Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page B

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    In fact, Rupert’s animal spirits were badly needed by the group at the Green Dragon Inn. Moore’s philosophy fitted in cosily with the aesthetic interests of a few congenial souls, but it counted for very little in the world beyond Trinity and King’s. Many of the Apostles gathered at Market Lavington had been struggling with arrested development, spinsterism, hypochondria, and inanition. In the egregious Saxon Sydney-Turner these traits had been raised to the level of a vocation, and James Strachey was an equally sad case. He was “a creature, not a man,” in Gwen Raverat’s eyes, “and pitiable for all his brains. He would sit curled up on the sofa looking like a cat that is afraid of wetting its feet.” 10 “Excessive paleness is what I think worries me most,” Lytton had once confided to Leonard Woolf. “The Taupe [E.M. Forster] . . . saw this about me, and feeling that he himself verged upon the washed-out, shuddered.” 11 One measure of the “paleness” of the 1908 reading party was that everyone there, except MacCarthy, either married late or not at all.
    Rupert’s history with the Apostles was largely a continuation of the public school culture that had formed his personality at Rugby. He had everything he needed to succeed in that world, but this also meant that there was little pressure on him to change his emotional habits, or to absorb the challenge of new and different experiences. Social life with his “brothers” was comfortable, and comforting. It was also sterile, inproviding no sustenance for Rupert’s truest vocation, as a poet. Instead, he could only imitate, somewhat feebly, the vocabulary and the moral system imposed by G.E. Moore.
    In becoming an Apostle, Brooke was also committing himself to having two separate sets of friends at Cambridge. One set would follow the Bedalian style of country living, theatricals, and an easy mingling of men and women. The other was exclusively male and devoted to gossip and philosophical speculation; it was also clandestine, which made it hard for Rupert’s other friends to understand why he spent so much time with people they mistrusted, and why he disappeared every Saturday night during term. He had to divide his loyalties, and cunningly keep one life separate from the other. Though he became a loyal “brother,” he would never give himself wholeheartedly to the Society. He didn’t mind catering to the Society’s obsessive interest in the subject of “copulation” (as they called it). But Rupert flatly refused to become the lover of James, or of any other “brother” (with one possible exception). 12 On the other hand, he never minded being pursued by older Apostles, whereas women who pursued him were bound to be treated badly.
    In April 1909 Rupert went to another of Moore’s reading parties, at the Lizard, in Cornwall. It was freakishly warm, and Rupert spent the days swimming in the surf and lying on the beach to dry. His new pose of being a child of nature put James Strachey under a severe strain. “This afternoon,” he reported to Lytton, “for the first time in my life, I saw Rupert naked. Can’t we imagine what you’ld say on such an occasion? . . . But I’m simply inadequate of course. So I say nothing, except that I didn’t have an erection – which was fortunate?, as I was naked too. I thought him – if you’ld like to have a pendant – ‘absolutely beautiful.’” 13 Once again, James plucked up courage to invite Rupert to his bed (as he had done intermittently since 1906), and once again he was bluntly refused. Rupert preferred to spend his nights in trying to beat off Moore’s relentless attacks on Fabianism. Moore was notoriously gifted and persistent at deflating other people’s enthusiasms. He did not deflate Rupert, but his ascendancy over the Apostles