Free Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page B

his camp at Grantchester. Thirty-one years old and already famous, John had been commissioned to paint a portrait of Jane Harrison at Newnham. If Rupert was flirting with the Simple Life, John had flung himself into it head over heels. Obsessed with the threatened extinction of the gypsy way of life, he decided to become a gypsy himself, leaving his Chelsea home to travel with an entourage of “six horses, two vans, one cart, six children, Arthur [a groom], a stray boy ‘for washing up,’ a broken-down wagon, Dorelia [Dorothy McNeil] and her younger sister Edie.” 15 The children, all boys, were by his wife Ida and his mistress Dorelia. John had lived with the two women in a ménage à trois until Ida died in childbirth two years before.
    Another of John’s mistresses, Lady Ottoline Morrell, came to sample his gypsy-style lodgings, but retreated to her home in London after one night. Rupert was delighted to hang around John’s encampment and romp with his pack of children (and also with the five-year-old Gregory Bateson, another resident of Grantchester). Nonetheless, he did not copy either John’s riotous dress (gypsy hat and sandals) or riotous sex life. Inspired by Whitman and Meredith, John posed as “a robust pagan with a creed that personified Nature as a mother.” 16 Indeed, he got so deeply into his pose that it effectively ceased to be one, whereas Rupert’s wildness and roughness were mostly on paper. He was never able to provide himself with one wife, let alone John’s long train of wives and mistresses. Nor was he able to support himself on his own talent, as John already did. Though he affected to be free as a bird, Rupert at Grantchester did nothing that truly endangered his academic prospects.
Learning From Bedales
    After their meeting at Bank in April 1909, Rupert had gone back to Cambridge, and Noel to Bedales. As soon as his exams were over, Rupert started intriguing to visit Noel at her school. He needed help from Jacques Raverat, who was living nearby with his schoolmate Geoffrey Lupton. Jacques’s mental and physical problems had ended his career at Cambridge, but he was able to visit Florence in March 1909, and indiscovering the Old Masters he also found a vocation for himself, as an artist.
    Noel was reluctant to have outsiders turn up in front of her schoolmates, and particularly to deal with Rupert’s manic advances, whether by letter or in person. They managed only a brief and awkward encounter while walking outside the school. By now Noel was a dedicated Bedalian, and the clash of values between Rugby and Bedales would be central to the remaining six years of their relationship. Yet Bedales had grown out of Rugby, if only by reaction; and Rupert’s attraction to the Bedales spirit revealed his own dissatisfaction with the world in which he had grown up. If the Fabians gave him the hope of making a new world through political reform, Bedales offered a more personal solution, by joining in a new way of life.
    The Victorian public schools and universities were total institutions. They would not have liked to admit it, but they still had much in common with the monasteries from which they had sprung. Total institutions have a way of begetting their own most ferocious adversaries: Luther the spoiled monk, Stalin the spoiled seminarian. One such adversary, though a much gentler one, was Edward Carpenter. In 1880 Carpenter decided to turn his back on the system that had formed him. He had become a clerical fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1867, when he was twenty-three. 17 After six years of teaching, Carpenter found himself becoming disillusioned in turn, though more with the academic than with the spiritual world: “I had come to feel that the so-called intellectual life of the University was . . . a fraud and a weariness. These everlasting discussions of theories which never came anywhere near actual life, this cheap