Fatal Glamour (15 page)

Again we went up to his room. He got into bed. I sat on it and talked. Then I lay on it. Then we put the light out and talked in the dark. I complained of the cold: and so got under the eiderdown. My brain was, I remember, almost all through, absolutely calm and indifferent, observing progress, and mapping out the next step. Of course, I had planned the general scheme beforehand.

I was still cold. He wasn't. “Of course not, you're in bed!” “Well then, you get right in, too.” – I made him ask me – oh!
without difficulty! I got right in. Our arms were round each other. “An adventure!” I kept thinking: and was horribly detached.

We stirred and pressed. The tides seemed to wax. At the right moment I, as planned, said “come into my room, it's better there. . . .” I suppose he knew what I meant. Anyhow he followed me. In that large bed it was cold; we clung together. Intentions became plain; but still nothing was said. I broke away a second, as the dance began, to slip my pyjamas. His was the woman's part throughout. I had to make him take his off – do it for him. Then it was purely body to body – my first, you know!

I was still a little frightened of his, at any too sudden step, bolting; and he, I suppose, was shy. We kissed very little, as far as I can remember, face to face. And I only rarely handled his penis. Mine he touched once with his fingers; and that made me shiver so much that I think he was frightened. But with alternate stirrings, and still pressures, we mounted. My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to and fro over each other, in the excitement. Quite calm things, I remember, were passing through my brain “The Elizabethan joke ‘The Dance of the Sheets' has, then, something in it.” “I hope his erection is all right” – – – and so on. I thought of him entirely in the third person. At length the waves grew more terrific: my control of the situation was over; I treated him with the utmost violence, to which he more quietly, but incessantly, responded. Half under him and half over, I came off. I
think
he came off at the same time, but of that I have never been sure. A silent moment: and then he slipped away to his room, carrying his pyjamas. We wished each other “Goodnight.” It was between 4 and 5 in the morning. I lit a candle after he had gone. There was a dreadful mess on the bed. I wiped it as clear as I could, and left the place exposed in the air, to dry. I sat on the lower part of the bed, a blanket round me, and stared at the wall, and thought. I thought of innumerable things, that this was all; that the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge seemed a very tiny affair, after all; that I hoped Denham, for whom I felt great tenderness, was sleeping. My thoughts went backward and
forward. I unexcitedly reviewed my whole life, and indeed the whole universe. I was tired, and rather pleased with myself, and a little bleak. About six it was grayly daylight; I blew the candle out and slept till 8. At 8 Denham had to bicycle in to breakfast with Mr Benians, before catching his train. I bicycled with him, and turned off at the corner of –, is it Grange Road? –. We said scarcely anything to each other. I felt sad at the thought he was perhaps hurt and angry, and wouldn't ever want to see me again. – He did, of course, and was exactly as ever. Only we never referred to it. But that night I looked with some awe at the room – fifty yards away to the West from the bed I'm writing in – in which I Began; in which I “copulated with” Denham; and I felt a curious private tie with Denham himself.

So you'll understand it was – not with a
shock
, for I'm far too dead for that, but with a sort of dreary wonder and dizzy discomfort – that I heard Mr Benians inform me, after we'd greeted, that Denham died at one o'clock on Wednesday morning, – just twenty four hours ago now.
¹⁶

The impact of Russell-Smith's early death belongs to the story of 1912. In 1909 his role was to give Rupert an escape from his sexual impasse. That he was not in love with Denham made it easier to seize the passing opportunity. For someone of Rupert's class, homosexuality opened a much easier and earlier path to sexual satisfaction. He may have felt “great tenderness” for Denham, but his main object was clearly “the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge.” Having taken the jump, his interest in Denham soon dwindled. There is no suggestion that Rupert felt for his sexual partner anything like the deep passion that James Strachey had long cherished for
him;
nor did his one-night stand with Denham make any difference to his love for Noel or to his determination to marry her. Rupert now knew about “all that James and Norton and Maynard and Lytton know and hold over me”; but he made no move to join their circle as a sexual partner. It took him three years to even tell anyone else about Denham.

It was part of Denham's attraction that he was unknown to Rupert's regular friends. The affair exacerbated his self-division, between the “dirtiness” of copulation and the “purity” of romantic love. “I thought of him entirely in the third person” and “[I] was horribly detached” sum
up the relation between Rupert and his lover. And his secretiveness was stronger than ever, since he could hardly have discussed his escapade with any of his still virginal woman friends – least of all Noel. It is possible, also, that he might have had a few more passing encounters with men of a similar kind. Three months after Denham's visit, Rupert was propositioned by a Romanian physicist he met in Munich. To James, Rupert made a joke of this. He described how the Romanian fell to his knees in front of him and groped at his fly, until they were inconveniently interrupted.
¹⁷
But Rupert agreed to go and stay with his new friend in Bucharest, except that a former teacher fell ill in Florence and he had to go there instead. On the other hand, it could be argued that Rupert's experience with Denham had the paradoxical result of making him more eager and enterprising in seeking a female partner with whom he could enjoy “the dance of the sheets.”

As Rupert digested his mediocre exam results, he had a retreat already planned at Grantchester, three miles upstream on the Cam. He claimed that he left Cambridge because he was “passionately enamoured of solitude.”
¹
But anyone who really wanted to be a hermit should not choose a picturesque spot within an hour's stroll from scores of acquaintances. Before he moved there in June 1909, Grantchester was already one of Rupert's favourite places, for tea in the famous orchard or bathing in Byron's Pool, a secluded stretch of the river a few hundred yards from the village. Nor could he really be alone when living as a lodger with the Stevensons, who ran the teahouse. Their honey came from bees kept by the Neeves at the Old Vicarage nearby. Rupert would always be a lodger with someone, and there is no record of his ever cooking a meal in his life.

Rupert's exile made him even more of a Cambridge celebrity and the village became the backdrop for his performance as a student Simple Lifer:

I work at Shakespere [sic], read, write all day, and now and then wander in the woods or by the river. I bathe every morning and sometimes by moonlight, have all my meals (chiefly fruit) brought to me out of doors, and am as happy as the day's long. I am chiefly sorry for all you people in the world. Every now and then dull bald spectacled people from Cambridge come out and take tea here. I mock them and pour the cream down their necks or roll them in the rose-beds or push them in the river, and they hate me and go away.
²

Later, when he had briefly dropped his mask, he would admit to James Strachey that “Solitude is my one unbearable fear.”
³
Like many magnetic personalities he was at his best with enough people to count as an audience, and became ill at ease as the number dwindled. His new image – the elfin vegetarian socialist, roaming barefoot through the meadows and leaping naked into the river – was a guaranteed star turn. His friends flocked to see and imitate it. Rupert had created a new student style, which caused him and his followers to be nicknamed “the dew-dabblers.” In 1911 Virginia Woolf would give them a more durable name, the “Neo-pagans.”

In the summer of 1908 Rupert had started calling himself “a wild rough elementalist. Walt Whitman is nothing to me.”
⁴
If Whitman was Neo-paganism's spiritual grandfather, its godfather was Edward Carpenter, with his gospel of nudity, sunbathing, and sandals. In
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure
, Carpenter had predicted the coming of a new and glorious post-Christian man:

The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations – all the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind – the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within.
⁵

Unlike the Oliviers, Rupert had not grown up with any special closeness to nature. Everything he did in his days at Grantchester was done to make a point, including his report in a letter to Noel:

I wander about bare foot and almost naked, surveying Nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand Nature, but I get on very well with her, in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we're both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together.
I don't know the names of things . . . but I get on very well by addressing all flowers “Hello, Buttercup!” and all animals “Puss! Puss!”
⁶

This was typical of the gratingly facetious style of Rupert's letters to Noel and she, also typically, quickly brought him down to earth: “no doubt you have a tremendous capacity for enjoyment, only I wish you wouldnt talk about Nature in that foolish and innocent tone of voice – you call it making jokes, and I suppose you think it's nice; but I dont like it a bit – I've told you why lots of times.”
⁷
Noel had spent half her childhood in the woods, and they were her first school. She cared deeply about nature, and wanted to know as much as possible about it. Rupert knew only that Grantchester required a pose, which he was only too eager to provide. Unfortunately for him, he had fallen in love with someone who had no appreciation – or tolerance – for poses of any kind.

Jacques Raverat was one of Rupert's first visitors in June. Instead of the mannered decadence of Rupert's first year at Cambridge, Jacques now found him a creature of sunshine and fresh air: “he had given up tobacco and any kind of alcohol, he lived on vegetables and fruits and dressed in a dishevelled style that showed off his beauty very effectively. He was well aware of it, and relished the romantic and Byronic impression given by his long hair and open-necked shirt.” In the morning Jacques and Rupert bathed in Byron's Pool before setting off to London to see Shaw's banned play,
The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet
.
⁸

Apart from the carefree image, what would Rupert live on, and what would he live for? There was no chance of his getting a fellowship in classics, but he persuaded his father to continue supporting him while he switched his studies to English literature, which was gaining recognition as a university subject.
⁹
He started by writing an essay on Shakespeare for the Oldham Prize, which he would win early in 1910. This paid £66 in two installments, more than many workers would make in a year. The next step would be to write a dissertation on Elizabethan drama, and submit it for a fellowship at King's. This was a feasible plan, though it would take Rupert three and a half years to succeed at it. Meanwhile, he was developing as a critic and writer of reviews, work that would not have come his way if he had remained in classics. He had been winning a steady flow of guineas in the poetry competitions of the
Westminster Gazette
. More significantly, Ford Madox Ford published four of his
poems in the July
English Review
, and paid him £3 for them.
¹⁰
Rupert's real plan, he told A.F. Scholefield, was not to be a fellow of King's or a lecturer in Leeds: “I am going to be a bloody
POET
.”
¹¹
Specifically, he wanted to write traditional lyric poetry, but inspired by the philosophy of G.E. Moore: “The man who does not know that the human ear finds metre very beautiful, and that the most lovely effects have been got by the combination of words, metre, and ideas, is a fool. The object of literature is to evoke certain very valuable states of mind. They can best be (it is surprisingly observed) got by poetry, that is by metre, words, and ideas, much more often than by prose. Certain of them poetry alone can produce.”
¹²

The poetic lifestyle was displayed in two riverside picnics Rupert organised at Overcote, outside Cambridge. The picnickers included Justin Brooke, who drove everyone in his new Opel 10/18 car (the first intrusion of the motor age), Gwen and Margaret Darwin, Ka Cox, Dorothy Lamb, Geoffrey Keynes, and Donald Robertson.
¹³
Activities included boating (in the newly popular Canadian canoes), wrestling, riding horses bareback, plaiting daisy chains, swimming in the nude (men and women separately), and falling in the river. Rupert crowned the day by reading Herrick's great ode to the pleasures of May:

Come, let us go, while we are in our prime,