Fatal Glamour Read Online Free PDF Page B

Switzerland, and England. In later life she would again suffer from bouts of depression, yet she had a base of stable common sense that her friends would often rely on in troubles that lay ahead.
    Gwen Darwin’s father, George, was another leading scientist, a professor of astronomy and fellow of Trinity. Like Frances, Gwen belonged to the first generation of academic children that appeared when dons were permitted to marry from 1878 on. Her girlhood, in the tight-knit and high-minded society of Victorian Cambridge, had not been easy; she was “fat and clumsy and plain” – and shy and bespectacled for good measure. But these awkward years had developed her gifts of sense and observation. In the year of
Comus
she was twenty-three – a year older than Frances – but only just emerging from her powerful family. She had wanted to be a painter since she was thirteen. Her parents had finally acknowledged that her talent for drawing was more than just a childish knack, and had agreed that she could go to London and enroll at the Slade.
    Frances and Gwen drew in other young women, to help with the costumes, like Ka Cox and Sybil and Ethel Pye (neighbours of the Oliviers at Limpsfield), or just to clean brushes, like Noel. 15 But most of the power gravitated to Rupert, who became effectively the producer, director, andstar. From Justin, Rupert had learned the actor’s knack of making himself a centre of attention. His friends became his daily audience – an insidious bond, perhaps, but one that raised casual gatherings into occasions that lingered in memory. The pleasures of the group required also that each should care more for the ensemble than for any favourite partner. So Rupert was not entirely facetious in asking his collaborators on
Comus
to swear that none of them would get engaged to be married within six months of the masque’s performance. 16 Having assembled a group of friends of which he was the unchallenged leader (unlike his subordinate role in the Apostles or the Fabians), Rupert wanted to steer them into the future with closed ranks.
    Frances Darwin saw how Rupert’s beauty made him into a symbol for his admirers. Noticing once that his blond locks were highlighted by the sun from a window above the stage, she captured the moment in a little poem:
    A young Apollo, golden-haired
    Stands dreaming on the verge of strife
    Magnificently unprepared
    For the long littleness of life. 17
    After Rupert’s death the poem became merely sentimental, a cultural cliché of the Great War. But Frances had grasped the contradiction in Rupert’s position: the golden boy of his tribe who could not live up to his pedestal, fatally undermined by the adulation he provoked. His long hair, casual dress, and schoolboy-hero manner were the target for every kind of gush and sentimentality. More than could be true of any beautiful young woman at that time, Cambridge made Rupert into a figure of sexual myth. But it could not have done so if he had not accepted the role. Frances describes how the girls taught him to hang his head upside down and shake out his hair; afterwards he could be seen “rumpling his fingers through the front and gazing in the glass with melancholy flower-like eyes. ‘I can’t get it right. Is it right now? Will my hair do now?’” 18
    For all Rupert’s care, the actual performances of
Comus
, at the New Theatre on 10 and 11 July, fell short of a triumph. The literary world outside Cambridge was well represented. Thomas Hardy even came up from Dorset. Rupert was invited to breakfast with him, and summed him up memorably as “incredibly shrivelled and ordinary, and saidfaintly pessimistic things in a flat voice about the toast.” Also present on the first night were Alfred Austin, the poet laureate; Robert Bridges, who left early; and Edmund Gosse, who, when someone congratulated him on having heard
Comus
, replied, “I have overheard