Customer Reviews

Lytton Strachey

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It is indeed a courageous undertaking to write the biography of the man who reinvented the genre. But, going by all the praise lavished on his life of Lytton Strachey, Holroyd has succeeded. And surely he cannot be faulted for his style of writing, which is lively, expressive, subtly humorous, and makes inventive use of metaphor. And yet, and yet... I became interested in Strachey not so much through reading his "Queen Victoria" which, frankly, I found rather boring and surprisingly humourless; but after seeing the movie "Carrington", based on Holroyds biography; - and much as I hate to say this, I liked the movie better.
The main problem simply is that Strachey's life was too uneventful to command attention for nearly 700 pages. What you end up with is this image of an old-maidish, pampered, and astonishingly self-centred man forever reading books in the aloofness of his country cottage while unaccountably being the object of universal adoration. The final and supposedly climactic love-affair with Roger Senhouse might have provided some eleventh-hour excitement, but honestly doesn't amount to more than the cliché of the unattractive (but intelligent, rich and famous) middle aged man infatuated with the vapid, reluctant and opportunistic (but very pretty) much younger man.
Surely Holroyd is a bit to blame as well for not gaining full hold of our (well, at least my) attention. Here we have The Apostles and the "Bloomsberries" in their heyday, with Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the likes casually thrown in as well. An incredible collection of brilliant and colourful people; and yet all they seem to occupy themselves with is bourgeois bickerings, common gossip, parties, parties, parties, and amorous obsessions of a peculiarly puerile nature. Where is all the wit and dazzling conversation that is frequently reported by Holroyd, but rarely demonstrated? We're told about a lot of people and things, but they remain abstractions. Even a character as bizarre as Ottoline Morrell remains a mere cipher. The frequent trips to France and Spain read like depersonalised itenaries from a travel agent's brochure, and we are kept in the dark about their meaning in Lytton's life.
Unfortunately Holroyd reverts to an overdose of Freudian psycho-analytical blabla to lend depth to his characters. This largely obsolete approach to psychology remains a staple of biographers, probably because it offers such metaphorically appealing instant explanations of all relational problems and personal obsessions. Seeing rather too much of Mama lately? - hello Oedipus! Such off-the-peg explanations add very little to our understanding of the person. Actually I didn't find this book all too insightful psychologically speaking. E.g., the bouts of anxiety and depression that troubled Carrington in her final years pop up out of nowhere as a rather too hasty prelude to her suicide. Her complicated relationship with Strachey is underplayed, so that at times she emerges more like a luxury housekeeper with a talent for painting than as Strachey's ticket to survival. For clearly it was she alone who saved him from utter and desparate loneliness (as well as he her). Gretchen Gerzina's biography of Carrington, in all its compactness, is much closer to the essence and tragedy of both Carrington's and Lytton's personalities, and the peculiar chemistry between them, it seems to me.
Another strange thing is that we get to know just about nothing about Strachey's sexual pursuits. Now call me unhealthily curious if you like, but Lytton himself was known to speak disparagingly of Virginia Woolf's books because of their 'lack of copulation'. So where is his own? How can you write 700 pages about one of the most notable and visible homosexuals in England at the time, and yet in the end leave the reader uncertain whether the man ever had any sexual contacts with anyone at all???
And the other, more troubling question that remains in the end is: why would this man deserve so much attention? His lasting output amounts to no more than three books. And Strachey may have thought Forster (another spectre relegated to the sidelines by Holroyd) a dreary 'old maid' (projection, the dedicated Freudian might wonder?), but himself certainly never mustered the courage or conviction to write something like "Maurice", let alone anything else approaching Forster's novelistic output! And output aside, Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster has shown in her collectors-item biography of Brian Howard, who was in many ways Strachey's extroverted counterpart, that you can even write a fascinating book about somebody who produced literally nothing at all of worth during his lifetime (could somebody please reprint this book!). Starting on Holroyds book I expected a classic like Furbank's Forster or Ellman's Wilde. Alas, it wasn't so; which is partly due to the fact that Strachey was simply a more superficial and less tragic or extravagant figure than either of these; and partly to the fact that Holroyd fails to make the most of the brilliant company he associated with.

Michael Holroyd's landmark biography of Lytton Strachey - a once-bright luminary of the Bloomsbury Group (including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and others) - keeps the spirit and achievement of this great writer alive for future generations. Strachey is probably known now, if at all, for the eccentric figure portrayed in the film "Carrington" but his contributions to the art of biography go far beyond what the film conveyed. Holroyd does an excellent job of capturing the milieu of Strachey's times, in particular London and the surrounding countryside (where Strachey lived in a succession of cottages) in the early part of the 20th century. Not only is Strachey's admittedly idiosyncratic personality expertly portrayed, we also get a strong sense of other equally unique individuals who played such an important part in his life (Ottoline Morrell, for one). Holroyd also writes in a flowing, sometimes complicated manner, but this is a welcome change from dryer, academic recitations of dates and places. In fact, the narrative often reads like a long novel with a relaxed pace. It's also extremely forthright about Strachey's sexual inclinations - in fact, at its original publication in the mid-60s, it was among the first to be so forthcoming. In all, Holroyd is to be saluted for making Lytton Strachey's achievements better known (especially his book, "Eminent Victorians," which freed the biographical form from more conventional restrictions from the l9th century.)

Lytton Strachey was one of the key figures in the Bloomsbury group, and one of Virginia Wolf's best friends. He is best known today for his portraits of four famous Victorians in "Emminent Victorians." At the time, the book was something of piece of generational warfare; the figures that Strachey dismantles were models of piety and determination held up to Strachey's generation when they were young as the sort of people to emulate. Strachey, who was one of the wittiest men of his time, shows that actually they were something of narrowminded fanatics.

Holroyd's biography is a superb portrait of Strachey and the circle he moved in. Well-documented, it brings to life many people never well-known in America. Strachey's personal life was extremely complicated; a woman named Carrington (she refused to use her first name which was Dora) fell desparately in love with him. This was unfortunate for her because Strachey was a confirmed homosexual. When examined for possible conscription during the First World War, he was asked what he would due if he saw a German trying to rape his sister; his response was "I should try to come between them." This made no difference to Carrington, whose love for him was so great that she committed suicide after his death. Carrington, and other figures who became involved in Strachey's complicated life make this almost a group biography. In fact, the biography was rereleased in connection with the movie "Carrington" (starred Emma Thompson in the title role and Jonathan Pryce as Strachey) and on the cover Carrington's name is in type as big as that used for Lytton Strachey. Holroyd's writing style is fluid, and his eye for a tellng anecdote make the biography eminently readable. One does not have to be obsessed with Bloomsbury to enjoy this book.

A very clear and readable, interesting and detailed account of Strachey and the many people in his life, this biography suffers from a major flaw: the author's evaluations of character and personality are consistently weighted toward negative - one is tempted to say dyspeptic - tones. Virginia Woolf, for example, is charming and playful, yet mentally unstable and neurotic. But the latter traits gets by far the most attention, while the author gives us little sense of why people loved her so. Most significantly, the same conclusion can be drawn about his portrayal of Strachey. Why are his biographies among the funniest and most memorable ever written, the very reason driving the reader to read this biography? This reader is left wondering about both halves of that sentence. Can positive evaluations be found? Of course, but overwhelmed by heavy clouds of material which makes Bloomsbury sound like a melancholic society of largely dysfunctional people, not remarkable writers, artists, and cultural leaders of their time, and for our own. His condescending comments on Vanessa Bell's character and art are scandalously negative. She comes across in this biography as neurotic and incompetent. I left very glad I had made the effort to read this biography, but very unsatisfied with the fairness and accuracy of the author's evaluations of Strachey and the people in his life. His comments about Virginia Woolf's jealousy toward James Joyce are simply sexist. Frank O'Connor called Joyce's later writings "Ph.D. literature," but no one ever called this male author "jealous." Women aren't competitive, rather they're jealous? Even when Holroyd wrote this in the late 60's, this is ridiculous.The material is fascinating; the author's judgments and tone are too often mistaken or at best misleading.

Reading this biography, I can understand why this is a classic in its field. It reads like water. It's effortless. It's a look into, of course, the life and times of another person, but also a look at another time and world. For not being a "thriller", I think it's a real page turner. I have read some of Strachey's books which are beautifully crafted and very evocative and this biography is a real tribute to that writer. The preface is also quite interesting as the author tells us about the history of his writing the book. While it is a long book it doesn't feel long in the reading. For anyone interested in the Bloomsbury group this is a not to be missed read. Just terrific.

It's difficult to imagine that anyone reads Lytton Strachey outside academic circles these days or why a second revised edition of this overlong biography has appeared over 40 years after it was first published.

Perhaps it is because the Bloomsbury Group, of which Strachey was a member along with E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and J. M. Keynes, is still a profitable market for publishers.

Much of this interest has been stoked by films, e.g. Forster novels like "A Room with a View" and "Howards End", Woolf's "Orlando" and "The Hours" about her life, and Christopher Hampton's "Carrington" about the painter Dora Carrington with whom Strachey had a relationship.

Many of the people Strachey knew are also still influential, e.g. Keynes is a towering figures in modern economics and Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore have maintained their reputations in philosophy.

I remember when the Bloomsbury group became fashionable in the early 70s and a torrent of biographies, memoirs and studies of its members flooded the market.

Michael Holroyd made a contribution to this move with this life of Strachey although I believe Quentin Bell's biography of Virginia Woolf published in 1972 was more influential.

Holroyd says he cut this "new" version by almost 250,000 words but he should have cut another 100,000 as it is still far too long, meandering and, at times, irrelevant and pedantic.

He also asks at one point "whether Strachey is worth all this extra labour, and whether a new generation will be interested in his life and work."

I feel the answer is "no". Strachey may have been a radical by the standards of his time by his rejection of Christianity, refusal to serve in the First World War and homosexuality but none of this is of much interest nowadays.

Despite this, the book is an interesting read for those who like literary biography but I would advise the reader to dip rather than dive into it.

I came across Lytton first through finding the Carrington movie. I was just knocked over by the film, so I made my way to Gretchen Gerzina's biography of Carrington, which I just loved. But, what still remained for me was the mystery of who this Lytton fellow was that she was instantly obsessed about. One day while trolling through a bookstore I came across Holroyd's bio on L. marked down, so I bought it.

Along the way through this massive book (which is the edition published in 1995 and which the film Carrington was the child of)....I found my attraction to, repulsion of and then compassion for Lytton traveling in a distinct course of thirds. By the end of the first third I found Lytton to be endlessly fascinating; second third I was turned right off by his manners and opinions; last third I could start to perceive just how lonely and void of (relationiship) fulfillment his life turned out to be.

Holroyd's "Lytton" is really several distinct books. First we have L. as the product of a huge Edwardian family of middle to high upper class distinctions. Then there is L. when found by Carrington, followed by L. as he falls in and out of love with a long list of men who would not duplicate the love and devotion given to him wholeheartedly by Carrington. And there lies an irony whose sadness tinges that part of the book from C. onwards.

Lytton, for all his adventurous bohemianism, with earrings, long hair, periods of flamboyant clothing, often imitating another man who inflamed his passions....never quite left behind his pedigree of Edwardian standards. How so? While not Dr. Samuel Johnson's equal for showing overt and complete respect for women in general and female authors in particular, Lytton was not known to hold his tongue when it came to uttering lacerating critiques of authors or personalities he met; subconsciously, I think he knew that when he wrote someone a letter and in it he let loose with his firebrand criticisms of another writer...that eventually it would be shared and other loose tongues would flutter and before you knew it, the whole circle of his world would be talking in quite a froth about what Lytton had said. In short, I think it was an unconscious ruse to gain attention and notoriety. Then again are his (uncomfortable to read in 2010) comments about blacks, browns of India and of Jews. These are embarrassing to read but were close to the bone of white English Edwardian imperial sensibilities, none of which he strayed too far from. I found his inability to speak about ANYONE without expressing the severest, flippant and often heartless castigation, judgments, and ENDLESS gossip do not endear him to me at this point. I found his attitudes towards most people to be childish, remote, prejudicial, unnecessarily provocative, often insincere (he would say one thing about a person to their face and then a diametrically opposite in a letter to another friend). I am focusing right now on the less attractive parts of his personality; in his defense, he could be very generous with his newly found wealth with his close friends. He tried his best to bring peace to the seemingly endless feuds, quarrels and tensions between those who circled closest to the Strachey/Carrington bee hive. He often brought a measured degree of charm with his humor to the frazzled nerves of some friend or another. Unfortunately, he could just as well become frozen and non-communicative in the famous Strachey periods of silence where he would utter almost nothing but one or two words over many hours of talking amongst friends or other people. This habit often unnerved them and only added to the unsavoury qualities people assigned to him, fairly or not. He was odd and quirky that way, full of mood swings that would make the best of us confused and full of vertigo. Like so many of his era (and not unlike Sam Johnson) he suffered from depression and used the distraction of travel, partying and conversation to keep himself steady.

Holroyd, for me, doesn't really tell me if he personally liked Lytton's writing. I happen to have liked "Eminent Victorians" and "Queen Victoria" quite a bit. Lytton wrote a very great deal in his 52 years, and it is perhaps our loss that his minor writing is not much in vogue these days. I think that he deserves more exploration past the two better known biographies.

Another thing that one has to consider is whether Holroyd had gone over the line, so to speak, in his scrupulous and superbly researched depiction of Lytton and his friends lives? What of course I refer to was the sexual honesty that this book became infamous for when first issued. Many an Englishman must have been purple and red with apoplexy when finding that so many famous men and woman had been "outed" by this book in the 1960's. And here too lies an incredible paradox about the English and their attitudes (in the 60's at least) towards sexuality. Consider how incredibly odd it was that Holroyd's book comes out in the midst of the swinging 60's of London, with the Beatles, long hair, drug use, all night parties, anything goes, unisex hair and clothing styles....it's all so liberated except that the older generation that was not participating in any of this orgy of exploration, which held dear to its secrets, none of which was more precious than the sexual orientation of those who lived in the first 30 or 40 years of the century. This, one found, could not be talked about directly but clearly only in private chambers of men only clubs where, with brandy in hand, one could speak in hushed tones about who had done what with whom. Holroyd's bio on Lytton sent a gigantic bomb into that club and blew everyone to smithereens. No wonder they all went gasping into the streets, screaming bloody murder and from then onwards, for years, Holroyd was subject to enormous venom and vituperative curses, even from Lytton's own brother.....Holroyd's book had not only crossed the lines, it did EXACTLY what Lytton himself would have desired with all the hairs of his long beard: to explode once and for all the many useless myths we hold about our own sexuality. In this way Holroyd's book is completely honest to Lytton's ethos and in that way Lytton would have been pleased. Seen these many decades later, all the fuss and bother about how it was so vile of the author to shine a light, to invade the sexual privacy of so many people....seems ludicrous now. We live in world now that Lytton would have loved to be in, where his own sexuality would not have to be so sublimated that he had to hide in plain site.

This brings another subject in the book to light. It was only a short 30 or so years after the sensational trials of Oscar Wilde, who gambled big and lost even more with his attempt to defend his honor in a court of law, knowing full well that homosexuality carried with it the full and powerful disapproval of the English legal system. His loss eventually destroyed him; however, it also gave a booming message to all other homosexuals in England: hide it or loose all. Into this realm Lytton found himself flung. In his forays through this legal land mine he flitted with disaster, lest any of his many affairs be found out. Was this merely the same sort of reckless self-destructive behavior of Wilde? Hard to say really.

Contrary to other criticism of this book, I found that Holroyd's psychological assessment of both Lytton and Carrington not developed enough, lacking some insights. And there is so much to look at. Surely it is a mystery as to what draws two humans into a loving relationship, even one as bizarre and mis-shaped as these two were. However, we know much about their childhoods to make some comments. Consider Lytton, coming almost at the end of a huge Edwardian family. He is very attached to his very busy mother and his father appears only at the vague extremes of a remote and emotionally frozen distance. Hemingway would have said that he missed a strong male role model that would have wrestled and tussled with him, Lytton having [then] been able to sense his dad's smells, physical realities up close. And in that way I think Hemingway would have been spot on. Lytton was dressed up like a girl through his earliest childhood and was quite surrounded by girls and women. As an adolescent his own physical frailties would have come forward. Where was his father to assure him that his physical form was all right? No where. Lytton had a life long feeling (strangely mirrored by Carrington and also Maynard Keynes!!!) of his own physical debilities and overall ugliness. None of which, to my eyes, was realistic. I think that he was unable to feel all ok with himself because he got so little positive reinforcement for what he was. Instead he got the silence of his huge family that mirrored itself in his own habits of turning icily silent to those around him for disturbingly long periods of time. In short, I feel that Lytton was an empty person who spent a lifetime looking to distract himself from that condition by seeking physical pleasure. He knew that few men would have been as well read and as articulate as he was, so what remained was the physical. In this he was endlessly chasing a phantom relationship to make up for his essentially lonely and empty psyche. Enter Dora Carrington.

Consider who she was. She absolutely loathed and hated her mother; never a good thing in Freudian thinking or for that matter in any psychological sense. She bounced around, a virgin, affecting a boyish haircut and overtly physical and manly gestures. She also loathed her own femininity in equal measure (how could she be ok with her feminine side if she hated her mother?). She loved, adored and idolized her father. Enter her meeting with Lytton Strachey. We will never quite understand what switch turned on when she thought of cutting off his beard, looking down on his calm face as he awoke....finding herself instantly smitten by that face, instantly and forever falling in love with him. We do know that from that time on she felt that her entire purpose in life was to care for and tend to any of Lytton's needs, no matter how much it meant sublimating and suppressing her own. Father substitute anyone? One can have a Freudian field day with these two.

Returning my thoughts to the last third of Holroyd's book, I found myself finally feeling compassion for Lytton. As someone coming to grips with the onset of middle age, being confounded by a lifetime of ill health, finding financial freedom and quite frankly, great self-earned wealth, he nonetheless also found that all of the physical world could not make up for the emptiness in his heart.

One aspect of Holroyd's book I found lacking was the recorded reaction of the Bloomsbury's when they finally became aware of the horrific true nature of World War one. We really have no indication in this book of what they felt, what they reflected on once they knew. Consider the incredibly gaudy goings on (party hearty) amongst these pacifist groups of intellectuals as an entire generation of young Englishmen were being slaughtered across the channel, so close in fact that they could hear distant echoes of cannons being fired in France and Holland if they were close to the coastline. This omission was a surprise for me.

Lytton's life was inevitably enmeshed with Carrington's, and one senses that he was glad that it was so arranged. Considering that total devotion that he could consciously count on in Carrington, he could afford to flit about as he felt. And this too is another stream that Holroyd does not adequately consider. Lytton was one of the most rootless individuals of record I have come across. Seemingly incapable of sitting still for long periods of time before the restless dark clouds would motivate him to see people, exchange gossip, eat, drink, flirt, observe and then move on. Where, one asks, is the center of Lytton's life other than in the heart of Dora Carrington? In Carrington we also find the spokes of many triad relationships that spun out of the home that she and Lytton occupied. Both Holroyd and Gerzina fully explore the many relationships that Carrington had. I was surprised to learn of her partially explored lesbian interests. What L. and C. had so much in common was a complete inability to create a lasting and stable long term life relationship with a significant other. Except, strange as it appears now, to each other. Carrington had an apparent inability to give herself to another man (other than Lytton), was unable to keep herself from lying to others, except to Lytton, was unable to find fulfillment in her self, her art or her relationships, except in those ways that her days were taken up with Lytton. Her obsession helped keep Lytton from being too much alone with himself. We wonder then, was this a symbiotic and perhaps dual obsessive relationship that maintained its own equanimity only by the proximity of a shared living space?

In summation, I consider this book to be well worth reading if for no other reason that it honors Lytton's own ethos. It really does shine a bright light on a large group of writers, artists, economists, scholars, intellectuals and politicians....in the end we really do have a strong taste of what the remnant generation of eminent Victorians were like in the first third of the 20'th century. Some of them were quite fascinating, none more tragically eclipsed by their own lifestyles than Lytton Strachey and his erstwhile wife and heartbroken caregiver, Dora Carrington. What a story.

Holroyd revised his biographies of Lytton Strachey, (1967, 1968). More information became available, comments were received on the original volumes, and so everything in the originals is here, re-arranged, along with some new material. It is interesting to note how much the times have changed.

The initial volumes were met with amazement that the sexual preferences of the subject and his friends were covered in the rendition of the life. In this era nothing dealt with in the book is surprising. The additional issue is that the author's original volumes on Strachey were among the first accounts of the Bloomsbury group, a group subsequently treated extensively in numerous works such as published diaries, letters, memoirs, and biogrphies.

Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey's companion, was a member of the younger generation. Initially she was attached to Lytton and to Mark Gertler, (she broke off with Gertler). David Garnett was a disciple of Lytton Strachey. When a house was rented, Mill House, Tidmarsh, Carrington undertook the gardening, much of the cooking and much of the housework. Less time was devoted by her to painting.

EMINENT VICTORIANS was brought out in 1918. The reviews were laudatory. It was called a revolutionary textbook. After the war Ralph Partridge fell in love with Carrington. In 1920 Lytton completed QUEEN VICTORIA. Max Beerbohm became a new older acquaintance. Lytton planned to stay with the Berensons in Florence after his book was published. Ralph Partidge got a job working for Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. In Lytton's absence, Carrington told Ralph she would marry him, (she feared getting on Lytton's nerves). Lytton found it difficult to express his feelings, but he provided reassurance to Carrington that marrying Ralph was the best plan. On their honeymoon, Carrington and Ralph spent a week with Lytton in Venice.

Lytton brought to his biographies psycho-sexual insights. BOOKS & CHARACTERS, a collection of essays, was issued by Lytton in 1920. Later LANDMARKS IN FRENCH LITERATURE was brought out again. Ralph, Carrington, and Lytton moved from Mill House, Tidmarsh, to Ham Spray House in 1924. The house was registered in Ralph's name. Lytton gave Ralph a car and Carrington a horse. ELIZABETH AND ESSEX was completed in 1928. Lytton brought out PORTRAITS IN MINIATURE in 1931.

The biography shows a writer, (a biographer), his friends, his family, in full. He struggled against the impression he made for reason of physical gawkiness and a high-pitched voice. He regretted his failures such as not entering Oxford, not receiving a fellowship, not winning prizes, and he moved on. He was productive, serious, an intellectual. Holroyd's achievement fills in the reader's knowledge of the Bloomsbury group and presents an amazing sort of figure in all of his unique attributes.

I remember when I first saw this immense book that Lytton Strachey must be a person of some importance. As I had at that point never heard of Lytton I was surprised that a person of such importance had escaped my notice. It was then that I discovered one of the important things in understanding books. The size is often related to the amount of material available rather than the importance of the person.

Lytton Strachey was an English writer in the interwar period. He wrote a number of histories including a biography of Queen Victoria and another work called Eminent Victorians. At the time it was published Eminent Victorians was seen as a savage attack on the reputation of a number of English heroes. Nowadays it seen as an affectionate but realistic portrait of a number of figures who were previously given mythical status.

The biography of Strachey is really a biography of the Bloomsbury Group. Keynes, Virginia Wolf and the others who lived or met around the London Suburb of Bloomsbury. It tells of their affairs, the ups and downs of their lives and how they interconnected.

The portrait of Strachey is a gentle and affectionate one. Strachey was a person who was gay. He married Carrington a woman who became a minor artist. Their relationship has been turned into a recent film.

The book is quite long but it is the portrait of an England that is long since gone. A description of a number of people who were once at the centre of their nations cultural life. It is a book that is gently endearing.