Word: stracheys
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...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...
...Strachey's strangest alliance was with a woman, of all people-a hoydenish little kook named Dora Carrington, described by a friend as "a tin of mixed biscuits." Carrington met him at a house party in 1915. He offended her one evening, and next morning she crept into his bedroom, intending to cut off his beard by way of revenge. Instead, she fell in love with him, and moved in to take care of him for the rest of his life. That was fine with Strachey, who later fell in love with a beau of Carrington's named...
Wherever possible, Holroyd allows Strachey to speak for himself, whether he was dropping Bloomsbury epigrams (on T. S. Eliot: "I fear it will take him a long time to become a letter writer"), or taking his place as the boldest public wit since Wilde. Strachey never hesitated to flaunt his homosexual inclina tions. His finest moment may have come during his court hearing as a conscientious objector in 1916, when he was asked what he would do if he saw a German soldier raping his sister. Strachey paused two beats, then remarked: "I would try to interpose my own body...
Holroyd notes in his preface that "it may seem ironic that the life and work of Lytton Strachey should finally be commemorated by two fat volumes-that standard treatment of the illustrious dead that he was so effective in stamping out." Ironic it is, but not half so much as it would have been if his biographer had followed Strachey's example and given short shrift to one of the best subjects of this century...