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Пишет DK (![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} k_d_s)@ 2020-08-02 20:00:00 |
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| Настроение: |  sleepy |
| Entry tags: | kanada, lgbt, poesie, uk, wwi, wwii |
Poetry and pretence: the phoney Native American who fooled Bloomsbury set
Sassoon, the famous war poet, spent time in the same psychiatric hospital, Lennel House in Coldstream, Scotland, and promptly fell in love with Prewett. “He was extremely handsome, with these hot brown eyes … he looked like the Italian movie star Rudolph Valentino, and was also a talented poet,” says Porter.
Previously unpublished letters between Prewett and Sassoon, which hint at their sexual relationship and Sassoon’s passionate pursuit of Prewett, are analysed for the first time in the book, which is coming out in July next year. Other letters, from Woolf, war poet Robert Graves and the aristocrat Lady Ottoline Morrell, demonstrate how the British literary elite fetishised Prewett’s “primitive soul”.
After being taken to Garsington Manor, Morrell’s Oxfordshire home, by Sassoon and introduced to some of the Bloomsbury set, Prewett began “playing Native American” in earnest in 1919.
“He appeals to the primitivist ideas of everyone around him. He goes around topless on a horse, looking gorgeous and fulfilling all their fantasies of being a native indigenous person – and using that to get his poems published by Virginia Woolf. And he gets Sassoon and the Morrells to pay for him to go to Oxford to get a degree,” says Porter.
At the time, few members of the British upper classes had ever seen a Native American in the flesh. “He’s meeting the needs of the British elite, who were very into primitives of all sorts. And they believed in beauty, and he was gorgeous,” she adds.
Hearing the whine and crash
We hastened out
And found a few poor men
Lying about.
I put my hand in the breast
Of the first met.
His heart thumped, stopped, and I drew
My hand out wet.
Another, he seemed a boy,
Rolled in the mud
Screaming, "my legs, my legs,"
And he poured out his blood.
We bandaged the rest
And went in,
And started again at our cards
Where we had been.
