Fatal Glamour (6 page)

If he had been no more than a beady-eyed autocrat, Arnold would never have had so wide an influence. But his nature also had its gentler side, when he turned to his pupils a face of warmth, understanding, and Christian love. This side of him appears in the worshipful portrait of “The Doctor” in Thomas Hughes's
Tom Brown's Schooldays
. A cynic might point out that successful dictators are good at displaying affection for small children and dogs. In any case, two different paths led from his work. One was the path of unthinking submission to the nation's cause. It inspired the “service classes” that ran the British Empire and it culminated in the mass sacrifice of the infantry subalterns of the Great War. The other way pushed the Victorian ethic of improvement to its utopian limit; it led to sexual reform, Fabian socialism, the “simple life,” and other attempts to build the New Jerusalem in Britain. The straight road to Waterloo and the crooked road to Wigan Pier began, after all, from the same place – the playing fields of Eton.

When Rupert entered Rugby School he was assigned to School Field, his father's house. From having been a boarder at Hillbrow, he now went to school by staying at home, a peculiar and anxious situation. His mother probably was equally anxious, about his physical and moral health. She could also save the cost of his lodging in some other house. He was one of the fifty boys who lived at School Field, and one of the family; he had to conceal from his friends how he felt about his parents, and conceal from his parents what his friends felt about them. Leading two lives under the same roof, his personality developed along two separate lines. One Rupert was a British stereotype: a model student who also got into the rugby First XV and the cricket XI. He applied himself to the classics and kept up a facade of purity for his puritan mother. The other Rupert belonged to the upstairs dormitory, a world that seethed with contempt for his parents, and with erotic intrigue.

Rupert needed a safety valve from the stress of life under his parents' roof. There were two gay men who lived in Rugby, in part so that they could cultivate friendships with boys at the school. One was St John Lucas, a poet, novelist, and aesthete who was eight years older than Rupert. Their friendship was a gesture of revolt against public school philistinism, and it gave Rupert affection and approval that were not
supplied by his parents. Lucas introduced him to Wilde, Dowson, and Baudelaire. Rupert duly produced poems with titles like “Lost Lilies” and an abortive novel whose hero, Chrysophase Tiberius Amaranth, sits in a “small pale green room” smoking opium-flavoured cigarettes. Another admirer of Rupert's was Arthur Eckersley, a playwright and journalist who lived in Rugby. He was twelve years older than Rupert, and would be remembered as “a lover of Youth,” but “always reserving first place for his mother.”
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In the summer of 1907, he spent three weeks with Rupert at Bournemouth, coaching him after his mediocre results in first-year Cambridge exams.

From the age of sixteen until his death, Rupert was continually under the protection of an older man who encouraged his writing but also idolised him for his looks. In no case, so far as we can tell, did these relationships progress to any sexual intimacy. It would be trite to say that Rupert needed a substitute for his actual father, weak and defeated as he was. Perhaps he just liked being under an older man's wing in a quasi-domestic relationship, and we need look no further than that. Others have looked further, of course, and John Lehmann has made the case in detail that repressed homosexuality was at the root of Rupert's later emotional problems.
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His case was more complex than that. Rupert's sexual identity emerged, like everyone's, from the family nexus. His domineering mother had wanted him to be a girl. After he reached puberty, she did her best to drive away any young women who seemed to threaten her hold over her beautiful boy. His father was too ineffectual to be an example of manliness for his sons. Rupert did become intimate with a series of older men – St John Lucas, Arthur Eckersley, Charles Sayle, Eddie Marsh – all of whom were gay or in the closet. But there is still no simple answer to the question “was Rupert gay?” Graves and Connolly believed that homosexuality at the public schools and Oxbridge was situational, the natural consequence of segregating young males with no access to women. This made it just a way station on the path to sexual maturity. Jacques Raverat told Virginia Woolf that homosexuality was quite natural up to the age of twenty, after which young men should leave it behind in order to marry and have children. An opposing view sees homosexuality as, for those who choose it, intrinsic to personal identity. It remains a foundation stone of the gay self, even if social pressure makes individuals conform to heterosexual norms.

Both kinds of arguments now need to be reconsidered, especially for the years leading up to 1914. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Richard Dellamora, and others have shifted the focus from sexual behaviour to masculine identity. Public school homosexuality is now placed on a continuum extending from sodomy to ideal and intimate friendship. All such attachments served to consolidate homosocial power within the interlocking hierarchies of gender and class. Paradoxically, though, this power had a masochistic tinge, in the sense of resting on discipline and self-denial rather than on sensual fulfillment. Adrian Caesar argues that “the idealism inculcated by the English public schools, which had its basis in Christianity, gave rise to a code of ‘manliness' immediately before the First World War which actively encouraged and rejoiced in pain.”
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Becoming a man meant learning to hold back your emotions; feelings were dangerous and were suitable only for those lesser beings, women.

In the nineteenth century, Sedgwick argues, there was no “association of a particular personal style with the genital activities now thought of as ‘homosexual.'”
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Her point is confirmed by Virginia Woolf, writing in 1925 about the younger generation of gay men: “I can't help finding it mildly foolish; though I have no particular reason. For one thing, all the young men tend to the pretty and ladylike, for some reason, at the moment. They paint and powder, which wasn't the style in our day at Cambridge.”
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Rupert Brooke greatly admired Oscar Wilde but never adopted any of his mannerisms (other than on paper). When he launched his vendetta against Bloomsbury, from 1912 on, he abused the Stracheys and their ilk as “eunuchs.” He despised them for their lack of manly assertiveness and their ivory-tower intellectualising, not for any feminine affectations.

Studies of Bloomsbury and of the Cambridge Apostles have made us familiar with the terms “Higher Sodomy” and “Lower Sodomy” (though Strachey's biographer Michael Holroyd never specified what physical acts went with each). The Higher Sodomy was a sequel to what was called, in
Tom Brown at Oxford
, “sentimental friendship.” At Rugby, Tom and East have deep affection for each other. They are the same age, study and play together, and protect weaker boys against bullies. They know about sex between boys but will have nothing to do with it, since there can be no “true manliness without purity.” Tennyson celebrated his sentimental friendship with Hallam in
In Memoriam
. It might be expressed
through the conventions of heterosexual romantic love, or the pederasty of classical Greece. But sentimental friendship was affectionate and idealistic rather than sexual, and it posed no obstacle to marriage and parenthood after leaving school or university.

Today, the enlightened view is that love, whether homo- or heterosexual, should be free to progress unhindered to mutual sexual fulfillment. Not so for Thomas Arnold. “None can pass through a large school,” he wrote, “without being pretty intimately acquainted with vice; and few, alas! very few, without tasting too largely of that poisoned bowl.”
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What Arnold calls vice is a predictable result of public schools being gender-segregated total institutions. Hierarchy may be an instinctual need, part of our primate inheritance. Still, public schools made hierarchy a universal rule, and took it to extraordinary lengths. Every boy in the school had a place on the ladder of status, marking them as superior to those below and inferior to those above. Their school career was one long climb up the ladder; at the same time they had to engage in horizontal struggle in the classroom or playing field – against their peers, against other houses, and against rival schools.

Everyone understood that hierarchy was founded on violence. When you entered the school, you expected to be beaten; eventually, you would gain the right to beat those below you. That was just the official violence; an unofficial realm started with bullying and might extend to torture, such as roasting a boy in front of a fire in
Tom Brown's Schooldays
. The masters condemned bullying but in practice they condoned it because they upheld the code of silence whereby victims should never inform on their tormentors. Bullying had its uses, too: it hardened the boys, teaching them the martial virtues that their country would need, once they had left school.

Three of the four great European powers – Germany, France, Russia – had conscription and large professional armies. The British officer corps was tiny by Continental standards: before 1914, only about 170 candidates entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst each year. In time of war, mass expansion had to come from the public schools where, in effect, every boy had acquired a military disposition by the time he left school, along with some basic military training in the Cadet Corps. The school culture made it a second nature to obey or to give orders, according to one's place on the ladder. And the system worked, producing the fantastic bravery and self-sacrifice of the amateur subalterns
in the Great War. Only two British officers were executed for desertion in 1914–18.
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Unlike other armies, the first duty of a British officer was to look after the welfare of his men. His second was to lead from the front, so that officers died at twice the rate of the rank and file. Rupert made light of it, but he undertook the usual military apprenticeship in the Rugby Cadet Corps.

If the public schools deserve admiration for their war record, their sexual system is more problematic. For Alisdare Hickson, their besetting sin has been institutional homophobia – the complex web of rules and physical barriers directed against the “menace” of schoolboy homosexuality. Official discourse glorified “purity” and warned fiercely against “vice.” Rupert's Rugby headmaster, Herbert James, allegedly told his boys that “If you touch it, it will fall off.”
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Promiscuous friendship was a danger: boys were not supposed to be friends with anyone outside their house, nor with any boys older or younger than themselves. But the danger could not, in practice, be controlled. Sexual hierarchy was stronger than all official attempts to deny it.
Tom Brown's Schooldays
describes the “small friend system,” “the miserable little pretty white-handed, curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who . . . did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next.” The painter Simeon Solomon saw in this a paradise of beauty and love, presided over by an angel. Tom Brown will have none of it. Such boys, he says, are the “Worst sort we breed . . . Thank goodness, no big fellow ever took to petting me.”
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Some time after he arrived at Rugby School, when he was about fifteen or sixteen, Rupert's face lost its boyishness and people became conscious of him as an astonishingly handsome young man. This was not just an individual quality; he also stood out as an example of the ideal public school type. Rupert took advantage of his looks, naturally, but they also made him uneasy. Part of this may have been the fear, common in beautiful people, that they are only admired for their superficial gifts, or that they don't really deserve to be worshipped. More importantly, Rupert found it hard to respond when others felt affection for him. With women this might go further, stirring up in Rupert a positive disgust at the emotions some besotted woman might be sending his way.

There is no evidence of Rupert having been an older boy's pet, though he must have had admirers when he was a pretty boy just entering the school at fourteen. He had a sentimental friend in Hugh Russell-Smith,
who was his own age, and at least three known passions for younger boys. The first was in the beginning of 1906, when Rupert was eighteen. Michael Sadler was a year younger and in another house. He set the ball rolling by telling the school photographer that he wanted to buy a photograph of Rupert. This required Rupert's permission, and he identified his admirer as a boy with “the form of a Greek God, the face of Hyacinthus, the mouth of Antinous, eyes like a sunset, a smile like dawn . . . It appears that the madman worships me at a pale distance: which is embarrassing but purple.”
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Living in a purple style was very much Rupert's ambition at this point. The original Antinous was a Greek boy beloved by the Emperor Hadrian, who was thirty-five years older. Antinous drowned in the Nile when he was eighteen, and his beauty inspired many posthumous statues.

At first Rupert could do no more than make eyes at Sadler in Chapel, but in such affairs it was the image that counted. “It is my obvious duty,” Rupert wrote, “to live the aesthetic life I preach, and break the laws I loathe.” By the end of March the two boys were exchanging letters, with Rupert doing his utmost to put Pater and Wilde in the shade: “The Greek gods lived that you might be likened to them . . . the fragrance of your face is myrrh and incense before the pale altar of Beauty.” And so on. “How much I am in earnest,” Rupert reported, “ – or how much he is – I really can't say.”
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On the surface, Rupert was an entirely conventional and successful public school boy. His affair with Antinous was designed to prove that he was something more, a boy who was playing his part in a great myth: “I have discovered whither the Greek gods went, when they left Olympus . . . They came to the English public schools. I have seen them often, young unconscious deities in flannel, running swiftly over the grass. Apollo is here, divinely cruel, and Dionysus, who maddens by his presence. Even Jove, lewd and bearded as of old, is not absent.”
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