Fatal Glamour (33 page)

Much of Rupert's turmoil also came from guilt over his compulsive nastiness towards Noel. He had given her, he admitted, “evil and wrong in return for fineness . . . I had been so wicked towards Noel; and that filled me with self-hatred and excess of feeling seeking some outlet.”
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But, if he felt such remorse, why did he go on jeering at her? Because she was a woman and therefore, he believed, bound to be corrupted sooner or later; whereas a man like James could be relied on, at least for understanding and loyalty. For the moment, this even included acceptance of James's courtship of Noel:

What
I
say is, Fair play and no favours, and let the best man win! . . .

My dear, you're male and you understand things: and even I want somebody like that I can exchange a sort of love with. After all,
I
have got and probably shall get only good things from my relationship to you: and it'd be rather
too
mad of me, wouldn't it, to sacrifice that for an off chance at a cunt? I'd rather have a brother than a penisholder any day. As long as I stay sane I know that.
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James's infatuation with Rupert had ripened into nearly six years of faithful service and admiration. Some women, like Ka and Bryn, had let Rupert down; the rest of them would eventually, simply by virtue of being female. “I am touched also to tears for them,” he told James, “because they never
quite
know what's up. Women aren't quite animals, alas! They have twilight souls, like a cat behind a hedge. What can one do?”
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So Rupert still wanted to count James as an ally. He
did
advise him to give up pursuing “holes” and go back to balls (so long as they weren't Rupert's), though he knew James was probably too hopelessly romantic to do so. For all that, a break would not be long in coming.

What was Rupert to do now? He thought of becoming a journalist, like Dudley Ward, or just wandering on to Denmark or Sweden. But England still held unfinished business. Ka had to be given an answer in August; perhaps Noel or Bryn might yet have an answer for him. He wrote to tell Bryn that he felt as if he had just woken up with a headache after being asleep for six months, and hinted even more strongly that it was time for them to have a real affair. Though he tried to make her feel ashamed of her motto, which was “hold on tight to nurse,” he was playing a cautious hand himself. He told her nothing about what he was up to with Ka, or what commitments he had made to Noel. Bryn's calling him “disingenuous” had stuck in his throat, but all it meant was that she knew how many secrets, and how much calculation, lay behind his facade of boyish impulsiveness. To get through to her he would have had to drop his mask, and that was the one thing he feared to do. He had opened his heart more to Ka than anyone, and she was already paying the price for knowing too much about him.

The next step was finally settled by a fit of homesickness for the land, if not the people, of England. He went down to Cologne to meet James
at a giant exhibition of modern painting and while there he read
The Four Men
, a rhapsody in the Merrie Englande vein about Hilaire Belloc's beloved Sussex:

He does not die that can bequeath

Some influence to the land he knows,

Or dares, persistent, interwreath

Love permanent with the wild hedgerows.

It was all very Neo-pagan, complete with Belloc's animus against the late-coming Jews. The theme stuck in Rupert's mind, and two years later was reshaped into his most famous sonnet. But Sussex was never his county. When he went wandering outside Berlin, looking for a place where he could stay with Ka, it had only made him nostalgic for the country round Grantchester, which he had not seen for almost five months. In town he often whiled away the time at the Cafe des Westens on the Kurfurstendam, writing letters or scribbling in his notebook.
¹³
The cafe was full of long-haired intellectuals, artists and their models, socialists and
Naturmenschen
(the German equivalent of Simple Lifers) in sandals. Some of them were “
temperamentvoll
German Jews,” including the poet Else Lasker-Schuler. She was there every day, lingering for hours over a single cup of coffee, and no doubt noticing the young Englishman who was also there to kill time. In this festival of Bohemia, Rupert scribbled a poem that rejected everything he saw around him. He first called it “Home,” then “The Sentimental Exile,” and finally “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.”

Mindful of what Bryn called his duty as an English poet, Rupert scorned the orderly German landscape in favour of England's “unofficial rose” – and its virtuous rustics. He only wished that his own morals had been as pure:

In Grantchester their skins are white;

They bathe by day, they bathe by night;

The women there do all they ought;

The men observe the Rules of Thought.

They love the Good; they worship Truth;

They laugh uproariously in youth;

(And when they get to feeling old,

They up and shoot themselves, I'm told).

It was not from feeling old that Rupert had wanted to shoot himself, but because
his
women had
not
been doing what they ought. Although the last lines of the poem may be read today as mere “camp,” for him they were a strangled plea that the river and meadows might swallow his – and Ka's – sexual guilt:

And laughs the immortal river still

Under the mill, under the mill?

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

Deep meadows yet, for to forget

The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . Oh! yet

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

“Considered as a poem,” Orwell would write, “‘Grantchester' is something worse than worthless . . . an enormous gush of ‘country' sentiment.”
¹⁴
But how could Orwell call it “valuable” at the same time? Because, for him, poetry was a young person's game. It revealed their deepest feelings – and their deepest illusions – before experience forced them to know the world as it really was.

Still, Orwell's ideas about popular poetry are too narrowly sociological. “Grantchester” may be a long string of clichés about the sentiments of Oxbridge graduates in 1912, but only a few poems succeed in capturing such historical moments. The poems that get into the popular canon do so on their qualities of style, rather than just a lowest common denominator of feeling. A “gush,” in Orwell's terms, just spills over higgledy-piggledy; but “Grantchester” has its own rhythm, diction, and narrative order. It is not mere chance that so many of Rupert's lines live on in the folk memory. Nor was Rupert merely dishing out commonplaces about English rivers, church clocks, and the rest. The miniature utopia of “Grantchester” arose from its contradictions: the seedy café in the middle of Berlin where it was written, the neurotic disaster of Rupert's love affair with Ka. Rupert was not just writing memorable verses on
eternal lyric themes, as might be said of his mentor Housman, or even Thomas Hardy. Rupert was a personal poet, rather than a philosophical one, and his poems reflected his confused reaction to the Edwardian social and sexual transition. His gift was to combine, in memorable words, the sweet and the sour.

It was never plausible, though, that Rupert might recover his innocence by returning to the great good place where the clock had stopped. In fact, he had become too restless to be able to live at Grantchester for any length of time again. It was lost to him, honey and all, long before the Great War put it out of everyone's reach, embalmed in the last Edwardian summers. Nonetheless, it was to Grantchester that Rupert now decided to go: the place where he had been just before everything went wrong. “I haven't bathed since November,” he joked. “There's a lot to wash off.” Perhaps he could find a herb at the bottom of Byron's Pool that could heal his “syphilis of the soul.”
¹⁵
He wanted desperately to recover his innocence – and to punish those who had taken it from him. On 25 June he boarded the ferry, with James, from the Hook of Holland. This got them back in time for the Society's annual dinner in London on 26 June. Rupert got drunk and maudlin with affection for his “brothers” – except for Lytton, who sat across from him at table – and alarmed E.M. Forster by weeping when he spoke to Bryn on the telephone. The Society, for its part, informally decided to take Rupert under its wing for the summer. He stayed with Eddie Marsh in London, then went to a weekend house party at Gerald Shove's; later there would be a visit to Roger Fry and a holiday with Maynard Keynes. Rupert had also become friendly with Leonard Woolf since his return from Ceylon a year earlier – a man who both saw Rupert clearly, and saw through him:

His looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective. When I first saw him, I thought to myself: “That is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite” . . . It was the sexual dream face not only for every goddess, but for every sea-girl wreathed with seaweed red and brown and, alas, for all the damp souls of housemaids sprouting despondently at area gates.

Rupert had immense charm when he wanted to be charming, and he was inclined to exploit his charm so that he seemed to be
sometimes too much the professional charmer. He had a very pronounced streak of hardness, even cruelty, in his character.
¹⁶

Did Leonard realise that Rupert felt no such warmth or interest towards him? He only saw one thing: that Leonard was a Jew.

Gerald Shove lived with his mother Bertha, a young widow, in a Thames-side house near Goring. The group of Apostles was carefully chosen to avoid upsetting Rupert. Harry Norton, Goldie Dickinson, Eddie Marsh, and J.T. Sheppard were all friends of Lytton, but other than that they had no connection with the storms of the last six months. The atmosphere was not androgynous, as in Bloomsbury, but exclusively gay – which Rupert clearly felt more comfortable with. He was in better spirits by the time he met Bryn in London for lunch at Gustave's, then went down for a few days to Limpsfield. Noel was there with Sir Sydney, who had been much impressed by Bryn's reading of “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” over the Sunday breakfast table. But Noel and Bryn gave Rupert sympathy only in carefully measured doses. Noel told James that Rupert was at a loose end because he couldn‘t go on pretending to be ill. By now, Noel mainly dealt with Rupert's tirades by ignoring them. She did tell Rupert that his need to divide people into sheep and goats resembled her sister Margery's behaviour: “[She's] got your way of looking at people on the brain; all that about the hards and softs (ridiculous!) unfortunately she carries it even further than you.”
¹⁷
Since Margery was becoming violent and descending into chronic schizophrenia this was not a good omen.

Rupert wandered on to the Old Vicarage. But when he got there it was not term-time, and he still had a nervous horror of being left alone. Few of his friends were on call: the Raverats had gone to France, Ka was spending her days weeping in the country. Bunny Garnett was off to Munich to study botany and meet a young protégé of his father's, D.H. Lawrence, who had just eloped with his English professor's wife.
¹⁸
That left only Frances Cornford to rely on, and Rupert always found it depressing to be with married friends after a few days. Frances was overburdened with Neo-pagan casualties. As she comforted Rupert in person, she also had to cope with pathetic letters from Ka. Justin Brooke was on hand too, suffering from nervous exhaustion and colitis. Though he was still nominally in articles he could not actually bring himself to
do anything. Rupert, who was two years younger, felt that Justin had simply failed to grow up. Nonetheless, he spilled out to him the story of his affair with Ka, and was given a lecture on how badly he had behaved. After that he tried to avoid seeing Justin at the Cornfords. “But I saw the ‘Rupert is so frighteningly sensitive' look coming into F's eyes,” he told Ka, “and she started pawing me. So I gave in, lest worse should happen. I don't mind, if he doesn't. Also I don't much mind him at Maynard's. It'll at least brighten up that rather dreary party. – Unless the females get nervy about him again.”
¹⁹

On the evening of 10 July, a few days after arriving at Grantchester, Rupert went to visit E.A. Benians, a history fellow at St John's College. He learnt that Denham Russell-Smith had died at the age of twenty-three. He wrote at once his long, confessional letter to James, about his affair with Denham three years before. There was a hidden motive, one suspects, in his regaling James with such a vivid account of how he had seduced Denham. He wanted to remind James of how firmly gay his life had been, and of how much he had been in love with Rupert. For James, he knew, was now shuttling between London and Limpsfield to pay court to Noel. He was thinking of going to Canada with Justin, Rupert told James; and then what would happen to Noel?

Noel stays in London, among all you people: a virgin of 19 with all the bright little ideas about the identity of the sexes that we've all had and that you have . . . You know, with friends like you and your Bloomsbury acquaintances, she'll go through the same process as Ka. With Virginia buttering her up in order to get her for Adrian, with you, with all the rest, she'll soon be as independent as any man – like Ka. Then any dirty little man could get hold of her – not you, my little friend, for she knows you too well, – but anybody she doesn't know . . .

This is an instance, chosen because though you don't love Noel, it may be true that you want to bugger her: so it may appeal to you.
²⁰

The next day he heard that Henry Lamb had quarrelled with Ottoline, and had met Ka. Rupert claimed to be past caring that she was “crawling in among those people again,” but he treated Ka to a tirade about Ottoline and Lamb wallowing in slime together. Another outburst was
triggered by the news that Leonard Woolf now knew about the Lulworth debacle. “They're a nice set, your friends,” Rupert fumed, “(and mine – or once mine.) How did it come? Did the noble Lytton find it too good a story to resist? Or is it James? I suppose the Jew'll have to tell his wife. And she could never resist a good joke. So it's no good trying to do anything –.”
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