Fatal Glamour (44 page)

Eileen was surely in love with Rupert; just how deeply we cannot know because he ordered her letters to be burnt after his death. It was probably Eileen who shocked Mrs Elgy by seizing Rupert by the neck and exclaiming, “Oh you gorgeous piece of flesh!”
²⁴
She agreed to keep their affair a secret because he was fit to dine with duke's daughters but not to marry them. They could have their trysts at Eddie's flat, but not at Apsley House. If Rupert cherished any ambition to marry into the aristocracy, there is no sign of it in his surviving letters to Eileen. “Do you know how real you are?” he wrote in his second letter to her, “The time with you is the only waking hours in a life of dreams. All that's another way of saying I adore you.”
²⁵
In fact, his time alone with Eileen was the dream because his many other commitments took precedence over his
erotic life. That life had always been conducted secretly, away from his mother's inquisition, since its start in the upstairs dormitory at School Field. Secrecy was intrinsic to sexuality, and all of Rupert's secrets were guilty secrets. That meant that the women he slept with were guilty too – except for Maaua and Taatamata, who were outside Mrs Brooke's radius of action. Rupert told Eileen that California had “‘Flowers without scent, birds without song, men without honour, & women without virtue' – and at least three of the four sections of this proverb I know very well to be true.”
²⁶
Rupert's Californian without virtue must have been Agnes Capponi.

Rupert's liaison with Eileen would continue until he sailed for Gallipoli at the end of February 1915. It helped him to postpone indefinitely the marriage question, so long as he had Eileen to meet his sexual needs. But what if she became sufficiently infatuated with him to want him for her husband, unsuitable match or not? To head that off, Rupert used the same line he had tried on Phyllis Gardner:

I find in myself two natures – not necessarily conflicting, but – different. There's half my heart which is normal & English – what's the word, not quite “good” or “honourable” – “
straight
,” I think. But the other half is a wanderer and a solitary, selfish, unbound, and doubtful . . .

Oh, it's all right if you don't
trust
me, my dear.
I
don't. Never trust me an inch.

Oh, I'm rather a horror. A vagabond, drifting from one imbecility to another. You don't know how pointless and undependable and rotten a thing you've got hold of.
²⁷

Rupert was asking forgiveness in advance for future disappointments. If Eileen should complain, he could always reply, “I warned you, didn't I?” “I'm very selfish and horrible towards you,” he wrote in October, “I expect it will be the best thing for every one if a stray bullet finds me next year, – for myself and for the rest of the world.”
²⁸

Eileen was no ingénue, and had jumped into the affair as impulsively as Rupert had. Still, the fragmentary correspondence suggests that her relationship with him, which lasted seven months altogether, might have been happier and more mature than anything he had managed before he met her. There is no sign in the letters of the hysteria and posturing that
poisoned his relations with Ka, Noel, or Phyllis; he seems to have cared for Eileen as she was, and tried to make an honest connection with her. “It's true,” he wrote, six weeks after they met, “what you said, that there was a great
advance
in knowing each other last night. I feel it so definitely. I think that sort of thing's
easier
to see and measure in absence – especially in writing a letter – than in presence. Do you see that?”
²⁹
Perhaps Eileen was able to draw out qualities in Rupert that no previous lover had managed to find. Alternatively, he felt obliged to be on his best behaviour with someone who was his social superior, unlike the previous lovers who were on the same rung of the ladder as him.

Rupert's conquest of Eileen was part of a wider social campaign in the summer of 1914. It was ironic that his biggest triumph – going to bed with a duke's daughter – was also the one he had to keep quiet about. He had been gravitating towards the Establishment in the months before he left for North America. Despite his effete manner, Eddie Marsh was taken seriously in the corridors of power, both public and private. It was a reason for Rupert to stay in his orbit: he might have been a wandering young poet, but it was seductive for him to be close to the centre of affairs, even if no one wanted to give him any actual responsibilities. He could feel superior to Bloomsbury and Cambridge just by being “in the know” about high politics. And rubbing shoulders with the great fostered the belligerent nationalism that he had brought home from his travels.

Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, but for Rupert it had the opposite effect. Contempt for foreigners implied going on the offensive against former friends who did not conform to his idea of how English men – and women – should behave. That included cutting ties with the two women who had meant most to him before 1913: Ka Cox and Noel Olivier. After his stern goodbye letter to Ka of June 1913, silence had fallen between them. Back in England he continued to avoid her, until his enlistment would bring about a tentative reconciliation. From the Grand Canyon in April 1914 he had laid down terms to Noel: “You
do
shine in comparison with the American female. Noel, I do not think you clever. I have given up every kind of admiration for you – everything, indeed, except a sort of affection . . . I shall come back to England – I intend to live
the rest of my life with my mother who is the only person I really like. But I shall take occasional holidays in London or Cambridge: so I may run across you again.”
³⁰

When they did run across each other, at the ballet on 18 June, neither of them was in an affectionate mood. Noel later called it “our very stern meeting in a theatre corridor”; Rupert called it something worse: “Noel is
not
a bloody little bitch. At least . . . not
quite
. I feel very kindly towards her just now. I met her the other day & didn't recognise her for some minutes. That
was
a triumph. Haven't felt so pleased with myself since Father died. I went home & laughed about it for an hour.”
³¹
The triumph, for Rupert, was no longer being under the spell of someone whose self-possession had proved stronger than his own. In his whole life, only Noel and his mother had got the better of him. Now, once he had renounced his desire for Noel, his main grudge against her was one of guilt by association. Just around the corner from her medical school was 38 Brunswick Square, where Maynard and Geoffrey Keynes lived with Adrian Stephen, and various others. Noel refused Adrian's love, but she was happy to stop by for tea, or go to the ballet with James Strachey or other Bloomsburyites living nearby. These everyday friendships infuriated Rupert. “One of the less creditable periods of my life enmeshed me with the intellectuals,” he told Cathleen, “I hover on their fringes yet: dehumanized, disgusting people.”
³²
With James and Noel it had become more than a friendship. James had wooed her passionately in 1913, until in September Noel had drawn a line and said they should stop seeing each other. After Rupert's death they became intimate again, for everything except complete intercourse. In 1916, for example, James was looking forward to Bedalian pleasures at Limpsfield: “We'll have a bath together each evening and it'll be nicer than it's ever been.”
³³
Rupert had managed that in a river, but never in the closer quarters of a bathtub.

It was not just a question of avoiding the intellectuals; Rupert launched a campaign of insults and ostracism against them. The only softening of his private war was in his attendance of the annual dinner of Apostles at the end of June. The presence of Keynes and the Stracheys was diluted by such other guests as G.E. Moore, Gerald Shove, H.T. Norton, and John Sheppard (Brooke's former tutor at King's). Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the Cambridge professor of English, had asked for Rupert's help with his teaching in the autumn term. But even without the war it is hard to imagine Rupert settling down to a don's life. He had bigger fish to fry
than were served at High Table. Moreover, living in Cambridge would mean being surrounded by intellectuals. He no longer cared that some of his fellow Apostles were among the seminal thinkers of his time – Keynes, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein. He was reverting to type: the Rugby ethos that not only was character more important than brains but that brains, in themselves, were objects of suspicion. After his last evening out with James Strachey, Rupert told him, “I may not have explained to you how much I was grieved at your opinions. I had hoped you had got rid of them. They seem to me not only eunuch & shocking, but also damned silly & slightly dangerous.”
³⁴
His rants against Bloomsbury expressed what has been called “anti-Judaism.” Former friends like the Stracheys were to him equivalent to Jews because of their rootlessness, their sterile intellectualism, and their lack of true masculinity. In Rupert's paranoid vision, you didn't have to be Jewish to sap the foundations of native English virtue.
³⁵
Feminism was equally threatening, as an abstract idea of equality that denied the biological imperatives of male and female. It scarcely occurred to him that the primacy of blood, soil, and genitals was an idea too, one that would begin its terrible blossoming in August.

The removal from his life of Neo-pagans and Bloomsberries was part of a thorough changing of the guard in Rupert's intimate circle. Pride and resentment accounted for the removal of Noel. With Ka, the chief motive was guilt. He refused her invitation to stay with her in her cottage at Woking, saying that any contact was unwise: “The thought of you . . . makes me deeply and bitterly ashamed of myself. I don't know
why
– I mean, it's not that my mind condemns me, especially, in any way. I only know that – inevitably or not – through me you have been greatly hurt, and two or three years of your life – which can be so wonderful – have been changed and damaged.”
³⁶
The only Neo-pagans that Rupert was still close to were the Raverats and Frances Cornford. Jacques was his particular confederate for outbursts against women, Jews, intellectuals, and other disturbers of the peace. Unfortunately, Jacques was trapped with Gwen in their country house at Royston, as
MS
tightened its grip on him. Frances was busy with her baby daughter Helena.

What kind of new group could Rupert assemble around himself? On the female side, Eddie Marsh had introduced him to all three of Cathleen Nesbitt, Eileen Wellesley, and Violet Asquith. For male friends, the picture was less clear. Eddie was promoting Rupert in all the best London circles: political (Asquith and Churchill), aristocratic (Lady Leeds) or literary
(Yeats, Barrie, Henry James). Almost everyone was won over by Rupert's charm and good looks. But if it was obvious how this helped Eddie, how much did it really help Rupert? As with a beautiful woman, being admired provided only a passive identity, laid on from the outside. His literary connections were now well established, but further success depended greatly on publishing a second volume of poems, at least a year or two in the future. Meanwhile, there was only the long march through journalism, for which he had no great talent.

Rupert's launch into a more glittering social world was bound to stir up sneers and jeers from those who considered themselves both more serious and more solid than his new friends. Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey were not immune to the glamour of lords and ladies, but they did not enter those circles until after the war, when they had achieved a wider reputation. Rupert was part of an emergent celebrity culture, where the daughters of the aristocracy were fawned upon as archetypes of English beauty and breeding. Their faces were on display around London, in society magazines and even newspaper placards. It hardly mattered that they did little but dress fashionably and go to one social event after another. Their fathers had never cared for them to be properly educated. That was no concern for Rupert, who now looked with a jaundiced eye both at women with university education (Ka, three out of four Olivier sisters) and at women who had a career (Cathleen).
³⁷

How might Rupert take advantage of the connections he was making in the political realm? He could enjoy intimate chats with Churchill, and know what went on in Cabinet; but a serious start on a political career required much more. Rupert was not inclined to take the civil service exam and follow in Eddie's footsteps. Hugh Dalton, his contemporary at King's, was studying economics and law. In 1914 Ben Keeling had published a book on child labour and was now an assistant editor on the
New Statesman
. This was how one moved on from Cambridge to a real career in politics. How could Rupert expect to climb the ladder of power – even if he wanted to – without serving any apprenticeship?

Two months after Rupert landed at Plymouth, Britain was at war, and what he had done since his return ceased to be relevant. But the broad strokes of a likely future had been laid on in June and July. They involved a base in London, the acceptance of Eddie as his mentor, and the cutting off of his former intimates. When he had moved to Grantchester in 1908, it had been a theatrical gesture of protest against upper-middle-class
conventionality. In 1914 the audience for that role had largely disappeared, and Rupert was no longer interested in playing it. He still complained about London as a foul and immoral place. But the central figures in his life – Eddie, Cathleen, Eileen Wellesley – were firmly rooted there, and so would he be unless some great event invaded his life.

On 4 August 1914 Rupert's life did change, regardless of what he himself might have chosen. The war would be both the making and the ending of Rupert Brooke, in less than nine months. But how should we judge the individual who, in some degree by mere chance, becomes a participant in great events? When D.H. Lawrence considered the Easter Rising in 1916, he weighed in on the side of events. Ottoline Morrell “thinks the Irish of the late rebellion all poets and fine fellows,” he told E.M. Forster. “I think them mostly windbags and nothings who happen to have become tragically significant in death.”
³⁸
By this standard, the personal stature of such figures was irrelevant. But Rupert was neither a windbag nor a nothing. If his poetic talent was not of the highest rank, it still had qualities that made him the most popular English poet for ten years or more. With his romantic appearance thrown into the balance, he became the individual whose death made him the tragic symbol of the sufferings of his class: the roughly one hundred thousand public school boys who went through school Officers Training Corps (
OTC
) and served in the British army from 1914 to 1918.