Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: 'Song of Love': First-class letters Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 20:06:09 EST Message-ID: \SE B;BOOKS \HD 'Song of Love': First-class letters \BY Priscilla Montgomery It is hard to reconcile Britain's reported economic woes over the last decade and a half with the existence of a cottage industry so healthy it could have funded one or two government programs at least. I refer of course to what one might call Bloomsbury, Unltd. - the spate of letters, diaries, reflections and belles lettres springing from the curiously influential social and intellectual group that included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and others. Just a casual glance through the pile of magazines and other reading material beside my evening easy chair reveals: one magazine article about how Vanessa Bell decorated her country home, how to get there and when the tours are; directions in a book on furniture painting on how one might emulate her style; and several newspaper and periodical reviews of this summer's PBS melodrama about Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West's marriage (or lack thereof). About the only thing I haven't run across is a Bloomsbury cookbook. (They don't seem to have been a bunch much fascinated by the delights of the table and cellar.) Pippa Harris' collection of her grandmother Noel Olivier's correspondence with the poet Rupert Brooke shouldn't be simply categorized or dismissed as part of this curious industry, though it is doubtful it would have been published if the circle of friends and lovers encountered - Stracheys, Keyneses, Stephenses - had included only Brooke as a subsequently celebrated personality. Brooke died near Gallipoli at 27 from complications of a mosquito bite (the kind of unromantic war wound that poets such as himself and Lord Byron seem rather unfairly to have to perish of). He had been catapulted to a measure of celebrity shortly before by the publication of his "1914" sonnets, and became something of a posthumous icon of the generation lost in the Great War. The letters collected in "Song of Love" were written between spring 1909 and late winter 1915, a few months before his death. Brooke, the son of a Rugby housemaster, and Noel Olivier, one of the four beautiful daughters of a former governor of Jamaica, met when her father addressed a meeting of the Cambridge Fabian society. They had other mutual interests as well - amateur theater, for example - and shared a number of mutual friends. Their early letters, written when she was still at school and he at Cambridge, are pleasant if unremarkable, striking mainly in his occasional attempt to play the urbane intellectual and her clear-eyed and candid responses. But they shortly become love letters in earnest, and the arduous arrangements for meetings and camping holidays in groups, the confessions and self-doubts of young lovers, are the stuff of which they're made. Rupert's and Noel's letters of courtship afford not only a glimpse of two intellectual, likable personalities, but insights into a way of living that has long vanished. First, and rather obviously, one is drawn to the loss in the richness of conversation generally, along with the loss of the habit of letter writing. And this may have been the last generation in which genuine innocence and youthfulness could last far past an age at which one could hope to be innocent today, accompanied by a level of education and intellectual exploration unusual in any era. (I do not mean here naivete, though it's sometimes present, and not sexual innocence, but an openness and lack of cynicism that was doomed in the trenches a few years later.) "Song of Love" is neither affected nor unaffecting. And the protagonists are likeable enough. There can't have been many flies on Brooke if he thought, as Miss Harris says, that Lytton Strachey embodied "all that was perverse and dangerous" about the Bloomsbury set and warned Noel to protect herself from its "intellectual windiness." Her combination of lively practicality with imagination makes it easy to believe that she became a medical eminence in later life as one of Britain's first female pediatricians. The problem with the book is that it is at the same time slight and private. For the Brooke scholar or Bloomsbury archivist, it may provide some useful information; as a piece of family history it's clearly of interest to its compiler, who has edited it lovingly if not stringently. But the exposure of the private conversation of two young people and the painful vicissitudes of their relationship, which finally resolved into loving friendship, is not in this case compensated for by uniqueness, great historical import or some sort of public "need to know." Perhaps Noel, who didn't allow access to the letters during her lifetime, didn't do so only because she wanted to spare pain to anyone who'd been spoken of unkindly, as the editor suggests. Perhaps she did so because, along with being among the last of the letter writers, she was among the last to understand the private. Priscilla Montgomery is a Washington writer and editor. ***** SONG OF LOVE: THE LETTERS OF RUPERT BROOKE AND NOEL OLIVIER Edited by Pippa Harris Crown, $22, 336 pages, illus. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM