Fatal Glamour (16 page)

And take the harmless folly of the time!

We shall grow old apace, and die

Before we know our liberty.

Rupert was now in his prime, and happy to be admired for it. Henry James was invited by Geoffrey Keynes and Charles Sayle to sample a round of Cambridge pleasures, from breakfasting with Maynard Keynes to going down the river with Rupert. Standing on the punt in his white open-necked shirt and flannels, Rupert did what he called his “fresh, boyish stunt” to killing effect. James was susceptible to pretty young men, even while keeping an acute sense of what prettiness was worth. “He reappears to me,” James wrote in his later tribute, “as with his felicities all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting of the river at the ‘backs.'”
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Does “promptly” carry a hint that Rupert's felicities were too blatantly on the surface, too readily trotted out for a famous visitor? James was too downy a bird, surely, to swallow Rupert's myth
whole. He even entertained the idea that Rupert was a “spoiled child of history.” But at the news of his death in the Aegean, he wept.

After James, John. The swarthy bohemian Augustus John turned up in July to pitch his camp at Grantchester. Thirty-one years old and already famous, John had been commissioned to paint a portrait of Jane Harrison at Newnham. If Rupert was flirting with the Simple Life, John had flung himself into it head over heels. Obsessed with the threatened extinction of the gypsy way of life, he decided to become a gypsy himself, leaving his Chelsea home to travel with an entourage of “six horses, two vans, one cart, six children, Arthur [a groom], a stray boy ‘for washing up,' a broken-down wagon, Dorelia [Dorothy McNeil] and her younger sister Edie.”
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The children, all boys, were by his wife Ida and his mistress Dorelia. John had lived with the two women in a ménage à trois until Ida died in childbirth two years before.

Another of John's mistresses, Lady Ottoline Morrell, came to sample his gypsy-style lodgings, but retreated to her home in London after one night. Rupert was delighted to hang around John's encampment and romp with his pack of children (and also with the five-year-old Gregory Bateson, another resident of Grantchester). Nonetheless, he did not copy either John's riotous dress (gypsy hat and sandals) or riotous sex life. Inspired by Whitman and Meredith, John posed as “a robust pagan with a creed that personified Nature as a mother.”
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Indeed, he got so deeply into his pose that it effectively ceased to be one, whereas Rupert's wildness and roughness were mostly on paper. He was never able to provide himself with one wife, let alone John's long train of wives and mistresses. Nor was he able to support himself on his own talent, as John already did. Though he affected to be free as a bird, Rupert at Grantchester did nothing that truly endangered his academic prospects.

After their meeting at Bank in April 1909, Rupert had gone back to Cambridge, and Noel to Bedales. As soon as his exams were over, Rupert started intriguing to visit Noel at her school. He needed help from Jacques Raverat, who was living nearby with his schoolmate Geoffrey Lupton. Jacques's mental and physical problems had ended his career at Cambridge, but he was able to visit Florence in March 1909, and in
discovering the Old Masters he also found a vocation for himself, as an artist.

Noel was reluctant to have outsiders turn up in front of her schoolmates, and particularly to deal with Rupert's manic advances, whether by letter or in person. They managed only a brief and awkward encounter while walking outside the school. By now Noel was a dedicated Bedalian, and the clash of values between Rugby and Bedales would be central to the remaining six years of their relationship. Yet Bedales had grown out of Rugby, if only by reaction; and Rupert's attraction to the Bedales spirit revealed his own dissatisfaction with the world in which he had grown up. If the Fabians gave him the hope of making a new world through political reform, Bedales offered a more personal solution, by joining in a new way of life.

The Victorian public schools and universities were total institutions. They would not have liked to admit it, but they still had much in common with the monasteries from which they had sprung. Total institutions have a way of begetting their own most ferocious adversaries: Luther the spoiled monk, Stalin the spoiled seminarian. One such adversary, though a much gentler one, was Edward Carpenter. In 1880 Carpenter decided to turn his back on the system that had formed him. He had become a clerical fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1867, when he was twenty-three.
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After six years of teaching, Carpenter found himself becoming disillusioned in turn, though more with the academic than with the spiritual world: “I had come to feel that the so-called intellectual life of the University was . . . a fraud and a weariness. These everlasting discussions of theories which never came anywhere near actual life, this cheap philosophising and ornamental cleverness, this endless book-learning, and the queer cynicism and boredom underlying – all impressed me with a sense of utter emptiness. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in that atmosphere terrified me.” Carpenter decided to renounce both his fellowship and Holy Orders. Soon, he had a vision of what he should do instead: “it suddenly flashed upon me, with a vibration through my whole body, that I would and must somehow go and make my life with the mass of the people and the manual workers.”
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For the next seven years, Carpenter travelled the Midlands as a university extension lecturer, but by the end of this period he was close to a nervous breakdown, tormented by unfulfilled homosexual desires. Finally, he took Whitman's advice: “The great thing for one to do when
he is used up, is to go out to nature – throw yourself in her arms – submit to her destinies.” In the summer of 1880 he moved from Sheffield to the hamlet of Totley, where he lived with a scythe maker named Albert Fearnehough. His companion had a wife and two children, but he seems to have satisfied Carpenter's sexual needs as well.

In 1883 Carpenter published his first major book,
Towards Democracy
, and set up a utopian community at Millthorpe, on the edge of the Derbyshire moors. Attracting a stream of curious visitors, Carpenter made his home into a potent centre of propaganda. Like Arnold's Rugby, Millthorpe was the work of a dominant, single-minded, magnetic personality. Its ideal was summed up in the phrase the “Simple Life.” Carpenter supported himself by growing vegetables and by writing; he proclaimed his comradeship with manual workers; he dressed in tweeds and homemade sandals (he called shoes “leather coffins”); he sunbathed, swam nude in the river at the end of his garden, and denounced the evils of the town and the factory. His remedy for Britain's ills was socialism, rural self-sufficiency, and sexual reform. The Millthorpe colony fascinated middle-class young men who suffered from the classic late-Victorian anxieties: worries over sexual identity, dissatisfaction with politics, or simple “neurasthenia.” That Carpenter had found the courage to leave Cambridge made him an oracle for those who remained there, such as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and E.M. Forster, and for the many other intellectuals who were fretted by modernity.

Carpenter had left the educational system in disgust; Cecil Reddie did so too, but then went back to try and renew it. Reddie came from the Anglo-Scottish middle class and went to school at Fettes, where Parker Brooke would have been one of his teachers. In 1885 he returned to Fettes to teach, and soon became a thorn in the side of his headmaster. Reddie was an eager socialist and member of the Fellowship of the New Life – the utopian society from which the Fabian Society was born. After only two years at Fettes, Reddie moved on to Clifton College, another satellite of Rugby. Here, he lasted only a year. He could not take orders from a superior and he loudly disagreed with every existing plan of education, especially in the public schools:

Listen to the four maxims of a great English school perpetually dinned into the boy's ears. Be industrious; that is, try and get above your comrades. Be self-restrained; cork up your feelings
and be cold, formal, and “moral.” Be modest; that is, be prudish and affected, be “gentlemanly” instead of natural and healthy. Be pure; that is, conquer and kill one lust . . . but never a word against lust of money, lust of power, lust of comfort.

These are the “moral” maxims of an immense school; but, as one boy, starved on these husks, said: “But, oh, sir, affection is foreign to the whole spirit of this place.”
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Close to a breakdown, Reddie fled to Carpenter's Millthorpe for refuge. As he recovered, Reddie decided that he should go out and found a school of his own. Carpenter's father had died a few years before, leaving him £6,000; he contributed funds, and Reddie started Abbotsholme School in 1889. Its ideal was “the nurturing and disciplining of the young child so that it might come to live the life of true freedom; to be a law unto itself, and a beneficent power in the world.”
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Unfortunately, Reddie was an autocrat and a crank as well as an idealist, and he kept Abbotsholme in a perpetual uproar. His personal style was completely at odds with his principles. He took it for granted that he should have absolute rule, not just over the boys, but over the staff too. Abbotsholme, he said, was like a battleship, and he was the captain on the bridge. Everyone in the school had to wear a Simple Life uniform of his own design: a Norfolk suit of grey tweed with big pockets and knee breeches. The regime of cold baths and manual labour was too much for the thirteen-year-old Lytton Strachey, who was sent home after a few months. Justin Brooke was another dropout.

Racked by desertions and mutinies, the “battleship” could not steer a straight course and Reddie suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. He could not recognise his own lust for power, nor his pederastic instincts. Between the ages of eleven and eighteen, he believed, schoolboys should go to a single-sex school, with only bachelor masters. “Worship of the male type,” he wrote, “is the natural hero-worship of adolescence; and comradeship is the natural outlet for the affections among normal boys during this period . . . The greatest crime against youth is the crime of accelerating puberty.”
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When Reddie was at last forced to retire, in the 1920s, there were only three boys left in the school. It was J.H. Badley who made progressive education work. The son of a country doctor, he arrived at Rugby in 1880 at the same time as a new master: Parker Brooke. Superficially, Badley
seemed to bend to the public school yoke. He became both the top pupil in classics and a member of the First XV at rugby. His ambition was to return to Rugby as a master. But at Cambridge he became a Simple Lifer, influenced by such friends as Roger Fry, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and Carpenter himself. When Reddie founded Abbotsholme, Badley signed on as one of the first teachers. After three years, however, he broke with Reddie. He wanted two things that were anathema to his headmaster: to make Abbotsholme co-educational, and to marry. “My greatest friend at Cambridge,” he recalled, “came of a rather well-known feminist family – Garrett Anderson – and he converted me to co-education as being the right thing to be done. Eventually I married his sister, who was of course still more keen, and who insisted if we had a school it must have boys and girls together.”
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Like almost everyone who features in this biography, Badley had “a bit of capital” to back up his ideals. He found a country house called Bedales near Haywards Heath, Sussex, and opened his own school in 1893. For the first five years, it was a school for boys only, since Badley had his hands full without the added stigma of sexual mixing. “Old Bedales,” as it came to be called, held faithfully to Carpenter's ideals. Here is what impressed one ten-year-old boy on his first day there: “Mr. Powell, the second master . . . wore clothes unlike other men's, a pale blue tweed suit with leather at the cuffs, grey stockings and a red tie, and on his feet were very large homemade leather sandals. Everything in his house was very clean; the walls were whitewashed with few pictures; there was plain oak furniture and bare boards. After the evening meal, Mr. Powell went into the kitchen to help his wife wash up.”
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The atmosphere of the school was spartan. The boys (and later the girls) had a large tub under their beds; they began the day by filling it with cold water and jumping in. They were driven on long cross country runs; they froze in winter and were hungry year round; they bullied each other and were beaten, though not so regularly or savagely as at more conventional schools. But Bedales found its supporters among the bohemian fringe of the upper-middle class and grew steadily. In 1900 it moved from Sussex to newly built quarters on a farm at Steep, near Petersfield, where it remains and flourishes.

Like many things at Bedales, the students' work on the land combined idealism and practicality. Badley certainly believed that nature was the best of teachers, but he also thought that there was more to be done than sit around in it. At harvest time, Bedalians put in a full day in the fields.
The rest of the year they studied in the morning and worked with their hands in the afternoon. The emphasis on country pursuits gave Bedales some reputation among the Continental landed aristocracy, such as the Békássys of Hungary who sent all six of their children there. Nearly a fifth of the early Bedalians were foreigners, recruited by Badley to avoid the imperialist chauvinism of the established public schools.

Backed up by his wife, Badley took on the other kind of chauvinism in 1898, when four girls entered the school. “We dubbed [them] ‘beastly shes,'” recalled Peter Grant Watson, “and set about to make their lives as intolerable as possible.”
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It was a typical Bedales paradox, however, that when Watson fell in love with one of the girls it was now his own life that was made intolerable, with one of the younger masters leading the hue and cry. When he was fifteen, Jacques Raverat was taken aside for a lecture by the captain of the school. “The Chief (as Badley was called) doesn't like stupid and obscene jokes about women,” he was told. “It's not something to joke about – and also there's nothing funny about something perfectly natural . . . Sooner or later you're bound to know what women are like. I myself have bathed with naked girls.”
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