Fatal Glamour (10 page)

Neo-paganism might have an image of breezy freedom and friendship, but it needed to make a place for love as well; and there could be the rub. Less than three months after
Comus
, the cast learned that Frances Darwin and Francis Cornford had broken their vow of loyalty to their
friends and become engaged. The
éminence grise
of the affair had been Jane Harrison, a kind of honorary Neo-pagan who preached nude bathing and similar pastimes as tributes to the ancient Greeks. She had long been Francis Cornford's mentor, and recognised that his painful shyness might be thawed by the intense and emotionally vulnerable Frances. The match between Frances and Francis was of her making, and proved a credit to her insight.

The years when Frances might have been at university had been taken up with rest cures, or with home life under the watchful eye of her father. But she was content to be an academic wife and let others pursue more worldly ambitions. Her taste had always been for art and poetry, in any case, and marriage to Francis was no bar to becoming a poet. By marrying a well-established don who was twelve years older than her, she would put herself on the fringe of the Neo-pagans even before they were well launched. Having the security of domestic life, she was often cast into a maternal role by her friends, and missed out on most of the “soul-making” that lay ahead.

Jacques was another of the vulnerable ones, who needed a partner to help him face life. After he recovered from the acute phase of his Christmas 1907 breakdown, his father brought him from Switzerland to England in the hope of finding an effective treatment. When Rupert broke down four years later, he said that he and Jacques had gone mad for the same reason: the burden of too many years of sexual frustration.
²¹
If it is true, as doctors say, that nobody dies of pain, then perhaps nobody goes mad from chastity either. Nonetheless a remarkable number of the Neo-pagans, of both sexes, had nervous breakdowns in the years between puberty and marriage.

Jacques's problem was organic, of course, but he still had to cope with the same problems as his friends, no matter how ill he felt. If lack of sexual companionship was a burden, it can hardly have helped that the accepted treatment for nervous collapse was to keep the sufferer almost completely removed from society. Jacques was not allowed to see anyone for months at a time, except for a few old and trusted friends such as Justin or Geoffrey Lupton, another old Bedalian. He stayed for some time at Froxfield Green, near Bedales, where Geoffrey plied his trade of making archaic furniture and building Arts and Crafts houses.
²²
Jacques wrote to Ka Cox that he would like a similar future for himself. Ka, meanwhile, was also to pursue the Simple Life in a cottage. Reading
between the lines, it seems obvious that Jacques hoped to share it with her. If his letters to Ka often seem bombastic and grandiose, it may be partly due to the euphoria that is a common symptom in the early stages of
MS
. Often there are swings to the opposite pole, also, and when Jacques came up to Cambridge in May 1908 he was too weak and nervous to see either Ka or Rupert. After a week he collapsed again and was taken for treatment to Dr J.M. Bramwell, one of Britain's leading hypnotists: “Dr Bramwell is to cure me in a fortnight, simply by suggestion, a delightful process: I simply sit and say Prospero's speeches to myself or bits out of Lear whilst he just ‘speaks' to the subliminal self. You soon get into a state not vastly different, I imagine, from the Buddhist Nirvana and your heart and soul are soon filled with an ineffable peace and quiet and silence hardly broken by his whisper. And in three days he has made me better than I had been for months.”
²³

Jacques and his father took Bramwell with them for a long holiday at Finistere in Brittany. Jacques lay nude in the sun, read Housman, Henley, and Meredith, and let Bramwell operate on his subconscious. For all that, it was November before he could return to England, staying again with Geoffrey Lupton (who was now building a house near Bedales for the writer Edward Thomas, using traditional methods of carpentry and plastering). Jacques was still afraid to visit Cambridge, he told Ka, because it would be “like a return from the land of the dead to the land of the living . . . I should hardly know a soul and those I knew, they will have travelled so far from where we parted.”
²⁴
But after nearly two years of illness he still had no firm hope of even seeing Ka and his friends regularly, still less of settling down with any of them.

In his emotional life, Rupert found himself by the autumn of 1908 almost as nervous and frustrated as Jacques, though for different reasons. To fall in love with Noel Olivier on a couple of hours' acquaintance in May seemed easy and inevitable, but what sequel could there be? She was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, who was not even allowed to receive letters from admirers. The production of
Comus
cannot have allowed for more than a few snatched hours together, after which they did not see each other for months. Rupert spoke of himself as frantic, at the Fabian Summer School, with a “purulent ulcer of
hysterica passio
” – of loving Noel with no prospect of expressing it freely.
²⁵

Because he could not openly woo Noel, Rupert hit on the subterfuge of cultivating an intimacy with Margery Olivier, using their joint work for the Fabians as a pretext. From time to time, he hoped, Margery would bring him into contact with Noel. The scheme paid off in an invitation for Rupert to join Margery and Noel on another Christmas ski trip, to Klosters in Switzerland. The group of about thirty was, again, mostly from Cambridge. One of them, who became a new friend, was Godwin Baynes, a well-known Cambridge rowing blue who was now a medical student.

Rupert summed up the holiday as “Switzerland fair (I morose) Noel Olivier superb.”
²⁶
Noel celebrated her sixteenth birthday at Klosters on Christmas day. The time Rupert was able to spend with her confirmed his love, but nothing was settled about what it could lead to. Noel was still firmly virginal and virtuous – like almost all girls of her age and class – with no intention of having a real affair with Rupert. But it was not just sexual caution that kept their relationship unripe. Three and a half years later, Rupert told James Strachey, with deep bitterness, that Noel seemed remarkable when one was in love with her, and was very kind, but didn't have any real emotions.
²⁷
He had persuaded himself, by then, that the whole Olivier family were “adamantine.” They didn't respond to others because they simply didn't understand what others were feeling. Many of Noel's friends, and almost all her suitors, seemed to end up judging her in similar terms. Much of her surface coldness may have been because she was less self-confident than she looked. She had grown up in the shadow of three strong-minded elder sisters, and had convinced herself that her pretty face was offset by “an ugly little body.”
²⁸
Her skin broke out easily, and there was always the shadow of her overwhelmingly beautiful older sister Bryn. She did, in fact, feel passion; but she never yielded to it until she was entering middle age.

Rupert's problem was rather different. He didn't keep passion at arm's length, but he tended to have several passions at once. They conflicted with each other, and left him confused about what was flood and what was froth. Like Noel he was virginal and virtuous but finding it more and more oppressive to be so. One side of him that believed in virtue was nourished by his ideal passion for Noel; the other side wanted sensual fulfillment but devalued any woman who seemed ready to give it to
him. The more lonely and dissatisfied he felt, the wider the split in his emotional makeup. And his mother was always there as the third point of any triangle he found himself in. He went directly to her from Klosters, playing the dutiful son, then quarrelled with her constantly as if to work off his resentment that it
was
a duty.

Preparing for the end of his undergraduate days at King's, in the spring of 1909, Rupert felt squeezed between unfulfilled desire and unappealing duty. He decided to take his Easter break in “the greenwood,” as E.M. Forster would call it. The line of escape was to the southwest. Rupert's first two weeks were spent with Hugh Russell-Smith at Becky Falls, near Manaton on Dartmoor. He was supposed to be revising for his final exams, but he had decided to leave the classics behind as soon as possible. Instead, he read the Webbs' Minority Report on the Poor Law, and worked on a new design for living: “I am leading the healthy life. I rise early, twist myself about on a kind of pulley that is supposed to make my chest immense (but doesn't), eat no meat, wear very little, do not part my hair, take frequent cold baths, work ten hours a day, and rush madly about the mountains in flannels and rainstorms for hours. I am surprisingly cheerful about it – it is all part of my scheme of returning to nature.”
²⁹

From Becky, Rupert went to the Lizard for four days, for G.E. Moore's Easter reading party. As he split hairs with the Apostles, Rupert was laying an elaborate plot to join a party of quite a different sort. Having got word that Margery and Noel Olivier were going to be in the New Forest, he persuaded Dudley Ward to find out where they would be and arrange to drop in on them “accidentally.” The rendezvous was a discovery of Ben Keeling's: the hamlet of Bank, no more than a few houses set around a clearing deep in the forest. A superb cook called Mrs Primmer let out rooms in her cottage, which became a favourite with the Cambridge Fabians. Margery Olivier had arranged a Newnhamite reading party there, with her friends Evelyn Radford and Dorothy Osmaston. Noel would come down from Bedales to be under her older sister's watchful eye. For Rupert, the meeting with Noel was an enchantment, by which he could slough off his old self and start afresh. He shared his secret with Jacques:

I was lost for four days – I went clean out of the knowledge of anyone in England but two or three – I turned, and turned, and
covered my trail; and for three-four days, I was, for the first time in my life, a free man, and my own master! Oh! the joy of it! Only three know, but you shall . . . For I went dancing and leaping through the New Forest, with £3 and a satchel full of books, talking to everyone I met, mocking and laughing at them, sleeping and eating anywhere, singing to the birds, tumbling about in the flowers, bathing in the rivers, and, in general, behaving naturally. And all in England, at Eastertide! And so I walked and laughed and met a many people and made a thousand songs – all very good – and, in the end of the days, came to a Woman who was more glorious than the Sun and stronger than the sea, and kinder than the earth, who is a flower made out of fire, a star that laughs all day, whose brain is clean and clear like a man's and her heart is full of courage and kindness; and whom I love.

This is about as far as one can get from the languid aesthete of three years before, but Rupert's new attitude was no less suspect. Suspect even to himself, since he went on to assure his correspondent that he was “not unlike the R.B. you used to find, as you say, learning Ernest Dowson by heart.”
³⁰
What is he up to this time, one wonders: learning by heart to be a Child of Nature? Rupert in the role of Pan is not altogether convincing, especially when he prances in constant fear of the Ranee, who waits for him suspiciously in her boarding-house at Sidmouth – and expects him to arrive from the west rather than from the east, requiring more subterfuge on Rupert's part.

What were the real emotions of those four days at Bank? Pictures show us Rupert in boots and Norfolk jacket (made popular by George Bernard Shaw), looking more hearty and less conscious of the camera than usual. His hair is shorter, too – perhaps because he expects to confront the Ranee before long. Noel, in her Bedales tunic, looks down with a shy smile; she is at the opposite end of the group from Rupert, with Margery planted warily in the middle. In fact, things were not so quiet as they look in the picture. The trouble, which would fester for years, was that Rupert had succeeded too well in pretending an interest in Margery. She had fallen in love with him, and Noel's presence must have seemed an irritation and a stumbling block. Meanwhile, Noel was slipping away for soulful meetings with Rupert among the great trees that surrounded their cottage.

On Rupert's side, there are two revealing poems inspired by the days at Bank. One is really his first breakthrough into serious and mature poetry: “Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire / Of watching you.” The speaker, who has died before his beloved, finally sees her arrive in the underworld:

Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host,

Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam –

Most individual and bewildering ghost! –

And turn, and toss your brown delightful head

Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.

The beloved, whom he has never possessed in life, acknowledges his gaze, but does not respond to it. Her aloofness, we suspect, is just what makes her lovable. “The Voice” gives their relation a darker outcome. It begins at twilight, with the poet brooding on his love:

Safe in the magic of my woods

I lay, and watched the dying light.

And there I waited breathlessly,

Alone; and slowly the holy three,

The three that I loved, together grew

One, in the hour of knowing,

Night, and the woods, and you –

But when the girl comes through the woods to join him, her “flat clear voice” breaks the spell:

You came and quacked beside me in the wood.

You said, “The view from here is very good!”

You said, “It's nice to be alone a bit!”

“How the days are drawing out!”

you said. You said, “The sunset's pretty, isn't it?”

By God! I wish – I wish that you were dead!

After lavishing sentiment on his absent beloved, the poet turns hysterical when the real person appears and fails to sense his mood. However
euphoric Brooke may have been at Bank, his happiness seems to have rested on the lack of any real dialogue between himself and his love.