Fatal Glamour (28 page)

The creature slimed down to Lulworth; knowing about women, knowing he could possibly get you if he got a few hours alone with you (his knowledge turned out to be justified.)

I was ill. Influenza (or poison in the house) frustrated me that Sunday. I was in the depths, leaning utterly on you. Oh my God! how kind and wonderful you were then; the one thing in the world I had.
⁹

But Ka also found time to disappear for a long tête-à-tête with Henry. Later, Rupert told James Strachey that Henry “nearly seduced” Ka, which meant, presumably, that she drew back short of the final act.
¹⁰
But when she came back to Churchfield House, she told Rupert flatly that she was in love with his rival. Henry, she pointed out, was four years older than she (Rupert was a few months younger), and had the same first name as her father, who had died when she was eighteen. Rupert, sick and distraught, cast off his endless vacillation between Ka and Noel and asked Ka to marry him at once. She calmly refused. She intended to go on seeing Henry, she said, and hoped, indeed, to marry
him
.

Two prominent traits in Henry's character were a love of mischief and a dislike of being pinned down. Having played the spoiler between Ka and Rupert, he promptly slipped away. He had a running joke with Lytton about paying tribute to “the Obelisk,” which was Henry's penis (as opposed to the rest of him). Back in London, he reported that “L'Obelisque m'aneantie, mais je finirais par l'asservir . . . I may write if I recover but it's clear that a visit to the fillettes must be made first.”
¹¹

Lytton had decided that Henry's propensity for rows and intrigues was taking both of them into dangerous waters. Henry's best bet was to get a rich and complaisant mistress, so even if Ka wanted to marry
him
, he would be foolish to marry
her
:

I can't believe that you're a well-assorted couple – can you? If she was really your wife, with a home and children, it would mean a great change in your way of living, a lessening of independence – among other things a much dimmer relationship with Ottoline. This might be worth while – probably would be – if she was an
eminent creature, who'ld give you a great deal; but I don't think she is that. There seems no touch of inspiration in her; it's as if she was made somehow or other on rather a small scale.
¹²

In any case, Henry was still formally married to Euphemia. Despite her rich and strange love life, some quirk of loyalty, or malice, made her refuse to give him a divorce. And Rupert and Ka did seem “to fit together so naturally – even the Garden-Cityishness.” By this Lytton meant their Neo-paganism, projected into the future – a domesticated Simple Life in one of the new mock-rural satellite towns. Henry relished the mockery; he dubbed Rupert “The Cauliflower,” and asked Lytton to arrange the match. “As the Garden City is quite near,” he suggested, “wouldn't I be able to give them a wedding present of great permanence? Then we'ld all be quits.”
¹³

Lytton, however, was rapidly trimming his sails. It was one thing to indulge Henry's whims, another to have Ka become a fixture in his own inner circle, even as a mistress:

I've now seen her fairly often and on an intimate footing, and I can hardly believe that she's suited to the post. I don't see what either of you could really get out of it except the pleasures of the obelisk. With you even these would very likely not last long, while with her they'ld probably become more and more of a necessity, and also be mixed up with all sorts of romantic desires which I don't think you'ld ever satisfy. If this is true it would be worth while making an effort to put things on a merely affectionate basis, wouldn't it? I think there's quite a chance that everything might blow over, and that she might even sink into Rupert's arms. Can you manage this?
¹⁴

To achieve such a happy ending, Ka and Rupert had to be brought down to earth and reconciled to each other. Ka had wanted to follow Henry to London, but Lytton convinced her to stay and minister to Rupert instead. “Rupert is besieging her,” Lytton told Henry, “I gather with tears and desperation – and sinking down in the intervals pale and shattered.”
¹⁵
By 5 January the Lulworth party had been reshuffled to prop up its invalid member. It now consisted of Rupert, Ka, and four other Apostles – Lytton, Maynard, Gerald Shove, and Harry Norton. Gwen
and Jacques at Studland were also called on for support, Rupert walking twenty miles along the coast to see them. Everything suggests that Rupert, in his distress, was looked after in a thoughtful and sympathetic way by his friends. There may have been some feeling, also, that the Society should take Rupert's part against Henry, the outsider. But in spite of everyone's care, Rupert kept sliding downhill. He was having a major nervous breakdown, which had been building up, he felt, for at least six months: “I had six days in the most horrible state you can think. I couldn't eat or sleep or do anything but torture myself. It was the most ghastly pain imaginable, worse than any physical pain, dragging on, unending – Everything seemed to go. If I thought I had to go through that again, I should shoot myself. It was madness – I can't describe it . . . I wasn't I.”
¹⁶

When it became plain that he needed professional help, Gwen and Jacques were the ones who took him in charge. After a difficult journey, they delivered him to Dr Maurice Craig in Harley Street.

Rupert's mental state in early 1912 is not easily defined. The former guardians of his reputation, Sir Geoffrey Keynes and Christopher Has-sall, felt that he was too disturbed to be held responsible for his actions during this period. This is a defensible view; what is less defensible is their withholding of much of the evidence for a fair judgment of Rupert's condition. His letters at this time are sprinkled with crude attacks on those he blamed for his suffering. These were the usual suspects: women, gays, and Jews. They were not, of course, to blame; nonetheless, for his apologists, such passages proved that he was mentally unbalanced and “not himself.” They therefore suppressed almost all of them. By this reasoning, anyone could be absolved from their darker impulses. Throughout 1912 Rupert's letters show him to be overwrought but able to write coherently about his troubled emotions.
¹⁷
Why suppress only those passages that show him in a bad light? One might just as well argue that the nasty parts show the “real” Rupert – the golden boy with the rotten core – and write off his charm and affection as mere hypocrisy. Rupert himself, in giving directions for his papers if he died in battle, said “let them know the poor truths.”
¹⁸
It still seems the best rule for this, or any other biography.

What, then, was wrong with Rupert? Why should a lover's quarrel with Ka push him over the brink into an acute manic-depressive condition that lasted for six months or more?
¹⁹
It is surely crucial that Rupert's obsessive jealousy of Henry Lamb included an equally obsessive hatred of Lytton Strachey:

If I can still, at moments, hate you [Ka] for having, in pitiful sight of a flirtation, invited that creature to Lulworth, and then left the rest of us, to go out walks and out for meals with him; how do you think I hate Lytton, who hadn't even your excuse of ignorance and helplessness, for having worked to get the man down there, and having seen the whole thing being engineered from the beginning, – and obligingly acquiesced in it as one of the creature's whims? You told me – in the first flush of your young romance – of the whole picture – Lytton “hovering” (your word) with a fond paternal anxiousness in the background, eyeing the two young loves at their sport: – it was the filthiest filthiest part of the most unbearably sickening disgusting blinding nightmare – and then one shrieks with the unceasing pain that it was
true
.
²⁰

Rupert harped on two things about Lytton: his homosexuality and his love of insinuating himself into other people's emotions. Despite his own participation in the gay milieu, Rupert could not bear the idea of its escaping its bounds and mingling itself with heterosexual love – the school dormitory invading the family bedroom. He remained trapped in the double life, and double standard, that had guided him since childhood. His peculiar upbringing had made him abnormally sly and secretive; these qualities clashed with Lytton's open-minded and rational – perhaps too rational – approach to sex. Both men had been accustomed to orchestrate the emotions of their friends, but they did so in very different styles, until the merger of Bloomsbury and Neo-paganism made them into rival masters of ceremonies.

In his own eyes, Lytton was a kind of scientist of personal relations, doing battle with the remnants of Victorian prudery and hypocrisy in the cause of a new era of sentiment. Since Henry would not physically respond to him, he chose to advance his beloved's other sexual interests. Lytton saw this as a sensible compromise in which he settled for the
biggest share in Henry's life that he could get. Rupert saw it as pimping. Perhaps he saw it as something worse and believed that Henry, like Julius Caesar, was Lytton's “wife” at the same time as he tried to be Ka's “husband.”
²¹
That Rupert had his own bisexual history seems to have been exactly what made the Lulworth affair unbearable to him.

In the months leading up to Lulworth, Rupert had been struggling to complete his thesis, and simple exhaustion certainly contributed to his breakdown. Much of this work had been straightforward enough, setting out the social background to Elizabethan plays and doing technical analysis of plays with mixed authorship. But Rupert's own dilemmas broke through in his identification with the moral chaos of Jacobean tragedy: “The world called Webster is a peculiar one. It is inhabited by people driven, like animals, and perhaps like men, only by their instincts, but more blindly and ruinously . . . A play of Webster's is full of the feverish and ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots. Maggots are what the inhabitants of this universe most suggest and resemble . . . Human beings are writhing grubs in an immense night. And the night is without stars or moon.” Characters in the plays are ignorant of their own motives, Rupert notes, “like people in real life.”
²²
Where, then, might salvation be found? Could the woman's world provide a cure for his own moral confusion? Women were innately pure, but also innately weak and corruptible. In November, he had started to address Noel in his letters as “child.” This became a nervous tic, frequent in his letters to various women until his death. Women had to be protected from people like Henry and Lytton, whom Rupert hated because he knew how close, in some ways, he had been to them. Henry, the great seducer, embodied a style of masculine predatoriness that Rupert both despised and envied. “All the women of that circle have been treated so well – too well – by the men they know,” observed Dudley Ward, “that they're peculiarly at the mercy of the other sort of man when he comes along.”
²³
Perhaps so; but it was also true that Henry and Lytton drove Rupert into madness by acting out, without compunction, his own hidden or unacknowledged desires. His mother and Noel had shown him how women should be treated; but so might Webster's Flamineo:

Women are caught as you take tortoises;

She must be turned on her back.
²⁴

Dr Maurice Craig was one of Britain's leading psychiatrists. He was consulted by Leonard Woolf over Virginia's breakdowns, and treated many other intellectuals (as well as the future Edward VIII). His book
Nerve Exhaustion
sets out his approach to people like Rupert. “It is hyper-sensitivity,” he writes, “which occasions in varying degrees the ultimate collapse of the nervous system . . . Rapid and intensive work increases the hyper-sensitivity of the nervous system, and if this is already in an overstrung condition, the risks are obvious . . . Sexual indulgence, whether by masturbation or intercourse, is a very important factor in the production of nerve exhaustion symptoms.” That is how Craig saw Rupert, and presumably how Rupert saw himself when prompted by the great specialist. He also developed another of Craig's symptoms: “the writing of libellous postcards and letters.”
²⁵

Craig's treatment had three parts: complete rest, weight gain, and 325 mg of potassium bromide each day:

My nerve specialist's treatment is successful and in a way pleasant,
aber etwas langweilig
. I have to eat as much as I can get down, with all sorts of extra patent foods and pills, milk and stout. I have to have breakfast in bed about 10 every day, go to bed early, never take any exercise, walk never more than two miles, and do no kind of brain-work.

After a few weeks of it one feels like Oldham or a sleepy version of the master of Magdalene.
²⁶

The bromide was supposed to reduce nervous excitement and suppress sexual desire, though Rupert reported that it seemed to have the opposite effect. It is no longer prescribed as a sedative, and at the time it often exacerbated the nervous symptoms that it was supposed to relieve.

After one or two sessions in Harley Street, Craig's patients would be packed off to the country to follow a regime of absolute tedium, either in the care of a relative or in a nursing home if they threatened violence. Mrs Brooke happened to be in Cannes for an extended holiday, so Rupert was sent there for his cure. It was not out-and-out quackery: the drugs did no real harm, while tranquility and good food helped many patients to feel better. Craig noted that most patients would recover after four to six months of seclusion. But there was no psychotherapy in any modern understanding of the term.

The strangest feature of “stuffing,” as it was called, was the obsession with the patient's weight as an index of his or her mental state. Everyone was put on the same regime of inactivity and a fattening diet, regardless of the nature of their distress, and the cure was measured by how many pounds the patient gained each week. Thirty pounds in two months was the usual target. Rupert gained seven and a half pounds in the first twelve days of treatment, then another seven more gradually. When Virginia Woolf broke down after her marriage she was “stuffed” by Sir Henry Head. She weighed 119 pounds in September 1913 and 179 pounds fifteen months later. The mythology of Leonard Woolf sitting devotedly by her for hours at a time, spoon in hand and begging her to eat, appears in a different light when one takes into account “stuffing” as the standard – in a sense, the only – treatment for mental illness.
²⁷
If patients tried to talk about their troubles, it would be taken as a morbid sign. Instead of responding to their feelings, the doctor would try to get them repressed again as soon as possible. If Rupert's letters to Ka seem obsessive and wild, we must remember that she was the only real therapist he had. Since she was also the main cause of his trouble, he alternately attacked her and cast himself on her mercy, which put her, also, under an almost unbearable strain.