Word: stracheys
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...point Biographer Lytton Strachey wrote to Economist Maynard Keynes of his "adoration" for Painter Duncan Grant, little knowing that Keynes would soon make Grant his lover. Grant later lived with Painter Vanessa Bell; when she bore their child, the happy event was cheered not only by Keynes but by Vanessa's absentee husband, Art Critic Clive Bell, and her former lover, Critic-Painter Roger...
...Robert Blake on Benjamin Disraeli. In literature there are treasures from both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Ellmann's Joyce, George Painter's Proust and Leon Edel's James are the chief prizes, but there are many other jewels, including Michael Holroyd on Lytton Strachey, Francis Steegmuller on Cocteau and Quentin Bell on Virginia Woolf. Moreover, the past year has brought a host of distinguished and bestselling additions to the collection: William Manchester island-hopping with Douglas MacArthur, Edmund Morris galloping up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt and Barbara Tuchman wading through the wars and devastations...
...Lytton Strachey had both, and his Eminent Victorians, which made fun of those letter-writing idols, delighted post-World War I readers, who wanted to hear the dirt about the people who had brought on the disaster. Strachey was imitated throughout the '20s and '30s and, wrote Bernard De Voto, "biography seemed to be no more than a high-spirited game of yanking out shirttails and setting fire to them." That game is over. In the past generation the best biographers have righted the balance, creating what approaches a fresh and vigorous art form...
Biography has always been a demanding discipline. "It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one," said Strachey. A good biographer should combine the skills of the novelist and the detective, and add to them the patience and compassion of the priest. Few people want their shortcomings exposed (biography has added a new terror to death, complained one 18th century writer), and they, or their heirs, often go to considerable trouble to hide them. Somerset Maugham asked his friends to destroy his letters; both Willa Gather and Ernest Hemingway inveighed against posthumous publication of theirs...
...that universal idiom known as translatese. Hence its lack of poetic rhythm, its inability to leave the ground. And when our poets do know how to write verse, they often pitch their tone very low as if to assure us that their lines will require no emotional response." Lytton Strachey, recalls the aphorist, once told him that Horace could not be a good poet because everything he wrote was a platitude. "This is the Romantic view of poetry, for in fact it requires a very great poet to make platitudes come alive, since they are sentiments we once felt...