Word: strachey
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Sense of Balance. Eight years ago, with an imposing biography of Lytton Strachey, Holroyd (now 41) became one of our best guides to the cultural life of England in the early 20th century. No one of his generation has done more to clarify the achievements and emotional imbrications of the Bloomsbury group, or to deflate its more self-enchanted pieties. A great deal of the truth about a society lies in the lives of its minor artists. To write about them without falling into postures of condescension, gossip or overpraise is one of the toughest of all biographical feats...
...smart and a crook. "Gerald Ford is Middle America," Time magazine said firmly. As long as Ford continued to cook his own breakfast and refused to follow his predecessor in fattening himself at the public expense, commentaries indicated, all would be right with the republic. Like Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorian, they were obsessed with the ideal of saintliness and convinced of the supreme importance of not eating too much...
...there is the "picayune" biography, which leaves the reader with so many personal, intimate but unnecessary and non-integrated facts that he feels like taking a shower. Often, the picayune biography is an "authorized" work, written by a worshipping professor after the death of a great writer. Lytton Strachey anticipated Blotner's contribution to this genre more than fifty years ago when he remarked on "those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead...with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection...
...from the revelation, at well-spaced intervals, of its members' sexual habits. Bloomsbury, was, we know now, stranger than we could have imagined. Each month for the last year or so has brought a new book calculated to shock, titillate, and endear these brilliant perverts to out hearts. Lytton Strachey's fascination with the eroticism of the ear, John Maynard Keynes's penchant for the hand, and G. Lowes Dickinson's boot fetishism have all been the subject of recent studies. At the center of it all stands Virginia Woolf, whose sexuality threatens to become a serious literary question...
Aside from her role as Vita's lover, Virginia Woolf is an important figure in Portrait of a Marriage because she came very close to embarking on a marriage exactly like the Nicolsons'. She considered, and at one point accepted, an offer of marriage from Lytton Strachey, which would have produced precisely the same sexual orientation. In the end Lytton chickened out, but the episode proves that this kind of marriage is not as irrelevant an accident as it might seem, but an increasingly major alternative to the problems that all the sex researchers of the sixties have done little...