Free Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany

of doors, and am as happy as the day’s long. I am chiefly sorry for all you people in the world. Every now and then dull bald spectacled people from Cambridge come out and take tea here. I mock them and pour the cream down their necks or roll them in the rose-beds or push them in the river, and they hate me and go away. 2
    Later, when he had briefly dropped his mask, he would admit to James Strachey that “Solitude is my one unbearable fear.” 3 Like many magnetic personalities he was at his best with enough people to count as an audience, and became ill at ease as the number dwindled. His new image – the elfin vegetarian socialist, roaming barefoot through the meadows and leaping naked into the river – was a guaranteed star turn. His friends flocked to see and imitate it. Rupert had created a new student style, which caused him and his followers to be nicknamed “the dew-dabblers.” In 1911 Virginia Woolf would give them a more durable name, the “Neo-pagans.”
    In the summer of 1908 Rupert had started calling himself “a wild rough elementalist. Walt Whitman is nothing to me.” 4 If Whitman was Neo-paganism’s spiritual grandfather, its godfather was Edward Carpenter, with his gospel of nudity, sunbathing, and sandals. In
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure
, Carpenter had predicted the coming of a new and glorious post-Christian man:
    The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations – all the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind – the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within. 5
    Unlike the Oliviers, Rupert had not grown up with any special closeness to nature. Everything he did in his days at Grantchester was done to make a point, including his report in a letter to Noel:
    I wander about bare foot and almost naked, surveying Nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand Nature, but I get on very well with her, in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we’re both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together.I don’t know the names of things . . . but I get on very well by addressing all flowers “Hello, Buttercup!” and all animals “Puss! Puss!” 6
    This was typical of the gratingly facetious style of Rupert’s letters to Noel and she, also typically, quickly brought him down to earth: “no doubt you have a tremendous capacity for enjoyment, only I wish you wouldnt talk about Nature in that foolish and innocent tone of voice – you call it making jokes, and I suppose you think it’s nice; but I dont like it a bit – I’ve told you why lots of times.” 7 Noel had spent half her childhood in the woods, and they were her first school. She cared deeply about nature, and wanted to know as much as possible about it. Rupert knew only that Grantchester required a pose, which he was only too eager to provide. Unfortunately for him, he had fallen in love with someone who had no appreciation – or tolerance – for poses of any kind.
    Jacques Raverat was one of Rupert’s first visitors in June. Instead of the mannered decadence of Rupert’s first year at Cambridge, Jacques now found him a creature of sunshine and fresh air: “he had given up tobacco and any kind of alcohol, he lived on vegetables and fruits and dressed in a dishevelled