I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like."
The letter describes the following encounter in it's entireity, and it's sad because Brooke is clearly trying to pretend as if he didn't care about the guy and reveals at the end of it, that he'd just found out that this person had died of blood poisoning - (which was the very thing that Brooke himself was later to expire of).
From here though the letters really begin to turn sour from his end and although his attitude toward James brightens and he is far more affectionate towards him.
"Write dear. I'm so sorry I'm so meagre and grey in trying to mitigate your loneliness. I should so like to - if indulging in your necrophilistic (earlier in the letter Brooke has described himself as dead) leaning would do it. What can I do? I feel...as though I could support you through anything and love you through most things. But I daresay I'm as useless to other people as I am to myself. Schade (sorry). Oh, I love you alright, if that's anything. -On the diminished scale, you know: but that's the scale's fault.'''
Lol amusing how offering to have sex with someone is what passes as affection from Brooke.
His letters have already by this time though become increasingly punctuated with instances of spite and misogyny. An early indicator of his mental illness and breakdown and his subsequent swing towards the sexism and conservatism that he so abhored in his youth.
"'Two of the others are in the carriage now - the skirty lower ones. They bend their bodies and souls in vague meek inferiority....Oh!Oh! I am touched almost to tears for them: because they never quite know whats up. Women aren't quite animals, alas! They have twilight souls, like a cat behind a hedge...But how dreadful that the whole world's a cunt for one."'
More than once he writes James letters pretending to be one of their female friends, using the opportunity to unleash spite about the person he is imitating. Or writes about the affectionate letters they have sent him with disgust and disapproval of them for what he considers their feminine weakness and inanity. He is immature and dickish and takes great delight in writing women he has met, romantic, letters of affection and proposal, to then laugh at them for taking him seriously.
There is really something of the idiotically juvenile, EURGH GIRLS ARE ICKY vibe to his dismissal of them.
....
This sexist bent to his expression is sparked off partly by the fact I think, that James, a great feminist, is also becoming interested in sex with women and thus writes to him informing him that he is less in love with him than he was. But he was mainly stirred this way by his emotional entanglement with one of his friends, Katherine "Ka" Cox.
Brooke, much like Strachey, had a tendency to enjoy unrequited love. That is to say that he pursued only the most elusive of people and was a mixture of turned off and even disgusted whenever a target of his, responded to his desire.
Ka and Brooke had a long history of apparently friendly affection - kept so by Brooke, for it seems that Ka was captivated by him. Then she decided to hook up with someone else, which caused Brooke to irrationally attack her, calling her a traitor and a whore. He then did an unthinkably erratic and peculiar thing and proposed to her.
In the depths of sado-masochism and the patriachy this somehow forced Ka's arm and as she believed that Brooke had affection for her.
Not only did she accept to marry him, but they also had sex.
Of course this led Brooke to desert her not long after, then to write letters to several people including James, expressing disgust for her character, her body, everything. Then when she continued the relationship that Booke's come on had interrupted, he appeared fantastically hurt and resumed his abuse of her in letters.
Horribly the poor woman was still trading letters with him when he died.
It's so horrible how intensely abusive he was to her.
James Strachey was as much a friend of Ka's as Rupert was, and upset with him for how he treated her and chided him for it in person - although I somehow doubt it was extensive. Which led Rupert to unleash a furious letter, the gist of which seems to be, that James wouldn't understand the deep rightness of his decision to abuse Ka because he is a "bugger".
"Listen. Men and women neither "copulate" nor want to "copulate": men have women: women are had by men.
Listen. There is between men and women, sometimes a thing called love: unknown to you. It has it's laws and demands. It can be defiled: poisoned and killed.
...I have loved Ka: I love her still in a way: I know what she's like...You find her as useful as a sleeping-draught: you have a dim little facitious respect for her as an impossible sexless thing and on those feelings you have the impudence to... base disapproval of me?"
Basically I think he is suggesting that it's manly to totally wreck the life of the woman who cares the most about you in the world, under the guise of caring about her, because that is what one does with women when one is a man. Especially when one is a v v v v v heterosexual manly man who knows tons about wimmin like Rupert Brooke, therefore how could a bugger like Strachey have the audacity to question him?
???
Seriously, I didn't know whether to remain angy at the stupid or just to lol at it's scarce logic. I did both. It's a litle too demented to take seriously, for him to rant about how men and women when you've just read a book where it seems he has just about avoided almost every legitimate relationship with a woman and almost every piece of sex with them that he was offered too.
Batshit insane.
From here on the sentiment never veers from it's course. He remains markedly homophobic towards James, irrationally blaming his gay brother Lytton for Ka's marriage to someone else, eventually severing all ties with him and denouncing him to all their friends.
"(I)"Try to hurt you" (you say) - I'd like to hurt anybody with the ideas you have. There is a fault in me: but my disapproval of (your sexuality), isn't."
Which just left me incredulous, because at the same time as this, although he was apparently going through the motions of these very literary, overly romanticised and very much platonic/not actually serious or physical, romances with various women, he was at the same time desperately trying to contact Charlie Lascelles, another person, like Denham Russell-Smith, who he'd been to school with and been desperately in love with.
Now given that the last time he did that he ended up shagging the person in question, forgive me for not really thinking he was just trying to contact Charlie (who he never did manage to see) to talk about old times. Instead it seems to me like he was playacting all the while at being a very heterosexual manly, man, (because if you alienate anyone who knows otherwise then who will question you) and yet all the while trying to arrange someone male to fuck.
The sheer immense swell of the hypocrisy.
...
It's like insanity.
A lot like insanity.
Also a lot like being a cunt of course but a lolarious cunt. Reflective of a lot of very problematic issues around the patriachy and what it does to men who feel themselves to be effeminate - as Brooke seems to have done.
Lol and then, after a period of time where they didn't talk, he starts to wade in on Ka Cox about James, along the whole line of.
I LOVED JAMES RATHER A LOT YOU KNOW, IT HURTS ME THAT HE'S TOO MUCH OF A BUGGER FOR ME TO EVER SEE AGAIN, BUT HE DOESN'T MISS ME, BECAUSE HE'S FAR TOO MUCH OF A BUGGER AND THEY ARE ALL SHALLOW AND INCAPABLE OF BEING SERIOUS ABOUT THINGS.
"He's far too trivial to be upset by anything ever."
Hahahah Brooke you old classic.
Because you see, in many ways, his deciding to turn on his oldest friend, hurt him most of all.
Rite? Rite?
...???
Still at least I'm not sad that Brooke died so young anymore.
He deserved it and very much sought it, apparently.
I think the best thing I can say about him is that at least I believe that he always found himself utterly revolting.