Fatal Glamour Read Free

Virginia Woolf as a specifically male propensity for rivalry, aggression, and militarism. But Rupert’s trouble was more on the negative side: feelings of guilt and failure that could only be purged through comradeship and violence. Whatever the broad causes of male eagerness for war, the special value of Rupert’s case is that we know more about his inner life before 1914 than just about any other Englishman. Endowed with the sublime egotism of a poet, Rupert could distill his feelings into a few memorable lines, or let them overflow into the hundreds of thousands of words of his intimate letters. These letters contain every conceivable mood: euphoria, nervous exhaustion, romantic idealisation, misogyny, socialist universalism, crude chauvinism. If Rupert had any kind of coherent self, it was assembled from radically incongruous parts.
    That incongruity is particularly evident in Rupert’s sexual fluidity, where bisexuality is only the beginning of his curious history. A beautiful woman would be left in no doubt about how she was valued, and what was expected of her. For a beautiful man, his looks were more likely to produce confusion, and even be felt as a stigma. A pretty boy was nice enough, but could there be a pretty man? This was a good part of Rupert’s troubles, and the contrast between his career and Bloomsbury values is striking. Bloomsbury accepted the variability in people’s dispositions, expressed in varying objects of desire and sexual acts.Rupert had a continuous gay life, relatively consistent and satisfying, and rooted in public school homoeroticism. In his twenties, he embarked on a series of turbulent affairs with women. Only two of these affairs – in Tahiti, on the other side of the world – ran smoothly. For most women Rupert was a disastrous lover: unreliable, misogynist, without respect or empathy. For him, as for many young men like him, going to war was a welcome escape from heterosexual obligations. It becomes painfully clear from Rupert’s letters that he was not afraid of death, but was afraid of marriage.
    We may admire the relentless hedonism of Duncan Grant, or the rationality of Lytton Strachey, but Rupert’s case is more intriguing because it was so erratic. By today’s standards, he behaved shamefully in his relations with women. Part of the time, this behaviour was a deliberate revolt against the Bloomsbury code of relationships (which has become the dominant code for the Western middle class of today). In his early twenties, Rupert seemed to be pioneering a new and enlightened post-Victorian way of life. His neo-pagan and Fabian friends were “children of the sun,” their eyes turned to a radiant future. Then came the crack-up of 1912, which gave birth to the nasty Rupert: blimpish, misogynist, and anti-Semitic. This can be seen as a reversion to public school orthodoxy, or as a psychic break, in which Rupert needed to repudiate parts of himself that he could no longer tolerate. Like a barstool drunk, he needed someone to quarrel with – Bloomsbury in this case – whether or not they wanted to quarrel with him. In 1915 they would mourn his death, despite his hateful campaign against them.
    If Bloomsbury was ready to make its peace with Rupert, his biographers have not always been so forgiving. As we learn more about our subjects, do we end up liking them, or despising them? In
Jacob’s Room
, Virginia Woolf tried to understand the young men of her class who sacrificed themselves in Flanders or Gallipoli. She had no sympathy for any crisis of masculinity that might be resolved by the war. Yet she was deeply curious about the separate, hidden lives of her male friends. After
Jacob’s Room
she turned, in
Mrs Dalloway
, to the post-traumatic injuries of those who survived. 6
    We can say that Rupert’s bad behaviour to women and foreigners was just a return to what was typical of his class. The fault then lies with the public