Fatal Glamour (36 page)

For the rest of 1912 Rupert pursued an erratic course, driven by two compulsions: never to be alone, never to stay in one place for more than a week. His first refuge after the showdown with Ka was the usual one: back to Bilton Road, where he spent a dismal twenty-fifth birthday on 3 August. He fired off letters to half the people he knew, setting up a round of visits, and left on 8 August. The first stop was Beckhythe Manor at Overstrand, Norfolk. Gilbert Murray, the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, was spending the summer there with his numerous family. His daughter Rosalind had met Rupert when she had a small part in
Faustus
at Cambridge, in August 1910. They got on well, though Rosalind did not become one of Rupert's obsessive loves. He saw her a few times more in September, and went to stay with the Murrays again in Oxford the following March. Nothing was made clear about his feelings for Rosalind, except that he reported to Ka, “my sexual egoism makes me believe that all young women I know are oozing for me.”
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Three months after that Rupert was taken aback to hear that Rosalind had become engaged to a
promising young academic, Arnold Toynbee, who had just been made a fellow of Balliol. While Rupert was at Overstrand another of his women friends was removed from circulation: on 10 August a marriage took place, at St Pancras Registry Office, between Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf. Rupert did not see Virginia until the beginning of November, when she and Leonard had moved to Clifford's Inn. “She seemed calmer for her marriage,” he told Noel, “I felt infinitely removed from her.”
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After five days with the Murrays, Rupert went to stay with Justin Brooke at Leylands, the family home near Dorking. Justin had troubles of his own: he was supposed to be studying law but spent most of his time laid up with colitis and nervous indecision. Rupert had an anxiety attack at Leylands too, and crawled back to Rugby. He was living in hope of the prenuptial walking tour near Carlisle with Bryn at the end of the month. When she called it off, Rupert had to settle for a much less exciting northern journey: a tour of Scotland with Harry Norton and his aunt. Norton was one of the Apostles, like Eddie, who were good at soothing Rupert. He had been in love with Rupert for a while, in 1908, and simultaneously with Vanessa Bell; neither passion had reached any tangible conclusion. James Strachey called Norton “the affable eunuch,” which probably made him the right kind of company for Rupert at that moment.
²²
Like Rupert he also suffered from manic depression – treated by Dr Craig – which cut short his career as a mathematician.

Rupert trailed around Dumfries and Galloway with the Nortons for ten days, sending off plaintive or angry letters to Noel as he went. Failure on the Olivier front coincided with a critical decision about his future domestic life. Since his nervous breakdown he had only made brief visits to Grantchester, finding it too haunted by painful memories. But if the Old Vicarage could no longer be his home, and Bilton Road was his mother's home, where could he find a secure resting place? The idea of having his own flat, and being responsible for his own cooking and washing up, was never on his horizon. One possibility remained, Eddie Marsh's rooms at 5 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn: “Brooke came to London in August, and wrote his name on an envelope and affixed it with a drawing-pin to the dark green outer door at the top of the spiral steps at Raymond Buildings. He now had first claim on the spare room, which he filled with his books and luggage and made the place his London home. Mrs. Elgy was delighted, in spite of the extra work, for Marsh was out all day and Brooke, she said, was a ‘stoojius [studious]
type', who caused no trouble.”
²³
It may have been September rather than August, and Rupert did not date his letters from “Eddie's” until the following spring (before that he used the National Liberal Club). But he was content to have a regular share in Eddie's flat, and Eddie was more than content to have him. What Rupert did not share was expenses, and this was no small consideration. He could live comfortably rent-free in central London, with Mrs Elgy's excellent cooking as a bonus. The package was worth at least £120 per year.
²⁴
Eddie was not wealthy, but his income and capital were more than enough for his needs, and he took pleasure in helping artists and writers to make ends meet. That goodwill was not always returned. His epicene manner, monocle, and snobbish devotions could easily make him a figure of fun. Jacques Raverat was cruel but deadly in calling Eddie “a valet to his heroes.” Yet he had shrewd tastes, and many rising young talents benefited from his patronage.

Still, it was Rupert who benefited most, which poses the question: what did Eddie get in return? Almost certainly no physical gratification beyond, perhaps, an occasional hug or holding of hands. Eddie seems to have been impotent all his life, due to a childhood attack of mumps.
²⁵
The relationship was a mixture of intellectual mentoring, like Rupert's earlier ties to St John Lucas, Arthur Eckersley, and Charles Sayle, and a curious kind of pseudo-marriage. Apart from the platonic relationship with Cathleen Nesbitt, later in 1912, all the young women who mattered to Rupert were kept secret from Eddie. In that respect, Eddie was like Rupert's mother: someone whom he loved, and who gave him emotional security, but who was usually kept in the dark about his erotic affairs. Rupert hardly ever appeared socially in London accompanied by a single young woman. In all his life he never “dated” in the contemporary sense, and never had an unsupervised domestic space where he could reliably be alone with a woman. Instead, he went about as Eddie's partner (and Eddie never appeared with a woman either). Eddie was the established and solicitous older man, Rupert the beautiful consort who raised Eddie's status. This was the unwritten contract. Eddie looked after Rupert financially and emotionally; in exchange, he was admired and envied for having Rupert under his wing. Effectively, it was a society marriage without sex. Seven months after Rupert's death, Eddie would establish a similar relationship with another beautiful and talented young man: Ivor Novello. The only difference was that Novello was unambiguously and exclusively gay.
²⁶

Eddie took care of business as well as pleasure. He had money, a nose for literary talent, and an impressive gift as a cultural entrepreneur. He recognised that “The Sentimental Exile,” the long poem from Rupert's stay in Berlin earlier in the year, was likely to boost his reputation beyond the slighter work in the 1911
Poems
. The title was changed to “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” and Eddie set about constructing an anthology around it. This would be a promising move in the old game of poetic back scratching (and, of course, back stabbing too). Eddie was as skilled a player here as he was in the bureaucratic manoeuvres of his day job in Whitehall. He and Rupert would make a collection of the emerging younger poets who suited their taste. The result was
Georgian Poetry
, a five-volume series that became the wildly successful house organ of what Orwell skewered as the “beer and cricket” school of English poetry. Rupert was a better poet than most of the Georgians, and less simple-minded about his enthusiasms, but they were the birds of a feather with whom he chose to flock.

On 19 September the venture was launched over lunch at Raymond Buildings, with Rupert, W.W. Gibson, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro (who edited the
Poetry Review
), and his assistant Arundel del Re. As the host, Eddie was also the natural choice to be the editor. He was also neutral, in the sense of not being a poet himself. A rival gang was led by Ezra Pound, who had just met in the British Museum tearoom with Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington and claimed the name “Imagists.”
²⁷
Georgian Poetry
signalled a break with the sententiousness of late Victorians, and with the Decadents of the turn of the century. The poetic figure who loomed over their enterprise was Thomas Hardy; the Georgians paid him homage, while falling short of the astringent originality of his vision. Hardy himself was never going to appear in such company, nor was the other great poet of the moment, W.B. Yeats. But Eddie rounded up seventeen contributors, most with shared styles and values, except for such outliers as G.K. Chesterton and D.H. Lawrence.

Positively, the Georgian movement was fuelled by the traditional sights and emotions of English country life. “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” was the central statement of
Georgian Poetry
thanks to its exploitation of nostalgia, and it was nostalgia that set the tone for the whole Georgian movement, even though its new young poets were supposed to be breaking with the past. A further irony was that in October Rupert went to stay at Grantchester for the last time. Having glorified it as the great
good English village, he had to admit that it was no longer a good place for him.

Rupert's two weeks at the Old Vicarage were set aside for work on revising his fellowship thesis, away from the distractions of London. As solitude began to pinch, he would go into Cambridge and wander around the colleges, seeing if any of his old acquaintances might be available to share a meal. One of them was A.C. Benson, fellow of Magdalene, known today for composing the imperialist anthem “Land of Hope and Glory.” Like Eddie, he was an asexual older gay man, an admirer of Rupert from a distance. Rupert needed such male company, but it did not exclude “womanising,” so long as one sphere of action did not overlap with the other. “One can't – I can't – be properly and permanently all right till I'm married,” Rupert told Frances Cornford, “Marriage is the only thing. But, oh dear! One's very reluctant to go into it without love – the full business.”
²⁸
That meant being able to feel love within himself, since Ka and others had been quite ready to love him. In any case, he believed that “love's more important for men than for women,” because women could find half their fulfillment in loving their children.

The only woman Rupert had really loved – Noel – did not love him, and was now unattainable. If love was so elusive, desire was all too present and pressing, whenever Rupert found himself alone. From Grantchester he wrote to Elisabeth van Rysselberghe at Swanley, asking her to go away together for a long weekend in the country. She agreed, but that left a few days to wait; and Rupert had another young lady who might be willing to come to him at the Old Vicarage. Phyllis Gardner had first laid eyes on Rupert on Armistice Day, 1911, in the tea-room at King's Cross station. Struck by his beauty, she made a sketch of him on the train to Cambridge, though they did not speak. Phyllis was just twenty-one, and had been a student at the Slade since 1908, where she was a classmate of Gwen Raverat. Her background might easily have made her a Neo-pagan, but something had kept her apart from Rupert's circle. Ernest Gardner, her father, was a former fellow of Caius; he was now professor of archaeology at University College, London. Mary Gardner, her mother, aspired to be both a poet and a friend of poets; these
ambitions would play a role in her daughter's romance with Rupert. In 1911 the Gardners were living at Tadworth, a leafy suburb near Epsom, rather like the Oliviers' base a few miles away at Limpsfield.

Before making any approach, Phyllis started to do some research on Rupert or, in modern terms, stalking him. She found a student at Newn-ham who knew him, a “dark, tragic-looking creature.” This must have been Margery Olivier, who was beginning her long mental collapse. Back in London, there was more to be winkled out from Noel, whom Phyllis already knew through the Women's Union at University College. On 4 December 1911 she went to tea at the Olivier house in St John's Wood, where she spotted a copy of Rupert's poems, just published. Noel sensed Phyllis's eagerness, and told her that Rupert was “very difficult to catch.”
²⁹
That had never been Noel's problem, but it amused her to see how many young women had pursued Rupert in vain. Her own relations with Rupert were at a critical point: he was demanding a deeper commitment, she was holding back. But Noel was not going to help Phyllis become her replacement.

While recovering from his nervous breakdown in Cannes, Rupert entertained Ka with news of Phyllis's campaign: “You know about the Romance of my Life. I know I told you, because I remember how beastly you were about her – Miss Phyllis (is it Phyllis?) Gardner. Everyone was so beastly that I hadn't the heart to meet her. She went to tea day after day in St John's Wood, and I was always too sulky and too
schuchtern
to go . . . Oh, I've put it in the hands of my solicitor (Miss Noel Olivier) who has been acting for me in this matter throughout.”
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Phyllis's infatuation made her a laughingstock to Neo-pagans, even as they fed her hopes that they would produce Rupert for her. He did not become available until 25 June when he came back from Germany after the final shipwreck of his affair with Ka. Phyllis's mother then tried the direct approach by inviting him to lunch at her club, with Phyllis in tow. Rupert was now turning again to Noel, with a side bet on Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. But an ardent, red-haired Slade student was at least worth an interview. For her part, Phyllis was head-over-heels from their first meeting. Rupert was flitting between London, Rugby, Scotland, and other points of attraction; but over the next three months he saw Phyllis intermittently, and went to stay with her parents at Tadworth. The major step was when he invited her to Grantchester, where he went on 12 October and stayed until the 30th. She could have her own room at
the Old Vicarage, which paid lip service to propriety. But in Rupert's room was something less decorous: a photograph of a friend standing naked in a willow tree, ready to dive into the river. If it was Noel, Phyllis would have recognised her, though it might have been some other Neo-pagan, or even Virginia Stephen from her visit a year before. In any case, Phyllis took up the challenge when Rupert proposed going down to Byron's Pool. If nudity helped to get his attention, nude she would be.