Puncturing the Strachey Myth

...There his comic, ungainly figure, quick wit, gossipy mind, his consuming affection for the young (held at bay, apparently, most of his life) endeared him to a whole generation of writers, esthetes, future Parliamentarians...

...It became a genre in itself...

...The well-turned phrase is his forte...

...Holroyd's two-volume life, in fact, is a much more thorough job than Strachey himself would have done...

...Strachey, it seems, slept virginally in all of them...

...Michael Holroyd, in his solid and revealing life of Strachey, makes good use of them...

...Its story of the literary and social life of a generation facing two world wars is both pathetic and gay, full of fading elegance and faddishness...

...He is asked the inevitable question: "Then tell me, Mr...

...A conscientious objector during World War I, Strachey appears before the Hampstead Tribunal with his family and friends...

...Even his death provides an example of the Strachey style...

...Reading Eminent Victorians or the lapidary essays in Portraits in Miniature, one is easily dazzled by Strachey's prose —as dazzled as Cambridge undergraduates, several decades ago, might have been by the malicious wit and cozening sentimentality of the author...

...I write a few reviews, and spend the rest of the day having tea with ladies of sixty...

...At the age of 25 he was an old auntie...

...Strachey sought to cast off his Victorian household—his high-minded but flighty mother, who'in her youth had been much influenced by John Stuart Mill, and in her old age took up the Greek language and American cigarettes...

...I'd no idea that the Webb fellow was so utterly without pretentions of being a gentleman...

...the Post-Impressionist painters were more interesting for their effect upon the public than for their incomprehensible work...

...By the end of his life, Strachey had brought the complaint to a state of high literary perfection...

...Their reputation in Stra-chey's time was based on the belief that he had punctured the Victorian myth, that he had instituted a new form: biography as an art instead of the usual banal homage and blind praise...

...One cannot help feeling that Holroyd has a persistent and perhaps salutory distaste for Strachey's writing...

...Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out," one of Strachey's relatives wrote to him...

...Yet, while it is true that he anticipated the taste of a later generation, what he actually invented was the cinematic biography with its cast of villains and sacrificial lambs, its dramatic confrontations of character —life in scenario form...

...Strachey's literary reputation rests on two books, Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria...

...It will no doubt stand as the definitive critical biography for some time to come...

...he reprimands the style on most occasions...

...now that the problems of the Victorian period—the social disruptions of a new technology, the resurgent political ambitions of a large part of the globe—have become our own, Strachey seems a very lively but unreliable Virgil to the Victorian era...

...Convalescing at home: "I'm not even allowed out, for fear of falling down in the middle of Piccadilly, and I sit all day trying to read and not succeeding very well...

...My nights I pass in incredible virginity among the folds of a highly tantalizing double-bed...

...With them, he wrapped up and shelved the Victorian era...

...They provide the spice of a tedious and restless life...

...One gets the impression that among the upper classes of English society at the turn of the century absolutely no one stayed at home...

...They all rented out their town houses, country houses, cottage and farms and went off to stay with relatives and friends in equally rented domiciles...

...One can see the necessity for it...

...I am stiff—frozen stiff—a rigid icicle," he writes to Virginia Woolf from one of his jaunts...

...She was lachrymose and white-haired...

...It is one of Strachey's masterful touches...

...In that pursuit, what an orgy of house-hunting and house-hopping...

...Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister...

...On a meeting of New Statesman subscribers: "B[ernard] Shaw made a quite amusing speech about nothing on earth...

...The rest of his "unknown years" were spent in a tireless and tiresome attempt to cut the umbilical cord...

...When the physical disorders of a lifetime close with terminal cancer and the sickbed, he rouses himself to a final moment of consciousness...

...Vegetating in the country: "I live in complete silence, infinite dimness and absolute monotony...

...In the end, one distrusts Strachey's grasp of history and even his version of the Victorian era...

...He was, in a sense, a midwife to 20th-century attitudes, to a certain shallowness and cynicism that we adopt toward public affairs and private lives...

...how I loathe writing for money and against time...

...I hang at this address for another week, and slowly melt southwards and eastwards?a weeping relic of what was once your old friend...

...Amid the back-biting, however, there are redeeming moments of droll courage...

...On Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: "It really is most unfortunate that she rules out copulation—not the ghost of it visible . . ." On Katherine Mansfield's Journal: "But why that foul-mouted, virulent, brazen-faced broomstick of a creature should have got herself up as a pad of rose-scented cotton wool is beyond me...

...As literature, his books are still delightful to read—classics of entertainment...

...Lytton Strachey's life was a succession of such longueurs, relieved by a very few ecstasies—and these mostly of his own making: plunging into bouts of unrequited love for stolid young athletes, ogling the waiters at the Carlton, rushing up to Cambridge to keep an eye on the new crop of "beauties...

...But Holroyd's painstaking analysis of the liberties Strachey took in order to heighten the drama—quoting out of context, suppressing facts that did not suit the story line—does not revive one's faith in Strachey's abilities as a historian...

...In the first, he got his own back at the cramping Victorian standards of education and morality under which he felt he had suffered, pillorying the bureaucracy and double-dealing hidden behind the Victorian facade of respectability...

...There are some things that I shall try not to think of, and you must do your best to help me in that...

...Generally, the letters are quite marvelous: biting, hypocritical, full of gossip about the labyrinthine domestic arrangements of the Bloomsbury Group and acid comments on Strachey's literary colleagues...

...Recuperating in Menton: "I have breakfast at quarter to eight...

...If this is dying," he remarks quietly, "then I don't think much of it...

...Surveying his sisters, he replies with the utmost gravity: "I should try and interpose my own body...

...At times, Strachey writes every day to Maynard Keynes, his friend and rival for the affections of the young bloods back at Cambridge, pleading for the latest scandal, reporting on his unsuccessful siege for the affections of the painter Duncan Grant, giving barometric readings on the state of his nerves and emotions...

...Curiously, Holroyd's approach to his subject seems to be the one method once credited to Strachey himself...

...He loved a good story...

...Most of Strachey's life seems devoted to finding a cozy nest in which to settle down and write literature rather than journalism...

...Also choose them, in the first place, because you dislike them...

...his taciturn father, a retired Victorian civil servant of some importance in Indian affairs who read six novels a week, brought to him, as one account has it, on a silver tray...

...For once, the bitching and the badinage were dropped, to be replaced by English good form: "Dear Maynard, I only know that we've been friends far too long to stop being friends now...

...Now that the vast system of the British Empire has crumbled and the political solutions it imposed upon Asia, Africa and the Middle East have come undone...

...The perverse outcome of these ministrations, which assiduously brought Keynes and Grant together, was their taking up with each other behind Strachey's back...

...As a writer, he was seldom able to appreciate the meaningful esthetic developments of his time: Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was "boredom and sheer anguish...

...Aside from its detailed account of Strachey's life, it is a revelation of the Edwardian era and the later Bloomsbury set...

...With "The Great Panjandrum," Victoria herself, he was a good deal milder...

...Queen Victoria ends superbly: The old woman, lying on her deathbed, is carried back through a series of flashbacks, past Disraeli and Palmerston and Melbourne, past the happy years with Albert to the green lawns of Kensington and her childhood...

...She comes across as a narrow, stubborn but, on the whole, admirable figure: He could no more exorcise her than he could exorcise his own parents...

...In its thoroughness and sanity, Holroyd's biography is comparable to Leon Edel's splendid life of Henry James...

...That seems to be your method...

...The literary rewards of this perpetual activity are the writer's letters...