Viking £30 pp698

“What a parcel of dynamite!”, Lytton Strachey wrote in 1906 as a collection of his letters was returned to him by their recipient, his Cambridge contemporary, Leonard Woolf. Strachey set great store by letters. He sometimes thought them “the only really satisfactory form of literature”, and was irritated on one occasion when an epistolary indiscretion (his description of a Trinity bedroom scene in which Arthur Hobhouse asked Maynard Keynes, “How would you like me? Au naturel?”) led Woolf to destroy his letter. “Was it so dangerous as all that?” was Strachey’s outraged response.

Strachey rarely censored his writing, though he did once claim that a letter might have been “so much more indecent”, but “the envelopes are so damned transparent”. One of the pleasures of this collection is to watch the master iconoclast turning his iconoclastic wit upon the circles in which he moved. Rupert Brooke “is a pseudo-beauty with yellow hair and a good complexion”, but also dim (“almost a second Corporal I often think”). E M Forster, flushed with the success of his first novel, is discovered “burrowing” in a corner of the London Library. “His book has gone into a second edition, and he sits in Weybridge writing another, and will go on doing so all his life.” Poor Ottoline Morrell gets the worst of it. Glimpsed hobbling through buttercups at Garsington in cheap shoes, she develops “the shrill wail of an aged dowager”, and then, in a devastating portrait of senescence, is described sitting in the lamplight after dinner, “her cheek-pouches drooping with peppermints, a cigarette between her false teeth, and vast spectacles on her painted nose”.

The book’s title is a misnomer, for, as Paul Levy admits in his introduction, a full collection of Strachey’s correspondence would run to nearly six volumes. Michael Holroyd and others have already extensively mined Strachey’s letters, but this volume assembles many of the brightest, most significant examples from British and American libraries. Inevitably, there are areas that might have been strengthened. The omission of letters documenting the tortuous planning and writing of Eminent Victorians (1918) is slightly regrettable, although Levy prints one from 1912 to Virginia Woolf that suggests how long the idea had been simmering in his mind before he put pen to paper: “Is it prejudice . . . that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites.”

Strachey describes himself as “like a doll that squeaks when you pinch it” (a reference to his piping treble), and while the malicious squeak in these letters entertains, there are also sadder, mournful notes of unrequited love. “One’s affections are so utterly blasting, so cruel and remorseless, that one sometimes almost wishes to be one of those stony women one sees in omnibuses”, he writes after falling in love again. Unrequited love as well as consummated love affairs trail through the pages. “Sinking into the mud” of his passion for Duncan Grant, he wonders if it is more pleasant to feel his buttocks or look into his eyes; “plunged into a throbbing world of romance” with George Mallory (strictly one-sided), he’s “lost in a trance of adoration, innocence and bliss”. Later, caught in the turmoil of his relationship with Carrington and her husband, Ralph Partridge, he writes movingly to assure her that his love for her has increased despite her marriage.

Levy is an assiduous editor, and the standard of his annotations is often high (particularly in the controversy surrounding Strachey’s declaration as a conscientious objector during the first world war). However, the long introductions that preface many of the letters don’t always present them to best effect, and sometimes lead to situations going unidentified (we need to be informed, for instance, that Strachey’s meeting with Thena Clough in 1919 was “awkward” because he had just caricatured her father, the poet A H Clough, in Eminent Victorians).

Strachey wouldn’t have been surprised that this selection of letters places its strongest emphasis on the story of his life rather than that of his work. He recognised that “for one reader who cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing, there are a thousand who are ready to explore with eager sympathy the history of the writer”. As a pioneer of sexual freedom and openness, he would have been delighted at the publication of his 1930 letter to Roger Senhouse, which makes it clear that the two men were involved in sadomasochistic sex, and that in one painful procedure Strachey had been “crucified” by Senhouse. After all, Strachey had once prophesied that the literature of the future would at last tell the truth, “and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic, and even written well”. Just like these wonderful letters.

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