This is an age whose like has never been
Since Jahveh made the world, and lo! ’twas green.
Through all the mouldy chronicle of Time
Scribbled in prose, or furbished up in rhyme,
Or in the pomp of monuments expressed
(Like some plain woman who is over-dressed),
Where shall we find, ye grim and dreary Powers
Of Human Folly, folly such as ours?
The bronze age and the iron age, we’re told,
Were once; and was there once an age of gold?
Perhaps: but now no learning of the schools
Need we to know this age the Age of Fools.
Lytton Strachey (1915)
The Lacket was a compact, rather isolated and romantic-looking thatched cottage, sheltering behind a huge box hedge with a boulder-strewn hillside rising behind it. A few hundred yards away lived the philosopher and mathematician, A.N. Whitehead, and his imposing wife Evelyn, with both of whom Lytton became friendly. He was to remain at The Lacket until the end of 1915, and it was here that he wrote two of the four essays in Eminent Victorians.
He was immediately taken charge of by Mrs Templeman – a ‘discreet old lady’, as Virginia Woolf described her, ‘who is as noiseless as an elephantine kind of mouse’. This formidable old woman seemed to comprehend all his wishes – she was reassuring even on the matter of economy. He still had a little of the hundred pounds that Harry Norton had given him, and to this sum his mother added a further hundred. With what he could earn from contributions to periodicals, he hoped to pay for enough time to complete his Eminent Victorians. The solitude was comfortless at times; and Mrs Templeman, for all her massive qualities, could be appallingly severe. ‘She places the vegetables upon the table with a grimness … an exactitude …,’ Lytton complained to James (April 1914). ‘When she calls me in the morning she announces the horrors of the day in a tone of triumph: – “Rain, as usual, sir.” – “Oh, Mrs Templeman, Mrs Templeman!” – “Yes sir; old fashioned weather; that’s what I call it.”’ Otherwise the two of them got on very well, though Mrs Templeman believed the ‘darkness’ to be bad for Lytton. ‘When I observed that the darkness in London was worse,’ he wrote to Hilton Young (9 January 1914), ‘she said “Yes, sir, but then in London you have the noise” – to which no reply seemed possible.’
Despite the severities of his housekeeper and the bleakness of winter in the country, Lytton was content. ‘I wish the place were mine,’ he told Henry (27 October 1913), ‘that I might mould it nearer to my eyes’ desire.’ He had implored Hilton Young to have an ‘owl stuffed with wings outspread, so that I may hang it up over my bed and confuse it with the Holy Ghost in my last moments’. To Duncan he wrote (28 October 1913) explaining how he was leading ‘a singularly egotistical life here, surrounded by every luxury, waited on by an aged female, and absorbed completely in Eternal-Peace. In the intervals of my satisfaction I struggle to justify my existence by means of literary composition, but so far the justification has not been so convincing as might be wished.’
His main work during these first winter months was not ‘Cardinal Manning’, but some minor pieces on contemporary politics and culture for the recently founded New Statesman (to which Desmond MacCarthy had been appointed drama critic); and, for the Edinburgh Review, a long essay on Stendhal which had been commissioned by Harold Cox in reply to Lytton’s request to write on Samuel Butler. The subject necessitated a return to the impressionistic style of Landmarks in French Literature, as opposed to his more incisive biographical narrative, but he had no hesitation about taking it on, and, having assembled his library at The Lacket, began reading through the whole of Stendhal’s work. ‘I am beginning to gird up my loins for the wrestling bout with Stendhal,’ he announced (27 October 1913) after ten days of intensive reading; and by 10 November he was able to report that ‘I have plunged into the writing of the Stendhal affair and find it far less unpleasant than I’d expected – in fact I’m so far enjoying doing it very much.’
Concurrently with this he had also sent to J.C. Squire at the New Statesman a short piece on the subject of toleration entitled ‘Avons-nous changé tout cela?’ To his mingled pleasure and alarm, the article was immediately accepted for the sum of three guineas (equivalent to £125 in 1994). ‘As for the New Statesman,’ he told Henry (17 November 1913), ‘I am getting to loathe it; and the worst of it is I now seem to be in imminent danger of becoming a regular contributor to its pages. The fellow Jack Squire, who is its editor or sub-editor, is most unpleasant, and I am trying hard to pick a quarrel with him, so as to escape having anything further to do either with him or it.’ The quarrel between Lytton and Squire held fire for almost five years, while Lytton wrote ten articles and reviews on subjects ranging from Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold to Shelley and Frederick and Great for this Fabian weekly competitor to the Spectator. In a number of these he is evidently spoiling for a fight, forcing in references to the Bible which he felt sure must prove too strong for the editor who, by demanding their excision, would provide him with a legitimate excuse to leave. What actually happened was less satisfactory. His contributions appeared with all their more audacious criticisms intact, but marred by many smaller changes, omissions of quite trivial words or insertions of Squire’s own, almost always fractionally inferior to the original text, and, though intensely irritating, never drastic enough to supply Lytton with a high-principled reason for cutting off this small source of income.
Every morning, he wrote at his desk; every afternoon, he would set off in a thick overcoat, gloves, scarf and earrings, to trudge through the woods where the gamekeeper, ‘a grimy old fellow with a nice bare breast’, would hold him in talk about football; every evening he would read and go through a programme of digestive exercises.
He sometimes travelled up to London at weekends, staying at Belsize Park Gardens or with the Bells in Gordon Square, and timing his visits to coincide with some concert, art exhibition, lecture or play. One weekend he spent with the St Loe Stracheys at a spectacular house-party in Surrey, full of reactionary ambassadors and their ladies, and an exquisite footman. There was plenty of ‘copy’ for his letters, yet no discoverable romance. The ambassadors, he told Pippa, were ‘the acme of unimportance’; and much of the conversation was taken in charge by Leo Maxse, ‘a mere spider in mind and body’, who was still raving obsessionally on about the Marconi scandal and discharging his venom against the Cabinet.1 Among the guests was a couple whom he would get to know better once he himself was better known – the Colefaxes.2 ‘He is a dreadful pompous lawyer and politician with a very dull large face pétri with insincerity,’ he explained to Henry (4 November 1913).‘ … She too is a thoroughly stupid woman.’
The hostility of these observations indicates how awkward a figure Lytton still was in the smart world of the upper classes. People who, half-a-dozen years later, would entreat him to lunch or dine with them, now viewed him with unconcealed distaste or overlooked him altogether. Such mediocre performances in society tended to disrupt his peace of mind, yet he could not suppress a growing desire to enter and be courted by this extraordinary world. ‘The result of it all is that I’m now feeling singularly solitary,’ he confided to Ottoline (6 November 1913) on his return to The Lacket. ‘But as I’m trying to work, it’s so much the better.’
Less disturbing in their after-effects were the weekends when he invited James, Pippa and Pernel, Duncan, Maynard and Henry over to The Lacket. Leonard also came down a couple of times with reports that, though Virginia’s condition was still serious enough to warrant a team of four nurses, the doctors were confident she would recover. ‘Poor Woolf!’ Lytton wrote to Ottoline (4 October 1913). ‘Nearly all the horror of it has been and still is on his shoulders. Ka gave great assistance at the worst crisis, but she is now in London. Apparently what started this attack was anxiety about her novel coming on top of the physical weakness. The Doctors say that all depends upon rest and feeding-up.’ Leonard himself had by this time finished a second novel, The Wise Virgins, the typescript of which he sent to Lytton early in the New Year. But Lytton decided that he could not recommend his friend to publish it. By nature Leonard was not a novelist. He was wonderfully nice, which made matters all the more difficult when he arrived down at The Lacket asking for a candid opinion on his typescript. ‘He was very sympathique, as ever, but there were some thorny moments during the discussion of his novel,’ Lytton admitted to Henry (19 January 1914). ‘I don’t think the poor fellow is in his right assiette – though what the right one is I can’t imagine. Perhaps he should be a camel merchant, slowly driving his beasts to market over the vast plains of Baluchistan. Something like that would I’m sure be more appropriate than his present occupations of Fabianising and novel-writing, and even than his past one of ruling blacks.’
So many guests came to The Lacket that Mrs Templeman soon began disintegrating. Before each new arrival she would sweep the chimneys, scrub all the floors and spread an air of ruin. It looked as if she might sink under her load of unnecessary duties. But Lytton’s resourcefulness eventually carried the day, and after several confidential chats, the handsome tip of a golden sovereign at Christmas, and a promise that whenever he was away her sister might come over from Newbury to stay, all was well.
‘I am enjoying myself very much here,’ he wrote to his mother after a couple of months (7 December 1913), ‘and feel as if I should like never to move away … I try to write a certain amount every day, and the rest of the time is spent in eating, sleeping, walking and reading. In the evenings I struggle with Italian. My occasional wish is for a wife – but it is not easy to be suited in that matter.’
‘Whoever thought’, he asked Ottoline, ‘that I should end my days alone with a widow?’
One unlooked-for effect of rustic chastity was the change of attitude it brought about towards London. Only recently it had been somewhere from which to escape; now it was transformed into an arena where no encounter was impossible and every adventure for the asking.
Such adventures as did come Lytton’s way were inconclusive. ‘After I left you I went to the Tube,’ he told Henry (20 February 1914), ‘and saw there a very nice red-cheeked black-haired youth of the lower classes – nothing remarkable in that – but he was 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 (straw coloured) which tied at the neck. I thought it so exactly your goût that I longed to get one for you. At last on the platform I made it an épreuve to go up to him and ask him where he got it. Pretty courageous, wasn’t it? You see he was not alone, but accompanied by two rather higher-class youths in billycock hats, whom I had to brush aside in order to reach him. I adopted the well-known John style – with great success. It turned out (as I might have guessed) that it was simply a football jersey – he belonged to the Express dairy team. I was so surprised by that I couldn’t think what enquiries I could make, and then he vanished.’
It was only on paper that he could carry things through triumphantly. When it came to a black-haired youth and a football jersey, he could not cross the class frontier. But there were always plenty of more restricted activities. In January he stayed with his family, who were then making preliminary arrangements to move from No. 67 to No. 6 Belsize Park Gardens. ‘I flew from Square to Square, from Chelsea to Hampstead Heath with infinite alacrity,’ he told Duncan (6 February 1914). ‘I even went to the Alpine Club.3 I could not look much at the pictures there, as I found myself alone with [Nina] Hamnett,4 and became a prey to the desire to pass my hand lightly over her mane of black hair. I knew that if I did she’d strike me in the face – but that, on reflection, only sharpened my desire, and eventually I was just on the point of taking the plunge when Fanny Stanley5 came in and put an end to the tête-à-tête.’
Early in February he rushed up to town again, ‘my excuse being that Swithin had just returned from Burma’, he explained to Duncan (6 February 1914), ‘but the truth is that I can’t resist Piccadilly – though how it’s spelt I’ve never been able to discover.’ Swithinbank treated him to a magnificent lunch at Simpson’s, with such quantities of Burgundy that he was ill for a week. He had not seen Swithin for nearly five years, and the change was devastating. Was this the young man with whom Lytton had once seriously contemplated falling in love? It seemed scarcely credible now as he sat regarding the ‘very benevolent, medical man’ lunching opposite him, so quiet, so respectable, so dazed. ‘All youth gone,’ he lamented in a letter to James (14 February 1914), ‘– and so sad – so infinitely sad and gentle: I suspect some tragedy – or would suspect one if there was anything in his character to allow of such a thing. Perhaps he’s simply become a Buddhist. As for talking to him, it was quite impossible, and he was pained by my get-up.’
Another old friend he met by chance that week was E.M. Forster. He was scarcely more satisfactory than Swithinbank. ‘We went all over London together,’ he told James (3 February 1914), ‘wrapped in incredible intimacy – but it was all hollow, hollow. He’s a mediocre man – and knows it, or suspects it, which is worse; he will come to no good, and in the meantime he’s treated rudely by waiters and is not really admired even by middle-class dowagers.’
Desmond MacCarthy had arranged for him to lunch with Kenneth Bell, ‘half-wit and publisher’,6 at the Devonshire Club in St James’s Street. ‘It was a singular function,’ Lytton observed to James (3 February 1914), ‘chiefly in my honour, as Mr Bell, the young and advanced partner of the old-fashioned firm of Bell, wished especially to get in touch with me. I accordingly thought it would please if I appeared in a fairly outré style – cord coat, etc. – and the result was an extreme nervousness on the part of Kenneth.
‘However, he suggested that I should write one of a new series of biographies of modern persons, to be written in a non-official manner; I suggested Cardinal Manning as a good subject; he appeared to be enthusiastic at the notion; but now I don’t know (a) whether he really wanted it done by me, or (b) whether I really want to do it. I hope to find out when I interview him in a few days’ time – if possible at his office; these club lunches with claret and kummel flowing through them in all directions don’t make for lucidity.’
Their second discussion took place ten days later at the Savile Club. Though subjected to some pressure, Lytton could only be induced to propose schemes that amounted to slight variations of what he was already writing or planning to write. He had been ruminating too long over his Victorian portraits to abandon them, and wanted to persuade Bell to forget his own projects and fix up a contract for Eminent Victorians. For this second meeting he decided to adopt a peevish manner but was disarmed by the reverential style in which he was received, and which brought to the surface his more natural modesty. ‘It’s very queer how they’re all after me so frantically,’ he commented to James (14 February 1914).
‘I interviewed Mr Basil Williams at the Savile (he’s the editor of the new Biographical Series) and he fairly crouched.7 It was plain that the series – “Creators of the 19th Century” – would not suit me, so I was firm and resisted all his pleadings. He begged me to write on Victor Hugo, Pius IX, Ibsen, and I really forget how many others, but I only smiled mysteriously, and a great deal, and so left him. However, at tea, Mr Bell appeared and pretty well bowled me over with his bonhomie (B. Williams is a sad, cheerful, compact and strangely uninspired little man, I forgot to mention.) The result is that I was led to suggest a series of 19th century essays on great men, in one volume, which he (K.B.) eagerly seized upon – though so far the financial arrangements are in the vague.’
For several weeks negotiations dwindled along, then finally broke down altogether, leaving Lytton to work at his volume of Victorian essays without a contract or publisher, wondering whether they would ever be more than silhouettes.
Business entertainment of a more unusual kind was provided by a meeting of New Statesman subscribers towards the end of April at the Kingsway Hall. Lytton turned up out of simple curiosity to see the Fabian junta. ‘The so-called editor was “in the chair”,’ he told James, ‘a most nauseous creature,8 I thought – with Mr and Mrs Webb and B. Shaw on each side of him.
‘I’ve no notion of what the point of the meeting was – no information of any kind was given, and I could only gather from some wails and complaints of the Webbs that it wasn’t paying. B. Shaw made a quite amusing speech about nothing on earth. I’d no idea that the Webb fellow was so utterly without pretensions of being a gentleman. She was lachrymose and white-haired. Altogether they made a sordid little group. At the end there were “questions” from the audience – supposed to be addressed to the Editor qua Chairman, but the poor man was never allowed to get in a word. The three Gorgons surrounding him kept leaping to their feet with most crushing replies.’
These spring and early summer months of 1914 seemed to glow with miraculous lightness, as if the atmosphere were electrically charged. Foreigners flocked to London, which was enjoying an extraordinarily extended social season. The new Russian ballets, the operas at Covent Garden, the sporting calendar appeared more spectacular than ever before. Everything moved with an odd ease and brilliance.
The bohemians of this Edwardian pageant were taking their last curtain call. That May, Augustus John had moved into the large square studio-house in Chelsea which he had had specially constructed for him by a man he met in a pub; and it was here that he gave an all-night house-warming party in fancy dress. ‘The company was very charming and sympathetic, I thought,’ Lytton wrote to James ‘– so easy-going and taking everything for granted; and really I think it’s the proper milieu for me – if only the wretches had a trifle more brain … John was a superb figure. There was dancing – two-steps and such things – so much nicer than waltzes – and at last I danced with him – it seemed an opportunity not to be missed. (I forgot to say that I was dressed as a pirate.) Nina Lamb was there, and made effréné love to me. We came out in broad daylight.’
Ottoline’s salon in Bedford Square had by this time reached the height of its fame as a rallying point for artists and writers. Among the most frequent habitués besides Lytton himself were Gilbert Cannan; Stanley Spencer; the handsome, volatile, Jewish painter Mark Gertler; Arnold Bennett and Augustus John (both dressed extravagantly in Ottoline’s clothes); Desmond MacCarthy reclining on a peripheral sofa; Vanessa Bell stepping out naked from the waist up; Bertrand Russell, taut and upright, dancing the hornpipe; a troupe of Slade School girls; and Nijinsky, who was soon to be married, and with whom Lytton had become disenchanted, but who still enthralled Ottoline ‘gaping and gurgling like a hooked fish’. Indeed Ottoline’s advances, and his unresponsiveness, were by this time causing ripples of merriment among her friends. She plied him with her most sentimental attentions. On one occasion the two of them were sitting in a tiny inner room when Lytton entered the house. As he advanced down the drawing-room he overheard Ottoline’s husky voice, with its infinitely modulated nasal intonations, utter the words: ‘Quand vous dansez, vous n’êtes pas un homme – vous êtes une idée. C’est ça, n’est-ce pas, qui est l’Art? … Vous avez lu Platon, sans doute?’ The reply was a grunt.
The principal guest at the most glittering of these receptions was Asquith, the prime minister, who had been offering a number of brave but unrewarded gallantries to Ottoline. The party early in May represented her last bid to secure an under-secretaryship for her husband, and might ultimately have proved successful had they not both embraced pacifist convictions at the outbreak of the war three months later. The gathering itself was brilliant and Lytton’s head spun alarmingly at finding himself close to so many celebrated people. Ottoline had warned him in advance that the prime minister was to be there, ‘but I was rather surprised’, he told James, ‘to be rushed, the very minute I arrived into the dear man’s arms. It was most marked; someone else whom he was talking to was scattered to the winds, and we were then planted together on a central sofa.
‘He was considerably less pompous than I’d expected, and exceedingly gracious – talked about Parnell and such reminiscent matters at considerable length. I could see no sign of the faintest spark of anything out of the common in cet estimable Perrier Jouet. He seemed a pebble worn smooth by rubbings – even his face had a somewhat sand-papered effect. He enquired about my next book, and I gave him a sketch of it. At the end he said with slight pomp “Well, you have a difficult and interesting task before you.” I said “You have a difficult and interesting task before you!” He grinned and said, “Ah, we do what we can, we do what we can” … The company was most distinguished and the whole affair decidedly brilliant. Henry James of course loomed in the most disgusting way. The Raleighs were also there, and – very extraordinary – Sir M. Nathan …9 Ottoline was in a vast gold brocade dress, and seemed remarkably at her ease, and in fact at moments almost tête-montée. In the middle of it all she fell upon me, and charged me with infidelity, breaking her heart, etc.’
The Ulster crisis was then at its height, and Asquith had dramatically taken over the War Office. His graciousness struck Lytton as being partly that of genuine good humour, and partly the professional manner of a man whose business in life it was at all times to create a favourable impression. They talked about various public figures – Lord Randolph Churchill among others – and Asquith then turned the conversation back to Parnell who, he declared, was the most remarkable man he had known. Lytton wished later he had suggested that Gladstone was surely even more remarkable; then, after Asquith recounted how he had met Parnell in the Temple one morning when the divorce proceedings had just become public and how Parnell had shown that he had no notion of the hubbub this would produce, the talk pausing a moment with a slight embarrassment, he got up, cordially shook Lytton’s hand, and sauntered into another room. The entire meeting had lasted about ten minutes. ‘If I hadn’t known who he was,’ Lytton afterwards wrote (May 1918), ‘I should have guessed him to be one of those Oxford dons who have a smattering of the world – one of those clever, cautious mediocre intelligences, who made one thank heaven one was at Cambridge.
‘Two particulars only suggested a difference. His manner was a little nervous – it was really almost as if he was the whole time conscious with a slight uneasiness, that he was the Prime Minister. And then, though his appearance on the whole was decidedly donnish – small and sleek and not too well made in the details – his hands were different. Small and plump they were too; but there was a masterfulness in them and a mobility which made them remarkable.’
Though Lytton’s manner had grown relaxed, he sometimes bristled awkwardly. ‘He doesn’t say anything, except tête-à-tête,’ Walter Raleigh wrote to Logan Pearsall Smith after seeing him that June at Newington. ‘I wish he would write a book called Life Among the Man-haters, or Out against God.’10 During these weeks and months, Lytton was busy distilling this animosity against God and man into his ‘Cardinal Manning’. ‘I’m at present devoting 3 hours a day to Cardinal Manning,’ he wrote to Clive Bell on 22 February. His letters record the progress he was now making after his long preparation.
Lytton Strachey to Henry Lamb, 22 February 1914
‘I sit here buried in books on Cardinals and Theologians, and am rapidly becoming an expert on ecclesiastical questions. For instance, I now know what Papal Infallibility means – or rather what it doesn’t – the distinction is highly important. I think that dogmatic theology would make a much better subject for a Tripos than most. Fine examination papers I could set – Discuss the difference between “definitionists” and “inopportunists”. – Explain with examples the various meanings of “minimism”. – Give a brief account of either Newman’s attitude towards the Syllabus or Dollinger’s relations with the Vatican Council. State clearly the interpretations put by (a) W.G. Ward, (b) Veuillot, (c) Dupanloup, upon the words “Ex cathedrâ”. Doesn’t it sound entrancing?’
Lytton Strachey to Henry Lamb, 14 March 1914
‘I’m enjoying my Manning a good deal so far; the chief drawback seems to be that it’s such a slow business. And of course I’m quite prepared to find when it’s done that it’s all a fantasia; but the only way of knowing that is to go through with it to the bitter end, and hope for the best.’
Lytton Strachey to Ottoline Morrell, 27 March 1914
‘I’m trying to work, and even succeeding to some extent. My task is rather a strange one. I think it may have some vestiges of amusement in it – but it’s difficult to say as yet. I won’t, I fear, be quite as bright as the Chartreuse de Parme, though, in any case!’
Lytton Strachey to James Strachey, April 1914
‘If one had the thews of a bull and the pen of a ready writer, one might get something done. As it is everything takes such a devil of a time. One has to sleep, eat, digest, take exercise – and after all that, one has to squeeze out one’s carefully moulded sentences.’
At the beginning of the year he had applied to Harold Cox asking whether he might write two articles for the Edinburgh Review, one on Dryden and the other on Byron. The reply was flattering but unspecific. His ‘Henri Beyle’ had been much liked, he was told; but no mention was made of Dryden and none of Byron. Instead, over the next eighteen months, he was to publish two long biographical essays on a favourite subject, Voltaire, while continuing with his irregular articles for the New Statesman and, in April 1914, sending in his very last contribution to the Spectator – a leading review of Constance Garnett’s translation of The Possessed.
Voltaire and Dostoyevsky were important influences on Eminent Victorians. In ‘Voltaire and England’, written at the same time as ‘Cardinal Manning’ and ‘Florence Nightingale’, he describes Voltaire’s ‘epoch-making book’, Lettres Philosophiques, as ‘a work of propaganda and a declaration of faith’ that carried over England ‘a whispered message of tolerance, of free inquiry, of enlightened curiosity’. This was Lytton’s ambition, too, in Eminent Victorians. He steeped himself in Voltaire’s spirit of Humanism, and studied his proselytizing raids on Christian theology. Whatever quips and mockeries played upon the surface, he was, like Voltaire, ‘in deadly earnest at heart.’
The reading of Dostoyevsky encouraged him to experiment with drama, irony and psychological suggestion. ‘While Tolstoy, Ibsen and Nietzsche sent waves of fresh thought across the Continent,’ Virginia was to write, ‘the English slept undisturbed …’ But, to the distress of Henry James, the impact of Dostoyevsky’s novels in Constance Garnett’s translations was experienced as a liberating force among younger writers in these years before the war. ‘It is directly obvious that he is the greatest writer ever born,’ Virginia wrote to Lytton (1 September 1912). Dostoyevsky’s material which, as James Strachey was to say, ‘reveals a lot of the same material as Freud,’ uncovered a richly comic irrational world which suggested to Lytton that ridicule was a valid historical attitude and literary aesthetic for his own work. In ‘A Russian Humorist’, he writes: ‘Dostoievsky’s mastery of this strange power of ridicule, which, instead of debasing, actually ennobles and endears the object upon which it falls, is probably the most remarkable of all his characteristics.’ Lytton was to use ridicule most endearingly in Portraits in Miniature. In Eminent Victorians it plays gently on some of the minor characters, but is otherwise sharpened by Voltairian wit to produce a deft attacking style.
Since coming to The Lacket he felt more confident of carrying this long project to its end – unlike a previous tenant of Hilton Young’s – Desmond MacCarthy. ‘Desmond is a great study,’ Lytton explained to James (9 February 1914):
‘I’ve never seen anyone so extraordinarily incapable of pulling himself together. He’ll never write anything, I’m afraid, in that hopeless miasma. He rode eighteen miles yesterday with Hilton, came back almost dead, and stretched his now vast bulk on a chair in a stertorous coma. At last we somehow got him to bed. He rose at 11.30 this morning, refused to have anything for breakfast, and then ate the whole of a pot of marmalade with extreme deliberation. He’s wonderfully good-natured, affable, and amusing, but there are moments when dullness seems to exude from him in concentrated streams.’
Another visitor to The Lacket was Leonard Woolf, who stayed a week. ‘He has been having a nervous breakdown in a mild way,’ Lytton confided to Henry (12 March 1914), ‘and seemed to want repose. He says he’s now much better, and goes away on Saturday. Virginia is apparently all right now, and there are no nurses any more.’
So Lytton’s life went amiably on – supported by his friends on Saturdays and Sundays, and by Cardinal Manning, Dostoyevsky, Voltaire and others during the rest of the week. There seemed no reason why this rhythm of living should not continue until he completed Eminent Victorians. After all those wandering years since Cambridge, the ordered days and weeks stretched purposefully ahead.
But on 4 August 1914 the social afterglow of Edwardian England was finally extinguished.
The Great War cast over Lytton’s life a shadow that coloured much of his writing. With his invalidism, there was no question of his being called up for service, even of a more subsidiary kind. Logically, therefore, the wisest course he could take might have been to cut himself off entirely from political and military affairs. Yet this he could not do. Painfully and unwillingly he found himself involved. War filled the horizon, darkening the days and disturbing his troubled nights.
Last night I dreamt that I had gone to Hell.
I seemed to know the milieu pretty well.
The place was crammed as tight as it would hold
With men and hatred, folly, lust and gold.
And lies? Ah, I’d forgotten: without fail
Red hot for breakfast came The Daily Mail.
Well, thought, they say, is free. I wish it were!
Can you think freely in a dentist’s chair?
Then so can I, when, willing or unwilling,
All Europe on my nerves comes drilling, drilling.
I do my best; I shut my eyes and ears,
Try to forget my furies and my fears,
Banish the newspapers, go out of town,
And in a country cottage settle down,
Far from the world, its sorrow and its shame;
But, though skies alter, still the mind’s the same.11
What comfort, when in every lovely hour
Lurks horror, like a spider in a flower?
Most people, while paying lip-service to peace, welcomed this outbreak of war. Lytton’s hatred of it was never assumed; he was not excited by the fighting. Though he loved the English countryside, feeling that he could not be happy living anywhere else, he never transmutes this love into a national superiority. ‘On the whole I don’t care much about England’s being victorious (apart from personal questions),’ he wrote to James (27 September 1914), ‘– but I should object to France being crushed. Mightn’t it be a good plan to become a Frenchman?’
France, to his mind, was the most civilized country in Europe and therefore the one least likely to provoke a war. All war was a return to barbarism and, in a modern world, all wars should be avoidable. They reinstated medievalism, substituting injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy for the virtues of tolerance and enlightened inquiry. They disrupted much that made life worth living; art degenerated into puerile propaganda; friendships were callously wrenched apart.
Field Marshal Sir John French, head of the British Expeditionary Force which landed in France on 17 August, predicted that the Allied Powers would be victorious by Christmas. Throughout the country an unashamed howl went up for conscription. But the Liberal Government remained firm. In an official statement in The Times of 15 August, Kitchener, newly appointed Secretary of State for War, announced that voluntary territorials were to be divided into two categories – those serving abroad and those at home. He was looking for 100,000 volunteers for his new army. But his announcement stressed the importance of home defence and made it clear that the Government ‘does not desire that those who cannot, on account of their affairs, volunteer for foreign service, should by any means be induced to do so’.
Lytton himself seems to have believed that all physically fit intellectuals should be prepared to defend the shores of England, but that no intellectuals were physically fit. He appeared eager to save the military services from the incompetence of writers and artists – let others do the dirty work. It was an attitude which Ottoline, a resolute pacifist, found ‘quite inhuman and cruel’. ‘I think one must resist,’ Lytton explained to James early that September, ‘if it comes to a push. But I admit it’s a difficult question.
‘One solution is to go and live in the United States of America. As for our personal position, it seems to me quite sound and coherent. We’re all far too weak physically to be of any use at all. If we weren’t we’d still be too intelligent to be thrown away in some really not essential expedition, and our proper place would be – the National Reserve, I suppose. God has put us on an island, and Winston [Churchill] has given us a navy, and it would be absurd to neglect those advantages – which I consider exactly apply to able-bodied intellectuals. It’s no good pretending one isn’t a special case.’
At the beginning of the war Bloomsbury and its friends were not wholly pacifist. That September, Clive Bell, whose Peace at Once (1915) was to be publicly burnt by order of the Lord Mayor, asked James Strachey for information on how to join the Army Service Corps or some other non-fighting unit. Duncan Grant immediately entered the National Reserve. Adrian Stephen spoke of enlisting. E.M. Forster volunteered as a Red Cross Observer in Egypt. Wittgenstein joined the Austrian army. Rupert Brooke prepared to go to Belgium. ‘I cannot see the use of intellectual persons doing this,’ Lytton commented on hearing the news, ‘as long as there are enough men in any case, and the country is not in danger. Home defence is another matter, and I think I should certainly train if I had the strength.’ But of all his friends the one caught up by the call to arms was, to his great sadness, Henry Lamb who, in the first week of September (after withdrawing his name from the recruiting office at Putney), enrolled as an assistant at Guy’s Hospital. His return to medical practice was an odd result, Lytton reflected, of Austria declaring war on Serbia. ‘The horror and repulsiveness of it all seem far greater than they used to be,’ Henry wrote. ‘… I am getting used to blood. It is much harder to bear when the people are not anaesthetised.’ Lytton was relieved that Henry’s common sense had overcome his initial militarism; but ‘he’s so fearfully undependable,’ he complained to James (27 August 1914). ‘Also his words have no connection with his feelings, nor his acts with anything; and he’s constitutionally incapable of constancy … It seems to me that really – from any point of view – it’s grotesque for a person of his health to go into the army: and I don’t think this has been sufficiently emphasised. I hope to goodness he’ll get fixed into something fairly harmless before long, as otherwise there’ll always be this terror.’
Despite the columns of patriotic journalism, Lytton did not believe that ordinary men and women were really warlike. He blamed the newspapers – particularly those of Lord Northcliffe – for deluding credulous people like Henry who did not know their own minds, and whipping up a blind animosity against the Germans. Disregarding the newspapers, the condition of things seemed reasonably calm during these first weeks. In the remoteness of the country there was hardly a detectable change, but within London it was obvious from the grave faces of the people in the streets that something grim was happening. Their expressions denoted no lust for conflict, only sorrow and despondency. ‘So far as I can make out there isn’t the slightest enthusiasm for the war,’ Lytton reported to Dorothy Bussy (21 August 1914). ‘I think the public are partly feeling simple horror and partly that it’s a dreadful necessity. But I think there will be a change when the casualties begin – both in the direction of greater hostility to the Germans and also more active disgust at the whole thing. Though of course a great deal will depend on the actual turn of events.’
Lytton tended to disassociate himself from the more belligerent pacifists, not because he disagreed with what they said but because he believed their fulminations, directed for the most part against the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, to be an error of tactics. ‘Those anti-Grey people are really too senseless,’ he complained to James (18 August 1914). ‘Can’t they see that they do nothing at this moment if they appear as pro-Germans? The only hope is to appear anti-German and also pro-peace. The more they worry Grey the more rigid he’ll become.’
Everyone was declaring war on everyone else – Germany on Russia and France; France and Britain on Austria-Hungary; Austria-Hungary on Russia; Serbia on Germany … it was an epidemic. On 14 August Russia, having invaded East Prussia, promised Poland autonomy in return for aid. The following day Japan issued an ultimatum to Germany (which became a declaration of war eight days later). ‘I agree that the Japanese and Polish affairs are very bad – especially the latter, it seems to me,’ Lytton wrote to James. ‘I didn’t expect those Muscovites would show their hand so soon. That manifesto was a wonderful piece of blatant hypocrisy. Is it possible that the Poles will be such fools as to put their faith in the Tsar? Also won’t it be plain pretty soon even to E. Grey that the war’s being run for the aggrandisement of Russia? I don’t believe the English public would stand that.’
The English public, Lytton considered, should be stirred up about peace. Instead of wasting energy blaming the Government, as Bertrand Russell was busy doing in the Nation, intelligent people ought to institute a Stop the War party in the Cabinet, backed by public opinion. Far from canvassing this support, Russell’s passionate denunciations were, Lytton suspected, alienating the populace. Nevertheless, despite the crowds in Downing Street cheering Asquith and singing the National Anthem, there remained a fundamental good sense about people’s attitude which he found heartening. ‘I haven’t seen anyone’, he told James (16 August 1914), ‘who hasn’t agreed on the main lines – viz: that we should take nothing for ourselves, and insist on ending it at the earliest possible moment.’
There seems little doubt that Lytton was being optimistic. Before the carnage begins, the idea of military action is not horrific, but simple and inspiriting. Grey and Asquith were personally responsible for bringing Britain into the war. The House of Commons would have had no debate at all on the question had not Philip Morrell courageously got to his feet and made a protest. His speech, by all accounts the finest he ever made, did no good and put an end to his political career – though nothing had so become that career as his leaving of it. ‘I can never forget seeing him standing alone,’ Ottoline noted in her diary (3 August 1914), ‘with nearly all the House against him, shouting at him to “Sit down!”’
Momentarily, Lytton himself would feel the faint vibration of war fever, instantly to be checked and corrected. Yet feeling it, he understood something of its appeal, and the force with which it was soon surging through the country, unerringly picking upon non-combatants. ‘I walked into Marlborough to-day,’ he wrote to James (18 August 1914), ‘and found there the news of the continued French advance in the Vosges, and the “confusion” of the German army. Is this possibly the beginning of a great movement? It is appalling to have to wish for such horrors – but now it’s the only way.
‘… Yesterday I felt for the first time a desire to go out and fight myself. I can understand some people being overcome by it. At any rate one would not have to think any more.’
For the most part, however, the war affected him as a personal tragedy. He felt helpless. One of his sisters was in Germany and he was worried about getting her out. But when Evelyn Whitehead advised him to appeal to the British ambassador in Germany, he was nonplussed. ‘But how can I?’ he asked in his most penetrating voice. ‘I have never met him.’
On a more public level he was equally incredulous. He followed the news carefully, growing more amazed and disgusted at each new communiqué and report. His political attitude in these early days of the war is nicely caught in a letter he wrote (21 August 1914) to Dorothy Bussy, after reading through a White Paper that reproduced the official dispatches between Sir Edward Grey and the ambassadors.
‘It’s like a puppet-show, with the poor little official dolls dancing and squeaking their official phrases, while the strings are being pulled by some devilish Unseen Power. One naturally wants to blame somebody – the Kaiser for choice – but the tragic irony, it seems to me, really is that everyone was helpless. Even the Austrians were no doubt genuinely in terror of the whole regime being undermined by Slavism, and the Russians couldn’t allow the Austrians to get hold of the Balkans; the crisis finally came when the Germans found out that the Russians were secretly mobilizing – that frightened them so much that the war party became supreme, and all was over. The real horror is that Europe is not yet half-civilized, and the peaceful countries aren’t strong enough to keep the others quiet.’
*
For the time being Lytton continued ‘living the life of a complete St Anthony’, as he described it to Ottoline (24 October 1914), ‘with Mrs Templeman in the role of the Queen of Sheba – and I can’t say she plays the part with conviction’. On most evenings he would spend a solitary hour or two, crouched over the fire ‘knitting mufflers for our soldier and sailor lads,’ so he informed Clive, ‘but I expect that by the time I’ve finished them the war will be over, and they’ll be given to Henry and Duncan’. Acknowledging the possibility of the country being overrun by the enemy, and feeling that it was essential to be ready with words of propitiation, he gave up Italian and began to take lessons in German.
Over the next four years there was to be no more travelling abroad, though he went between Wiltshire and the metropolis much as before. There were still the Thursday evening parties at Bedford Square, where wartime anxieties could be relieved for a few hours. To assist in the pretence that things were otherwise than they actually were, everyone would robe up in fancy-dress and, while Philip Morrell thumped out Hungarian dances or Russian ballet music at his pianola, fling themselves into fantastic dances. ‘Now and then,’ recalled Ottoline, ‘Lytton Strachey exquisitely stepped out with his brother James and his sister Marjorie, in a delicate and courtly minuet of his own invention, his thin long legs and arms gracefully keeping perfect time to Mozart – the vision of this exquisite dance always haunts me with its half-serious, half-mocking, yet beautiful quality.’
There were also Bloomsbury parties to which Lytton had started going again. Clive and Vanessa gave one of the most spectacular of these affairs. It began with Mozart chamber music played by Adila and Jelly D’Arányi (who, as Hungarians, were looked upon with hostile suspicion by some English people, but to whom Bloomsbury was particularly hospitable). Afterwards the guests went upstairs to see the last scene from Racine’s Bérénice, acted by three titanic puppets eight feet tall, painted futuristically and cut out of cardboard by Duncan. The words of the play were spoken by members of the Strachey family, whose fearful Gallic mouthings before ‘several eminent frogs’ were as bold in their way as the puppets themselves.12
But something had begun to go wrong with these parties. Cigarettes were ground out under the heels of the dancers at Bedford Square; bottles clinked and crashed as they were smuggled in under overcoats. Everything was moving from romantic comedy into ghastly farce. Gilbert Cannan’s friend, the painter Mark Gertler, stamped on Marjorie Strachey’s foot on the dance floor, then bruised Aldous Huxley’s future wife so badly that her arm turned purple, and smashed another guest’s spectacles. ‘One young lady,’ Miranda Seymour writes, ‘attempting a spirited pirouette, struck David Garnett in the face and gave him a black eye. Another guest, embarking on a high-stepping dance with his hostess, tripped on her skirt and brought her crashing to the ground in his arms.’13
Practical jokes were the vogue. One of the more ingenious was played by Duncan on Lytton. At breakfast one morning, while he was staying with his family in Hampstead, he received through the post a poem in French purporting to come from a rather taciturn French actor named Delacre, a man whom he had met at several of Ottoline’s parties and whose conversation was made up of long sombre stories beginning: ‘Figurezvous, mon cher …’ This poem, composed in rhymed couplets and written with ominous capital letters on a single sheet of paper, implied that the writer had recently seen Lytton in a compromising situation.
SI UN VIEUX
VEUT BAISER DANS LA RUE
UN JEUNE HOMME
VAUT MIEUX
PRENDRE UN FIACRE
AVANT QU’APRES
TON AMI DELACRE
DEMEURE TOUT PRES
DE KNIGHTSBRIDGE CHER MAÎTRE?
CA BIEN PEUT ETRE
Although he was at a loss as to what indiscretion Delacre was claiming to have observed, Lytton’s imagination began to canter away. He felt terrified that the story – whatever it was – might get out. Already he could see the newspaper headline – ‘Astonishing Accusation!’ In panic he rushed round to Delacre’s hotel, and implored him not to show it to anyone.
Lytton confided to his new friend David Garnett at tea that same afternoon what happened next. ‘Delacre had then behaved in a most extraordinary and alarming manner. He had listened to Lytton’s little speech without making any comment whatever. He then excused himself and left the room. After waiting three-quarters of an hour Lytton had asked a waiter to find Delacre and had been told that he had left the hotel. Lytton was completely baffled by this behaviour and felt that he had not improved matters by his démarche.’14
After listening to Lytton’s story, David Garnett examined the lines again and pointed out that it was highly improbable that such a vain and solemn actor would select the word fiacre as a rhyme for his own name. ‘You don’t think that Duncan wrote it by any chance?’ he hazarded.
Lytton stared in dismay. The notion had briefly occurred to him, but he had dismissed it. The French seemed so idiomatic and it rhymed so ingeniously. Yet this was the obvious explanation.
‘What, that monster!’ he exclaimed. ‘… I believe if the truth were known all the preposterous predicaments in the Universe might be traced back to him.’
To all appearances Bloomsbury was the same as ever; but appearances were misleading. Beneath the striving high spirits lay a darker mood deepened by news of the first fatalities. ‘For myself I am absolutely and completely desolated,’ Maynard wrote to Lytton from King’s (27 November 1914). ‘It is utterly unbearable to see day by day the youths going away first to boredom and discomfort and then to slaughter. Five of this College, who are undergraduates or who have just gone down, are already killed, including to my great grief Freddie Hardman, as you may have seen from the papers.’ Lytton had seen Hardman only a few weeks earlier at one of Ottoline’s parties. ‘I think what the Greeks meant by that remark of theirs about those who die young was that they escape the deterioration of growing old; and perhaps if Freddie had gone on living he could hardly have gone on being so nice,’ he wrote in his reply to Maynard (1 December 1914). ‘But I’m afraid this reflection isn’t much of a consolation to you.’
The war also ended Lytton’s intimacy with Henry who, after being commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the summer of 1916 – serving in Palestine and France, winning a Military Cross and being badly gassed – was appointed an official war artist only as he lay in hospital after the signing of the armistice. Their flow of correspondence trickled on until the end of 1915. ‘There is not a spoonful of brains to be found in the whole collection, beau-monde, doctor, matron, or nurses,’ Henry complained that summer from L’Hôpital Anglais du Casino at Fécamp.‘ … I can see no hope of wars ceasing while such people abound.’ There was no one, during these war years, to take Henry’s special place. Lytton was always having infatuations – ‘a violent, short, quite fruitless passion’ for the twenty-one-year-old painter Geoffrey Nelson, for example, and a romantic affection for Ted Roussell, a young plough-boy from Sussex, who enlisted in 1917 and was killed in the last week of the war* – but these attachments, though sometimes highly charged, were of little lasting significance.
Two men of whom he soon grew particularly fond were Maynard’s, charming Apostolic lover Francis Birrell and David (‘Bunny’) Garnett, themselves close friends. With both of them he enjoyed what was partly a friendship, partly a flirtation. ‘I think he’s a nice fellow at bottom,’ he wrote to James about Francis Birrell (21 January 1915), ‘but the overlaying paraphernalia are distinctly trying. He seems a sort of secondary Clive – and in the Dostoievsky style, half knows it.’ To David Garnett, Birrell seemed a secondary Mr Pickwick, with all ‘the innocence of Mr Pickwick which revealed itself as an incapacity for selfish calculation’. While Birrell chattered on, Garnett would remain exasperatingly silent until eventually achieving utterance with extreme rustic slowness, his sentences pockmarked with ‘ghastly pauses’, as Lytton later complained to Roger Senhouse (2 February 1929), ‘– each long enough to contain Big Ben striking midnight – between every two … words’. Even so, Lytton grew very close to Bunny Garnett. ‘No, the world is not agreeable,’ he wrote to James six months after meeting him (11 June 1915). ‘And then again I think of dear Bunny – and the fact that such a person should exist in it fills me with delight. Charming!’
It was Francis Birrell who in December 1914 had introduced Lytton to Bunny Garnett. That Christmas, Lytton held a party at The Lacket. Daphne and Noel Olivier, James and Duncan all came down to stay with him in the cottage, while Birrell and Garnett took rooms at a local inn. ‘Daphne liked it awfully,’ Noel Olivier had written (7 January 1915) in her last letter to Rupert before his death. ‘… I don’t know why I shd inflict the information on you though.’ But if so many were going to die nothing much mattered, and it was good to refresh oneself in the company of friends. David Garnett wrote of Lytton in his autobiography:
‘I was struck first of all by his gentleness and his hospitality. Then I could see he was very much alive and very responsive. That evening the response may sometimes have concealed boredom, for Lytton was easily bored and the prospect of Christmas with two young women in the house – one of whom often spoke in tones of indignant emotional idealism – may have seemed rather appalling. James had let him in for them, and his curiosity and affection for Frankie [Birrell] had let him in for the shy, but good-looking hobbledehoy he had brought with him.’15
Bunny Garnett had a foot in all camps. His mother was Constance Garnett, the translator of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov; his father Edward Garnett, a famous publisher’s reader and editor of D.H. Lawrence. Bunny had been educated as a botanist, though he was to make his reputation after the war as a novelist. He was good-looking, with a tall muscular body, fair hair and intense blue eyes. Outgrowing his shyness, he enjoyed a range of sexual experiences. He had pitched his tent With the Neo-Pagans and seduced the youngest of the Olivier girls, Daphne. But though a famous womanizer, he was also part of the ‘sodomitical’ world. When asked towards the end of his life about his ‘homosexual leanings’, he replied: ‘I was more leant against than leaning.’ He was leant against a little by Frankie Birrell with whom he was to go to France later in 1915 to work With the Friends’ War Victims Relief Mission. But he was leant against more seriously by Duncan whom he met for the first time at The Lacket this Christmas.
One evening Lytton assembled his guests round the fire and read them ‘Ermyntrude and Esmeralda’. The story, which reminded Bunny Garnett of Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, persuaded him to be a libertine, he writes – ‘that is a man whose sexual life is free of the restraints imposed by religion and conventional morality’.
The results of this conversion became apparent in the first week of the New Year. On 6 January 1915, at a Café Royal dinner preceding a party given by the Bells in Gordon Square, Maynard placed Bunny between Vanessa and Duncan. ‘Vanessa is a darling,’ Bunny wrote in his diary. She was now in her mid-thirties and still beautiful. ‘Her face had a grave beauty in repose: the perfect oval of a sculptured Madonna,’ he remembered. ‘Her straight dark brown hair, parted in the middle, was swept in wings over her ears to be fastened in a loose knob on the back of the angled pedestal of her neck. Her mouth was lovely, not small or too large, rather turned down at the corners, often impudent and full of humour. The eyes, under deeply hooded lids, were … blue-grey and deceptively innocent.’16 Bunny Garnett, then twenty-two, felt much attracted to her. He must have heard that, over the last couple of years, Vanessa had been painfully disengaging herself from Roger Fry, whose forceful intellect and wild enthusiasms, mixed with sudden spells of irrational pessimism, had begun to jar on her nerves. She liked men – but not dominating men. She needed someone younger than herself, someone to love, her biographer Frances Spalding writes, ‘as a younger brother or even son’. In some of his writings David Garnett hints at an affair between them. And it was true that Vanessa was transferring her love to someone at the Café Royal that evening – not Bunny but Duncan.
Duncan was, unusually for him, at a loss. Like Lytton, he had been dazzled by the Botticelli-like beauty of George Mallory and got as far as painting him naked – but George had recently married. He had also been enjoying an affair with Adrian Stephen – though Adrian was now becoming engaged to be married. He accepted gratefully enough the bonus of Vanessa’s growing love for him, but was not yet certain if he could reciprocate it. At The Lacket he had felt himself becoming passionately attracted to Bunny. Then, following the Café Royal dinner, late at night, he declared his passion, and Bunny, with the themes and ideas of ‘Ermyntrude and Esmeralda’ reverberating in his mind, consented to go to bed with him. So began one of the most extraordinary of Bloomsbury’s ménages à trois, a truly dangerous liaison played out during the war against a changing set of beautiful farmhouses, and reaching out to haunt the next generation.
After the initial shock of war, writes Maynard’s biographer Robert Skidelsky, ‘Bloomsbury was recovering its nerve.’17
Though the war sharpened his critical faculties, the magnitude of world events threatened to burst through Lytton’s careful plans. How could he concentrate on nineteenth-century culture and politics in the middle of such grief and disaster? By the last week of August the German army had overrun Namur which, with its garrison of forts, was the hinge of the French outflanking movement. Twenty-five thousand soldiers lay dead. ‘Namur is terrible,’ Lytton wrote to James (August 1914). ‘I suppose it’s certain now it will be a long business. As for my private hopes, they’re almost gone.’
When he did manage to settle down to some literary work he found it, as he told Henry (5 September 1915), ‘a considerable sedative’. But the Manning biography, which should have been finished by the end of August, was giving him difficulty. Twenty-seven foolscap pages of it had to be rewritten, and it was not completed until shortly before Christmas. His letters contain repeated avowals of his determination to ‘re-attack the Cardinal’, but it was only in the New Year that he could show his friends the finished essay. ‘I have seldom enjoyed myself more than I did last night, reading Manning,’ wrote Virginia who seemed that January to have recovered her health. ‘In fact, I couldn’t stop, and preserved some pages only by force of will to read after dinner. It is quite superb – It is far the best thing you have ever written, I believe – To begin with, what a miracle it is that such a group should have existed – and then how divinely amusing and exciting and alive you make it. I command you to complete a whole series …’
Encouraged by this and other enthusiastic letters, Lytton started on the second of what Duncan called his ‘eminently disagreeable Victorians’.18 The previous year Lytton had read Sir Edward Cook’s official biography of Florence Nightingale, telling his mother (15 January 1914) that although the lady with the lamp was a fascinating woman, he did not really like her. Having turned down the offer of writing this book himself, he was particularly interested to see what kind of woman Edward Cook had depicted. ‘I have just been reading the book I might have written – the Life of F. Nightingale,’ he told James (16 January 1914). ‘I’m glad I didn’t, as I couldn’t have satisfied anybody. She was a terrible woman – though powerful. And certainly a wonderful book might have been made out of her, from the cynical point of view. Of course the Victorian age is fairly reeking all over it. What a crew they were!’
From this point of view, he wanted to make a short unofficial biography of Florence Nightingale, giving his selection of information from the official Life a dramatic unity. ‘I’m beginning to attack Florence Nightingale,’ he told Henry (3 January 1915) who had stayed up nearly all night reading ‘Cardinal Manning’. ‘I want it to be very much shorter than the Cardinal, which will involve rather a different method, I think. I’m not quite sure whether the damned thing will be possible, but I hope for the best.’
The progress of ‘Florence Nightingale’, which occupied Lytton for almost six months, is charted in his correspondence. ‘I wish I didn’t dislike hard work quite so much,’ he admitted to Henry (12 January 1915).‘ … I think it’s chiefly the starting that’s so unpleasant.’ A month later he is describing Florence Nightingale as ‘a hard nut to crack’, but assuring Ottoline (11 February 1915) that he was ‘struggling with extraordinary persistence’.
Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf, 28 February 1915
‘I am in rather a state just now with Miss Nightingale, who is proving distinctly indigestible. It’s a fearful business – putting pen to paper – almost inconceivable. What happens? And how on earth does one ever manage to pull through in the end?’
In the early summer Lytton moved his books and papers into the garden where he sat all day locked in struggle.
Lytton Strachey to James Strachey, 11 June 1915
‘I’ve been getting into a frantic state with F. Nightingale – working incessantly until my brain spun round and round, and then in its usual dim unexplained way my health went groggy, and yesterday Lady S. arrived.
… the F.N. affair has been much more terrific than I could have expected. I imagined originally that I’d be able to do the whole thing in a fortnight. It’s still not nearly done; and I’m in terror lest after all it should turn out quite illegible – I imagine Eddie Marsh trying to read it and saying afterwards, “It bored me stiff.” I feel there would be no appeal from that.’
Lytton Strachey to Henry Lamb, 13 June 1915
‘I am submerged by Nightingale, which has turned out a fearful task. I’m now within sight of the end, though, I hope.’
Lytton Strachey to Ottoline Morrell, 23 June 1915
‘F. Nightingale has at last been polished off, I’m glad to say. So I’m feeling very gay and chirpy –’
The events of the war gave him the sense of living on a perpetual volcano. He was appalled by the suggestions he read in The Times about the possibility of a coalition Government. Could the rumours be true? His head buzzed with unanswered questions. Why should the Cabinet contemplate such a move? Had everyone come to the conclusion that the war was hopeless without conscription? If that were true, then the country would find itself in a jungle of militarism. Already there was a sinister augury in the riots directed against civilians of Germanic extraction still living in England. The most alarming feature of these incidents had been the conduct of the authorities who made use of them as an excuse for further maltreatment of those miserable people. ‘Doesn’t it all make one want to go and bury oneself somewhere far, far away – somewhere so far away that even the Times will never get to one?’ he asked Ottoline. ‘“Où me cacherai? Fuyons dans la nuit infernale!”’
But worse than all this political uncertainty at home was the awful finality of news from the front. In June, Ferenc Békássy was killed in Bukovina after only two days’ fighting. Two months earlier Rupert Brooke had died. This tragedy affected him probably more than any other: so much of his past was raked up by it. He had felt sure that, in normal circumstances, Brooke’s aggressive malaise would have faded. ‘I feel his state is deplorable,’ he had written three years earlier to Ottoline (22 October 1912), ‘and something ought to be done to bring him back to ordinary cheerful ways of living … I feel it particularly because once when I was very low – in health and spirits – Rupert helped me a great deal, and was very charming. And then besides, how wretched all those quarrels and fatigues are! Such opportunities for delightful intercourse ruined by sheer absurdities! It is too stupid.’
That Rupert should have ended his life with all the old quarrels and intrigues unresolved held a peculiar pathos, and brought home with added force the futility of this war. ‘I suppose by the time you get this you will have seen about Rupert’s death,’ he wrote to Duncan (25 April 1915). ‘James is a good deal shattered, and altogether it’s a grim affair. It was impossible not to like him, impossible not to hope that he might like one again; and now … The meaninglessness of Fate is intolerable; it’s all muddle and futility. After all the pother of those years of living, to effect – simply nothing. It is like a confused tale, just beginning and then broken off for no reason, and for ever. One hardly knows whether to be sorry even. One is just left with a few odd memories – until they too vanish.’
Lytton tried not to discuss the war with anyone. He opened The Times every morning with dread; and in the evenings struggled to immerse himself in books which had little or no association with war – Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, H.G. Wells’s Boon, and The Voyage Out. Had the war contributed to Virginia’s breakdown? He did not know. He saw everything in terms of the individual and felt that he was growing increasingly sensitive, instead of gradually turning, as he once half-humorously predicted, into a solid rock of a man. Yet he could not show his feelings. He used his writing both to obliterate the surrounding horrors and also, indirectly, to make sense of them. But the writing itself was agonizingly slow. ‘The slowness of my work is alarming,’ he had written to Henry while writing ‘Florence Nightingale’ (2 February 1915). ‘I fully intend to do another play when this affair is finished, and after that I daresay a novel – by which time, at the present rate of progress, I shall be 75.’
The novel he never attempted, but a Chekhovian jeu d’esprit, Old Lyttoff, the scene of which was set at Eleanor House, a cottage which Clive and Vanessa had taken, surrounded by farm buildings and a boathouse-studio, near the Sussex village of West Wittering, he composed later that year. It was, he told Bunny Garnett (18 May 1915), ‘a horrible melancholy story, ending with a pistol-shot, of course’.
He was re-reading War and Peace in Constance Garnett’s translation with ever-increasing admiration. ‘It is an amazing work,’ he told Ottoline (21 August 1915), ‘and I really think the best chance of putting a stop to the War would be to make it obligatory for everyone to read it at least once a year. In the meantime I think it ought to be circulated broadcast, though to be sure it would make rather a bulky pamphlet! But, oh dear me! in between whiles, what an ass the poor man makes of himself! “Matter and impertinency mixed”, but luckily there’s a good deal more matter than impertinency.’
Here was a subject that could be turned to anti-war propaganda. Before he was half-way through the novel, he had sounded out the editor of the Edinburgh Review. ‘In a moment of rashness I wrote to Harold Cox, suggesting that I write an article on him [Tolstoy],’ he told Bunny Garnett (7 August 1915). ‘I don’t know whether he’ll accept, but if he does it’ll be a fearful job – rather like writing on God. Have you read “Family Happiness” – in the Ivan Ilytch book? After that, one’s left wondering how anyone can dare to write anything else ever again. And then – one remembers – Dostoievsky!’
As usual, Harold Cox countered Lytton’s proposal With one of his own. Tolstoy, he replied, was out of date. And Lytton, who in the meantime had been reading Aylmer Maude’s biography, experienced some relief at this preposterous decision. ‘I have no patience With a man who decides to commit suicide because he can’t see the object of existence,’ he confided to Bunny Garnett (23 August 1915), ‘and men decides not to because everything becomes clear to him after reading the Gospel according to St Mark. But I suppose one may forgive a good deal to the author of War and Peace.’
The outcome of his negotiations was that Harold Cox commissioned ‘Voltaire and Frederick the Great’, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review that October. It was natural, Lytton argued, for everyone’s attention to be fixed on soldiers and statesmen in time of war, yet there was solace, and perhaps other advantages, to be gained by turning one’s mind to dramas of the past. He offered his nine thousand word essay as an instructive entertainment. In his interpretation, Frederick the Great becomes a one-eyed man who, though observing things close at hand with great clarity, was limited in the perspective that Voltaire, with both eyes open, could command. By showing the most powerful man of action of his day outwitted by the most celebrated writer and philosopher, he hoped to refocus his readers’ minds more optimistically. The present-day realists were not Asquith or Lloyd George, but men like Bertrand Russell and, he hoped, Maynard Keynes. ‘My Voltaire-Frederick article occupies me to the exclusion of all else,’ he reported to Ottoline (21 August 1915), ‘… I feel like a negro slave; whenever I look up from my writing table, I seem to see Mr Harold Cox over my shoulder whirling a cat-o’-nine-tails.’
The atmosphere in the country that summer was oppressive. Rumours of a German invasion were everywhere and women distributed white feathers to men, including farm labourers, who were not in uniform. Against this hostile background Bloomsbury appeared determinedly capricious and irresponsible. Lytton, going down to stay with Clive and Vanessa at Eleanor House, was treated as an old gentleman (author of Old Lytoff) and butted into the sea by Duncan with a fearful cacophony of roars and growls.
Eleanor House had been rented the previous year by Clive’s friend St John (‘Jack’) Hutchinson. He was a strawberry-red ebullient barrister famous for his ‘deadly’ broadmindedness which Clive employed while making his friend’s wife his new mistress. Mary Hutchinson was a cousin of Lytton’s.19 Her silences – so unlike Bloomsbury’s continual storytelling – were considered examples of the highest sophistication. But though Vanessa felt that Mary was better made for fashionable salons than their own ramshackle world, she welcomed her affair with Clive since it gave a reassuring balance to her own affair with Duncan. ‘When Vanessa realized that Duncan loved her and would give her what he could in return,’ wrote David Garnett, ‘she was wildly happy and so was he.’ What she wanted from Duncan was a child to add to her two sons, Julian and Quentin, by Clive. What she feared was that Bunny Garnett’s relentless pursuit of artists’ models and Slade students, especially James Strachey’s future wife Alix Sargant-Florence, would provoke Duncan’s jealousy and imperil their triangular relationship.
At Eleanor House, Lytton could see how sensitively Vanessa had weaved together this relationship. The two parties spent a good deal of the time in the boatshed-studio on Chichester harbour, painting Bunny. ‘I feel as if I had spent years in that shed with you and Duncan,’ Vanessa wrote to him (25 August 1915) after he had left for France with Frankie Birrell. ‘… The life there was quite unlike anything else.’ Duncan’s portrait gave Bunny ‘the beauty of a god’, writes Frances Spalding, ‘Vanessa portrayed a rather inert, red-nosed young man, colouring his lumbering body a luminescent pink.’20 But though this unappetising picture may have conveyed her resentment of Bunny’s physical appeal for Duncan, she was careful to amuse and flatter Bunny, and defer to him when the three of them were together. ‘After all, if you have your nights together it seems to me your days can be spent à trois,’ she cheerfully told Clive (28 April 1915). Only to Roger Fry did she reveal some of her qualms and uncertainties. ‘I can’t pretend I was always happy for it’s impossible not to mind some things some times’ (2 May 1915). Ever since Vanessa turned to Duncan, Roger had felt ‘with a fresh bitterness how utterly I am out of it’ (21 September 1914). It seemed impossible to devise an emotional arrangement that included everyone all the time, though ‘a great deal of a great many kinds of love’21 was a Bloomsbury ideal.
Every now and then Lytton would return to his family in Hampstead. The ‘Temptations of London’ were still very hard for him to resist, and in spite of the sternest resolutions he seldom got to bed before one o’clock each morning. ‘Life here seems to continue in an agreeable manner,’ he wrote to Bunny Garnett from 6 Belsize Park Gardens (14 July 1915), ‘one can’t help feeling rather guilty about it, with these surrounding horrors; but there it is … a beneficent Deity appears to have provided suitably for every moment of the day and night. You need not suppose that I am idling far from it. I am working hard …’
Sometimes, back at The Lacket, he became vulnerable to war pessimism. The spring of 1914 had been idyllic – ‘peonies and poppies in the garden, feathered songsters on every bough, and flannelled Marlborough boys in the middle distance’. But this year it was full of unforeseen terrors. ‘The Spring has set in with all its hatefulness,’ he announced to Henry (6 March 1915). ‘… the birds wake one up at three o’clock in the morning with their incomplete repertories; and Mrs Templeman’s fancy turns to thoughts of – I don’t know what, but certainly something pretty astringent.’ With the summer a continuous firing of guns started up on Salisbury Plain – heavy, massive, booming guns that acted as a perpetual reminder of what, in any case, he could never forget. He likened himself to a solitary desert cactus. ‘I am alone – desolate and destitute – in a country of overhanging thunder clouds and heavy emptiness,’ he wrote to Francis Birrell (August 1915). ‘I’ve got so low that I can hardly bear the thought of anything else, like the prisoners who beg not to be let out of their sentence.’
In the last weeks of his tenancy, he summoned his family and friends. Pippa and Pernel came down to The Lacket, and so did James with his new girlfriend Alix Sargant-Florence, ‘an absolute boy’ from Newnham, as well as Clive Bell, Roger Fry who was reading the poems of Mallarmé (a poet missing from Landmarks in French Literature) and E.M. Forster22 who cut Lytton’s hair crooked, but recovered himself walking through the ‘scabious, harebells and white rabbits’ of the Wiltshire Downs. Almost the last visitor was G.E. Moore. ‘I feel that in my present state he’ll reduce me to tears with his incredible reasonableness,’ Lytton admitted to Francis Birrell (August 1915). ‘When I last saw him I asked him whether the war had made any difference to him. He paused for thought, and then said – “None. Why should it?” I asked whether he wasn’t horrified by it – at any rate at the beginning. But no; he had never felt anything about it at all.’
Lytton had planned to stay on at The Lacket until the beginning of October, but when an opportunity arose for sub-letting the cottage for the last three weeks he seized upon it (being hard up for money), and moved back to London in the second week of September. ‘By a stroke of genius I got Forster to do my packing up at The Lacket,’ he gleefully told James (17 September 1915), ‘and actually to transport the 10 million packages to B.P.G. for me!’
‘I’m feeling some twinges of regret, too, at leaving these remote regions,’ he confessed to Ottoline (21 August 1915), ‘but on the whole I’m not sorry – and anyhow it must be done. Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me
Your
Lytton.’