The Letters of Lytton Strachey (review)

Modern biography began on May 9, 1918, when Chatto and Windus released Eminent Victorians, the book that assured its author a definite place in English literary history and inspired a legion of imitators. Indeed, the impact of this singular book remains palpable today, if in a typically rather perverted form, in countless examples of the postmodern tell-all subgenre. Two other major biographical works—Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928)—followed during the ensuing decade from the pen of Lytton Strachey, the notorious debunker of Victorian values whom Richard Holmes has celebrated as "a destroyer of illusions and a liberator of forms."¹ In addition to these books, this unlikely scion of a distinguished military line, Cambridge Apostle, Bloomsbury iconoclast, and sexual pioneer published scores of miniature portraits and biographical essays until his premature death from stomach cancer in 1932 a month short of his fifty-second birthday rendered him, as he wrote of Edward Gibbon, "unconscious—for ever."²

Strachey's perennial fascination with the textures of individual lives led him toward biography as his preferred genre; and his interest in the unique psychological and aesthetic shapes of those lives spurred him to break from the stolid life-and-letters tradition of nineteenth-century life-writing and to reinvent the form in a manner consonant with other modernist experiments in poetry, drama, and fiction. Strachey was, moreover, one of British modernism's most notable inheritors of the aestheticist tradition in literary portraiture—the polemical preface to Eminent Victorians reads, from an ethical as well as an aesthetic perspective, as a continuation of Walter Pater's conclusion to The Renaissance. Like his aestheticist predecessors, Strachey was also painfully conscious of what Pater calls "that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without."³ To judge from the sheer volume of his surviving correspondence, however, Strachey seems to have accepted this seemingly intractable barrier to human connection not only as a challenge but also as an invitation.

Paul Levy, a longtime co-literary executor (with Strachey's biographer Michael Holroyd) of the Strachey Trust's copyright holdings, observes in his introduction that if Strachey's letters were "to be collected, they would run to nearly the six volumes needed for Virginia Woolf's"(xvi). The Letters of Lytton Strachey represents a selection from Strachey's correspondence intended to "contribute to a narrative, either telling of an incident that is familiar from Holroyd's life, or from the film Carrington, or from one of the many other books dealing with Bloomsbury, or shedding a new light on the now old, old story" (xvi). To borrow one of Strachey's own phrases, Levy succeeds through this principle of selection in "shoot[ing] a sudden, revealing searchlight"⁴ on one important aspect of Strachey's life story—namely, his complicated sex life, which is the subject of "the more obvious revelations" (ix), and upon whose more "shocking" and "startling" aspects Levy chooses to dwell (ix). But as Strachey writes exasperatedly in his first letter to T. S. Eliot, in early 1920, "How terribly complicated is life!" (456). These letters as a whole go beyond the merely titillating to provide a fascinating intimate portrait of a man who, as both "the last eminent Victorian"⁵ and a leading proponent of the new in intellectual and sexual matters, was seismographically sensitive to the involved complexities of living between times and among a "kaleidoscopic" dapple of social worlds and who, as a correspondent, described his impressions of those times and those worlds (413). "The world is rather tiresome, I must say," he tells Dora Carrington: "everything at sixes and sevens—ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too" (444). Notwithstanding this tiresomeness, Strachey saw clearly that he was living at an exciting time when, as he writes to Carrington, "morality...