Letters from the Duguay-Trouin
Welcome to the website and blog inspired by my new novel, Blue Death.
The title for this site is taken from the Duguay-Trouin: a French hospital ship made infamous for where the renowned English poet Rupert Brooke tragically met his end at the start of the first World War. I use the word ‘tragic’ here more in a literary sense…
…Succumbing to sepsis from an insect bite, the young lieutenant was laid to rest in the arid hills of a Greek island (Skyros) before he could ever reach the battlefields of Anatolia, where he and his companions had imagined — perhaps naïvely — the glory of re-living Homer’s Trojan siege. The irony of his tale strikes me as the type of story the great writers of Classical Tragedy might spin over a hero bound for immortality in legend but cut down too soon by an inane turn of fate. Brooke’s iconic and frequently quoted poem The Soldier seems to portend his destiny ominously…
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth, a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore…
I chose the ship’s name for the site because of what it represents for me in telling the novel's story. It’s also fitting because of the letter sent by Brooke to friends and family right before his demise, which chronicled his sad plight. Deeply conflicted, the man wrestled inwardly with what he seemed to believe was a wayward, lonely fate in life. Some have argued he was courting death on that mission, consumed by his struggles about love and sexual identity.
Rupert Brooke’s death and the fascinating character of his life drive the story behind Blue Death. It’s clear the handsome poet was infatuated with death long before the events that led to Gallipoli. Harriet Monroe explains in her published collection of his works…
“Brooke was in love with death long before the war; his poems are full of hunger and desire for death as a consummation and preservation of beauty (and youth)….”
Brooke’s Duguay-Trouin is one of twelve French warships that have carried that name through history (including a modern Barracuda-class submarine). All were named for Rene Duguay-Trouin — a Breton corsair and commander of the French Marine Royale. The vessel began military service in the later part of the 19th century delivering soldiers into battle as a transport ship. Her first refit following that original commission was into a training platform. Then, in 1900, she was hulked a second time into a hospital ship.
After seeing modest action in the opening days of World War I in the Atlantic, the refitted support ship was attached to the flotilla in which Rupert Brooke set out for the Aegean on his faithful last mission. That infamous campaign to push open the Dardanelles and seize Constantinople would end in the disaster of Gallipoli, where many of Brooke’s long-suffering companions — some hand-picked by Winston Churchill himself — met their ends as well. Brooke would never make it to the landing, however.
So, for me, through the Duguay-Trouin’s seemingly contradictory refits — from a warship delivering men into strife to a medical vessel conveying casualties home to safety — her radical shift in mission serves as a parallel metaphor for how our perspectives on war have evolved, too. This is a central theme of the novel.
Blue Death will confront readers with the emotional fallout of Brooke’s death for his companions, the brutal pith of the First World War, and the wake of the Spanish Flu (which, in many ways, is an extension of the conflict). The story chronicles the life of a young steward on the Dagauy-Trouin, Michel Sadlier, who encounters Brooke shortly before the poet succumbs to his illness. Their brief liaison propels the young porter on a personal odyssey into love, war, and pandemic. His tale is both a coming-of-age story and an exploration of sexual identity in the Edwardian era.
More is to follow about the novel as I take on a workshop in the coming year with the completed manuscript. This blog, however, explores the sundry themes that came to me while writing the novel — not all of which made it into the story. Writing Blue Death has churned up so many notions for me about where we have been over the past few years with COVID and where we are going in modern society — especially considering the Ukrainian crisis — that I needed an added venue to get it all out as I complete the work. Remarkably, these recent events have placed us all in a similar set of circumstances to the ones Rupert and his contemporaries faced.
Ultimately, however, Blue Death is about Michel’s journey taking ownership of what he names as his ‘effete’ identity: a term intentionally substituted for ‘queer.’ The idea may seem strange to us now, despite our challenges, but in that era contending with non-gender-conforming inclinations was its own kind of personal war of epic proportions. The language we currently use to speak about ourselves has a rich history to explore.
Looking back through this project, I see our world is so radically different now for gay men. Prison sentences and life-long scandals were the norm of that day. I am convinced the evidence points to that being one of Brooke’s challenges and why he took the path he did. I’m cautious in this effort, however, over using our contemporary language to describe the experience of men who loved men then. In fact, we know very little about the gay sub-culture of that time; criminal concerns over sexuality, unfortunately, discouraged the preservation of enormous amounts of queer literary material. Scholars are only piecing it together today.
Nevertheless, this work aims to explore how our two worlds — separated by a century now — hold many striking parallels despite the differences. Writing the novel has been a journey for me. And from it, I’m amazed by how the adage of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr remains true…
“The more things change, the more things stay the same.”
