Fatal Glamour (22 page)

With all the festivities of 1910, Rupert had lagged far behind schedule with his fellowship thesis for King's on the Elizabethan dramatists. By September he had decided that he would have to submit it a year late, at the end of 1911. Four months of study in Germany were supposed to make him into an expert philologist, but his real reason for going was to escape the frustrations of his personal life in England and sort out his conflicting emotions about Noel and Ka. Yet, on the night that he left for Munich, he invited both of them to supper, which left all three of them tongue-tied and embarrassed.

From the beginning of 1911 to the outbreak of war in August 1914, Rupert would spend almost half his time out of England. There were better chances of sexual freedom across the Channel; not coincidentally,
the further from England was also the further from the surveillance of his mother. He went down to Limpsfield early in January for a couple of days, to try and clear the air with Margery and Noel before he left. “I shall be glad,” he told Ka, “to be in Germany, at peace. Rest means being where no one knows you.”
¹³
The stay in Germany was meant to disentangle him from his undergraduate follies, and launch him into a more sober adulthood and career. In the event, the outcome was more the reverse. During his year and a half at the Orchard, Rupert had come as close as he ever would to having a stable home, a single beloved, a cohesive group of friends, and even a coherent personality. When he left for Munich on 9 January 1911 he had four years and a few months left to live, and was heading towards a series of emotional crises that would last until his death.

To study in Germany was a natural move for any aspiring academic, but to go to Munich showed the particular Germany that attracted Rupert. The academic centre of the country was Heidelberg and the political one Berlin. Munich promised a warmer and softer life than either: as D.H. Lawrence put it, on his first visit a year and a half later, “a lovely town, all artists, pictures galore.” The artists lived mostly in Schwabing, the headquarters of German bohemianism.
¹⁴
The country branch of Schwabing was Ascona, where writers, psychiatrists, dancers, and
naturmenschen
lived on a mountain and tested the very limits of civilised life.
¹⁵
By going to Munich, Rupert was looking for sensual adventure rather than mere academic improvement (in fact, he did no serious studying while he was there). Adventure he found; but he recoiled from the experience and left Munich without having accepted the spirit of the city. While he was in Munich, the painter Sophie Benz killed herself with poison supplied by her lover, the mad psychiatrist Otto Gross. English Neo-paganism was like a children's party when put beside what was happening in Schwabing and Ascona. But bohemian life in Munich left Rupert hesitant and uneasy, and his return a year later was largely an attempt to redeem the disappointment of his first visit.

In 1908 the kaiser had dismissed Hugo von Tschudi, director of the National Gallery in Berlin, for being too sympathetic to modern art. Tschudi left for the friendlier climate of Bavaria, where in 1909 he became general director of the state museums. He stood as friend and patron to the avant-garde artists of Munich, who organised themselves first as the
Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen, later as the Blaue Reiter group. Their leading spirit was the Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky, allied with Franz Marc, Hans Arp, Paul Klee, and the musician Arnold Schonberg. Somewhere on the fringes of bohemia, at once sympathetic and ironic, was Thomas Mann. At the time of Rupert's stay he was writing his own meditation on paganism, beauty, and transience,
Death in Venice
. In September 1910, just before the London Post-Impressionist show, Kandinsky's group put on a show in Munich with works by Braque, Picasso, Rouault, Derain, Vlaminck, and Van Dongen. As in London, these paintings set off a furore. “Either the majority of the members and guests of the Association are incurably insane,” said one newspaper, “or they are shameless bluffers who are not unfamiliar with the age's demand for sensation, and who are capitalizing on it.”
¹⁶

Into this crucible of modernism drifted Rupert, armed with a few scraps of German and a passion for the drawings of Augustus John:

I move among the Munchen P[ost] I[mpressionist]s. They got up an exhibition of their French masters here last year; and go pilgrimages to all the places where Van Gogh went dotty or cut his ears off or did any of the other climactic actions of his life. They are young and beetle browed and serious. Every now and then they paint something – often a house, a simple square bordered by four very thick black lines. The square is then coloured blue or green. That is all. Then they go on talking . . . It is all very queer and important.
¹⁷

This report was for Jacques, so that he could compare the artist's life in Munich with the Slade. The aim of Rupert's account, it seems fair to say, was to render the “queer and important” familiar and unimportant: Cambridge looking down its nose at the Continental avant-garde. After Munich, Rupert would be equally unimpressed by Vienna. In time, his most famous poem would take insularity to its logical extreme by vowing to turn a foreign field into British soil.

Insularity was reinforced, in Rupert's case, by the fear and self-doubt that threatened him whenever he was left to his own devices. When asked what experiences he was having, he said he had come to Munich “
exactly
to escape ‘experiences.' I'd been having too damned many! . . . 
‘Experiences' – one stays in England for
that
.”
¹⁸
Was he just going through the motions of foreign travel from a sense of duty, like the revellers who filled the streets for Fasching, the carnival of Lent? Rupert was left with his eternal fear of losing himself in spontaneous action. The worm of self-consciousness had turned his affair with Denham Russell-Smith from an experience into an experiment; now, when opportunity with a woman came his way, he would find himself in a similar plight.

On the “Bacchus-fest” night of Fasching at the end of February, everyone roamed around dressed, as scantily as possible, like ancient Greeks. Each man was looking for his
Faschingsbraut
– his carnival bride for a day, or a week. “I found,” Rupert told Jacques, “a round damp young sculptress, a little like Lord Rosebery to look on. We curled passionate limbs round each other in a perfunctory manner and lay in a corner, sipping each other and beer in polite alternation.” The evening progressed well along Dionysian lines, but when it came to the crunch both Rupert and the sculptress found that they were “conscious, sensible intellectuals” rather than devotees of Bacchus.
¹⁹
The girl went home with her mother and Rupert slunk back to his lodgings at dawn, naked, cold, frustrated, and ridiculous.

Elisabeth van Rysselberghe was a more serious proposition. Rupert met her briefly around the beginning of February, probably through the painter Frau van Ewald, who had taken him under her wing. Unlike most of the other young ladies that he met in Munich, Elisabeth spoke fluent English. Three years younger than Rupert, she was the daughter of the leading Belgian Neo-Impressionist painter Theo van Rysselberghe. The Flemish poet Emile Verhaeren was her godfather. She was visiting Munich with her mother Maria, a writer who travelled widely and was an intimate of Andre Gide's literary circle. At the beginning of March, Elisabeth came back to Munich by herself, giving Rupert a chance to “snatch the opportunity” of an affair, as he had told Bryn he was now determined to do. Elisabeth was an ardent and impulsive soul who had fallen head over heels in love with Rupert. She was dark-skinned, with large sad eyes and aquiline features – a bit like Noel in appearance, though Elisabeth's looks were more strong than pretty. She was attracted to men who were weaker than herself, with a feminine side to their nature. One sees a lot in common between her and Ka, qualities of devotion and integrity that would reassure Rupert – but also, unfortunately,
make him skittish. Here was a free-spirited young woman, alone with him in a foreign city, making it plain that she was in love with him. All he had to do, it seemed, was plunge into the waves of passion.

In his sonnet “Lust” Rupert tells how he “starved” for Elisabeth, how “the enormous wheels of will / Drove [him] cold-eyed” in her pursuit. But when she actually responds to his desire, he pulls up short of his goal:

Love wakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver,

And suddenly the mad victory I planned

Flashed real, in your burning bending head

My conqueror's blood was cool as a deep river

In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand

Quieter than a dead man on a bed.

One suspects that it was not the heart, but another organ that failed him. Soon Rupert was complaining to Ka that he was “in a state of collapse – from disease and Elisabeth. She is a Rat.”
²⁰

When it came to sex Rupert could always talk a good game, but he had trouble finishing in front of the net. Recoiling from his difficulties with Elisabeth, he went off to Vienna to stay with Ernst Goldschmidt, a Cambridge friend. Ernst was from a wealthy Jewish family; he got out in the 1930s and became a leading antiquarian book dealer in London. As with Rupert's other Jewish friends – Arthur Schloss, Albert Rothenstein, and Leonard Woolf – Ernst enjoyed his company, but would not have done so if he had known what Rupert was saying behind his back.

Elisabeth wrote to Rupert in Vienna, agreeing to spend a couple of days with him at Venice, later in April. Would he desire her, there, she asked wistfully? Of course he would, Rupert vowed, in the middle of a roundabout disquisition on the dangers of pregnancy. Elisabeth promptly wrote back to tell him that she was not prepared to “give herself” to him in Venice. He told her that she should expect to take “Life,” and the sooner the better – “Life” meaning a brief affair, with a clear understanding that there would be no strings afterwards. Rupert was bitter at the lesson he had just learned, that honesty about one's intentions was not the best policy when dealing with romantic young ladies. “I can't help believing (am I right?),” he told her, “that if we'd met in Venice, that
there
, touching your hands, looking into your eyes, I could have
made you understand, and agree. But I preferred to be honest. And so perhaps one of the best things in my life, or yours, is lost – for a time – through a desire for honesty!”
²¹

Rupert now had to go to the aid of his old classics master, Bob White-law, who had been taken ill in Florence. Before going, he returned to Munich for a melodramatic settling of accounts with Elisabeth. Having fled from the emotional complications of England, Rupert found himself fleeing the worse complications he had stirred up in Germany:

The parting with Elisabeth was most painful. I felt an awful snake. Especially when she said she would kill herself, and I felt frightened of the police. She's quite come round, and apologised for her telegram; and, it appears, we're to have a week at Marseilles in August. I am very bitter with myself, and frightened of England . . . The maid-servant suddenly brought two students to see the room, and found her with her hair down weeping, at full length, on that
plateau
of a sofa, and me in great pain on one leg in the middle of the room, saying “Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .” But, anyhow, do assure me that one
ought
to tell the truth: and that it's not honest to want to be raped.
²²

Elisabeth, Rupert felt, wanted to be promised eternal love and then swept off her feet; whereas he wanted her to copulate with him on fixed terms, having first carefully read the directions that came with the syringe. Both of them were by now thoroughly confused, guilty, and unsatisfied. But Elisabeth would soon rally and make another attempt to win his love.

Rupert went to a string of Ibsen plays in Munich, of which
John Gabriel Borkman
made by far the strongest impression on him. Mrs Borkman is an ice queen who wants to make her son, Erhardt, as deathly as she is. Erhardt mopes around the house complaining, “Ich muss leben, Mutter! Ich muss leben!” Finally, he escapes to the south with Mrs Wilton, a divorced woman seven years older than himself. Rupert identified with Erhardt, though he could not order his own affairs so decisively. He had not joined the vanguard of Schwabing, figures like Ludwig Klages, Fanny zu Reventlow, and Otto Gross who had declared war on bourgeois convention. But when he heard from Gwen Darwin about her tangled relations with Jacques and Ka, he affected the Ibsenite stance that we can always seize our Fate by the neck: “You said you'd all three
felt, that week, as if you were in the hands of some external power, rushing you on. External Power? What? God? The Life-Force? Oh, my Gwen, be clean, be clean! It is a monstrosity. There is no power. Things happen: and we pick our way among them. That is all. If only you'd been at Camp last year, you'd have learnt that one can sail eight points
into
the wind. To be certain of it is the beginning and end of good behaviour.”
²³
What did Rupert's nautical metaphor mean? Apparently that the Neo-pagans were free to ignore convention, and that telling the truth about one's emotions was guaranteed to keep any love affair on a steady course. But since that camp Rupert had done more drifting than sailing, whatever he claimed to Gwen.

Clearly, however, that drift was carrying him away from Noel and towards Ka. Rupert told her to make a clean break with both Jacques and Gwen – good advice, perhaps, but not quite disinterested: “Why are you sad? . . . Lust. But that's absurd. You'd never have gratified that anyway . . . Even if, as I'll grant, a sort of lustjealousy may plague you (an infinitely pale reflection of part of that plagues me every time I hear of anyone getting married!), that doesn't come to much. Tragedy – much pain – doesn't come from that, for any creature.” The heaviest blows to Ka were her wounded vanity, and the fear of losing both Jacques and Gwen as friends. Rupert, however, told her to cheer the engaged couple on: “Jacques and Gwen are in love and are going to marry. That is very fine . . . It is a risky business, as they're both so dotty. I hope Gwen won't hurt her wood-cuts with babies, or Jacques get domesticated. It's very splendid. They'll be in love for a couple of years. I hope they'll do it more gracefully than most.”
²⁴
His agenda, as soon as he got back to England, was clear: to catch Ka on the rebound, and succeed with her where he had failed with Elisabeth.