Free Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page A

style that showed off his beauty very effectively. He was well aware of it, and relished the romantic and Byronic impression given by his long hair and open-necked shirt.” In the morning Jacques and Rupert bathed in Byron’s Pool before setting off to London to see Shaw’s banned play,
The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet
. 8
    Apart from the carefree image, what would Rupert live on, and what would he live for? There was no chance of his getting a fellowship in classics, but he persuaded his father to continue supporting him while he switched his studies to English literature, which was gaining recognition as a university subject. 9 He started by writing an essay on Shakespeare for the Oldham Prize, which he would win early in 1910. This paid £66 in two installments, more than many workers would make in a year. The next step would be to write a dissertation on Elizabethan drama, and submit it for a fellowship at King’s. This was a feasible plan, though it would take Rupert three and a half years to succeed at it. Meanwhile, he was developing as a critic and writer of reviews, work that would not have come his way if he had remained in classics. He had been winning a steady flow of guineas in the poetry competitions of the
Westminster Gazette
. More significantly, Ford Madox Ford published four of hispoems in the July
English Review
, and paid him £3 for them. 10 Rupert’s real plan, he told A.F. Scholefield, was not to be a fellow of King’s or a lecturer in Leeds: “I am going to be a bloody POET .” 11 Specifically, he wanted to write traditional lyric poetry, but inspired by the philosophy of G.E. Moore: “The man who does not know that the human ear finds metre very beautiful, and that the most lovely effects have been got by the combination of words, metre, and ideas, is a fool. The object of literature is to evoke certain very valuable states of mind. They can best be (it is surprisingly observed) got by poetry, that is by metre, words, and ideas, much more often than by prose. Certain of them poetry alone can produce.” 12
    The poetic lifestyle was displayed in two riverside picnics Rupert organised at Overcote, outside Cambridge. The picnickers included Justin Brooke, who drove everyone in his new Opel 10/18 car (the first intrusion of the motor age), Gwen and Margaret Darwin, Ka Cox, Dorothy Lamb, Geoffrey Keynes, and Donald Robertson. 13 Activities included boating (in the newly popular Canadian canoes), wrestling, riding horses bareback, plaiting daisy chains, swimming in the nude (men and women separately), and falling in the river. Rupert crowned the day by reading Herrick’s great ode to the pleasures of May:
    Come, let us go, while we are in our prime,
    And take the harmless folly of the time!
    We shall grow old apace, and die
    Before we know our liberty.
    Rupert was now in his prime, and happy to be admired for it. Henry James was invited by Geoffrey Keynes and Charles Sayle to sample a round of Cambridge pleasures, from breakfasting with Maynard Keynes to going down the river with Rupert. Standing on the punt in his white open-necked shirt and flannels, Rupert did what he called his “fresh, boyish stunt” to killing effect. James was susceptible to pretty young men, even while keeping an acute sense of what prettiness was worth. “He reappears to me,” James wrote in his later tribute, “as with his felicities all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting of the river at the ‘backs.’” 14 Does “promptly” carry a hint that Rupert’s felicities were too blatantly on the surface, too readily trotted out for a famous visitor? James was too downy a bird, surely, to swallow Rupert’s mythwhole. He even entertained the idea that Rupert was a “spoiled child of history.” But at the news of his death in the Aegean, he wept.
    After James, John. The swarthy bohemian Augustus John turned up in July to pitch