Confessions of a bohemian

The letters of Lytton Strachey vividly capture the gossipy, saucy lives of the Bloomsbury group, says David Jays
The Letters of Lytton Strachey
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Confessions of a bohemian


The Letters of Lytton Strachey
Edited by Paul Levy
Viking £30, pp698

'As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature,' mused Lytton Strachey in 1916. 'They give one the facts so amazingly, don't they?' Strachey's iconoclastic biographical writing pounced on intimate detail and modern biography has followed suit, often focusing on the Bloomsbury circle. Michael Holroyd's sprightly 1967 life of Strachey followed precisely this model, twitching at sauce and gossip, for which letters and diaries rather than published writings represent a treasure trove.

'The literature of the future,' he assures Virginia Woolf, 'will, I clearly see, be amazing. At last it'll tell the truth, and be indecent and amusing, and romantic.' Initially, Strachey imagines writing plays or panoramic social novels - 'My footmen are amazing, and so are my prostitutes' - but only gradually defines his supple notion of personal history.

He and his friends, the Woolfs and Bells, Keynes and Forster, believed they were inventing the modern world and, to a surprising degree, they did. Their idea of modernity - of free thought, free talk, technological advance and self-examination - is still very much our own.

In an early letter, Strachey asks: 'What will happen to us all when we have got rid of every vestige of early Victoria?' His work constituted something of a cultural decluttering. The Victorians, he says, 'seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites'. In retrospect, even the celebrated Eminent Victorians (1918), at first received as a bonfire of the pieties, is more complicatedly loving than that. His brother, James, studied with Freud and Lytton wishes Victoria herself could have visited the good doctor's couch: 'It's quite clear, of course, that she was a martyr to anal-eroticism: but what else?'

'Brilliant letters we wrote each other once,' said Virginia Woolf. 'We were getting to know each other then and there was a thrill about it.' In their correspondence, Strachey writes to the moment, accessing an often elusive confessional intimacy. His Virginia is no neurasthenic victim but surprisingly grounded, and he marvels at her writing - 'How on earth does she manage to make the English language float and float?'

He makes a brilliantly misguided early marriage proposal to her, instantly regretted and instantly rejected, and urges Leonard Woolf to marry her instead: 'As I did it, I saw that it would be death if she accepted me. I think there's no doubt whatever that you ought to marry her. You would be great enough and you'd have too the immense advantage of physical desire. I was in terror lest she should kiss me.'

Sex is one of this selection's revelations. It reveals that Lytton enjoyed slap as well as tickle, at least with his last lover, Roger Senhouse. Levy gets into quite a tizz about Strachey's tingling cheeks and a description of an erotic crucifixion is admittedly startling - 'The cut has quite healed up and only hurts when touched.' After years of sighs and botched raptures, this cheerful physicality is actually rather touching; Strachey calls Senhouse 'the best of monkeys' or 'you blue-nosed baboon', and signs himself 'your faithful Zebra.' (Less welcome creatures were the crabs Senhouse gave him.)

Hearts are bruised as they struggle to find new affective forms. Strachey has passionate sex with Duncan Grant while they shelter from the rain on Hampstead Heath, but loses him to Keynes ('He has come to me reeking with that semen'). His most passionate companionship was with artist Dora Carrington, making a complicated triangle with the buccaneering heterosexual Ralph Partridge - 'Ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too. Where will it all end?'

These liaisons that make up their own rules as they go along may seem enjoyably wry, but Carrington's occasional distress forces him to confess how much she means to him; she committed suicide only weeks after his death in 1932. Strachey, who witters on about his health, laments in his last letter (to Senhouse) that it's 'particularly annoying because there doesn't seem to be anything serious the matter'. Actually, it was stomach cancer.

Outspoken indecency is a cardinal Bloomsbury virtue; they hold play-readings of lickerous Restoration comedy ('Vanessa said that we'd better begin with the most indecent thing we could, so as to get it settled'). It becomes something more when Strachey refuses conscription during the First World War. A hostile tribunal asks what he would do if a German soldier were raping his sister. 'I should attempt to come [pause] between them,' he answers gravely. Here, roguishness seems like warm humanity and smut like resistance.

Strachey was a striking figure, inviting caricature: one friend called him 'old man Strachey with the billowy beard and alternating basso-falsetto voice'. He was also a rapturous bibliophile, so might have resented Viking's cheapskate production: no photographs and the skimpiest paper. Levy's selection is fascinating, but fitfully well-presented. Screeds of notes buzz around minor details but skirt over major events; I had to keep Holroyd's biography to hand.

In the letters themselves, Strachey's snobbery is frequently daunting. You admire the unloosening of sexuality and companionship that his Cambridge days allowed, but it's a long, dull trudge through fluttery innuendo and minute discrimination in the academic ganglands: 'The place was thick with stupendous crises.'

Even in 1930, he greets news of a philosopher's death with 'the loss to Cambridge is incalculable'. There's also dismayingly jocular anti-semitism - 'These jewboys!' he scoffs and assures Leonard Woolf about the 'placid, easy-going vulgarity of your race'.

Strachey is saved time and again by his keen sense of absurdity. He cruises a handsome tart in the National Gallery, before realising it's the Prince of Wales. He spots a working-class lad on the tube, wearing 'a heavenly shirt, which transported me. It was dark blue with a yellow edge at the top, and it was done up with laces which tied at the neck'. This garment is the man's football shirt, from the Express Dairy team.

Cajoling jollity only reluctantly tweaks into gravity. An argument about conscription becomes so vexed that Lytton says: 'I thought it better to glissade away from that.' From his unwilling romantic avowals to the muted agonies of Virginia's suicide attempts, there's a lot of glissade in this collection.

'I feel desperately homesick,' Lytton complains in 1905, 'but for what home?' The Bloomsbury project, was in part, about creating a community. In this confiding correspondence, the evenings and long weekends together helped to knit bonds tight, wrapping the participants in a communality beyond parental control and social policing. Perhaps the most endearing pleasure of the letters is to feel the fuzz of life. Carrington busies herself with the potatoes or makes puppets for home theatricals, while Lytton scribbles away in bed or in the garden.