Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

when the girl comes through the woods to join him, her “flat clear voice” breaks the spell:
    You came and quacked beside me in the wood.
    You said, “The view from here is very good!”
    You said, “It’s nice to be alone a bit!”
    â€œHow the days are drawing out!”
    you said. You said, “The sunset’s pretty, isn’t it?”
    By God! I wish – I wish that you were dead!
    After lavishing sentiment on his absent beloved, the poet turns hysterical when the real person appears and fails to sense his mood. Howevereuphoric Brooke may have been at Bank, his happiness seems to have rested on the lack of any real dialogue between himself and his love.
    When the days of academic reckoning came in May, Rupert had not worked steadily at Greek or Latin for many months, and he cared more for picnics or sleeping out on the Backs than for examinations. Conceivably he was constructing another pose – the schoolboy who never swots but does brilliantly on the exam – and had worked secretly and hoped to do well. In any case, he only managed a Second. Frances Darwin (who was in the know) refrained from telling him that he almost got a Third. Surely there was something deliberate in Rupert’s turning away from the classics. His father had won his First at King’s, gained a fellowship there, and taught classics for a living. Rupert had to succeed in his own way, avoiding a mere repetition of his father’s early triumphs – which had led only to his present eclipse at School Field. If this entailed a conspicuous failure to live up to high expectations, then so be it. In any case, Rupert had his own hopes, which by now had crystallised into the belief that he could be one of the English poets. When Hugh Dalton had come to visit him at Rugby the previous October, Rupert showed him the memorial in the school chapel to Arthur Hugh Clough, who had composed “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” while dying of malaria in Florence. Rupert pointed to the bare wall beside it and said, “They are keeping that for
me
.” 31 Was it just a joke, or was he already weighing the odds? Clough had died at forty-two; Rupert would be up on the wall in less than ten years – a portrait medallion from one of Sherrill Schell’s overblown photographs. It would take an even more romantic death to put him there.

4
Apostles, and Others
October 1906–October 1909
Brothers
    At Andermatt, Christmas 1907, Brynhild Olivier had introduced Rupert to the pleasures of flirting with a woman. Before that his only objects of desire had been boys, and “giggling females” were to be avoided if possible. 1 For the remaining seven years of his life, Rupert was almost always in love or in lust with a woman, sometimes with several at once. Yet what happened to him at Andermatt was not a classic conversion experience, where someone discards an old self and is reborn as an entirely different person. Rupert continued to feel desire for men, and to respond when they showed desire for him. When Jacques Raverat and Gwen Darwin got married, he commented that “Gwen’s the only woman in England, and Jacques almost the only man, I’ve never lusted for.” 2 He did not feel obliged to choose between an exclusively gay or straight identity. It would be presumptuous for a biographer to choose for him, by saying that he was “really” or “fundamentally” one or the other.
    Rupert may have had a fluid sense of gender, but straight and gay desires played out in two quite different social arenas, each with its own rules. Relations with well-brought-up English girls were governed by strict propriety, and by the constant fear of an undesired pregnancy. The gay world, on the other hand, was clandestine and anarchic, with few inhibitions about asking for sex, or agreeing to it. If Rupert remained coy and rejected most of the men who desired him, it was because he