Word: holroyde
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LYTTON STRACHEY by Michael Holroyd. Two volumes, 1,229 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston...
...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...
...voiced, germ-ridden, manic-depressive esthete, caustic as lye except when caught in the eternally adolescent marshmallow bogs of homosexual passion. "Duncan Grant is the full moon of heaven," he wrote to Maynard Keynes, who was one of his earliest friends and confidants. In fact, Keynes was something more. Holroyd discloses that like Strachey, Keynes was a homosexual and a frequent rival for the affections of winsome young men; it was a proclivity that did not affect Keynes's later standing as one of the world's great economists...
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...
...Kirkland House Ford dinner series presents Michael Holroyd, biographer of Lytton Strachey, speaking on "The Perils of a Biographer" at 8 p.m. tonight in the Kirkland House Junior Common Room. Admission is free...