Fatal Glamour (26 page)

From the dark woven flow of change

Under a vast and starless sky

I saw the immortal moment lie.

I saw the stillness and the light,

And you, august, immortal, white,

Holy and strange; and every glint

Posture and jest and thought and tint

Freed from the mask of transiency.

The lover, the beloved, and Time are the eternal triangle of lyric poetry. What is typical about Rupert's love poems, though, is the lack of understanding between the poet and his beloved. The woman gives him a glimpse of transfiguration, but never knows that she has given it:

How could I cloud, or how distress,

The heaven of your unconsciousness?

The eternal holiness of you,

The timeless end, you never knew.

While the laughter plays around the table, the poet goes “a million miles away” – then comes back to this single summer evening in Devon.

His beloved's unconsciousness was an old story with Rupert by now, and had become a self-serving myth that did little justice to Noel's sense of her own personality and interests. What saves “Dining-Room Tea” is how the poet makes the beloved's unconsciousness stand for that of the whole group. In their spontaneous joy, they are unaware of the party's aesthetic value. Only the poet, from his position of detachment, can see it and capture it. Virginia Woolf would make a similar event, Mrs Ramsay's dinner party, the centrepiece of
To the Lighthouse
. But
there the radiant moment is kindled by Mrs Ramsay's labours as hostess and mother. The success of that party comes from her nurturing; Rupert, in his, is either carried along with the others' joy or stands above it with a superior vision.

To the Lighthouse
epitomised Bloomsbury's struggle against transience and loss. They remained a group for so long because they had such solid foundations of tolerance and mutual affection. The Neo-pagans, on the other hand, were facing disintegration after only a few years together. Part of their fragility as a group derived from a simple inferiority of character and talent, compared with Bloomsbury. In the long run, they had less to build on. But sexual dynamics had a part in it too. Most members of Bloomsbury were either gay or married late. In their twenties they were relatively promiscuous. These love affairs caused turmoil and jealousy but when they burned out friendship reasserted itself, and was often strengthened by the ordeal. The Neo-pagans, despite being younger, suffered more from the legacy of Victorianism. So long as their young ladies, at least, did not “copulate before marriage,” they were all caught between the millstones of chastity before marriage, monogamous domesticity after it. Their sexual choices weighed more heavily, because they were thought to be “once and for all”; and, under the pressure of those choices, the vision of unity in “Dining-Room Tea” would quickly fade.

Returning to London from Dartmoor, Rupert learned that Dudley Ward was engaged to Annemarie von der Planitz. Their engagement, coming three months after Jacques's marriage, seemed to Rupert another nail in the coffin of his youth. “Luckily it's not very definite,” he told Ka. “Dudley won't give up his freedom for some years yet. But I'd so idolized him . . . I felt so awfully lonely.”
³⁵
Dudley was too stiff and sober and reticent to count as a true Neo-pagan, but Rupert found his conventionality reassuring. Once married, which he was within months rather than years, Dudley became for Rupert a trusted refuge in times of trouble.

Having met the engaged couple, Rupert congratulated them on not appearing
too
engaged: “You live in the present; like me (an Infantile Paralytic) and Mr George Meredith (now, alas! dead).”
³⁶
But calling himself an Infantile Paralytic was rather too good a joke at his own expense.
Was he really, like Peter Pan, a “boy who would not grow up”? And was he using Noel's unattainability as an excuse to avoid following his friends into marriage and maturity? If so, an obvious cure was at hand. For three years he had kept up both his soulful love of Noel and his twilight affairs with Denham, Elisabeth, or Ka. Why not combine soul and sense at last, by turning wholeheartedly to Ka? After his nervous breakdown, he blamed himself to Ka for failing to make that, or any other choice, during 1911:

For a year you loved me, and I loved Noel and you – Oh I was a youthful fool, and I wronged you, I see, both of you, a great deal. I plead innocence and youth. But I
did
love, both of you, – with a growing uneasiness that if I gave either all I could give I'd scarcely be worthy, but that as it
was
– I was a beast to both. I loved you a great deal; more as the year went on, I think – Once or twice I felt your kindness and loveliness creeping over me, and loyalty to Noel made me kick. And in the autumn occasionally I was tired and cross and worried about Noel, and a little dead to you.
³⁷

Through the summer and autumn of 1911 the word “tired” becomes more and more frequent in Rupert's letters. Certainly he was trying to cram a great deal of research and writing into six months. But the underlying cause of his fatigue, and eventually of his collapse, was his inability to choose between Noel and Ka. Instead of resolving the dilemma he tried to ignore its pressure. “I'm determined to live like a motor-car,” he told Ka, “or a needle, or Mr Bennett, or a planetary system, or whatever else is always at the keenest and wildest pitch of activity . . . I am not tired! I am as lively as God, and working like an engine.”
³⁸
His manic side drove him to pack each day with activity, but he was living beyond his emotional means, and the bill would soon fall due.

Early in October Rupert decided that he would start spending weekdays in London and returning to Grantchester at weekends. The ostensible reason was that he needed to use the British Museum Library for his thesis, but he was probably finding the Old Vicarage lonely now that the fine weather was past, and he wanted to be closer to Ka. At Grantchester he was too well known to have any regular intimacy with an unmarried young lady, whereas in London the main hazard would be running the gauntlet of Bloomsbury gossip:

If you only knew what James said Virginia said So and So said . . . But your repper, my dear, is going. Oh, among the quite Advanced. I, it is thought, am rather beastly; you rather pitiable.

All the worst things drive them on. The furtive craving to interfere in the other people's lusts, the fear of unusual events, and the rest. The mother and the clergyman are at one in these kind hearts . . . Is there no
SIGN
to give them, that each minute is final, and each heart alone?
³⁹

This was really a message in code to Ka: that Rupert didn't want her to be afraid of having an affair, but also that he didn't want to be manoeuvred into marrying her. Bloomsbury, of course, had little to do with the values of mothers or clergymen, and was just coming up with its own remarkable designs for living. Virginia had been sharing rooms with her brother Adrian at 29 Fitzroy Square; the lease ended in November 1911 and she decided to set up a communal household at 38 Brunswick Square. Besides herself and Adrian, there would be quarters for Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf on the top floor. It looked much more improper than it really was, but friends and relatives were shocked, while Vanessa helpfully pointed out that it was just across the road from the Foundling Hospital.

Ka's friendship with Virginia was making her a part of this milieu. Its sexual heresies, along with her failed affair with Jacques and Rupert's solicitings, threw Ka's morals into confusion. The rules of Neo-pagan sex were that the women should appear fast but remain chaste, while the men should practise chastity within the Neo-pagan circle and, if they could manage it, enjoy a surreptitious licence outside. By proposing that he and Ka should have an affair, Rupert was radically changing the game as it had been played up to now. His opening gambit was to settle, around 12 October, in the studio at 21 Fitzroy Square that was shared by Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant. Grant was away, and Keynes lived mostly at Cambridge. Rupert complained to Jacques that his quarters were “inconceivably . . . disgusting,” but they were handy to the British Museum, and allowed him to be alone with Ka whenever he wished. Whatever his professed beliefs or his commitment to Noel, he had now strung himself up to try and make Ka his mistress.

Rupert's impatience may even have led him into another brief gay affair as soon as he arrived in London. In her memoir
Old Bloomsbury
,
Virginia Woolf recalls an exchange with her sister: “‘Norton tells me,' Vanessa would say, ‘that James is in utter despair. Rupert has been twice to bed with Hobhouse' and I would cap her stories with some equally thrilling piece of gossip; about a divine undergraduate with a head like a Greek God – but alas his teeth were bad – called George Mallory.”
⁴⁰
Describing his affair with Denham Russell-Smith, Rupert says that he had never gone to bed with anyone before then (October 1909); the height of the Mallory boom was around May of the same year. Either the story about Rupert and Hobhouse was exaggerated, or it happened later. Hobhouse, once beloved by Maynard Keynes and Lytton, had faded from the Bloomsbury scene by 1909, but he was still an Apostle, and the discussions about electing new brothers in the autumn of 1911 could have drawn him back into his old orbit.

A letter from Maynard to James Strachey in October of that year might refer to James's hurt feelings about an affair between Rupert and Hobhouse:

Yes, I should certainly suppose “nothing,” but then that's not your theory of life. Nor after the night before does it seem to me that last night was really so very unexpected. And wouldn't it, if there had been so much as that going on on
both
sides, have come to a more palpable longitudinal head before midnight? It seems to me that you've now learnt to sit more firmly, but are not much nearer standing at the end of it. However, we'll see, I suppose. Isn't, perhaps, Covent Garden with Bryn almost out of the propriety?
⁴¹

The reference could also be to James finding Rupert and Ka in a compromising position at Fitzroy Square, but James had never been really jealous of Rupert's “womanising” – up to now at least.

Noel was making her own contribution to Rupert's discomfort. She was now living with her parents in St John's Wood and beginning her medical studies. They could meet casually for the ballet or theatre, but proximity did not work any better for them than distance. Keeping quiet about his developing intimacy with Ka, Rupert bombarded Noel with long, half-hysterical letters, fuelled by sleeplessness and anxiety about his fellowship dissertation. The letters can be summed up in one quote:
“I love you more than anyone ever will. Damn you!”
⁴²
Noel did her best to calm him, but on 15 December they went for a long walk on the Embankment and agreed that they should stay apart for some time. Rupert had to accept that Noel could not or would not yield to his demands.

Who was to blame for their failure over the past three and a half years? “Have you worked out, by the way,” Rupert asked, “just
when
the Surrey and St John's Wood upper middle classes will permit you and me to go a walk together?”
⁴³
He was still fuming about Noel's refusal to walk cross-country with him before Clifford's Bridge. One obvious response from Noel might be: “When we are married.” Yet that was the one trump that Rupert would die without laying down. It was not a question of being “snug and safe and respectable,” Noel fired back; she was breaking it off because they couldn't be together without ending in fury and mutual disappointment. All they could do was stay apart “until you love less, or I love more, or until we're both stronger and can bear anything.”
⁴⁴

Before this, Rupert had moved from 21 Fitzroy Square, after only a month. It was horribly dirty, there were fleas, and he was under the eye of Virginia and Adrian at Number 29. Ka had found him rooms nearby at 76 Charlotte Street, and there they began a
demi-vierge
kind of affair that left both of them unhappy and unsettled:

And then we had those nights – – – I had such lust for your fine body, far more
(
you
never
understood!) than for Noel. I had passion for you, – and, as you know, other things, other ways of love, (I knew you –,
Ka
, – so deeply) as well. I was foolish and wicked, indeed. First, that I didn't chuck everything, turn wholly to you, marry you, if you would. Then, I was a fool . . . I'd baby ideas about “honour” “giving you a fair choice” “not being underhand” “men (!) and women (!) being equal” – – – I wanted you to fuck. You wouldn't, “didn't like preventives.” And I respected you! . . . felt guilty and angry with myself when lust made me treat you “unfairly”!

I was getting ill and stupid . . . I was an object for pity – even love; not, of course, lust. You gave me strength, comfort, rest – for a bit. I threw all my affairs – all the mess Noel and I had made – onto you.
⁴⁵

When Rupert said that his friends didn't copulate before marriage, he might have added that they hardly knew how to do it. They were in a muddle over contraception for a start, but they were also stuck with the belief that premarital sex was only an overture to the real thing. Although they expected their marriages to be more sensual and companionable than their parents' had been, marriage was still a tremendous rite of passage, with the wife as the high priestess of its mystery. To draw back the veil casually or prematurely would arouse deep guilt. On the other hand, they assumed that the sexual act, by itself, would grant them maturity and strength of will. So long as his relation with Ka remained unconsummated, Rupert could hope that, once it was, his emotional confusion would be resolved. He did not foresee how upset he would be when she
did
respond to his sexual needs; and even more, when she responded to someone else's.