Word: strachey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year was 1904, and scattered about Europe half a dozen men, unacquainted with one another, were lighting the fuse of the post-Victorian revolution-Einstein, Freud, Lenin, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky. But they didn't matter at all. For in Cambridge, England, 24-year-old Lytton Strachey was loudly proclaiming that he and his fellow members of the Apostles, a small society of intellectuals, were about to inherit the earth. They never quite made it, but in their later guise as the Bloomsbury Group-Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell among others-they did become...
...Lytton Strachey, English Biographer Michael Holroyd argues that the author of Eminent Victorians belongs in the forefront of the Bloomsberries, and then substantiates the claim through 1,229 improbably fascinating pages. Strachey's is one of the legitimately original voices of the era, and it has suffered from a conspiracy of ear plugging. Though his work has always been read, especially in the U.S., his reputation after his death in 1932 was increasingly demeaned by historians, who dismissed his readability as shallowness, his hyperbole as untruthfulness, and his point of view as malicious bias. In Eminent Victorians, Strachey provided...
Marshmallow Bogs. Eminent Victorians was a light at the end of a tunnel for its author too. The eleventh of 13 children of a Victorian soldier-scientist, Lytton Strachey grew up as the most squirrelly member of a pandemoniously eccentric household. The grotesque English public school system did little for him except inspire the literary decapitation, in Eminent Victorians, of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the spartan Christian of Rugby. By the time Lytton reached Cambridge in 1899, he was a distinct oddity-a gangly, shrill-voiced, germ-ridden, manic-depressive esthete, caustic as lye except when caught in the eternally adolescent...
...Despite Strachey's reputation as perhaps the most brilliant of the Apostles, he was denied a fellowship by Cambridge, took only second-class honors, and left the university in 1905 to begin 13 years of scratch-penny frustration as a book reviewer and minor literary essayist. Then in 1918, after two years of fierce work in defiance of his chron ically miserable health, he brought out the four devastating historical essays-on Dr. Arnold, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale and Chinese Gordon-that shredded all lingering pretensions of Victorian moral eminence. "The his torian of Literature," Strachey had once written...
Lugubrious Comedy. Holroyd is thorough and judiciously appreciative in his treatment of Strachey's work, but he reserves his full concentration for the egomaniacal oddball himself. The biographer was given access, by Strachey's brother James, to 30,000 letters that flowed between Lytton, his family and his Bloomsbury intimates. In his letters, he disgorged himself of the full, untidy range of his lusts, ambitions, despair, sickness, vanity and, best of all, his maliciously acute observations of the people and places he knew. The letters alone make an overwhelming self-portrait, and to them Holroyd adds a detailed...