Fatal Glamour (13 page)

Sorting out ancient British muddles was meat and drink to the Webbs. They wanted to replace the local Boards of Guardians with a national system of boards to provide health care, pensions, and relief. But the central issue was what to do with the able-bodied unemployed, and here the Webbs could not break with deterrence. They viewed poverty as a social disease that needed to be quarantined, then treated. Whether the poor wanted to be treated was irrelevant. The state should operate like the Salvation Army, indoctrinating the people it helped and dividing them into grades. “It is essential,” Sidney Webb wrote, “that the [unemployed] should be always moving up
or
down, by promotion or degradation.”
²³

Meanwhile the Liberal chancellor of the exchequer, Lloyd George, was incubating a comprehensive scheme of state unemployment insurance. For Beatrice, this had “the fatal defect that the state got nothing for its money – that the persons felt they had a right to the allowance whatever their conduct . . . That is, of course, under the present conditions of human will, sheer madness, whatever it may be in good times to come.”
²⁴
Rupert signed up for the Webbs' campaign, but in fact his views on unemployment relief sounded more like Lloyd George:

When we are in trouble or danger from other people, we throw ourselves on the State in the shape of the policeman or the law court. This “loss of independence” does not weaken the character; it leaves men free to use their energies more profitably. For a working-man to spend his time in unaided, individual encounters with thieves, disease, and the devil of unemployment, certainly may (if he is always victorious) foster and widen his sense of personal responsibility and self-reliance, but it is still more certainly a
ridiculous and sentimental waste of time and trouble
 . . . It is not possible, as Society is organised, for every man to get work.
²⁵

Rupert's and Dudley's decision to tour the southern countryside, rather than the industrial North, showed their roots as Simple Lifers and devotees of Olde England. Their choice of a caravan followed the example of the gypsy artist Augustus John rather than the Webbs, who insisted on bourgeois amenities and efficient working conditions. There was no reason, except nostalgia, to travel by horsepower instead of by train or bicycle. Starting near Winchester, Rupert and Dudley went southwest through the New Forest as far as Corfe and then came back, speaking on village greens and street corners as they went. At Wareham it came on to rain and their cat was run over by a car, so they retreated to a hotel for beds and a lobster tea. No doubt the rustics of Wessex were bemused to be told about poverty by two fresh-faced young men from Cambridge, but it took determination and moral courage to stick at it for twelve days, and few of Rupert's other friends would have been able or willing to do as much in a good cause.

Jacques Raverat, for example, was taken along to a Fabian dinner by Dudley Ward and Margery Olivier and detested everything about it: “What beasts! What swine they are! Long before midnight Keeling and
[R.H.] Mottram and three or four others were as drunk as lords and much more loathsome. It would be difficult to imagine any sight more revolting, more pitiably mean, tawdry, contemptible and joyless . . . I went home, treading on air, never before so conscious of the bestiality of men, and my immeasurable pride.” Nonetheless, Jacques spent a week canvassing in Walworth for the Liberal candidate in the January 1910 general election, and was surprised to find how well he could do it. “The enthusiasm was quite spurious,” he told Ka Cox, “and I'm afraid I haven't any political sense after all: I remain quite impartial and aloof, really, thinking how foolish all this turmoil and how vain, and how much misspent these energies. I think my democratic principles are purely intellectual; and my instincts – well, the less said about
them
the better.”
²⁶
Jacques's instincts, and Justin's too, were shaped by having rich fathers. They wanted to claim their independence, but by way of bohemia rather than political activism. Ka Cox spent much of her life on good causes, but mostly in a more traditionally feminine style of nurture, nursing the sick or aiding refugees during the war. Of the Olivier sisters, only Margery showed much political sense. Having been brought up on Fabianism from the nursery, they looked elsewhere to find their adult identities.

Even Rupert had little relish for the political process itself. Working in the second 1910 election, he complained about the conflict he felt in being both a Fabian and a disciple of G.E. Moore: “It is not true that anger against injustice and wickedness and tyrannies is a good state of mind, ‘noble'. Oh, perhaps it is with some, if they're fine. But I guess with most, as with me, it's a dirty mean choky emotion. I
HATE
the upper classes.”
²⁷
Keeling was at this time the manager of one of the new Labour Exchanges, at Leeds. He had found the workaday world a letdown after Cambridge, and Rupert had to lecture him on his “pessimism”:

I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see . . . That is, when the mood is on me. I roam about places – yesterday I did it even in Birmingham! – and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet. I can watch a dirty middle-aged tradesman in a railway-carriage for hours, and love every dirty greasy sulky wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his spotted unclean waistcoat. I know their states of mind are bad.
But I'm so much occupied with their being there at all, that I don't have time to think of that.
²⁸

These moments of euphoria would have been viewed with suspicion by the Apostles, who held that a good state of mind was less valuable when it was experienced by an inferior person. At a gathering in January 1909 “Sheppard delivered an indictment on poor Rupert for admiring Mr. Wells and thinking truth beauty, beauty truth. Norton and Lytton took up the attack and even James and Gerald . . . stabbed him in the back. Finally Lytton, enraged at Rupert's defences, thoroughly lost his temper and delivered a violent personal attack.”
²⁹
Nonetheless, by using “states of mind” as a touchstone, Rupert was defining politics much more widely than the Webbs would have done. “Every action,” he wrote, “which leads on the whole to good, is
‘frightfully'
important . . . It is not a question of either getting to Utopia in the year 2,000 or not. There'll be so much good then, and so much evil. And we can affect it.”
³⁰
The key word here was “Every.” Why shouldn't private life contribute as much good, in the long run, as organising transport to the polls in a general election? A single-minded political commitment would require submission to large and menacing powers: first the Webbs, and behind them what Rupert called “Modern Industry.” Rupert had no intention of going to live in the gritty world of factories and workhouses. The North of England would remain for him what it was for most people of his kind: what you passed through on your way to the Lake District or the Highlands.

Rupert devoted a great deal of youthful energy to politics, but very much on his own terms. Did Virginia Woolf make any sense, then, when she imagined that Rupert, if he had lived, might have become prime minister? One war veteran did become the youngest member of Parliament in the December 1918 election, at the age of twenty-two. He had served in the trenches, and was handsome, aristocratic, and a spellbinding orator. This was Oswald Mosley, elected as a Conservative in Harrow. He soon became a Fabian and from 1924 made his career in the Labour Party. Dissatisfied with Labour's failure to cope with unemployment, Mosley left to found the neo-fascist New Party in 1931. His model was Mussolini, another veteran of the trenches and former socialist.

Might Rupert have followed Mosley's path rather than, say, Hugh Dalton's? In 1913 he had seen New Zealand's model welfare state, and
realised that it was still a far from ideal society. He held to his Fabian views, but when he returned to England much of his social life was spent with aristocrats and Liberal politicians. The foundation stones of Rupert's political identity had become militarism, nationalism, anti-feminism, and anti-Semitism. Fascism, whether of the Italian or German variety, has been called “the socialism of the soldier.”
³¹
Mosley was not able to rally a mass following in Britain, but lack of popularity has rarely given pause to political fanatics. If Rupert had joined the British Union of Fascists in 1934, it would have been quite consistent with his views in 1914. But what he might have become, or how Britain might have changed if it had not lost the generation of 1914–18, no one now can say.

At Andermatt, Christmas 1907, Brynhild Olivier had introduced Rupert to the pleasures of flirting with a woman. Before that his only objects of desire had been boys, and “giggling females” were to be avoided if possible.
¹
For the remaining seven years of his life, Rupert was almost always in love or in lust with a woman, sometimes with several at once. Yet what happened to him at Andermatt was not a classic conversion experience, where someone discards an old self and is reborn as an entirely different person. Rupert continued to feel desire for men, and to respond when they showed desire for him. When Jacques Raverat and Gwen Darwin got married, he commented that “Gwen's the only woman in England, and Jacques almost the only man, I've never lusted for.”
²
He did not feel obliged to choose between an exclusively gay or straight identity. It would be presumptuous for a biographer to choose for him, by saying that he was “really” or “fundamentally” one or the other.

Rupert may have had a fluid sense of gender, but straight and gay desires played out in two quite different social arenas, each with its own rules. Relations with well-brought-up English girls were governed by strict propriety, and by the constant fear of an undesired pregnancy. The gay world, on the other hand, was clandestine and anarchic, with few inhibitions about asking for sex, or agreeing to it. If Rupert remained coy and rejected most of the men who desired him, it was because he did not have an anarchic temperament. The letters he exchanged with James Strachey spoke freely about gay intrigues and sentiments, yet Rupert always denied the sexual union that James longed for so abjectly. Still,
Rupert was entirely at home in the gay world of Cambridge; he required only that it be kept hidden from the realm of respectable heterosexuality.

One of Rupert's gay inclinations was his need to be taken under the wing of an admiring older man. When he arrived at King's in October 1906 his rooms were across the hall from a famous local character, the snobbish aesthete and Apostle Oscar Browning. Dismissed from Eton on suspicion of moral turpitude, Browning had returned to be a fellow of King's, where he had been an undergraduate. But his fin-de-siècle affectations were too much for Rupert to take, so instead he found a replacement for St John Lucas in Charles Sayle, who wrote Uranian poems and novels and worked at the university library.
³
Sayle had gone to Rugby, where he had had a sentimental friendship with J.H. Badley (the future headmaster of Bedales). He went on to Oxford, but was sent down for some kind of sexual misconduct. Small, fussy, and spinsterish, his nickname was “Aunt Snayle.” Bertrand Russell called him “a well known ass.” Now forty-two, he had a little house at 8 Trumpington Street where he entertained a stream of students and fell tremulously in love with the prettiest ones. “I do not know if these undergraduates love me,” he wrote in his diary, “but I know that they love me to love them!”
⁴
He was also a pedophile, swooning over working-class boys whom he called “Angels of Earth.”

During his first two years at Cambridge, Rupert was a constant visitor to Sayle's house, sometimes staying overnight. Geoffrey Keynes and the climber George Mallory were often there with him. Their intimacy was of a kind that has long vanished, and today it appears both touching and preposterous. As with St John Lucas, Rupert was drawn to an older man who could give him domestic tenderness and sympathy. He must have known that Sayle was infatuated with him, but almost certainly there was no sexual contact between them. In later years Rupert kept quiet about the friendship with Sayle, realising how pathetic his way of life might appear to an outsider. Sayle had no such second thoughts. “I do not know in what language to moderate my appreciation of this great man,” he wrote in his diary, “great in his ideals, great in his imagination, great in his charm. The world will learn to know him later on. It has been mine to know him now.”
⁵
Before dismissing this as mere gush, we should remember that it was exactly how most of Britain would judge Rupert in his posthumous heyday.

An invitation to Trumpington Street was not hard to come by. The “Cambridge Conversazione Society” or “The Apostles” was far more exclusive, but in both cases long blond hair and a pretty face made it easier to gain admission. When Rupert was infatuated at school with Michael Sadler or Charlie Lascelles, he was older than them and the one who set the terms of the relationship. With the Society, Rupert was in the junior position. He was now the object of desire, and had to decide if he wanted to satisfy the passion that he aroused in older or less physically attractive men. He set a pattern of toying with his suitors' emotions but never responding with equal love or desire. The one who most persistently and most vainly desired him was his Hillbrow schoolmate James Strachey. James had not gone on to Rugby but to St Paul's School in London, first as a boarder and then as a day boy. He renewed a correspondence with Rupert in the summer of 1905, when James was preparing to enter Trinity College. They were the same age, but James went to university a year before Rupert. In September Rupert accepted an invitation to visit the Strachey family at a house they had rented, Great Oakley Hall, near Kettering. “I wasn't particularly impressed,” Lytton reported to J.M. Keynes. “His appearance is pleasant – mainly, I think, owing to youth . . . He's damned literary, rather too serious and conscientious, and devoid of finesse.” Duncan Grant was given a more positive account: “He has rather nice – but you know –yellow-ochre-ish hair, and a healthy young complexion. I took him out for a walk round the Park this morning, and he talked about Poetry and Public Schools as decently as could be expected.”
⁶
When Rupert went to King's in December to write his scholarship exams he travelled with Geoffrey Keynes and stayed at the Keynes home on Harvey Road. He met J.T. Sheppard, already a fellow of King's and an Apostle, and the mathematician H.T.J. (Harry) Norton, who was at Trinity, and would be elected to the Society in January.