Fatal Glamour (9 page)

With no brothers to restrain them, the Olivier girls took their cue from their father's Olympian manner. “They were all aristocratic creatures,”
Garnett wrote of them. “Pride was the moving force of their lives; they felt contempt easily; pity did not come naturally, except for animals.”
¹²
Their self-containment was reinforced by their parents' disdain for conventional schooling. The three older girls did not go to school at all, but were intermittently tutored at home. All of them spent much of their childhood roaming the woods for miles around.

A year after the Oliviers moved to Limpsfield, Edward and Constance Garnett followed, to build a house nearby at The Cearne, Crockham Hill. Their only child, Bunny, would have a playmate his own age, the three-year-old Noel, and Constance could translate her Russian novels in the peace of the country. Others were drawn to this nucleus of the Oliviers and Garnetts: political exiles from Russia like the Kropotkins and Stepniaks; Fabians like the Peases and Hobsons; literary visitors like Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, or D.H. Lawrence. Limpsfield was different from both the planned utopian community of Welwyn Garden City and the “beer and cricket” flavour of villages then being colonised by middle-class intellectuals. “There was no church within two miles,” recalled Bunny Garnett, “no rookery, no immemorial elms, no ancient red brick or mellowed ashlar walls, no water, no fertile soil. Instead there was a great horizon, solitude, and the encompassing forest.”
¹³
Leading such unbounded lives, the children there grew up contemptuous of established society. Rupert admired this freedom of spirit in the Olivier sisters, especially Noel, and tried to emulate it. But his own upbringing and temperament were far more constricted. In Neo-paganism, as it came to be called, there would always be an uneasy coexistence between the pastoral anarchy of Limpsfield and the pastoral reaction of Belloc; and between the new Bedales and the old Rugby.

When the Neo-pagans came together at Cambridge in 1908, they had no thought of any formal manifesto to found their group. They were friends of Rupert, and friends of each other, who had a common style of youthful unconventionality and overlapping links to Bedales, Fabianism, Cambridge, and the Simple Life. The central group would include Rupert, Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat, Gwen and Frances Darwin, Ka Cox, and the Olivier sisters. Fringe members included Bunny Garnett, Geoffrey Keynes, Ethel, Sybil, and David Pye, Dudley Ward, Godwin Baynes, and Ferenc Békássy.

Apart from liking each other, they had various dislikes in common. They agreed that the social conventions of the previous century needed
to be consciously trampled on. For some members of the group – Rupert in particular – this meant judiciously snubbing their parents. There were other negative definitions. Being Neo-pagan was something that Young Fabians did when they were not doing politics, or that the children of Fabians did as a way of not following in their parents' footsteps. They were keeping alive the ideals of H.G. Wells's
A Modern Utopia
, after the purging of its author and his ideas from the Fabian Society. They were the friends to whom Rupert turned when he wanted to keep James Strachey and the other Apostles at a distance, and in whom Justin Brooke found refuge from his father and Brooke Bond tea. Neo-paganism was, finally, the antidote to the creed of “John Rump,” a retired public school housemaster who was the butt of one of Rupert's satirical poems. Rump ascends to heaven, with top hat and umbrella, and tells God that what
he
believes in is:

Safety, regulations, paving-stones,

Street-lamps, police, and bijou-residences

Semi-detached. I stand for Sanity,

Comfort, Content, Prosperity, top-hats,

Alcohol, collars, meat.
¹⁴

When Beatrice Webb called Amber Reeves “a dreadful little pagan” she had in mind the new feminism of cigarette-smoking and careers, free thought and free love. Neo-paganism was not nearly so radical or aggressive. It was, rather, the paganism of Diana and Juno: of free-thinking but chaste young women, who would live as comrades with both sexes, before entering a devoted and domestic marriage. They thought of themselves as an emancipated new generation, and flouted convention by consorting with young men unchaperoned. But they drew a sharp line at sexual freedom; there, they were as much the “gatekeepers” as their mothers before them. Paradoxically, it was this restraint that allowed the Neo-pagans to continue as a stable group of friends for several years. Rosamund Bland and Amber Reeves, two less inhibited Fabian daughters, both found themselves married in 1909. Given the current state of contraception, and of middle-class morality, any sexually active young woman became a loose cannon that had to be quickly tied down. For women, the cycle from licence to confinement was bound to be short.

Nonetheless, the Neo-pagan ideal of comradeship was bound to clash with the realities of sexual desire and possessiveness in young men and women alike. Was a young woman to be looked on as a soulmate or a bedmate? Was she to be an untouched nymph, a mistress, or a wife? The Victorians had firm answers to these questions, but the more thoughtful young Edwardians would not accept them. They were determined to make new rules, out of their own imagination and experience. But rules there still would be.

It seems right that Rupert and Noel's first shared activity, and the project that made the Neo-pagans into a group with Rupert as its leader, should be a production of Milton's
Comus
in July 1908. Here was a masque about a young virgin who loses herself in a forest, is accosted by a silver-tongued seducer, but is saved through the intervention of an Attendant Spirit – played by Rupert. The production was sponsored by Christ's College to celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of its former student and Cambridge's greatest poet. Justin and Rupert were enlisted as directors, but Justin also had finals to think about, so Rupert found himself both stage manager and playing the longest part.

Justin had begun a revival of Elizabethan drama at Cambridge the previous autumn, with a production of Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
for the new Marlowe Dramatic Society. Justin wanted to do at Cambridge what his Headmaster Badley had already done at Bedales: to present Elizabethan verse as living, rhythmic speech (instead of stilted recitation), and to cast women in the female roles. Unfortunately, the fellows of Newnham were not yet willing to let their young ladies take part in such a dubious venture. Nonetheless,
Faustus
was performed on 11 and 12 November 1907. The general verdict was that it was odd but effective, despite having no music, scenery, or footlights. Rupert played one of the leads, Mephistophilis, though he made no great impression. In everyday life he was theatrical to a fault and could read poetry brilliantly to his friends, but on stage he tended to choke.

Because
Comus
was a masque rather than a play, and was being produced out of term, Justin and Rupert could cast their net more widely than previous student directors and even have women in the female
roles. Francis Cornford, a young classics don from Trinity, played the seducer Comus; Jane Harrison recruited young ladies from Newnham, including Dorothy Lamb as Sabrina. Albert Rothenstein came from London to paint the scenery. Two cousins, Frances and Gwen Darwin, were given the job of designing the costumes. Neither of them was at Newnham, but as granddaughters of Charles Darwin they could claim deep roots in the Cambridge intellectual aristocracy. Frances's father, Francis, was an eminent botanist and a fellow of Christ's. She had inherited from her grandfather the prognathous jaw and vaguely simian features that inspired the famous Victorian cartoon of the ape blending into the man. Her looks were comely enough, though more striking than winsome. She was already sensitive, artistic, and a poet when Rupert met her, and her photographs suggest that she liked striking a pose almost as much as he did.

Frances was a year older than Rupert, but when the production of
Comus
began she had just returned to Cambridge after four years in limbo. Her mother's death, when Frances was seventeen, had caused a series of nervous breakdowns. She had been shuttled from one cure to another in Cannes, Switzerland, and England. In later life she would again suffer from bouts of depression, yet she had a base of stable common sense that her friends would often rely on in troubles that lay ahead.

Gwen Darwin's father, George, was another leading scientist, a professor of astronomy and fellow of Trinity. Like Frances, Gwen belonged to the first generation of academic children that appeared when dons were permitted to marry from 1878 on. Her girlhood, in the tight-knit and high-minded society of Victorian Cambridge, had not been easy; she was “fat and clumsy and plain” – and shy and bespectacled for good measure. But these awkward years had developed her gifts of sense and observation. In the year of
Comus
she was twenty-three – a year older than Frances – but only just emerging from her powerful family. She had wanted to be a painter since she was thirteen. Her parents had finally acknowledged that her talent for drawing was more than just a childish knack, and had agreed that she could go to London and enroll at the Slade.

Frances and Gwen drew in other young women, to help with the costumes, like Ka Cox and Sybil and Ethel Pye (neighbours of the Oliviers at Limpsfield), or just to clean brushes, like Noel.
¹⁵
But most of the power gravitated to Rupert, who became effectively the producer, director, and
star. From Justin, Rupert had learned the actor's knack of making himself a centre of attention. His friends became his daily audience – an insidious bond, perhaps, but one that raised casual gatherings into occasions that lingered in memory. The pleasures of the group required also that each should care more for the ensemble than for any favourite partner. So Rupert was not entirely facetious in asking his collaborators on
Comus
to swear that none of them would get engaged to be married within six months of the masque's performance.
¹⁶
Having assembled a group of friends of which he was the unchallenged leader (unlike his subordinate role in the Apostles or the Fabians), Rupert wanted to steer them into the future with closed ranks.

Frances Darwin saw how Rupert's beauty made him into a symbol for his admirers. Noticing once that his blond locks were highlighted by the sun from a window above the stage, she captured the moment in a little poem:

A young Apollo, golden-haired

Stands dreaming on the verge of strife

Magnificently unprepared

For the long littleness of life.
¹⁷

After Rupert's death the poem became merely sentimental, a cultural cliché of the Great War. But Frances had grasped the contradiction in Rupert's position: the golden boy of his tribe who could not live up to his pedestal, fatally undermined by the adulation he provoked. His long hair, casual dress, and schoolboy-hero manner were the target for every kind of gush and sentimentality. More than could be true of any beautiful young woman at that time, Cambridge made Rupert into a figure of sexual myth. But it could not have done so if he had not accepted the role. Frances describes how the girls taught him to hang his head upside down and shake out his hair; afterwards he could be seen “rumpling his fingers through the front and gazing in the glass with melancholy flower-like eyes. ‘I can't get it right. Is it right now? Will my hair do now?'”
¹⁸

For all Rupert's care, the actual performances of
Comus
, at the New Theatre on 10 and 11 July, fell short of a triumph. The literary world outside Cambridge was well represented. Thomas Hardy even came up from Dorset. Rupert was invited to breakfast with him, and summed him up memorably as “incredibly shrivelled and ordinary, and said
faintly pessimistic things in a flat voice about the toast.” Also present on the first night were Alfred Austin, the poet laureate; Robert Bridges, who left early; and Edmund Gosse, who, when someone congratulated him on having heard
Comus
, replied, “I have overheard it.”
¹⁹
Lytton Strachey's review in the
Spectator
gave the fairest summing-up of what the production had achieved: “How infinitely rarely does one hear, in any theatre, the beauty that is blank verse! From this point of view, the performance at Cambridge was indeed memorable . . . The existence of such a body of able and enthusiastic lovers of poetry and drama must be welcomed as at least an augury of a better state of things.”
²⁰

The weakness of the Marlowe Society was that their productions had more poetry than drama. Rupert loved gorgeous language, but he had little sense of creating a character or working in an ensemble. There was still a gulf between the universities and the London stage. Few of the Marlovians became professional actors, and they were complete novices at presenting a natural interplay between men and women. The whole production was a kind of glorified charade, like the set-pieces of so many Edwardian parties. After the final performance, a cast party followed at Newnham Grange – Gwen Darwin's home on the river – where the actors remained in costume to mingle with their guests. Rupert's tunic was so short and tight he couldn't sit down; he could have danced, along with the rest, except that dancing was something he could never bring himself to do.

When the party ended, Mrs Brooke carried off her son for three months in Rugby (including a subdued twenty-first birthday on 3 August). She was disturbed by his seeming to be overtired and overexcited, by his cloudy academic prospects, since he had let his studies slip, and by the company he kept. The girls, especially, seemed ominously “fast.” She could see the impact of Rupert's looks on his peers, and intended to keep him under her eye – not to say under her thumb – for as long as she could.