Word: strachey
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...eccentric," he recalls, "because I was not homosexual." In the years since, he has been astonished that the widespread practice has hardly ever been mentioned in print. Nor did he himself have anything to say on the subject until the publication of a new biography of Cambridge Biographer Lytton Strachey gave him an opportunity. In a review of the book in the current Encounter, he gives high-level English homosexuality between the wars its first startling airing...
Other accounts have been written of Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians, but all of them, says Rees, have omitted his sexual preference- an ardent, lifelong homosexuality. The 1,229-page, two-volume biography by Michael Holroyd is long enough-and honest enough-to include much of Strachey's hitherto unpublished correspondence with John Maynard Keynes, a contemporary of his at Cambridge. The letters consist mostly of outpourings of enthusiasm for comely young men, for whose favors Strachey and Keynes strenuously competed. "It was a kind of intricate ballet of the affections," writes Rees, "in which Keynes, ruthless, serpentine...
Underground Doctrine. Strachey and Keynes were leaders of the Cambridge contingent of that select literary circle, the Bloomsbury group. Its members' intellectual attainments were beyond dispute, but a central preoccupation, suggests Rees, was homosexuality. Nor was it confined to this group. At both Oxford and Cambridge in the period between the World Wars, writes Rees, "homosexuality, among undergraduates and dons with pretensions to culture and a taste for the arts, was at once a fashion, a doctrine and a way of life." It also reached well beyond the university. Since Oxford and Cambridge produced the governing classes of Britain...
Treatments & Trips. This year's most noticeable category in nonfiction is the literary biography, notably Andrew Turnbull's Thomas Wolfe and Carlos Baker's Ernest Hemingway (Papa is also the subject of Irwin Blacker's novel, Standing on a Drum). Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, Lytton Strachey, Richard Wright, Nikos Kazantzakis, Nathanael West, André Gide and Samuel Taylor Coleridge also get full-length treatment; and there will be an autobiography from André Malraux, a second volume of Bertrand Russell memories, and a third of Harold Nicolson diaries...
Russell had come to the university in the hope of meeting the most brilliant of his contemporaries. It was some time before he found out that he already had done so: they were his immediate circle of friends, including the three Trevel-yans, poet, historian and scholar; Lytton Strachey, J. M. Keynes, and the philosopher G. M. Moore...