A Bloomsbury Idyl

...On the other hand, it does accentuate a limitation any slim book has: It leaves out significant aspects of the figures it focuses on...

...At least that is the thought until one realizes that the nature of their friendship made frequent communication unnecessary...

...This does not mean that Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey Letters is negligible...

...Otherwise Matthew Arnold's stricture about seeing life steadily and seeing it whole would degenerate into an immature expectation of virtue or an equally immature expectation of vice...

...Western Humanities Review'' Against the pleasure in a touched-up portrait—the heightened color, a plane changed, a flaw artfully concealed—there is something in us which also welcomes authenticity...

...The editors themselves admit that they made occasional cuts and changes in names...

...A procedure of this sort automatically raises the question: Were the alterations courtesies or manipulations of material fact...

...but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren"—and of Katherine Mansfield: "I may add that she has an ugly, impassive mask of a face—cut in wood, with brown hair and brown eyes very far apart...

...Morgan, of course, is E. M. Forster, whose vote of approval went rather to The Voyage Out...

...What a pity then to have to add that some of the items in the book have been tampered with...

...A mutual fondness for literature and a penchant for impaling someone on a pin of wit was not all between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey...

...Oddly enough, it is a rather sparse affair for prolific writers...

...But if the letters present little of the prose poet or champion of women's rights who appears in The Waves and A Room of One's Own, they do give us the feminine creature that yearns for praise from men and writes gratefully to Lytton Strachey apropos of his tribute to her on Night and Day: "Ah, how delightful to be praised by you...

...He wrote her presciently of Victorians: "They seem to me a set of mouthing, bungling hypocrites...

...He could expect and did hear from her in return something like this on Henry James's work: "I read, and can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane & sleek, but vulgar"—or this on the novel T. S. Eliot has called the most considerable work of imagination in English in our time: "We've been asked to print Mr...

...Edited by Leonard Woolf and James Strachey, the former the husband of Virginia, the latter the brother of Lytton, it covers a friendship of some twenty-five years between the two it deals with...

...Joyce's new novel, every printer in London and most in the provinces having refused...

...It could not have been altogether a lazy compliment that made Strachey make a request of this kind: "a little advice also on a plot for a comedy would be useful...

...I enjoy every word...

...The fact is that they saw each other whenever they could...

...It titillates us with unexpected tidbits like Virginia's regret at not being able to introduce some tupping in a novel of hers...

...Wrinkles do not faze us then, nor a frown, nor those asperities known but not often put into words...

...First there's a dog that p's—then there's a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject...

...What is the value of a book like Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey Letters...

...The limitation noted for Virginia Woolf applies also to Lytton Strachey...

...I don't suppose there's anything in the way of praise that means more to me than yours...

...Conjecture pushes the latter balance down...

...and a sharp and slightly vulgarly-fanciful intellect sitting behind it...

...Two days later in her Diary she nevertheless records as strong a response to another person whose praise is important to her...

...If one makes allowances for letters inevitably lost and for trivia like telegrams sensibly kept out, the collection is substantially complete...

...More seriously, though, it helps to furnish us with that human perspective in which works of significance truly have their being...

...If a clinching value be still to find, seek it in this: The book is a Platonic idyl in which a couple of noted writers, even as many lesser citizens do, keep in touch with one another, content, though often separated, with each other's affection and particularly with each other's approval...

...The collection, Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey Letters, avoids either imbalance...

...Perhaps too engaged with respective projects, they tended to save their creative efforts for publication...

...Whether such ambivalence is an example of the struggle in us between romanticism and reality, or, taking a leaf from theology, an illustration of the conflict between faith and doubt, with nil nisi bonum or good taste ranged against event or accuracy, this point is certain: Neither side absolves us of the necessity to correct what-should-be with what-is...

...Well, it admits us, as memoirs and autobiographies will, to circles otherwise closed to us...

...Yet I suppose," she writes, "I value Morgan's opinion as much as anybody's...

...If the didactic individual concerned with fate in Eminent Victorians or Queen Victoria is but meagerly revealed, we still get something of the man who needs a confidant, which is what he sought and found in Virginia after his abortive engagement to her...

...They had something of a craftsman's relationship to each other as well...