Fatal Glamour (14 page)

Rupert's debut in gay Cambridge aroused a curious mixture of rivalry and cooperation in those who pursued him. It was accepted by Lytton and other Apostles that James was most in love with Rupert, and therefore entitled to lobby the Society for his beloved's admission. But anyone in their little circle could also try their luck with the new beauty, and keep everyone else informed about progress. As soon as Rupert arrived at Cambridge in October 1906, Harry Norton put in his bid. “Of course the pose is pretty bad, damnably bad,” he reported to Lytton, “And Mr
Sadler is responsible for much . . . But on the other hand; he is quite, yes quite, unintelligent. Of course he is hopelessly wrong-headed; but he is willing and anxious to learn.” Willing to learn, yes, but not to go to bed with Harry: “He also thought one shouldn't commit sodomy ‘since in physical things we should obey the dictates of Nature.' And when I burst into tears and asked who Nature was, he replied ‘Well, Evolution or God.'” Norton had to be satisfied with ogling Rupert's appearance in
The Eumenides
in November: “Conjecture is already rife as to the state of his legs.”
⁷

The production of Aeschylus'
Eumenides
was directed by Justin Brooke. Rupert unfortunately suffered from stage fright, so Justin cast him as the Herald. All he had to do was stand downstage in a short skirt, look interesting, and say nothing. Eddie Marsh, private secretary to the young cabinet minister Winston Churchill, experienced the coup de foudre at his first sight of Rupert's “radiant, youthful figure.” A.C. Benson, an older fellow of Magdalen, made a note in his diary: “A herald made a pretty figure, spoilt by a glassy stare.” James Strachey, now at Trinity and able to renew his acquaintance with Rupert, left a note after the performance telling him how beautiful he looked. For his first year and a half at Cambridge, Rupert found himself in the role of the young and pretty boys that he had admired during his last two years at Rugby. If the role had come to him from outside, he was nonetheless happy to accept it. In a single evening he had become Cambridge's pin-up of the year, and he threw himself full tilt into the role of the gay and handsome ingénue. Even the eminent Newnham classicist Jane Harrison was drawn into the game, with a wry reference in a lecture to Rupert's
bon mot
that “Nobody over thirty is worth talking to.” So easily infatuating others, Rupert was in danger of becoming fatuous himself.

When James made him a declaration of love after the performance of the
Eumenides
, Rupert made it clear that he wanted nothing more than friendship – and probably not even that unless James could control his infatuation. But James went on pursuing him, getting as close as he dared, and then retreating when Rupert turned skittish. He followed Rupert into the Fabians, abandoning his former conservatism without a pang. But in the company of political enthusiasts like Ben Keeling, or of emancipated New Women like Ka Cox or Margery Olivier, James was bound to look pallid and peripheral. What use was it to be loyal and
intelligent when you had the personality and status of a schoolboy swot? If he wanted to shine in Rupert's eyes, he would have to get him on to his own ground and in a more intimate setting. The ideal way – the only way – to do this was to promote Rupert's election to the Apostles, of whom James had been a member since February of 1906.

The Society was founded in 1820 as an exclusive and idealistic circle of male friends. They referred to each other as “brothers,” and signed their letters “Yours fraternally.” Several Apostles of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eddie Marsh, G.L. Dickinson, J. McT. E. McTaggart, and G.E. Moore, were romantically drawn to their own sex, but they were shy of giving their feelings a physical expression, and might even have denied that they had such feelings at all. From 1901 to the beginning of the war, however, a majority of those elected were actively gay, and among these Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes were most influential in setting the Society's tone. Under their regime, talk about philosophy and the good life was combined with compulsive flirtation. Gradually, the “brothers” divided into two distinct types. Some – Lytton and James Strachey, Keynes, J.T. Sheppard – were intellectually and sexually on the prowl, often as a way of making up for feelings of physical inferiority. To be both clever and ugly was their uneasy fate. Then there were those whose ticket of entry was their boyish good looks and the passion they had inspired in someone from the first group: people like Arthur Hobhouse, Cecil Taylor, and Brooke himself. Whatever intellectual gifts they had, these were not the main reason they had been elected. Within a few years, the Society had been reorganised around the sexual couple.

Rupert became an Apostle on 25 January 1908. He owed his election mainly to James, who had to overcome heavy opposition from unnamed quarters. Three years earlier, Lytton Strachey and Keynes had pushed through the election of another yellow-haired public school hero, the Etonian Arthur Hobhouse. He had turned out to be a grave disappointment to them, both sexually and intellectually.
⁸
His sponsors probably feared that Rupert would be a pea from the same pod, but finally gave in to James's pleadings. Rupert held his own as an Apostle, however. For the Easter vacation of 1908 he was asked to join G.E. Moore's reading party at Market Lavington, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Since he scarcely knew Moore, this was a notable endorsement from the man whose
Principia Ethica
had made him the unchallenged intellectual
leader of the Society. Being invited to one of Moore's reading parties was the entry into an inner circle that included most of the Apostles who became members of “Bloomsbury.”

Reading parties were an old public school and Oxbridge tradition, and Rupert had already been on a few with his school friends. But the gathering at Market Lavington was in a different league altogether. Besides Moore there were Keynes, the poet Bob Trevelyan, the barrister C.P. Sanger, the economist Ralph Hawtrey, the critic Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton and James Strachey. For someone who had scraped through his preliminary classics exams with a shaky second the previous May, Rupert might seem to be in over his head. But his looks, good humour, and native wit pulled him through. “Rupert Brooke – isn't it a romantic name?” Lytton told Virginia Woolf, “– with pink cheeks and bright yellow hair – it sounds horrible, but it wasn't . . . I laughed enormously, and whenever I began to feel dull I could look at the yellow hair and pink cheeks of Rupert.”
⁹

In fact, Rupert's animal spirits were badly needed by the group at the Green Dragon Inn. Moore's philosophy fitted in cosily with the aesthetic interests of a few congenial souls, but it counted for very little in the world beyond Trinity and King's. Many of the Apostles gathered at Market Lavington had been struggling with arrested development, spinsterism, hypochondria, and inanition. In the egregious Saxon Sydney-Turner these traits had been raised to the level of a vocation, and James Strachey was an equally sad case. He was “a creature, not a man,” in Gwen Raverat's eyes, “and pitiable for all his brains. He would sit curled up on the sofa looking like a cat that is afraid of wetting its feet.”
¹⁰
“Excessive paleness is what I think worries me most,” Lytton had once confided to Leonard Woolf. “The Taupe [E.M. Forster] . . . saw this about me, and feeling that he himself verged upon the washed-out, shuddered.”
¹¹
One measure of the “paleness” of the 1908 reading party was that everyone there, except MacCarthy, either married late or not at all.

Rupert's history with the Apostles was largely a continuation of the public school culture that had formed his personality at Rugby. He had everything he needed to succeed in that world, but this also meant that there was little pressure on him to change his emotional habits, or to absorb the challenge of new and different experiences. Social life with his “brothers” was comfortable, and comforting. It was also sterile, in
providing no sustenance for Rupert's truest vocation, as a poet. Instead, he could only imitate, somewhat feebly, the vocabulary and the moral system imposed by G.E. Moore.

In becoming an Apostle, Brooke was also committing himself to having two separate sets of friends at Cambridge. One set would follow the Bedalian style of country living, theatricals, and an easy mingling of men and women. The other was exclusively male and devoted to gossip and philosophical speculation; it was also clandestine, which made it hard for Rupert's other friends to understand why he spent so much time with people they mistrusted, and why he disappeared every Saturday night during term. He had to divide his loyalties, and cunningly keep one life separate from the other. Though he became a loyal “brother,” he would never give himself wholeheartedly to the Society. He didn't mind catering to the Society's obsessive interest in the subject of “copulation” (as they called it). But Rupert flatly refused to become the lover of James, or of any other “brother” (with one possible exception).
¹²
On the other hand, he never minded being pursued by older Apostles, whereas women who pursued him were bound to be treated badly.

In April 1909 Rupert went to another of Moore's reading parties, at the Lizard, in Cornwall. It was freakishly warm, and Rupert spent the days swimming in the surf and lying on the beach to dry. His new pose of being a child of nature put James Strachey under a severe strain. “This afternoon,” he reported to Lytton, “for the first time in my life, I saw Rupert naked. Can't we imagine what you'ld say on such an occasion? . . . But I'm simply inadequate of course. So I say nothing, except that I didn't have an erection – which was fortunate?, as I was naked too. I thought him – if you'ld like to have a pendant – ‘absolutely beautiful.'”
¹³
Once again, James plucked up courage to invite Rupert to his bed (as he had done intermittently since 1906), and once again he was bluntly refused. Rupert preferred to spend his nights in trying to beat off Moore's relentless attacks on Fabianism. Moore was notoriously gifted and persistent at deflating other people's enthusiasms. He did not deflate Rupert, but his ascendancy over the Apostles at this time meant that Rupert would have to look elsewhere for friends who would share his political beliefs.

Rupert moved to Grantchester in July 1909, and his friends came to frolic with him in the river and under the apple boughs. But by October the light was fading and he began to suffer from lonely nights. A few months before, James Strachey had given up on the hope of Rupert going to bed with him, or with any other young man. “I found out something about him,” James told Duncan Grant, “which
did
make me despair. He's a
real
womaniser. And there can be no doubt that he
hates
the physical part of my feelings
instinctively
 . . . just as I should hate to be touched by a woman.”
¹⁴
James, however, was only half right. Rupert wanted to lose his virginity, but not through a surrender to some older, predatory Apostle. Nor, whatever his “womanising” instincts, could he expect Noel or any other young woman he knew to surrender to him. His solution was to invite Denham Russell-Smith to come and stay, for the weekend of 30 October. Rupert had been closer friends with Denham's older brother Hugh, but found Denham more physically appealing. He was two years younger than Rupert, which fitted Rupert's pattern of being attracted to younger boys. If he was going to be initiated into sex, it would not be by an act of submission. It was not until his nervous breakdown, three and a half years later, that Rupert told the story of that weekend to James Strachey. It was probably the most revealing letter he ever wrote:

How things shelve back! History takes you to January 1912 – Archaeology to the end of 1910 – Anthropology to, perhaps, the autumn of 1909. –

The autumn of 1909! We had hugged & kissed & strained, Denham & I, on and off for years – ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two small dorms. An abortive affair, as I told you. But in the summer holidays of 1906 and 1907 he had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there. – He had vaguely hoped, I fancy, – – – But I lay always thinking Charlie [Lascelles].

Denham was though, to my taste, attractive. So honestly and friendlily lascivious. Charm, not beauty, was his
forte
. He was not unlike Ka, in the allurement of vitality and of physical magic. –
oh, but Ka has beauty too. – He was lustful, immoral, affectionate, and delightful. As romance faded in me, I began, all unacknowledgedly, to cherish a hope – – – But I was never in the slightest degree in love with him.

In the early autumn of 1909, then, I was glad to get him to come and stay with me, at the Orchard. I came back late that Saturday night. Nothing was formulated in my mind. I found him asleep in front of the fire, at 1.45. I took him up to his bed, – he was very like a child when he was sleepy – and lay down on it. We hugged, and my fingers wandered a little. His skin was always very smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my own room: and lay in bed thinking – my head full of tiredness and my mouth of the taste of tea and whales, as usual.
¹⁵
I decided, almost quite consciously, I
would
put the thing through next night. You see, I didn't at all know how he would take it. But I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was
like
, and to do away with the shame (as I thought it was) of being a virgin. At length, I thought, I shall know something of all that James and Norton and Maynard and Lytton know and hold over me.

Of course, I
said
nothing.

Next evening, we talked long in front of the sitting room fire. My head was on his knees, after a bit. We discussed sodomy. He said he, finally, thought it
was
wrong . . . We got undressed there, as it was warm. Flesh is exciting, in firelight. You must remember that
openly
we were nothing to each other – less even than in 1906. About what one is with Bunny (who so resembles Denham). Oh, quite distant!