Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page A

conservatism without a pang. But in the company of political enthusiasts like Ben Keeling, or of emancipated New Women like Ka Cox or Margery Olivier, James was bound to look pallid and peripheral. What use was it to be loyal andintelligent when you had the personality and status of a schoolboy swot? If he wanted to shine in Rupert’s eyes, he would have to get him on to his own ground and in a more intimate setting. The ideal way – the only way – to do this was to promote Rupert’s election to the Apostles, of whom James had been a member since February of 1906.
    The Society was founded in 1820 as an exclusive and idealistic circle of male friends. They referred to each other as “brothers,” and signed their letters “Yours fraternally.” Several Apostles of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eddie Marsh, G.L. Dickinson, J. McT. E. McTaggart, and G.E. Moore, were romantically drawn to their own sex, but they were shy of giving their feelings a physical expression, and might even have denied that they had such feelings at all. From 1901 to the beginning of the war, however, a majority of those elected were actively gay, and among these Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes were most influential in setting the Society’s tone. Under their regime, talk about philosophy and the good life was combined with compulsive flirtation. Gradually, the “brothers” divided into two distinct types. Some – Lytton and James Strachey, Keynes, J.T. Sheppard – were intellectually and sexually on the prowl, often as a way of making up for feelings of physical inferiority. To be both clever and ugly was their uneasy fate. Then there were those whose ticket of entry was their boyish good looks and the passion they had inspired in someone from the first group: people like Arthur Hobhouse, Cecil Taylor, and Brooke himself. Whatever intellectual gifts they had, these were not the main reason they had been elected. Within a few years, the Society had been reorganised around the sexual couple.
    Rupert became an Apostle on 25 January 1908. He owed his election mainly to James, who had to overcome heavy opposition from unnamed quarters. Three years earlier, Lytton Strachey and Keynes had pushed through the election of another yellow-haired public school hero, the Etonian Arthur Hobhouse. He had turned out to be a grave disappointment to them, both sexually and intellectually. 8 His sponsors probably feared that Rupert would be a pea from the same pod, but finally gave in to James’s pleadings. Rupert held his own as an Apostle, however. For the Easter vacation of 1908 he was asked to join G.E. Moore’s reading party at Market Lavington, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Since he scarcely knew Moore, this was a notable endorsement from the man whose
Principia Ethica
had made him the unchallenged intellectualleader of the Society. Being invited to one of Moore’s reading parties was the entry into an inner circle that included most of the Apostles who became members of “Bloomsbury.”
    Reading parties were an old public school and Oxbridge tradition, and Rupert had already been on a few with his school friends. But the gathering at Market Lavington was in a different league altogether. Besides Moore there were Keynes, the poet Bob Trevelyan, the barrister C.P. Sanger, the economist Ralph Hawtrey, the critic Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton and James Strachey. For someone who had scraped through his preliminary classics exams with a shaky second the previous May, Rupert might seem to be in over his head. But his looks, good humour, and native wit pulled him through. “Rupert Brooke – isn’t it a romantic name?” Lytton told Virginia Woolf, “– with pink cheeks and bright yellow hair – it sounds horrible, but it wasn’t . . . I laughed enormously, and whenever I began to feel dull I could look at the yellow hair and pink cheeks of Rupert.”