Camp Mandarin: The Prose Style of Lytton Strachey

Camp Mandarin: The Prose Style of Lytton Strachey BARRY SPURR University of Sydney AFTER A DECADE OF ACCLAMATION, following the publication of Eminent Victorians in 1918, intensifying on the appearance of Queen Victoria in 1921 and culminating in 1928 with Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey's reputation suffered a sharp decline. This was hastened by his death in 1932 and by the burgeoning vilification of Bloomsbury, led by Wyndham Lewis and F. R. Lea vis. In spite of the judiciously sympathetic portrait of him in Michael Holroyd's exhaustive biography, Strachey's notoriety persists to this day when the Master of Balliol has pilloried him as "that contemptible sniggerer."1 It is no longer necessary to have read Strachey to know, like the reviewer of The Daily Telegraph, that his most famous work consists of "sniggering little hatchet jobs."2 The coincidence of terminology is significant. Strachey's popular reputation as a sniggerer is as established as that of T. S. Eliot as a fascist or D. H. Lawrence as a pornographer . So wrongheaded is this denunciation that it cannot even be sustained in the consideration of Strachey's attitude to his subjects in the three well-known biographies I have mentioned, which range from caricatures (such as that of Dr. Arnold) to moving paeans (of Queen Victoria, of all people), let alone in his neglected literary criticism with its many examples of sober, objective assessment. His several essays on his ideological hero, Voltaire, although containing satiric elements, are decidedly not the work of a debunker. The revaluation of Strachey's achievement is long overdue. I want to suggest that it might begin with the appreciation of his genius as a prose stylist. Like the man, his writing is idiosyncratic—an individuality, nonetheless, which arises not from modernistic iconoclasm but from subtle transformations of conventional procedures. There is classical decorum, seemly order and self-restraint; the notation and ornamentation are traditional. But Strachey's pitch is new. In actual conversation, his speech was remarkable for its two contrasting tones—one a resonant basso, the other a shrill treble—as he 31 ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 seemed to vocalise the many contradictions of his mind and sensibility : its passion and detachment, humour and sadness, cynicism and hope, solitariness and desire for love. Introducing the vocabulary and cadence of Mandarin, Strachey proceeds subtly and wittily to pervert and violate its conventions, manipulating the solemnity of the Ciceronian, Gibbonian dialect to produce a voice placed, as it were, midway between the male and female ranges and sounding, at once, like both and like neither. It is the artistic resolution of the sexual contradiction that bedeviled him. Indeed, it is as much in the manner of Strachey's prose as in its matter that we discern the fascinating and complex personality behind it. Whether in biography or literary criticism, in the historical essay or private correspondence, Strachey's style is calculated to entertain. From childhood, he was a verbal showman. "Of course there is much agitation here," he wrote to his sister Philippa, from school at Leamington College, "when any rather out of the way word is used. So you may imagine the contempt, surprise, amusement, and admiration with which I am viewed, who simply flow with abjects, wierds, stringents, etc. etc. etc."3 In maturity, he persisted in seeking a striking verbal idiom which would win the attention he always craved and elicit support for the principles he espoused. Yet the individuality of Strachey's technique owes more to the adaptation of Augustan and Victorian styles, to his unconventional purposes, than to innovation. Favouring a latinate vocabulary and an elegant cadence, exploiting the intricacies of etymology and observing the disciplines of order and balance, Strachey expressed special aesthetic affinity with the writings of Edward Gibbon. He imitated the historian's controlled resonance but quickened its ironic pulse to produce an ambiguous elevation particularly effective in lampoon. But his style was by no means confined to the oblique approaches of the satirist. In passages of heartfelt expostulation, whether in direct and furious criticism, or in the mood of generous praise of a life or a work of art, the subjectivity of Strachey's...