Fatal Glamour (12 page)

This enticing curriculum was a reversal of Wells's own experience: he had practised self-denial in his youth, by hard necessity, and was now revelling in a promiscuous middle age. His Samurai rulers would work intensely and keep the lower orders under strict scientific control, but in their private lives they would be moral adventurers and a law unto themselves. Wells himself did not aspire to be a muscular Samurai mountaineer. His need for adventure was centred on the pursuit of “fresh girls,” as he ambiguously called them. It was splendid that his friend Sydney Olivier should become a Samurai governor of Jamaica, improving the lot of the “subject races.” But Wells needed something
closer to centre stage. He liked invitations from the society hostess Lady Desborough, or making thousands of pounds on his popular novels, or chasing the daughters of his Fabian colleagues. He was so made, furthermore, that part of the enjoyment of these actions was to ensure that everyone could see what he was up to. His recklessness ensured that he would before long be in hot water, both with the outraged right and the puritanical left.

On 10 May 1908 the Cambridge Fabians gave their dinner at Trinity in honour of Sir Sydney Olivier. Two guests came in late, and had to sit on a window sill: Olivier's old friend H.G. Wells, and a bright-eyed Newnham student called Amber Reeves. Amber was the daughter of a leading Fabian couple, Maud and William Pember Reeves. Her father was soon to be appointed director of the Webbs' new foundation, the London School of Economics, and Amber herself had served as treasurer of the Cambridge Young Fabians. Wells was in hot water at the time with the Fabian executive. He had written a letter supporting the Liberal candidate, Winston Churchill, in a Manchester by-election, even though there was also a socialist in the running.
¹²
At the Fabian annual meeting on 22 April, he had tried to defend his letter, then walked off the platform in a huff.

The row over the Churchill letter was only the visible tip of a bitter quarrel between Wells and the Fabian old guard that had been seething for three years. Publicly, Wells had annoyed them by pressing the Society to support children's allowances, as a means of undermining the “masculine proprietorship” of women. Privately, he enraged them by drawing their wives towards feminist ideas, and their daughters towards sexual emancipation – in the form of going to bed with
him
. In 1905 he had a brief affair with Rosamund Bland, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Hubert Bland. Wells claimed that he was not especially attracted by Rosamund's plump and brown-eyed charms, but wanted to save her from her father's incestuous advances.

In the spring of 1908 he was involved, more deeply this time, with Amber Reeves. She was the same age as Rupert, not quite so good-looking but an equally magnetic personality. Amber was precocious sexually, as well as intellectually. After some months of friendship with Wells, she took advantage of his visit to Cambridge for the Olivier dinner to tell him that she was in love. When he asked her “with whom?” she threw
herself into his arms. Wells was not one to miss an opportunity, and they went to bed without more ado. What gave this passionate encounter an extra spice was that it took place in Amber's room at Newnham, to which Wells had been admitted on the claim that he was an old friend of the family. Both of them were exactly the sort of people who would enjoy being, in all likelihood, the first couple to use a Newnham room for such a purpose. However, their embrace had to be incomplete because H.G. had failed to stop at a chemist first. Having agreed to meet again soon in Soho, for a more leisurely encounter, they made it to Trinity in time for dinner. One wonders what excuse they gave for being late.
¹³

Wells's extramarital caperings were part of his campaign for putting “New Women” in the vanguard of social reform. This points to a contrast between two of the couples at the Olivier dinner. H.G. Wells and Amber saw Fabianism as going hand in hand with sexual experimentation. Rupert and Noel were embarking on a conventionally chaste and idealistic relationship. Rupert did not expect his passion for socialism to spill over into his romantic life. That would still belong to the ancien régime.

In August 1908 Rupert went to the Fabian Summer School at Llanbedr, near Harlech on the Welsh coast. The first one had been organised the year before by Charlotte and George Bernard Shaw. For thirty-five shillings a week Fabians were offered board, lodging, outings, and lectures on marriage or socialism by G.B.S.:

some hundred members of both sexes and all ages living in 3 Houses and camping out roundabout there, listening to lectures in the morning, and bathing and rock-climbing in the afternoon, discussing in the evening – food almost vegetarian and clothes of the most unconventional – ladies in “Gyms” and men in any description of flannels . . . Mixed up with these university men and girls, were some score of elementary teachers and minor civil servants – some of the new pension officers –, the whole making a most varied little world, living in intimate companionship one with the other.
¹⁴

It is easy to laugh at the vegetarian food, the Swedish drill in the morning, and the dress code: tunics for the ladies, knee-breeches for the men, sensible shoes for both. But the crankishness was incidental to building a classless community, dedicated to a brighter future for Britain. The Fabian Summer School's values owed a good deal to Edward Carpenter's Millthorpe. Unlike Millthorpe, however, it had no erotic agenda and no connection with the long rhythms of country life. It was a temporary encampment, designed to energize its participants and then send them back to the front lines of social reform in the cities.

Beatrice and Sidney Webb decided to attend in person for four days in 1908. Beatrice, who was staying at Leominster before going to the Summer School, issued a blanket invitation to any Fabians heading for Llanbedr to stay the night. Rupert and James Strachey duly turned up, accompanied by Ben Keeling, Dudley Ward, Hugh Dalton, Arthur Waley, and Gerald Shove.
¹⁵
Ward, a new friend of Rupert's, was reading economics at St John's. His manner was shy, bumbling but likeable, his appearance humdrum, his politics vigorously Fabian. Although Rupert became very fond of him, Ward never quite stood out; he was always “dear old Dudley,” making himself useful somewhere in the background. Beatrice, however, was favourably impressed by him, and still more by Dalton: “one of the most astute and thoughtful of our younger members – by nature an ecclesiastic – a sort of lay Jesuit – preparing for political life.”
¹⁶

The Webbs were at this time much concerned with eugenics and the virtues of the “highly regulated races” who had sex well under control, like the Japanese and the Germans.
¹⁷
They hoped that the Young Fabians could be made into a kind of socialist Jesuit order, with Beatrice and Sidney standing in the place of the pope. “There are some,” Beatrice had noted in her diary, “who wish to reach a socialist state by the assertion of economic equality – they desire to force the property-owners to yield to the non-property owners. I prefer to have the forward movement based on the obligation of each individual to serve the state, in return getting maintenance.” What this really meant was that a disciplined elite of civil servants would regulate the lives of everyone else. The Webbs found an impressive precedent for this in the Salvation Army, who were setting up rural colonies for the destitute: “They represent in part a true ‘Samurai' class . . . If the State undertakes the drainage system the Salvationists are quite the best agency to deal wisely with some of the products of this drainage system . . . Their spirit of persistent work, their extraordinary
vitality – even their curious combination of revivalist religion, with the technique of a very superior and reformed ‘Variety Artist' exactly suits the helpless, hopeless, will-less man, a prey to sexual impulses, to recover his virility and faculty for regular life and regularwork.”
¹⁸

For the Webbs, the main purpose of the Summer School was to provide strict training for future political leaders. It was not to be a holiday camp or an experiment in living. Unfortunately for them, many of the students went there in search of novelty, or simply a good time. The young university men and women took a malicious pleasure in shocking their straitlaced elders and flouting the rigid rules of chaperonage. By the fourth school, in 1910, Beatrice's dissatisfaction was focused on the Cambridge “clique” of Brooke, Dalton, James Strachey, Clifford Allen, and William Foss: “They are inclined to go away rather more critical and supercilious than they came . . . ‘They won't come, unless they know who they are going to meet,' sums up Rupert Brooke . . . They don't want to learn, they don't think they have anything to learn . . . The egotism of the young university man is colossal.”
¹⁹
It was quite true that they skipped lectures and generally ignored the school rules. But James's main reason for going was the hope of getting his mattress next to Rupert's, in the stable where the young men slept. Rupert provided Lytton Strachey with titillating reports of fun and games after lights-out: “Daddy [Dalton] was a schoolboy in dormitory; and conceived a light lust for James – who, I thought, was quite dignified about it. He would start up suddenly behind him and tickle him gently under the armpits, making strange sibilant cluckings with his mouth meanwhile. And when James was in bed Daddy stood over him, waving an
immense
steaming penis in his face and chuckling softly. Poor James was nearly sick.”
²⁰

One suspects that such campy outbursts helped to keep the Newnhamites away from the Summer School. Ka Cox, for one, refused to go even when urged by Rupert; perhaps she did not care to compete for his attention when he was constantly shadowed by James. Beatrice Webb certainly sniffed out something distasteful in the Cambridge Fabians and Apostles, though she was apparently unaware of their submerged gay life:

[Bertrand Russell] is a bit of an “A” – Artist, Anarchist and Aristocrat, and in spite of his acquired puritanism, is apt to be swept away by primitive instincts . . . I am sorry now that Bertie went to Cambridge – there is a pernicious set presided over by Lowes
Dickinson, which makes a sort of ideal of anarchic ways in sexual questions – we have, for a long time, been aware of its bad influence on our young Fabians. The intellectual star is the metaphysical George Moore with his
Principia Ethica
– a book they all talk of as “The Truth”! I never can see anything in it, except a metaphysical justification for doing what you like and what other people disapprove of! So far as
I
can understand the philosophy it is a denial both of the scientific method and of religion – as a rule, that is the net result on the minds of young men – it seems to disintegrate their intellects and their characters.
²¹

But there was more to Rupert's position than Apostolic metaphysics or “primitive instincts.” He was not the kind of person to sit quietly while, for example, the actor-manager Harley Granville-Barker argued that under socialism “all women will have dresses of the same material and wear them for the same length of time.”
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Still inspired by the myth of the Golden Age, Rupert was a utopian and a humanist who shrank from the juiceless planned societies of Shaw and the Webbs. His only socialist poem, “Second Best,” ended with a vision of post-revolutionary brotherhood, a joyous celebration by the Children of the Sun:

Yet, behind the night,

Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar,

Some white tremendous daybreak. And the light,

Returning, shall give back the golden hours,

Ocean a windless level, Earth a lawn

Spacious and full of sunlit dancing-places,

And laughter, and music, and, among the flowers,

The gay child-hearts of men, and the child-faces,

O heart, in the great dawn!

For the Apostles, such a vision would be too vague and lush; the Webbs would have made the same criticism, if for different reasons. Rupert's brave new world was neither a coterie nor a technocracy, but a place where personal life was made radiant. It was inspired by William Morris, by Wells, and by Campanella's vision of a “City of the Sun.” It was not enough for Rupert to be just a Fabian (especially now that Wells was on his way out), or an Apostle, or even both in turn. He was reaching for
an integrated vision that would make the world a better place, and himself more complete. The conflict between the “great dawn” and old-fashioned monogamous love had yet to declare itself.

In spite of his cool reception by the Webbs, Rupert went to two more Summer Schools, in 1909 and 1910. In July of the latter year he did more, renting a caravan to travel through Hampshire and Dorset with Dudley Ward, making speeches for reform of the Poor Law. A Commission on the Poor Law had reported in February 1909. Its majority had argued for piecemeal reform, but Beatrice Webb had written a Minority Report saying that the whole system needed to be overthrown. To fight for her views in the political arena, she and Sidney formed the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution. There was a tinge of absurdity in Rupert and Dudley going from one village green to another, haranguing the yokels, even if they were part of a well-organised campaign with thousands of supporters. Nonetheless, the campaign failed, for reasons that struck at the root of the Fabian idea. Since the time of Dickens, the Poor Law and its Boards of Guardians had been a stink in the nostrils of enlightened opinion. The system of relief was a typical British muddle, a haphazard combination of state and private charity, of workhouse and “outdoor” (i.e., home) relief. Everything rested on the principle of deterrence. The infirm, aged, or unemployed should be given enough support to keep them alive, but at a level well below that of the poorest employed workers.