Fatal Glamour (23 page)

One definite result of going to Germany was to harden Rupert's politics. The Jewish milieu of Vienna in which Goldschmidt lived provoked some nasty racial sneers in Rupert's letters, but he found the Aryans even more repellent: “I have sampled and sought out German culture. It has changed all my political views. I am wildly in favour of nineteen new Dreadnoughts. German culture must never, never, prevail. The Germans are nice, and well-meaning, and they try; but they are
SOFT
. Oh! They
ARE
soft. The only good things (outside music perhaps) are the writings of Jews who live in Vienna.”
²⁵
This bulletin went to Eddie Marsh, now private secretary to Winston Churchill at the Admiralty. Rupert was not
just unveiling his own visceral chauvinism, he was trying to get it high on his country's agenda. The naval rivalry between Britain and Germany had been getting more intense for some years, coinciding with a rash of small colonial wars and crises on the periphery of Europe. Rupert came back from Munich convinced that Britain should keep Germany in check, and fight her if necessary. Along with his anti-Semitism, this nascent imperialism exposed the shallow roots of his professed Fabian beliefs. He, and all Europe with him, was now only a short step away from the catastrophes of 1914; a step that was fatally easy to take when no one realised what 1914 would come to stand for.

Part of Rupert's confusion lay in having made an implicit declaration of love to Ka, heedless of her long and intimate involvement with Jacques. But while he was in Germany that relation quickly unravelled. At the same time as she dampened Jacques's ardour, Ka had kept hinting that he might be more warmly received by Gwen, who was probably her closest friend. Gwen was now twenty-five, the same age as Jacques, and had been with him at the Slade for a year. Next to someone like Bryn she might seem plump and plain, but she had wit, a keen eye for character, and a real, if small-scale, artistic talent. This last gift was the strongest bond between her and Jacques. Both were exhilarated by the great Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London during November, and both had an almost fanatical devotion to their artistic work. They knew what they wanted, and they wanted the same thing. In the right circumstances, it could be enough to kindle love between them.

Whatever emotional difficulties he may have had, Jacques was not a self-divided puritan like Rupert. He considered it long overdue that he should have a regular sexual fulfillment, and fiercely denounced the chastity of middle-class girls – especially English ones. Jacques was not really the rampant immoralist he claimed to be, but he did know that sexual convention was putting him under an unbearable strain. “I wish you could once see right into me,” he wrote to Ka after one confrontation, “you would know that I am not wise, but most feeble, most fond and foolish, lustful, vain, ambitious, cruel – my only grace, love . . . And between these two I am torn and buffetted
:
my love and my desire: my
wild and passionate desire to try and
make you
love me; and the fear I have that you
should
love me; because I love you and because I know myself so vile a thing.”
²⁶

After Lulworth, Jacques apparently decided to go from push to shove. In Gwen's novel, he bluntly tells Ka that it is time she “had him,” with or without marriage:

“But supposing I had a baby?” said Ka, “I mustn't harm you, you know.”

“Why on earth should it harm me?” said Jacques, “. . . It's
you
it would be supposed to harm . . . of course we could be married before it was born if you wanted to.”

“I don't know that I do want to,” said Ka.

“As you please,” said Jacques exasperated, “that's your business. I'll provide for the child if there is one. Or if you want to be
prudent
” (with a sneer at the word) “we won't have one. We can take precautions; though I should like to have a son . . . Only for God's sake make up your mind.”
²⁷

Ka's response was to say she
would
have him – but not yet. To Jacques this meant that she was playing a game, like a hen running from a cock. It was his cue, he realised, to sweep her off her feet: “But his anger rose steadily: why couldn't she confess what she wanted? What a liar she was. Well, if she could be obstinate, he could be obstinate too. No, he would not take her as she wanted ‘so that she can say afterwards she couldn't help it'; not though he died with the effort to restrain himself.”
²⁸
In the novel, Jacques flings Ka back into her chair, storms out, and takes the night train to Paris. After ten days of debauchery, he comes back “knowing women.” He snubs Ka when he sees her, tells Gwen what he has done and asks her to marry him. She goes off to Ka, who tells her that she fell in love for the first time at Lulworth – but with Rupert: “One night when the others were all out, I was sitting by the fire with him. And suddenly I found I was shaking all over and I wanted to take his hand. And he was shaking too . . . But, you see, Gwen, he really loves Noel. So he can't care for me like that.” Ka cannot decide whether or not she wants Jacques, while Gwen admits she loves him without reserve. Next day they are engaged, while Ka dithers. In the evening Jacques comes to her, and tells her, “it seems simpler to marry Gwen . . . She's got bones in
her mind. We understand each other. It's rather like marrying yourself in a way; but it's all right. Anyhow it's settled.”
²⁹

All this, or something very like it, happened in January and February 1911, while Rupert was out of play in Munich. Soon Jacques's and Gwen's engagement was announced, to the general approval of their friends. By April, however, Virginia Woolf was regaling her sister Vanessa with stories of how Jacques's emotions were wilder than ever:

[Jacques] says now that he is in love with them both; and asks Ka to be his mistress, and Gwen to satisfy his mind. Gwen is made very jealous; Ka evidently cares a good deal for Jacques.

Obviously (in my view) J. is very much in love with K: and not much, if at all, with Gwen. Ought they to break off the engagement? J. has doubts, occasionally; Ka sometimes thinks she could marry him; Gwen alternately grows desperate, and then, accepting J's advanced views, suggests that Ka shall live with them, and bear children, while she paints.
³⁰

As Virginia saw it, Jacques had “muddied their minds with talk of the un-chastity of chastity.” He was certainly bombarding Ka with immoralist orations: “Chastity is criminal. Particularly in women. The more I think of it, the worse I think it. It's much worse than prostitution and equivalent to murder, suicide, abortion or self abuse. A society where it is not only tolerated but encouraged is rotten, rotten, rotten.”
³¹

It was Gwen, the most mature and sensible of the three, who called them to order. For a while she was ready to give up Jacques, or even to share him with Ka, but at last she gave her rival her marching papers:

I would never have consented to marry Jacques, if I had thought you loved him like that. I now think that it is possible you will find you do, when you face up to things. Which
you must do
Ka. But now I think things have changed and I think Jacques loves me more than he does you (I hate being so brutal). If either you or J. have the
least
doubt of this, I absolutely refuse to go any further in the matter.

But if things are as I think, I am sure that for
your own sake
all such relations must stop between you and Jacques; and that it will be better if you don't see Jacques at all for a longish time.

Jacques chimed in with a recantation of his polygamous hopes:

The truth – it's hard – is that since the beginning of this year, I've not really wanted you except “in the common way of lust – and friendship.” The difficulty was that no one knew – not yourself even – what you felt about me. It seemed that as I ceased to
need
you, you began to need me. And I was afraid of being cruel and truthful – so much so that I sometimes deceived myself. Now I am
sure
that I am in love with Gwen and not with you. You see I'm very honest and brutal about it.
³²

With these ungracious farewells, the door was firmly shut in Ka's face. Jacques had been reading
Les liaisons dangereuses
, and trying to follow its example of sexual sophistication. But the Neo-pagans were, at heart, nothing like the jaded aristocrats of Laclos. Although Gwen had started with a weak hand, she had known what she wanted and managed to get it. The marriage was set for early June, followed by a month-long painting honeymoon at – Churchfield House, Lulworth! For the rest of the summer they would go to France. Their “Moment of Transfiguration” – as Rupert sardonically called it, borrowing Jane Harrison's phrase – would now be a strictly private affair, with Ka written out of the script. Both Rupert and Ka had started the year with failed love affairs; and both were now free to turn to each other.

What might be called a collective affair between Bloomsbury and the Neo-pagans began near the end of January 1911, when Virginia Stephen (soon Woolf) met Ka Cox at Bertrand Russell's house near Oxford. Like many individual affairs, this one started in excitement and mutual admiration; began to conflict with rival commitments after a few months; and ended a year or so later in crisis and a good measure of rudeness and dislike. Later some friendship survived, and after both sides had suffered their share of death and disaster the affair reached its final stage: nostalgia. But why should relations between these two groups follow such an erratic course? Superficially alike, Bloomsbury and the Neo-pagans had crucial differences of style, beliefs, and morals. They might still have made peace with each other, but Rupert's vagaries in 1911, and his truculent philistinism in 1912, opened a breach that had become an abyss by the time of his death three years later.

In March 1910 Rupert was sorting through drawers at School Field, getting ready to move out after his father's death. He came across “two old photographs, 1893 perhaps, of me, Dick, Adrian Virginia Vanessa Toby Leslie – – – all very sporting and odd. Virginia and Vanessa are incredibly old in it: a little gawky: Virginia very fat faced.”
¹
This would be the Brookes and the Stephens playing cricket on the sands at St Ives, when Rupert was six and Virginia eleven. When he was ten, Rupert met Duncan Grant and James Strachey at Hillbrow School; at fourteen, Geoffrey Keynes joined him at School Field. After James fell in love with him and got him into the Society, Rupert knew all that went on in
Bloomsbury. But Bloomsbury, he took care, knew much less of what went on with him. “He lived a kind of double life,” Jacques recalled, “he had two sets of friends that he was not interested in bringing together; for a long time, he even tried to keep them apart. Was this because of his natural love of mystery, from fear of too great an incompatibility and mutual disdain, or did he fear a rapprochement at his own expense – that both sides might be exposed to a dangerous influence?”
²

Why did the wall between the two groups break down in 1911? In the first instance, because Virginia took a fancy to Ka, just after Rupert had gone off to Germany for four months. They met through their mutual friend Ray Costelloe, a Newnham student and niece of Bertrand Russell's wife Alys.
³
Having missed going to Cambridge herself, Virginia was intrigued by the new generation of women students. She found Ka, who was five years her junior, “a bright, intelligent, nice creature; who has, she says, very few emotions.” Soon they were firm friends. Virginia was in an unhappy state: “To be 29 and unmarried – to be a failure – childless – insane too, no writer.”
⁴
She compared her gloomy isolation with Ka's Cambridge career, her vigorous hikes, her political work with the Fabians. These young people had a style of their own, Virginia decided, and deserved a nickname: the “Neo-pagans.”

Neo-paganism had been current since the 1880s, as a label pinned on the Pre-Raphaelites. A few years before Virginia picked up the idea, Edward Carpenter had been lecturing on Neo-paganism as a modern ideal. In April 1911 Rupert heard from James Strachey that “Virginia had become a . . . what is it? ‘Neo-Pagan'? . . . Lord! Lord!”
⁵
James had stayed with Virginia in the middle of March, so we can assume that she began using the term around then – and that Rupert greeted it with surprise and derision. Nevertheless, it stuck, though without spreading beyond Bloomsbury and environs. It was a private joke; but also something more, especially for Virginia.

When she first imagined Ka, Rupert, and their friends as Neo-pagans, Virginia did so almost wistfully. They were only a few years younger than her own generation, but they seemed to have a much firmer hold on the strings of life. The Bloomsbury style of exclusive other-worldliness could easily be seen as a form of invalidism: physical with Lytton and James Strachey, social with E.M. Forster and Saxon Sydney-Turner, psychological with Virginia. Except for the Bells and the MacCarthys, Bloomsbury seemed unable even to have children. Virginia and Lytton
were brilliant in conversation, but slow and uncertain writers. Around 1911 they often wondered if they could ever bring a substantial work to completion.

Can Neo-paganism be dismissed as just a passing fancy of Virginia's, and of Bloomsbury in general? It is true that if one judges the Neo-pagans as a significant and fashionable group of youthful pioneers, their joint activities tended to fizzle out after 1912, when Rupert abdicated as their leader. But they continued to play an important role in Virginia's imagination. She used elements of Ka's pre-war life for her portrait of the politically idealistic Mary Datchet in
Night and Day
. After that,
Jacob's Room
was an elegy for Rupert as much as for her brother Thoby. It was also her attempt to come to terms with how Rupert's generation of young men had embraced the World War.
⁶
In personal relations, close ties persisted between Virginia and Noel Olivier, Ka and Jacques Raverat; and there would be a decades-long affair between Noel and James Strachey.