Fatal Glamour (11 page)

When the days of academic reckoning came in May, Rupert had not worked steadily at Greek or Latin for many months, and he cared more for picnics or sleeping out on the Backs than for examinations. Conceivably he was constructing another pose – the schoolboy who never swots but does brilliantly on the exam – and had worked secretly and hoped to do well. In any case, he only managed a Second. Frances Darwin (who was in the know) refrained from telling him that he almost got a Third. Surely there was something deliberate in Rupert's turning away from the classics. His father had won his First at King's, gained a fellowship there, and taught classics for a living. Rupert had to succeed in his own way, avoiding a mere repetition of his father's early triumphs – which had led only to his present eclipse at School Field. If this entailed a conspicuous failure to live up to high expectations, then so be it. In any case, Rupert had his own hopes, which by now had crystallised into the belief that he could be one of the English poets. When Hugh Dalton had come to visit him at Rugby the previous October, Rupert showed him the memorial in the school chapel to Arthur Hugh Clough, who had composed “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” while dying of malaria in Florence. Rupert pointed to the bare wall beside it and said, “They are keeping that for
me
.”
³¹
Was it just a joke, or was he already weighing the odds? Clough had died at forty-two; Rupert would be up on the wall in less than ten years – a portrait medallion from one of Sherrill Schell's overblown photographs. It would take an even more romantic death to put him there.

Rupert's vocation in life was as a writer and scholar. But his second great passion was for politics. That he was a committed man of the left did not fit comfortably with the legend that grew up after his death. A young hero who hated the upper classes could not be a hero for everybody, so it was best to keep quiet about his partisan activities. Also, the upper classes did not hate him; rather, they were making him one of their pets during the last two or three years of his life. One is left wondering how Rupert would have squared that circle, if he had lived.

Rupert was born a little Liberal, and might have been expected to remain one when he grew up. His mother was keenly interested in politics, and remained a hard-core Liberal all her life. When Rupert arrived at King's he was still keeping up a pose of world-weary decadence, in part as a gesture of opposition to his mother's do-gooding. But that did not lead to any action, beyond moping in one's room and writing gloomy poems. Soon he was looking for wider and more radical prospects. The Liberals had won a landslide victory in the February 1906 election, beginning eight years of sweeping social reforms. But standard electoral politics held little appeal for eager young intellectuals. They would be expected to study law or economics, gain some practical experience, and perhaps get a chance to run for Parliament in their late twenties. Hugh Dalton, a friend of Rupert's, ended up as the most successful politician of his generation at King's. He was defeated in four elections before becoming an
MP
in 1924, when he was thirty-seven. He first got into Cabinet when he was fifty-three. Another young Fabian, Clement Attlee, did
social work in the East End and qualified as a lawyer, before entering Parliament at age thirty-nine. Virginia Woolf imagined that Rupert, if he had lived, might have become prime minister; but he was never interested in doing the sorts of things that aspiring prime ministers were expected to do.

With a kindred spirit, Hugh Dalton, Rupert started a reading club called “The Carbonari,” inspired by the secret society of Italian revolutionaries. Jacques Raverat made him an admirer of Hilaire Belloc, the aggressively anglophile Frenchman who had become a British subject in 1902 and had been elected to Parliament in 1906 as a Radical Liberal. In June of 1907 Belloc came to speak at Cambridge. By the end of the evening he was too drunk to go home unaided, and Rupert volunteered to shepherd him to his bed.

Belloc sided with the working class and the Irish, but was too eccentric and egotistical to march in step with the rising socialist tendency. In alliance with G.K. Chesterton he broke away from the Fabian socialists to promote “Distributism,” a neo-medieval alternative to modern capitalism. His ideal, as Rupert saw it, was to go back to the merry days before the Reformation when every Englishman had a cottage, a field, and all the beer he could drink.
¹
Such heartiness and love of the English countryside strongly appealed to Rupert. But there was also a bullying and suspicious side to Belloc's nature, including a rabid streak of anti-Semitism. Raverat embraced this prejudice, and passed it on to Rupert. From then on, anti-Semitic slurs were freely sprinkled in his letters, usually harping on the Jews as rootless, intellectually destructive outsiders. He and Jacques imagined that the traditional English way of life, based on the field and the village, was threatened by urban plutocrats of mongrel origin. Belloc himself went much further, wanting actually to revive the Middle Ages and restore the supremacy of Rome. He was a belligerently orthodox Catholic, an anti-Dreyfusard, and an enemy of female suffrage (lecturing to an Extension class, he pointed to his women students and said, “These are not the kind of women we want to make our wives”).
²
The Catholicism was too much for Rupert to swallow, but the anti-Semitism and anti-feminism he adopted as incongruous elements in his socialistic beliefs. At this stage, such dislikes were perhaps only two of many other affectations. After his nervous breakdown in 1912, however, they took on a more obsessive and sinister tone as cornerstones for the aggressive philistinism of his last three years.

Belloc's campaign for “Distributism” was really a one-man band, which meant that by late 1907 a leftist student at Cambridge was almost bound to gravitate to the “scientific” socialism of the Fabian Society. George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb had been putting up an intellectual fireworks display that more than doubled the size of the Society, though it still had only about two thousand members.
³
Ben Keeling, a Trinity undergraduate and fiery revolutionary, set up a branch of the Young Fabians at Cambridge. He promoted a speech by the militant trade unionist Keir Hardie. When a mob of rugger-playing hearties vowed to prevent it, Keeling foiled them by deploying two counterfeit Hardies, rigged out with beards and red ties. In his room he had a large poster of the workers of the world striding ahead with clenched fists, over the slogan “Forward the Day is Breaking.” The only actual workers that the undergraduate socialists knew were their bed-makers, who would give them advance warning of raids by the hearties. Nonetheless, revolution was in the air and the Cambridge students were eagerly debating how it would come and what part they would play in it.

At first Rupert would put only one foot into the socialist camp, signing on as a Fabian associate rather than a full member. His uncle Clement Cotterill, a disciple of William Morris, had just published a pamphlet whose title put Fabianism in a nutshell:
Human Justice for Those at the Bottom from Those at the Top
. Rupert told Cotterill that he hoped to convert the Cambridge Fabians to “a more human view of things . . . Of course they're really sincere, energetic, useful people, and they do a lot of good work. But, as I've said, they seem rather hard . . . They sometimes seem to take it for granted that all rich men, and all Conservatives (and most ordinary Liberals) are heartless villains.”
⁴
To go even as far as this set Rupert on a different course from his two closest friends, Jacques Raverat and Justin Brooke. Both were the sons of rich men and expected to inherit a comfortable patrimony. Jacques remained a folk-revolutionary of the Belloc type, while Justin steered clear of politics.

A crucial difference between the Fabians and Belloc lay in their attitude to the crusade for women's suffrage. Belloc was a patriarchal chauvinist, whereas the Fabians were coming round to equal rights. Their constitution was called “The Basis,” to which full members had to give formal consent. After much internal debate they passed an amendment to the Basis, in January 1907, calling for “equal citizenship
of men and women.” The Fabian Society became the first place at Cambridge where male undergraduates and the women of Newnham and Girton Colleges could meet on equal terms. In 1906 Edith Moggridge was actually elected president of the Society, though Girton refused her permission to take up the post. When Rupert joined and got on to the steering committee, the Newnhamite Ka Cox had just become treasurer. She was the daughter of Henry Fisher Cox, a Fabian who also had enough business sense to become a prosperous stockbroker. His first wife died young, leaving three daughters: Hester, Katharine, and Margaret. Henry then remarried and had two more daughters before dying suddenly in 1905, when Ka was eighteen. Ka and her two grown-up sisters were left financially independent. She had a cottage near her father's old estate in Woking, and shared her sister Hester's flat in Westminster when she was in London. She was in the unusual position, for a young woman of her class, of being relatively free to live and travel – and even to love – as she pleased.

Ka had gone to a feeder school for Newnham, St Felix's in Southwold. It had been founded by Margaret Gardiner as “a school where girls are treated like sensible creatures.”
⁵
One of Ka's friends there was a Jewish girl, Marjorie Leon, who came with her to Newnham (and who was one of the skiers at Andermatt in Christmas 1907). Ka was not conventionally pretty, but she had a sweet nature and a fresh, clear-skinned look that appealed to many of her fellow students. “She was an aesthete,” one of them recorded, “– wore loose, diaphanous clothes with Peter Pan collars (not stiff high ones with bones sticking into the neck like ours) and had silver baubles in her hair . . . At nineteen she was a miracle of poise, maturity and charm.” Male undergraduates were equally susceptible to Ka's appeal. They felt that she would accept and nurture them, soothing the trials of their young manhood. Rupert once called her “a Cushion, or a floor.”
⁶
Her troubles would begin when she discovered needs and wants of her own.

At Andermatt, Rupert had been much impressed that his party were “nearly all Socialists, and . . . all great personal friends of H.G. Wells.”
⁷
Since 1903 Wells had chosen the Fabian Society as his vehicle for bringing about a new Britain. Originally founded to study and debate social questions, the Society had plenty of intellectual firepower, directed by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Sydney Olivier, and George Bernard Shaw.
⁸
Wells wanted to turn it into a disciplined vanguard – not just
contemplating social change, but provoking and guiding it. For two years now, he had been trying to make the Society the instrument for a root-and-branch transformation of British life. He had been successfully boxed in by the old guard on the Fabian executive: the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Hubert Bland, and Edward Pease. But Wells had made more headway with several of the old guard's wives and children, who were attracted by his feminism, his eagerness to transform private as well as public life, and his sheer bounciness. He was the roguish uncle, always ready for a spree. As the children of his Fabian friends went to university Wells tried to recruit them, and at the same time to get a taste of undergraduate pleasures that had been denied him in his own hard-pressed student days at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington.

In February 1908 Wells gave a lecture to the Cambridge Young Fabians. Afterwards, he agreed to discuss “the family” – which meant his new and dangerous ideas on sex – with a group of students and dons in Rupert's rooms at King's. Rupert was by now a firm Wellsian, and he soon moved to become a full member of the Fabians by assenting to the Basis. This committed him to the abolition of private property, rent, and interest (though by constitutional means rather than violent revolution). Wells had given Rupert two incentives to take the plunge and become a full-blooded socialist. There was, first, the wonderful painlessness of being a Wellsian revolutionary. “Socialism may arrive after all,” Wells suggested, “not by a social convulsion, but by . . . a revolution as orderly and quiet as the procession of the equinoxes.” The leader of this stately march would be the “Constructive Socialist,” who undertakes “whatever lies, in his power towards
the enrichment of the Socialist idea
. He has to give whatever gifts he has as artist, as writer, as maker of any sort to increasing and refining the conception of civilized life.” The cynic might observe that this would allow Rupert to go on doing what he was doing already, but with a good social conscience. Ingenuous as always, Wells had just informed the
Labour Leader
that he didn't want people to live in slums on a pound a week, so why should he live that way himself? “I am ready to go on working for [socialism],” he announced, “having just as good a time and just as many pleasant things as I can.”
⁹

An opposite sort of appeal lay in the disciplined half of Wells's split personality. He had started out as a scientist, and believed that social reform should be tackled in the same spirit of inquiry. What tipped the
balance for Rupert to sign the Basis was reading
New Worlds for Old
, where Wells argued that “In place of disorderly individual effort, each man doing what he pleases, the Socialist wants organised effort and a plan.”
¹⁰
But who would be in charge of the plan? Wells saw no problem: the planners should be superior individuals who had both conscience to be shocked by poverty and ignorance, and intellect to create a better social order. In
A Modern Utopia
he had imagined a new kind of ruling class, the high-minded and ascetic “Samurai.” Rupert read it when it first appeared in the
Fortnightly Review
in 1904–05, and started to think along Wellsian lines. Unlike the existing British aristocracy, the Samurai would be an intellectual elite, living modestly and abstaining from alcohol and tobacco. They would be recruited from young men and women whose revolutionary ardour had not yet been blunted by the cares of everyday life. Samurai training would include a period of sexual experimentation, which pointed to the “hidden agenda” that Wells was trying to insinuate into old-guard Fabianism: “The majority of those who become
samurai
do so between twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between seventeen and thirty, the Utopians have their dealings with love, and the play and excitement of love is a chief interest in life. Much freedom of act is allowed them so that their wills may grow freely. For the most part they end mated, and love gives place to some special and more enduring interest, though, indeed, there is love between older men and fresh girls, and between youths and maturer women.” Once a year the Samurai were required to spend a week alone in the wilderness, in order “to secure a certain stoutness of heart and body in the members of the order, which otherwise might have lain open to too many timorous, merely abstemious, men and women.”
¹¹