Beauty keeps a foothold

Invincible Strangers 22 Chapter 9

When 26-year-old Rupert Brooke arrived in Sāmoa in 1913, he was a literary sensation. Irish luminary William Yeats called him ‘the handsomest young man in England’.

‘I want to walk a thousand miles, and write a thousand plays, and sing a thousand poems, and drink a thousand pots of beer, and kiss a thousand girls,’ Brooke wrote as he left England for the South Seas, ‘– oh, a million things.’

Rupert Brooke portrait by Sherrill Schell, 1913

Arriving in Pago Pago he heard a suffragist woman exclaim ‘look at those niggers, whose are they?’ Letters home hinted at a grand sex and love adventure. Brooke was taken by the physicality of Polynesians: ‘A white man living with them soon feels his mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those glorious golden-brown bodies.’ He marvelled at his accommodation: ‘I lived in a Sāmoan house (the coolest in the world) with a man and his wife, nine children, ranging from a proud beauty of 18 to a round object of 1 year, a dog, a cat, a proud hysterical hen, and a gaudy scarlet and green parrot, who roved the roof and beams with a wicked eye; choosing a place whence to ---, twice a day, with humorous precision, on my hat and clothes.