Eminent.Edwardian

...In the future, yes, but Strachey was already obscene in his own correspondence...

...The underhanded jibe was typical: "It was only when the offer of a Stephen Barbara is a writer in New York...

...But the most interesting letters in this book are the ones that shed light on the Modernist movement, for it is too easy to forget, when reading the frequent banter and gossip in his correspondence, that Strachey was a pioneer who lived in exciting, inventive times...

...This he has done cynically, choosing the letters most appealing to the Bloomsbury enthusiast's love of high camp and malicious gossip, while omitting the bulk of the correspondence relating to Stra-chey's works, particularly his masterpiece, Eminent Victorians...

...The same gift for ridicule is on display here, only amplified...

...Poverty, too, is a persistent theme, as in the letter to his mother where he asks her to deposit £10 into his bank account...

...That correspondence is well-represented in these pages...

...He had recently read G.E...

...Of special note are the letters to the publisher Roger Senhouse, Stra-chey's last boyfriend...

...Of course, Stra-chey himself knew that "for one reader who cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing, there are a thousand who are ready to explore with eager sympathy the history of the writer...

...Which shouldn't mean that one reader ought to be neglected...

...Later, Keynes is derided as "a malignant goblin gibbering over destinies that are not his own...

...In that book, Strachey parted ways with the panegyrics of the day, instead exposing the hypocrisies of his subjects in a superbly detached style...

...Levy refers to this relationship as "the last secret of the Bloomsbury group...

...Aware of his many contradictions, both sexually and intellectually, he wonders to his brother James whether he is "an utter fool, a genius, or an ordinary person...

...Rupert Brooke, then a love interest of his brother James, is "poetical and pseudo-beautiful" and "proposes a philosophy of quietude and general mist...

...Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1912, he looks back at the Victorians and asks: "Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case...

...He then predicts that the literature of the future will "at last tell the truth, and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic...

...The morals, the sentimentality, and the melodrama are incredible, but there are even further depths of fatuity and filth...

...The man who wrote with the brevity and wit of a Condorcet in his great critical and biographical works was a voluble correspondent...

...Inevitably, Strachey's relationship with the painter Dora Carrington will be most interesting to readers who've seen the 1995 film Carrington, which captured one of the oddest love stories of the 20th century, the homosexual Strachey and the virginal Car-rington bound platonically—and, on one occasion, more than platonically...

...They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites...

...Moore's Principia Ethica, and knew Freud's work...

...Editor Paul Levy has had the difficult task of selecting the best of these letters and presenting them in a single volume...

...In fact, Strachey was passed medically unfit during World War I after unsuccessfully claiming exemption as a non-absolutist conscientious objector...

...Not to say Strachey was smug...

...Writing to his friend and Cambridge contemporary, Leonard Woolf, Strachey skewers John May-nard Keynes in a grand series of rhyming couplets: "A eunuch with his fly-buttons undone;/ A puzzle that is plain to everyone...

...Frequently in poor health, he diagnoses his ills with the studied care of a hypochondriac: "I've been attacked by violent hay-fever, which I feared would develop into apoplexy," he writes in one bleak moment...

...In one 1930 letter to Sen-house, he describes the aftermath of a harrowing mock crucifixion that had taken place the night before: "A ticklish business, applying the lanoline— but your orders had to be carried out," he writes, proof that he could match shocking words with actions...

...When Duncan does eventually leave him, for Maynard Keynes, the letters strike a desperate note...

...We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illuminations in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love...

...Levy has done a fine job annotating these letters, but one wishes he had included more that shed light on Strachey's work...

...Writing to Woolf (the most written-to friend in this collection), he imagines his first cousin Duncan Grant, then his lover, running off with his brother James: "If it happens, I only know one thing more— that I shall crumple up...

...The Letters of Lytton Stra-chey...

...Forster, whose novel The Longest Journey is "a good deal worse than the last, and certainly contains things infinitely more foul...

...The introduction, which lacks any serious discussion of Strachey as biographer and critic, is equally unsatisfying...

...One can hope...

...Merton Fellowship seemed to depend upon his taking orders that Cardinal Manning's heavenly ambitions began to assume a definite shape...

...Some of them, yes, but a true collection of Strachey's letters would require six volumes...

...But no one gets it worse than E.M...

...In letter after letter, we see him sharing his quirks and frailties with his correspondents, not so much in a tone of despair as of wry amusement...

...Flushed with the consciousness that a brave new world was replacing its Victorian predecessor, he writes to classmate Leonard Woolf in 1902: "We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization...

...Some of the letters here are calculated to shock, and shock they do...

...Agonies brought on by his love affairs also feature heavily in these letters...

...These clearly reveal that the two were carrying on a sado-masochistic relationship, with Strachey playing the role of masochist...

...He was all three, and more...