‘The greatest crime against youth is the crime of accelerating puberty.’
Cecil Reddie
‘We’ll be children seventy years, instead of seven.’
Rupert Brooke to Jacques Raverat (3 November 1909)
‘The past seems to me the only thing we have which is not tinged with cruelty and bitterness … the only pang I feel is the pang of approaching age.’
Lytton Strachey to John Sheppard (17 March 1906)
During the autumn of 1910, two people, who between them were to dominate the next few years of Lytton’s life, emerge into prominence. Lady Ottoline Morrell he had encountered casually some years earlier at Haslemere, where his mother had taken him to see the Berensons. ‘His tall, bending figure and a rather long, cadaverous face, with long nose and a drooping moustache, made him then a not very attractive figure,’ recalled Ottoline, ‘but I found him most sympathetic and everything he said was of interest.’
In Lytton’s correspondence there are occasional references to Ottoline after this meeting which suggest a latent curiosity about her. But it was not until they met one evening as fellow guests of Charles Sanger and his wife Dora, that their friendship began. The Sangers were living near the Strand, high up above the noise of the traffic. Amid the group of young intellectuals Ottoline felt rather out of place. But her uncertainties were quickly dispelled by Lytton. ‘I see him now,’ she wrote of that first evening, ‘sitting in a long basket-chair by the Sangers’s gas-fire leaning forward as he would still do, holding out his long, thin hands to warm. I think he had just come from one of Bernard Shaw’s plays … [I] came home quite excited.’
Some seven years older than Lytton, Ottoline was the daughter of General Sir Arthur Cavendish-Bentinck and his wife, Lady Bolsover. Her childhood had been lonely, lavish and discontented, and she grew up determined to shake off her plush philistine background. First she plunged into evangelical religion; next she persuaded her family to allow her to travel to Italy, absorbing the beauties of art and nature; and then she had fallen miserably in love with Axel Munthe. ‘How much was my fault, how much his fickleness, I never knew,’ she wrote. Returning to England, she decided briefly on an academic career studying logic at the University of St Andrews, but soon abandoned logic and secured her freedom through marrying Philip Morrell, a shadowy picturesque lawyer who became the Liberal member of Parliament for South Oxfordshire.
It was only now, as a married woman, that she was able to find a satisfying outlet for her energies – in the political activities of her husband and, more completely, by entering Bloomsbury. Her introduction to the Bloomsberries came largely through Virginia Stephen, at whose evenings in Fitzroy Square she began to appear. Here she would regularly see Lytton, and though she did not get to know him well, the impressions of him she carried away that were sensitive and acute. ‘Of Lytton Strachey I used to feel most shy,’ she wrote, ‘for he said so little and he seemed to live far away in an atmosphere of rarefied thought.
‘His voice so small and faint, but with definite accentuations and stresses of tone, giving a sense of certainty and distinction, appeared to come from very far away, for his delicate body was raised on legs so immensely long that they seemed endless, and his fingers equally long, like antennae. It was not till I knew him better that I found how agile those long legs could be, and what passion and feeling lay in that delicate body…‘1
It was not long before Ottoline made herself hostess to a circle of writers, artists and politicians. Once a week she would invite them to her home at 44 Bedford Square. In a great double room on the first floor, decked with modern pictures on pale grey walls, yellow taffeta curtains, soft lights and banks of flowers, they would intrigue over their coffee and cigarettes, listen to chamber music or dance in their pullovers and corduroy trousers. ‘You have the most delightful salon in London,’ William Rothenstein assured her. During the four or five years before the war, Lytton was among the most frequent of her guests at these occasions, and also at her more formal dinner-parties.
Ottoline Morrell has been described as an impresario rather than a creator. She ‘has the head of a Medusa’, wrote Virginia on first meeting her in 1909; ‘but she is very simple & innocent in spite of it, & worships the arts.’ Ottoline had seized upon the names and addresses of Virginia’s ‘wonderful friends’ and swept them into her exotic whirlpool. Observing their gyrations from an upper landing in Bedford Square, Henry James put a restraining hand on her arm and cautioned: ‘Look at them. Look at them, dear lady, over the banisters. But don’t go down amongst them.’ He was shocked to hear that she wanted to meet Conrad. ‘But dear lady… he has lived his life at sea … he has never met “civilised women”.’ But Ottoline wanted to live dangerously, gorgeously, on the grand scale. ‘Conventionality is deadness,’ she wrote in her diary. Besides: ‘I was already too far down the stairs to turn back.’ Indeed she had several times fallen into, and risen out of, an anguished yet revitalizing love affair with Augustus John who was to paint a flamboyant portrait of her, like the prow of a ship in full sail over tempestuous seas – which she hung over her mantelpiece. ‘Whatever she may have lacked,’ John testified, ‘it wasn’t courage.’2
What she lacked was moderation. She was a big woman, six feet tall, brilliantly painted (‘You beat us all for colour,’ the painter Henry Lamb acknowledged), and she nursed a passion for exotic clothes. ‘Ottoline was never afraid of looking extraordinary,’ her biographer Miranda Seymour wrote. She used this sensational presentation of herself to attract friends and lovers, and to conceal illness, nerves, lack of self-esteem. In her enormous hats, high-heeled scarlet shoes, voluminous pink Turkish trousers, she became a creation of fantasy. ‘She gave me a complete mental reorientation,’ wrote Aldous Huxley. Virginia was so overcome that ‘I really felt as if I’d suddenly got into the sea, and heard the mermaids floating on their rocks.’ To Gertrude Stein she seemed like a ‘marvellous female version of Disraeli’; to Henry James she appeared ‘like some gorgeous heraldic creature, – a Gryphon perhaps or a Dragon Volant!’ Her head, covered with masses of dark Venetian curls and uplifted as if scenting the air for scandal, appeared with its powdered cheeks, baronial nose and long jutting chin, to have been artificially attached to her tall and stately body. It was her ‘distinctive desire’, she declared, to live her life ‘on the same plane as poetry and music’. She was determined to infiltrate the lives of these artists and intellectuals who turned up at her parties, share their ‘experiences of the soul’, perform as their ministering angel, femme inspiratrice, lover, champion.
Needing to help them, she gate-crashed into their world with imperious directness. Overcoming her fastidiousness, loudly sucking and crunching between her prominent equine teeth a succession of bull’s-eye peppermints, she would subject some of the shyer poets and more inarticulate painters to a series of questions concerning their work and the specific details of their love-affairs. ‘M-m-m. Does your friend have no love-life?’ she once complained in her deep drawling voice to a poet who had brought some particularly reticent friend to tea. Sometimes, intolerant of delay, and despite little enthusiasm for sex, she would supply the missing love affair herself. ‘Loving you is like loving a red-hot poker,’ Bertrand Russell was to cry out in 1912, ‘which is a worse bedfellow than even Lytton’s umbrella: every caress brings on agony.’ Many of her friendships exploded into extravagant quarrels, in the aftermath of which she would see herself caricatured in her late friend’s next novel – as Priscilla Wimbush in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Lady Septugesima Goodley in Osbert Sitwell’s Triple Fugue, or Hermione Roddice in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love – or even perhaps as Lady Chatterley herself.
In Lytton, Ottoline recognized someone who could help her unpick the lock to the writers’ secret chamber. She was also, in some respects, well-suited to act as Lytton’s confidante and to give him encouragement. ‘Ottoline has moved men’s imaginations,’ stated D.H. Lawrence, ‘and mat’s perhaps the most a woman can do.’ Certainly she moved Lytton’s imagination. He found her alternately exhilarating and embarrassing. She exercised to perfection Bloomsbury’s methods of interleaving affection with malice, and was transformed in Lytton’s letters, Virginia’s diaries, Augustus’s portraits, into an exotic illusion reflecting their own heightened moods and needs.
It was at her parties in Bedford Square that Lytton now renewed his acquaintance and began to develop a friendship with another of Ottoline’s protégés, Henry Lamb. Lamb had been educated at Manchester where his father was Professor of Mathematics at the university. He himself wished to be an artist, but his father would not hear of this, and a compromise had been reached whereby Henry agreed to study at medical school. Encouraged by his friend Francis Dodd,3 he had nevertheless persisted in drawing in his spare time, and several of his pictures shown at the Manchester City Art Gallery had been praised by critics. But it was not until he met a dazzling young student at the University Ball in the summer of 1905 that he decided to throw up his studies and abscond with her to London. Euphemia, as he called her (Nina Forrest was her actual name), seemed the bohemian ideal of an artist’s mistress-model, with a natural sense of comedy and adventure. She lived through men, many of whom found her charming figure and husky voice, her oval face and honey-coloured hair, pneumatically memorable.
Henry and Euphemia were a spectacular pair when they came to London that summer. Lytton’s interest in Henry had been roused by his elder brother Walter who spoke tantalizingly of his beauty. Soon Henry joined Vanessa’s Friday Club (so did Euphemia ‘to the indignation of the more strait-laced members’) and was invited to Gordon Square where Lytton first set eyes on him. ‘He’s run away from Manchester, become an artist, and grown side-whiskers,’ he reported to Leonard Woolf (October 1905). ‘I didn’t speak to him, but wanted to, because he really looked amazing, though of course very very bad.’
Lytton had no opportunity of getting to know him then, since Henry suddenly married Euphemia and together they eloped to Paris where he embarked upon his artistic training and ‘amatory wanderings’ in company with Augustus John. These were crucial years in his life, and Lytton used occasionally to hear something of them from Duncan. ‘That Lamb family sickens me and that man John,’ he wrote (7 April 1907), ‘I’m convinced now he’s a bad lot.’ ‘What a “warning”! as the Clergy say,’ Lytton replied (12 April 1907). ‘When I think of him, I often feel that the only thing to do is to chuck up everything and make a dash for some such safe secluded office-stool as is pressed by dear Maynard’s happy bottom.’ Henry was largely overshadowed by the figure of John. ‘I should have been Augustus John,’ he was reported to have said. But the comparison often vexed his spirit. While Augustus commandeered Euphemia (whom he rechristened ‘Lobelia’), Henry fell long-lastingly in love with Augustus’s Dorelia. It was the end of his marriage, though his divorce from Euphemia did not come through for another twenty years.4
According to John’s biographer, Henry took his apprenticeship to Augustus very seriously. ‘He let his hair grow long; he failed to shave; he fastened on gold ear-rings … With his hypnotic deep-blue eyes he fascinated men and women alike, and his entrance into any gathering was almost as striking as that of his master.’ ‘He is no ordinary personage and has the divine mark on his brow,’ Augustus had assured Ottoline (20 September 1908). What better person was there than this brilliant understudy to fill Augustus’s role in the theatre of Ottoline’s romantic life? After his return to London in 1909, Dorelia had introduced Henry to Ottoline at Augustus’s old studio in Fitzroy Street, and by the spring of 1910 she had fallen for him. ‘It was perhaps a half maternal instinct that pushed me towards this twisted and interesting figure,’ Ottoline wrote. Yet he was wonderfully attractive, sometimes like ‘a vision of Blake’, sometimes a version of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel. ‘I was in love with him,’ she testified at the end of her life. But ‘all his heart is given to Dorelia’ (May 1910).
At first Lytton seems to have hardly differentiated between their various attractions. ‘Ottoline has vanished to her cottage, but tomorrow she begins her parties again, and I shall drag myself there if I can,’ he wrote to Duncan (4 April 1910). ‘My last view of her was at a dim evening party full of virgins given by the Russells in a furnished flat. I was feeling dreadfully bored when I suddenly looked up and saw her entering with Henry. I was never so astonished, and didn’t know which I was in love with most. As to her, though, mere seems very little doubt. She carried him off to the country with her under my very nose, and I was left wishing that Dutch William and his friends had never come to England.’5
Eight months later Lytton himself was invited to stay at Peppard, Ottoline’s cottage near Henley-on-Thames. One Sunday in October, they had met at a tea-party given at Newnham by Jane Harrison. Ottoline, half-laughingly, suggested that Lytton should come and visit her, adding that Henry would be the other guest. Lytton appeared to ponder this suggestion, drifted away, then came back to ask: ‘Do you really mean me to come to Peppard?’ ‘Of course I do,’ replied Ottoline, all at once dreading the responsibility of entertaining him at her home. So it was settled.
Away from the fogs of London and the noisy General Election fever that autumn, enjoyment came spontaneously to Lytton. He could find no fault with anything. He ate enormous meals, went for enormous walks through the beech-woods (where Henry had sketched Ottoline naked among the leaves), and had his portrait painted indoors by Henry, who had set up his studio in the stables. ‘This is altogether exquisite,’ he wrote rhapsodically to his brother James (18 November 1910), who was suspicious of this new attachment.
‘Such comforts and cushions as you never saw! Henry, too, more divine than ever, plump now (but not bald) and mellowed in the radiance of Ottoline. The ménage is strange. Fortunately Philip is absent, electioneering in Burnley.6 Henry sleeps at a pub on the other side of the green, and paints in a coach-house rigged up by Ottoline with silks and stoves, a little further along the road. She seems quite gone – quite! And on the whole I don’t wonder …
… I’m afraid I have now been permanently spoilt for country cottage life. How does the woman do it? Every other ménage must now seem sordid…
Ah! She is a strange tragic figure. (And such mysteries!)’
It was during these weeks at Peppard that the pattern of their triangular relationship was fixed and defined. Both Ottoline and Lytton had fallen uncompetitively in love with Henry who returned their attentions with a mixture of gratitude and exasperation. Lytton’s feelings are easily enough accounted for: Henry had now come to occupy in his scheme of things the position recently vacated by Duncan. ‘That he’s a genius,’ he wrote to James (30 November 1911), ‘there can be no doubt, but whether a good or an evil one?’ Such romantic speculation excited Lytton, who, half-cherishing the role of unrequited lover, was still drawn to people whom he instinctively felt might use him badly. Henry was heterosexual and a prey to aggressive moods of depression. ‘I cannot answer to his temper,’ Ottoline had written to Lytton when renewing her invitation to Peppard (16 November 1910). Henry often felt himself to be the victim of dark powers, but ‘I feel sure you could tame me & that with your help I could overcome myself’, he told Ottoline, who nevertheless observed his temper to be growing more unreasonable. ‘The more I suffered from it the more he delighted in tormenting me.’
All this fascinated Lytton who was not so sure he wanted Henry tamed. E.M. Forster was to describe them ‘bounding like kittens in the corridor’ of Covent Garden one night and attracting much attention. Sometimes Lytton would think of Henry as a cat which he loved to stroke and which would come with a soft pad ‘onto my thigh – oh so soft and caressing! –and then – the sudden stiffening and the claws starting out and drawing blood right through my trousers.’ It made him an unpredictable lover. ‘He is the most delightful companion in the world,’ Lytton confided to James (11 November 1911), ‘– and the most unpleasant.’
Henry treated Ottoline as a creative flame and Lytton as a prize-winning model. ‘When are you coming to sit?’ he constantly asked them. But he was a slow impatient worker. ‘Must I wait for the age & fame of a Henry James?’ he demanded in one of his intemperate letters to Ottoline. After working hard and long, interrupted by sickness and with mounting frustration, he blamed the dwindling creative flame, the feeble sitter, for his disappointments. ‘None of my friends have any really imaginative affection for me, they all love me lazily & after their own halting fancy.’
But Ottoline was optimistic that she could make Henry a better person. ‘I believe there is something in our friendship, something that unites our souls,’ she wrote (29–30 January 1911). Nevertheless, for the time being, he ‘certainly cares more for L[ytton].’ Lytton’s fancy was much tickled by Henry’s bawdiness. Both of them had what Ottoline called ‘a love of indecency’ mixed with their literary and artistic interests, and possibly connected to their unruly digestions and what Maynard referred to as the regular visits from ‘Inspector Piles’. Their correspondence and conversation were full of balls and buggeries, farting and phalluses. ‘Fart for me under the nose of Maynard,’ Henry implored Lytton. But it was less amusing when he metaphorically farted under Lytton’s nose. While Ottoline believed, in the words of her biographer Sandra Jobson Darroch, that Lytton ‘might yet be saved for the female sex’, Lytton himself was convinced that Henry, with his angelic smile, his feminine skin and moments of incredible charm, could be converted to bisexuality. What did all this bawdiness mean if it didn’t issue into action? It was provoking to find out that Henry was writing to Ottoline, ‘I burn to embrace you and cover all your body with mine,’ while he was waiting in vain for such letters himself and only allowed an occasional tepid embrace. Henry, it was true, liked to give him descriptions of French boys looking like ripe plums, silent and flirtatious, and photos of the Bluecoat Boys with their yellow stockings at Christ’s Hospital, or send him postcards of ‘that lovely serpent’ Nijinsky and the young Prince George inscribed, ‘With love from me & George’. All this, of course, was no more than teasing and when Lytton’s advances grew bolder he was abruptly told to ‘cork up your arse’. Yet he did not give up hope.
Henry was suspicious of the Bloomsbury Group, though he seemed to have a soft spot for Saxon Sydney-Turner (who at least never interrupted him). ‘I get suffocated by those people,’ he complained, ‘why must they go on talking about their bloody little group.’ In particular he was hostile to what he called ‘the false aesthetics of the Clive–Fry coalition,’ feeling ostracized as Matthew Smith occasionally (and Wyndham Lewis permanently) were to feel. ‘I hear Duncan Grant’s very famous in London,’ he wrote from France in 1911, ‘& Clive Bell declares him the greatest artist since Cézanne.’ More important, from Lytton’s point of view, Henry did not value human relationships. ‘His state of mind baffles me,’ Lytton admitted to James (August 1911). ‘He seems to be completely indifferent to everything that concerns me, and yet expects me to be interested in every trifle of his life.’
Nevertheless Henry’s appeal was potent. He offered both Ottoline and Lytton admission into a superbly bohemian set – the world of all-night Chelsea parties with exorbitant artists such as Augustus John and the Russian mosaicist Boris Anrep,7 both of whom assumed in Lytton’s mind the proportions of myths. Henry was, too, a man of salamander-like good looks, pale, slim, with long flowing hair, and a mesmerizing Pan-like beauty. Ottoline, so close to the pair of them, saw clearly how Lytton was being tossed about on a sea of emotion.
‘Lamb enjoyed leading him forth into new fields of experience. They would sit in pubs and mix with “the lower orders”, as Lytton called them, picking up strange friends. And so great is the imitative instinct in the human breast that he even altered his appearance to please Lamb, wearing his hair very long, like Augustus John … He discarded collars and wore only a rich purple silk scarf round his neck, fastened with an intaglio pin. They were a surprising pair as they walked the streets of London, as Lamb wore clothes of the 1860 period with a square brown hat, Lytton a large black Carlyle felt hat and a black Italian cape.’8
Lytton’s relationship with Ottoline was as picturesque but psychologically less straightforward. A rumour spread through Bloomsbury that he was romantically inclined towards her – a piece of gossip which Virginia, who pictured the great hostess when absent from Lytton as ‘languishing like a sick and yellow alligator’, helped to popularize. There were stories that appeared to give body to these rumours. Henry, it was said, had come upon them fixed in a fierce embrace, witnessing when they sprang apart, blood flowing down Lytton’s lip. But then this might have become confused with the occasion when Lytton found Henry and Ottoline embracing, and Ottoline turned to explain: ‘I was just giving Henry an aspirin.’ In any event, it was all good pseudo-robust Elizabethan stuff, more stagey than real and with curious transvestite casting. ‘I often wish I was a man,’ Ottoline confessed to Lytton, ‘for then we should get on so wonderfully.’ But since Ottoline was the more masculine of the two, they did get on curiously well. She belonged to that breed of overruling imperious women – a breed which included Florence Nightingale, Lady Hester Stanhope, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth – that lit up Lytton’s androgynous imagination.
‘What a pity one can’t now and then change sexes!’ Lytton had once written to Clive (21 October 1909). ‘I should love to be a dowager Countess.’ In the company of Ottoline, this desire could partly be gratified. Ottoline’s aristocratic air appealed to his eighteenth-century respect for noble birth. She was his ‘plus chére des Marquises’; he was her ‘dear Monsieur Le Comte’. Together they soared high above middle-class rules and regularities. Sometimes they would step outside the drawing-room to play at tennis in Bedford Square gardens, and their huge slow lobs over the net were accompanied by such convulsive shrieks of laughter that crowds of passers-by would assemble and stare.
By themselves they were naturally giggling and easy-going, one hungering after secret confidences, the other so eager to impart them. But introduce a third person and their friendship was made subject to uneasy strain. To Lytton’s eyes, Ottoline would then change from a beautiful, stately woman of genuine artistic sensibility into a bespangled monstrosity, with a hat (as Desmond MacCarthy noted) ‘like a crimson tea cosy trimmed with hedgehogs’. Once, coming from a particularly sportive tête-à-tête with Ottoline, he began to extol her virtues to Duncan and Vanessa. ‘She was majestic!’ he cried. ‘She was splendid! Magnificent! Sublime!’ But when Duncan and Vanessa demurred at so excessive praise, he quickly added a string of qualifications to dim the opening eulogy. He mistrusted Ottoline’s often-denied talent for gossip, and never used her as his sole confidante, apportioning the part between her and his brother James, who was less stimulating but more reliable and who deplored Ottoline’s frivolous influence on Lytton.
Lytton had gone to Peppard expecting to stay a few days; but the atmosphere of so many pugs, cushions and erections held him there, the days dissolved into weeks, November slipped by and December came –and still he lingered on. Some of this time he spent reading up for Landmarks in French Literature, and also, in French, the novels of Dostoyevsky, to which he had been introduced by Lamb.9 He also diligently transcribed his poems in a manuscript book, beautifully bound in orange-vermilion vellum, with which Ottoline had presented him. Towards the end of November she went off to help her husband’s electioneering in Lancashire, and Lytton was left with Henry, dressed in Cossack boots and an amazing maroon suit, as his sole companion. Almost daily they wrote affectionate letters, telling Ottoline of all they were doing and how Henry’s portrait of Lytton was progressing. ‘He sits admirably & doesn’t mind. But we are inclined to talk too much,’ Henry wrote. ‘… I have not had such stirring conversation since the early days when I had just left school.’
As for Lytton, these weeks at Peppard, he told Ottoline, had been like ‘an interlude from the Arabian nights’. He felt that he was on the brink of something curiously enticing. ‘My existence here’, he told James (30 November 1910), ‘is something new. I tremble to think what an “idyll” it might be, if only – and even as it is – in fact I really have no notion what it is. It seems to me more like Country House Life in the thirties than anything else. I feel like George Sand – shall I write an Indiana?’
Shortly before Christmas, Lytton left England and set off for the South of France to stay with the Bussys. At Roquebrune he hoped to avoid the hardships of an English winter and press ahead with his writing of Landmarks in French Literature.
Now that he was in France, England seemed infinitely desirable. ‘You can imagine how I long to be at Peppard,’ he wrote to Henry (21 February 1911), ‘and rejoice in the honest warmth of an English winter – it all sounds so heavenly that I hardly dare to think of it.’ He consoled himself with the French translations of Dostoyevsky, reading L’Idiot, Le Crime et le châtiment and Les Possédés which he liked best of all. ‘I’m as converted as you could wish about Dostoievsky,’ he wrote in another letter to Henry (5 January 1911). ‘The last half of Vol 2 of the Possédés quite knocked me over. Colossal! Colossal! It’s mere ramping and soaring genius, and all possible objections are reduced to absurdity. I shudder to think that I might never have read it, and I never should if it hadn’t been for you …’
At the beginning of March the Bussys left for Sicily, and Lytton’s sister Marjorie came down to look after him and his child niece, Jane Simone. Life went on much as before, ‘a mere blank of utter nothingness punctuated by a few horrors and rages here and there’. He was getting on with his book, and had completed the chapters on ‘Louis XIV’ and ‘The Eighteenth Century’. ‘I am in an almost complete stupor,’ he admitted to James. But out of this struggle to advance was born a greater resilience. ‘I feel quite reckless,’ he added, ‘– more I think than I ever have before. It came to me quite suddenly the other day – how little anything matters … and then that really, after all, one has a confidence.’
Early that April, Lytton returned to England. After a week with Henry at the Dog Inn, near Henley, he went on with James to Corfe Castle in Dorset, putting up at the Greyhound Inn. The evening of their arrival, a Friday, he complained of being ill. James took his temperature with the thermometer he always carried and saw that it was 104. Next day, to the general relief, an attack of mumps declared itself. James looked after him to start with, but had to go back to the Spectator on Tuesday morning. So Oliver Strachey, having just returned from India on short leave, was ordered to take his place at Corfe. He was furious. To save money they were obliged to transmigrate from the relatively comfortable Greyhound to the poky little Castle Inn, cramming themselves into a small closed carriage piled high and wide with luggage, and balancing every sort of treasured object in their arms – oil cans, ink bottles, safety-razors and Russian novels. Because of the risk of infection, Lytton was entombed in his bedroom at the Castle Inn for almost three weeks, attended by Oliver who, very kind and incompetent, endeavoured to look after him without succumbing to the disease himself. While he sat downstairs writing love-letters to his fiancée Ray Costelloe, upstairs in his bed Lytton lay composing love-letters to his ‘très-cher serpent’ Henry, who had gone off to stay with Boris Anrep in Paris, and letters about love-letters to his ‘Chère Marquise’ Ottoline. The only book he had to read was a French edition of Dostoyevsky’s letters which tended to deepen the gloom of his quarantine. ‘For one thing his [Dostoyevsky’s] portrait – most infinitely abattu – with eyes – oh! – but almost, I thought, as if he had been too much crushed – which was also the effect of the letters,’ he reported to Henry (4 May 1911).
‘His life was perfect hell till six years before he died; and his letters are almost entirely occupied with begging for money – always “pour l’amour du Christ”. At last whenever you see Christ on a page you skip it because you know that an appeal for 125 roubles will follow. It’s deplorable and it’s impossible not to have rather a lower opinion of the man. He was not at all souterrain – very simple and at all times silly. On Christianity he writes the most hopeless stuff.’
There were occasional visits from friends. Clive Bell came for a day and waved up cautiously at the invalid’s window; and Ottoline blew an elaborate kiss to him from the roadway and he responded ‘out of the window, Romeo fashion’ as she travelled up to London. ‘It was very touching,’ he commented, ‘but insubstantial.’ He was experiencing difficulty in catching up on all the winter’s gossip. While he had been away in France, Ottoline had started two new affaires: a passionate and demanding one with Bertrand Russell who, finding ‘to my amazement that I loved her deeply’, was pressing her to leave Philip and had already told his wife Alys, who threatened to cite Ottoline in divorce proceedings; and a brief but awkward entanglement with Roger Fry who, emerging ‘amazed and wondering’ out of the hopelessness following his wife’s confinement in a mental hospital, was now reacting in some panic as he formed a deeper emotional commitment to Vanessa Bell. Philip Morrell and Clive Bell (who had equipped himself with a pre-marital lover, the luxurious Mrs Raven-Hill, as his post-marital mistress) were the complaisant husbands in these affaires. But Alys’s brother Logan Pearsall Smith, and Vanessa’s sister Virginia, were to flavour the well of gossip with many fantastical stories.
It was during these weeks of illness at Corfe that Lytton grew his beard.10 At first he was baffled as to its merits. Did it, for example, make him appear too ridiculous? ‘The beard question is becoming rather dubious – but you shall judge,’ he wrote to Ottoline. She, and all his friends, begged him to keep it; and soon enough he agreed to do so. ‘The chief news is that I have grown a beard,’ he informed his mother (9 May 1911). ‘Its colour is much admired, and it is generally considered extremely effective, though some ill-bred persons have been observed to laugh. It is a red-brown of the most approved tint, and makes me look like a French decadent poet – or something equally distinguished.’
The growing of this celebrated beard was one sign of Lytton’s more challenging attitude to life. Though he still remained outwardly diffident, and tended to exaggerate his setbacks, his self-assurance was growing. Under the influence of his brother James he had become more interested in politics, and was in the gradual process of rejecting his romantic Conservatism in favour of a more combative left-wing position. ‘Have you noticed there are three classes of human beings?’ he asked Sheppard, ‘– the rich, the poor and the intelligent. When the poor are serious they’re religious, when the intelligent are serious they’re artistic, but the rich are never serious at all.’
Something of this changing attitude was also implicit in a paper he delivered to the Apostles (20 May 1911) at Cambridge, where he and Oliver went after leaving Corfe Castle. Near the opening, he confesses his sentimentalism and the rather reactionary form it took: ‘I even have a secret admiration for the typical Englishman – the strong silent man with the deep emotion – too deep – oh! far too deep ever to come to the surface; I can’t help being impressed.’ Victorian conventions seemed to have been slipping in the seven years since he had come down from Trinity. But with expanding freedom came a somewhat prosaic world. Now that the bishops had started going to the music halls the community seemed to be faced not with a growing sense of humour among the clergy, but an increasing solemnity on the variety stage. The managers of those places had taken to writing to newspapers to assure everyone that no risqué jokes were to be heard in their establishments – one could only hope they were not telling the truth. Again, eminent literary critics were pulling long faces over the more outspoken classics, wondering how Boccaccio or even Tristram Shandy could be so immoral. In Lytton’s view it was high time that some light-hearted jester shook his cap and bells a little in the faces of such intruding Malvolios.
Lytton’s manner, as well as his appearance and his political opinions, was also undergoing some change. The long body, which had for years proved such an embarrassment to him, was more coordinated, his ungainliness manipulated into part of a stylized personality. His scarecrow figure too was in the process of being shaped by the same alchemy into strange symmetrical proportions, radiating a spidery fascination. Of course, some people – Angelica Homere was one – had always found his looks compelling; others – Wyndham Lewis for example – would always be revolted by him. From the beginning, Lytton had sadly accepted this latter view. Now he did so less readily. To some extent, his external appearance had changed; but there were also internal changes to account for his more optimistic attitude and to influence the way in which others regarded him. He was also better able to reflect embarrassment back on others. Shortly after his beard had grown to its full magnificence, a lady came up and asked him: ‘Oh, Mr Strachey, tell me, when you go to bed, do you keep that beard of yours inside or outside the blankets?’ Using his most insinuating voice – which always reminded Desmond MacCarthy of the gnat in Alice in Wonderland – he piped: ‘Won’t you come and see?’ At another party, the conversation turned to the question of which great historical character the people there would most have liked to go to bed with. The men voted for Cleopatra, Kitty Fisher and so on, but when it came to Lytton’s turn he declared shrilly: ‘Julius Caesar!’
Ottoline, whom he visited at Peppard for a few days that June, noticed a change in him.
‘He was franker with me than he used to be and I was less timid and nervous with him than I had been …
It is hard to realize that this tall, solemn, lanky, cadaverous man, with his rather unpleasant appearance, looking indeed far older than he is, is a combination of frivolity, love of indecency, mixed up with rigid intellectual integrity…
The steeds that draw the chariot of his life seem to be curiously ill-matched: one so dignified and serious, and so high-stepping, and of the old English breed, so well versed in the manners and traditions of the last four centuries; the other so feminine, nervous, hysterical, shying at imaginary obstacles, delighting in being patted and flattered and fed with sugar.
In general he takes little part, rather lying in wait than giving himself away – only occasionally interrupting, throwing in a rational and often surprisingly witty remark. But tête-à-tête he is a charming companion –his feminine quality making him sympathetic and interested in the small things of life, and with those who know him well he is very affectionate.’11
Leaving Peppard, Lytton returned once more to Cambridge, where he installed himself, with Oliver, in lodgings at 12 King’s Parade, and the history of French Literature advanced another chapter. At Cambridge he was ‘a different & happier person’, Henry had noticed, ‘calculating’, as his brother Walter Lamb put it, ‘the capacities of the well-dressed genitals around him’. From the vantage point of a punt near King’s, ‘propped up by the innumerable cushions, and surrounded by innumerable books which we never read’, he inspected the parade of undergraduates flocking down to the bank, smoking their cigarettes and eating langues-de-chat as they sat down, row upon row, on the grass in the sunshine. The willows, the parasols, the blue skies, the white flannels all conspired to make a perfect décor for this pastoral court. Then, at weekends he would tear himself away to visit Lady Lytton at Knebworth, or, avoiding ‘the terrors of the Coronation’, George Mallory at Charterhouse, or, once again, his ‘Chère Marquise’ at Peppard, ‘where it was all very idyllic, dining out in the moonlight with purple candle-sticks’.
But Cambridge, though delightful, was not conducive to hard work. At the beginning of July, Oliver having left to marry Ray Costelloe, Lytton decided to travel down to Becky House, near Manaton in Devon, which Rupert Brooke had recommended for its inexpensive peace and comfort. A largish country cottage, set in a rocky Dartmoor valley next to a famous Victorian waterfall and small rushing stream, it was occupied by a labourer and his family who let lodgings – a large sitting-room and a few bedrooms. Here he settled down to complete the final chapters of Landmarks in French Literature, working for five or six hours every day, and describing himself as ‘extraordinarily healthy and industrious’. It confirmed what he instinctively believed: that the country was the place for him in which to live and work.
While at Becky House, he was joined for a week by two old friends, G.E. Moore and Leonard Woolf who had at last returned from Ceylon, his ascetic features burnt up by the tropical sun. ‘He has a long, drawn, weather-beaten face,’ Lytton rather morosely observed in a letter to James (15 June 1911), ‘and speaks (when he does) very slowly, like one re-risen from the tomb – or rather on the other side of it.’
So much had happened in the six or seven years since they had been really close. Ottoline, like some theatrical impresario, had opened up the gorgeous world of smart dinner-parties and country house weekends; Henry had introduced him to the rough-and-tumble life of Augustus John with his bohemian crew of jokers and drinkers, gypsies and magicians; and through Rupert he was glimpsing a sportive group of nymphs and sylphs and dryads, bright innocent creatures, all children of the sun, who camped in the fields at night and bathed naked in the rivers. In comparison with all this, his old Apostolic friends seemed dull. Apprehensively he wrote off to Henry (5 July 1911): ‘My heart quails at the thought of their conversation. Oh dear! How things must have changed since the days when I thought it was the absolute height of pleasure and glory! But now there is something cold and dry – I don’t know what – the curiosity of existence seems to vanish with them; it’s not that I don’t like them – only that they are under the sea.’
But Moore and Woolf turned out to be less submarine than he feared. While his life and personality had been changing, theirs had not been static. ‘I find them – oh! quite extraordinarily nice – but… if they are no longer under the sea, perhaps it’s I who am somewhere else now – in the clouds, perhaps,’ he told Henry (14 July 1911); ‘at any rate I find myself dreaming of more congenial company. However we are very happy, and go out for walks, and discuss this and that, and do a great deal of work.’ It was, in fact, Leonard Woolf to whom this Apostolic atmosphere seemed most foreign. ‘I am beyond flux -I really am on a fixed course probably to damnation or beyond it,’ he had written to Lytton shortly before sailing back. ‘I expect you when we meet to pass me by because of it.’ Everything in England was new to him in 1911 – the Post-Impressionist pictures, the Russian ballet, the theatre of Shaw and Granville Barker. After his deliberate shutting-down of intellectual curiosity in Ceylon, he feared the astringent company of Moore and Lytton in this bleak Dartmoor cottage. ‘In the morning Lytton used to sit in one part of the garden, with a panama on his head, groaning from time to time over his literary constipation as he wrote Landmarks in French Literature for the Home University Library,’ he recalled; ‘in another part of the garden sat Moore, a panama hat on his head, his forehead wet with perspiration, sighing from time to time over his literary constipation as he wrote Ethics for the Home University Library. Lytton used to complain that he was mentally constipated because nothing at all came into his mind, which remained as blank as the paper on his knees. Moore on the contrary said that his mental constipation came from the fact that as soon as he had written down a sentence, he saw that it was just false or that it required a sentence to qualify the qualification.’
In the afternoons the three of them went for long walks across Dartmoor, and Moore, who had a passion for bathing, would strip off his clothes whenever they came to one of the cold black rock pools, and plunge in. ‘Nothing would induce Lytton to get into water in the open air,’ Leonard records, ‘and so I felt I must follow Moore’s example. It nearly killed me.’ In the evenings, ‘Moore sang Adelaide, Schubert songs, or the Dichterliebe, or he played Beethoven sonatas. It was good to see again the sweat pour down his face and hear the passion in the music as he played the Waldstein or the Hammerklavier sonata.’12
By the middle of August Landmarks in French Literature was nearly completed. ‘I’ve only seven more centuries to do,’ Lytton boasted to James (22 August 1911). He had moved to Woodstock Road, Gilbert Murray’s house in Oxford, which Lady Strachey had taken for the month and where Pippa typed out the earlier chapters for him. He hoped to complete the book by the end of the month, but failing in this, fled back to the solitude of Becky House for another fortnight to finish off Chapter VII – ‘The Age of Criticism’ – and his short ‘Conclusion’. By 10 September he was able to report to Maynard: ‘I am feeling very lazy, as I’ve just this minute finished my poor book, after a solid two months of perpetual labour; and the thought of more such inventions is not attractive.’
*
Far more attractive was the thought of Rupert’s radiant young friends, especially the remarkable-looking progressively educated Olivier sisters, all fearless tree-climbers, mad moonlight divers, elusive creatures of the woods. Rupert loved them all – Bryn, Noel, Marjorie and Daphne, the four daughters of Sir Sydney Olivier, an aristocratic Fabian now Governor of Jamaica. But particularly he loved Noel. He loved her idealistically, sexlessly, stereotypically, as one might love a wild rose or the setting sun. With many evasions Rupert kept this outdoor life, with its virginal assemblies of ageless boys and girls, separate from his brotherly congregations with the pipe-smoking Apostles, as he had earlier separated the school playing fields from his parents’ home in School House at Rugby. He led a double life: that of a schoolboy hero with the Neo-Pagans; and a college pin-up with the Apostles. Both had their appeal, for both wanted to prolong youth. In his Neo-Pagan world the educationist ideals of Edward Carpenter and J.H. Badley seemed to have reached perfection. All the girls were honorary boys and, like Polixenes and Leontes,
… thought that there was no more behind
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be a boy eternal.
It was a life of everlasting skies and eternal afternoons, camping and canoeing, sun-filled, free-floating, a fairy tale of innocence, immune from adult complexities. The Apostles too dreaded middle-age and the loss of potent youth. But they stopped the clock at later than ten-to-three, recognizing much of what was suppressed under ‘innocence’, ‘purity’ and the ‘respectability’ of parents, and in the darker hours of the evening celebrating its release in a new marriage of male intellect and sex.
It was James Strachey who was largely responsible for bringing these two milieux together. He had procured Rupert for the Apostles, but never succeeded in going to bed with him. He followed him everywhere, even into the fields and woods and round the evening fires and lake-side camps of his other friends. He appeared to them a pitiable object, indeed hardly a man at all with his unathletic ailments and awkwardnesses. ‘He had the face of a baby and the expression of an old man,’ wrote one of the group, Ka Cox; ‘he seemed to take no pleasure or interest in material life or the physical world, and to exist only in the realms of pure intellect.’ Nevertheless they grew curious about the catlike James, while he stirred the curiosity of Lytton and Virginia and Maynard when he came back with tales from Rupert’s Neo-Pagan tents, like a miniature arcadian version of the German youth movement.
The first mingling of these two communities took place in August and September 1911 in a meadow on the bank of the Teign, not far from Becky House where Lytton was staying. Virginia strode down to sample camp life, ‘sleeping on the ground, walking at dawn, and swimming in a river’; the economist Gerald Shove spent the night there in his suit and trilby hat, and James lay wretchedly awake under a gorse bush wrapped in a blanket. Maynard also turned up, seeking a casual substitute for Duncan that would be safer than his rough trade (‘Auburn haired of Marble Arch’, ‘Lift boy of Vauxhall’) in London. He found no one, though ‘camp life suits me very well’, he reported to his father. ‘The hard ground, a morning bathe, the absence of flesh food, and no chairs, don’t make me nearly so ill as one would suppose.’ But Lytton would not risk it. Patrolling nearby in his knickerbockers and tam-o’-shanter like ‘Christ on a walking tour’, he concluded that the ground was too awkwardly shaped for relaxation.
After eighteen days of camping, a strange tension shimmered in the air round Rupert. He drove it off with long scrambling walks over the rocks and wet green boulders round Becky Falls, slitheringly pursued by James together with Lytton whose leg muscles hardened into granite, causing him exquisite pain.
There was more tension at Studland, in Dorset, where Lytton next went to stay with Clive and Vanessa, who had recently suffered a miscarriage. Roger Fry was also there, like some medieval saint in attendance upon Vanessa who seemed unconscious of everyone. ‘Are you changing with all the rest of the world?’ she had written to ask Lytton, the previous month. Their undiagnosed changes, during this glorious hot summer, were painful. Ottoline had retired to Marienbad that August seeking a cure for her persistent headaches – she was suffering from what was called ‘neuritis’ and had been ordered to sleep. On Roger’s advice, Vanessa had been put under the care of a controversial psychiatrist or ‘nerve specialist’, Dr Maurice Craig of Harley Street, who prescribed six months of relaxation and good food. Helen Fry was now permanently confined to an asylum for an illness which after her death was found to have been caused by ossification of a cartilage. Virginia, too, had spent part of the previous year in a ‘polite madhouse for female lunatics’, fearful that she might become insane like her poor mad half-sister Laura, ‘Her Ladyship of the Lake’, who had lived apart in die family home, the symbol of Victorian terra incognita. Even now Virginia was ravaged with headaches, and seemed to Lytton so shrivelled up that she had hardly any real being. The lease of Fitzroy Square was coming to an end, and she planned to take a larger house (it would be 38 Brunswick Square) where she and Adrian could occupy separate floors, where Duncan could have a studio, Maynard a pied-à-terre and, at thirty-five shillings a week, Leonard might rent the attic. It was unconventional, but seemed to promise a happier way of life. Clive had hardly forgiven her for her momentary engagement to Lytton whom he wanted to forbid entry to Gordon Square. The two men’s antagonism fretted her nerves. ‘Clive presents a fearful study in decomposing psychology,’ Lytton wrote to James while at Studland (24 September 1911). ‘The fellow is much worse – burgeoning out into inconceivable theories on art and life – a corpse puffed up with worms and gases. It all seems to be the result of Roger, who is also here, in love with Vanessa. She is stark blind and deaf. And Virginia (in dreadful lodgings) rattles her accustomed nut. Julian [Bell] is half-witted.’
On the spur of the moment Lytton decided to make a dash to see Henry in Brittany. Borrowing five pounds from the loyal Pippa, he started out on his adventure, travelling by boat from Plymouth to Brest, and the following day from Brest by train to Quimperlé, and on to Doëlan by pony and trap.
‘Did you hear he [Henry] raped Dorelia’s sister,’ Ottoline had politely inquired (21 July 1911). Henry had carried off Dorelia John’s younger sister to paint and paint again that summer in Brittany. But the work was slow and difficult, and as the summer days went by she began to change from the Virgin Goddess of the John caravan, ‘picturesque, kind-hearted Ede’, into an ‘effigy of sloth and obstinacy’. She was a perfect model, an impossible companion. Boris Anrep joined them, and Henry, welcoming this diversion, had resented the distraction. Now Lytton turned up to take Anrep’s place. This was the first time Henry had seen his beard, though he did not immediately recognize its painterly virtues. ‘He arrived well and with armsful of gossip,’ Henry reported. But some of the gossip they had to exchange was oddly irritating. In Paris, four months earlier, Ottoline had confided to Henry that she was comforting Bertrand Russell because he was a tortured soul in need of her help (she had said almost exactly the same thing to Russell about Henry). The business was complicated by Ottoline’s mother-in-law who suspected Lytton of being her lover. ‘Shall I write to him,’ Russell inquired, ‘telling him to appear dying of love – doing his best to conceal his grief, but alas unable to do so?’
This news of Ottoline and Bertie had electrified Henry who became dementedly charming and high-spirited. ‘O do not stint me!’ he cried to Ottoline. ‘I am insatiable for more life with you and in you.’ Now he was sunk in aggressive depression, already suspecting that he must initiate a parting from the woman he had believed would be his salvation. He seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown. Suffering from sickness and headaches, he accused Lytton of getting into ‘a silly panic’ about his own health. ‘I felt’, Lytton wrote to Ottoline (15 October 1911), ‘like a white man among savages in Central Africa.’ Henry was certainly savage. ‘Lytton’s visit was a failure,’ he wrote, ‘he simply moped and whined and funcked in his room except for the days of his arrival and departure. I was … glad to shunt him on to Paris.’
But Lytton had greater resilience. At the end of a night-journey through Nantes, he arrived at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères. Walking through the Luxembourg Gardens next day, in the brilliant morning light, he saw all he loved best in France. It was crowded, happy, well-ordered; the leaves on the trees were beginning to change colour and everything looked vivid and alive. After the emotional failure of his week in Brittany, ‘an extraordinary sense of vitality and excitement came upon me; a spring of self-confidence gushed up … it was delightful and astonishing.’ He had finished his book on French Literature, he was thirty-one, ‘and life was still before me …’
While waiting for die publication of his book, Lytton found London fluctuating and misshapen that winter after the invigorating glory of Paris. He wandered between cocoa parties in Fitzroy Square and the more effulgent hospitality of Bedford Square. Meanwhile Henry returned from France that November and began renting a strange new studio in the sky, on the top floor of the Vale Hotel, in the Vale of Health, on Hampstead Health, where Lytton began again to sit for him. ‘I think I have a good design for his portrait,’ he wrote, ‘it will be very big.’
Then there were Leonard Woolf’s uncertainties, which mirrored Lytton’s own. ‘I have been having an exhausting day with Woolf looking for lodgings in Bloomsbury. Like everyone else he doesn’t know where to live; but the rooms we saw to-day were enough to make one despair of all human habitations. Filthy darkness and hideousness combined – I quite sink back with a sigh of relief among the new cretonnes of the poor old shooting-gallery.’ It seemed that Leonard really would have to lodge in Virginia’s new attics.
Otherwise Lytton bent over the proof-sheets of Landmarks in French Literature ‘which I find a very soothing occupation. But the printers seem to sniff vice everywhere. As there’s so much talk about “literature”, I sometimes use the phrase “letters” as a variation – “men of letters” – and so on. And once or twice I refer to “French letters” – So and so “inaugurated a new era in French letters” – and the words are underlined and queried. My innocent mind failed at first to grasp the meaning of it… there are singular pitfalls for unwary authors.’
After Lytton’s proofs had been corrected and following the publication of Rupert Brooke’s Poems, Bloomsbury and the Neo-Pagans planned a second coming-together at Lulworth in Dorset. The prospect alarmed Rupert, threatening to break through the compartments of his life – even his Poems were divided into homosexual and spiritual sections. Maynard was invited. He had shocked these children of nature by openly propositioning Justin Brooke – and was now becoming an unlikely object of Bryn Olivier’s admiration. Harry Norton would be there, sunk with his three chins between paralysed adoration of Vanessa Bell and James Strachey who, in disconcerting imitation of Rupert, was falling in love with Noel Olivier. Lytton was to bring Henry over and be joined by his younger sister Marjorie Strachey, a big fat romantic novelist-to-be, already famous for her lewd readings of nursery rhymes, who, like Maynard, had taken a shine to Justin Brooke, and like so many others was rumoured to have been seduced by Henry. Finally there was to be a brilliant young bisexual poet and Apostle, a Hungarian aristocrat called Ferenc Békássy. Rupert resented Békássy, though he could not object since he had been recommended by Noel Olivier. But then Békássy too was in love with ‘cette éternelle Noel’.
Rupert had loved Noel since she was fifteen. She was now twenty and they were secretly engaged. But this engagement involved no sexual relations, nor even, it appeared, the promise of sexuality in the foreseeable future, since his love depended upon not ‘dirtying’ the purity of their relations with sex. His letters to her were full of poetic bluster and bravado. ‘I know how superb my body is, & how great my bodily strength,’ he wrote to her (28 August 1912). I know that with my mind I could do anything. I know that I can be the greatest poet and writer in England.’13 Yet the strain within Rupert by his twenty-fifth year was unendurable. ‘I know for certain I can’t go on like this.’ The fact was that he still found it easier to have erections with men than with women. Not long ago he had gone to bed with a schoolfriend, or so he alleged, and later sent a vivid description of what may have taken place to James Strachey, who was further tormented by rumours that Rupert was also engaged in an affaire with, of all people in the world, Hobhouse! Yet Rupert treated homosexuals as a Victorian paterfamilias might treat prostitutes, and his puritanism sealed off these experiments from the mainstream of his life. ‘We must give it up,’ Noel wrote to him (28 December 1911) after almost four years of short platonic meetings and long absences,‘… until you love less, or I love more.’ But unless she committed herself to him sexually he could not break his love for her. As his frustration mounted, however, he edged towards another experiment that might be more easily absorbed into his general experience and set him free. He had found out all he could about contraception and was on the brink of taking the plunge with another of the Neo-Pagans, Ka Cox.
It was Ka Cox who had arranged the camp and reading-party at West Lulworth – a fact that may have persuaded the Olivier sisters at the last minute not to come. Ka was the daughter of a Fabian stockbroker, ‘a broad bottomed, sensible, maternal woman’, Virginia described her, with strong shoulders, a pince-nez and long brown hair gathered at the back. Her rather squashy appearance was far removed from the lyrical beauty of the Olivier sisters, but no one thought of her as ugly – she had the same powers of attraction as Miss Joan Hunter Dunn for John Betjeman’s subaltern. Her parents had died before she was out of her ’teens and, after completing her education at Newnham, she was in the unusual position of being free and financially independent. She was also more mature than the other Neo-Pagans. ‘Ka treated us all like children,’ wrote Gwen Darwin, ‘with easy affection.’ She had been courted by Jacques Raverat who, complaining of ‘the whip of Eros’, urged her ‘to love and yet to be perfectly free’. But she thought him too babyish for marriage and he had become engaged instead to Gwen Darwin whose cousin Frances Darwin married die anthropologist Francis Cornford). Rupert hated these engagements and marriages which broke their vows of friendship and rites of perpetual youth and made him feel ‘so awfully lonely’. As he later confessed to James Strachey (10 July 1912): ‘Solitude is my one unbearable fear.’
The way out of Rupert’s predicament seemed to lie with Ka who was ‘fine & wise’, he informed Noel, and who ‘arranges & satisfies everyone’. Nevertheless the tension that had been mounting in him during the previous summer camp revived. The weather was so wonderfully mild that some of die party bathed in the sea – but not Rupert, who on the last day of the year, after receiving Noel’s letter of recantation, retired to his room with a cold.
Henry, who had been spending Christmas a few miles off with Augustus and Dorelia John at their new home, Alderney Manor, in the New Forest, was intending to join the Lulworth camp for the New Year. Lytton met him with a carriage at Wool station and they were driven to the Lulworth Cove Inn. It was ‘divinely beautiful – almost too poetical and sweet’, Henry wrote to Ottoline; ‘dreamy white, graceful cliffs, with fantastic caves & arches, orange-red beach & green sea. The sky is like Giotto’s blue … die hedges fawn & blood red against it.’
Ka had met Henry in London that autumn and been ‘fascinated’ by him. Here was a truly bohemian artist not afraid of women but actively involving them in his life and work. Hearing of her ‘madness’ over Henry, Rupert had been put out; but this did not prevent her inviting him to Lulworth and planning to flirt with him there. On New Year’s Eve, while Rupert lay on his sick-bed, Henry and Ka went off together into the country. When she came back, Ka told Rupert that she wanted to marry Henry. Inflamed with jealousy, Rupert immediately proposed to Ka, and when she refused, he descended into ‘the most horrible kind of Hell; without sleeping or eating – doing nothing but suffering the most violent mental tortures [which]… reacted on my body to such an extent that after the week I could barely walk’.
Henry soon left Lulworth for London, leaving a wake of disaster behind him. Ka wanted to follow him, but she was persuaded by Lytton to stay and help look after Rupert. For this was a serious mental collapse, a sexual hysteria arising from the collision of his two long-separated lives. ‘Despite his own dabblings in the homosexual milieu, Rupert could not bear the idea of its escaping its bounds and mingling itself with heterosexual love –the school dormitory invading the family bedroom,’ wrote the biographer Paul Delaney.‘… His peculiar upbringing had made him abnormally sly and secretive; these qualities clashed with Lytton’s open-minded and rational approach to sex … die merger of Bloomsbury and Neo-Paganism made them into rival masters of ceremonies.’14
‘I hate Lytton,’ Rupert told Ka a few weeks later (27–29 February 1912), ‘… for having worked to get die man [Henry] down there, and having seen the whole thing being engineered from the beginning, – and obligingly acquiesced in it as one of the creature’s whims.’ He described Henry as ‘Someone more capable of getting hold of women than me, slightly experienced in bringing them to heel, who didn’t fool about with ideas of trust or “fair treatment” … The swine, one gathers, was looking round. He was tiring of his other women, or they of him. Perhaps he thought there’d be a cheaper and pleasanter way of combining fucking with an income than Ottoline … He cast dimly round. Virgins are easy game … He marked you down.’ But the author of this crude seduction was, in Rupert’s imagination, Lytton, arch-manipulator of vice, hovering over the lovers, eyeing them at their sport. ‘It was the filthiest part of the most unbearably sickening disgusting blinding nightmare,’ he burst out, ‘– and then one shrieks with the unceasing pain that it was true.’
But how much of it was true? Lytton was still greatly attracted to Henry and ‘would grope [him] under the table at meal-times in view of all the ladies’, as Maynard reported to Duncan (5 January 1912). Yet he must have realized that sexual relations between them could not proceed much further than this. He was not jealous of Henry’s womanizing and might even have welcomed a liaison with someone sensible and easy-going like Ka who would not cut him out. At any rate he could not have been surprised by her becoming infatuated with him ‘like a fish fascinated by the glitter of some strange bait’. But as soon as he realized the emotional wreckage this was likely to cause, he behaved very differently from the monster of Rupert’s fantasy. It was, in fact, to Lytton that Ka first confessed her infatuation; and it was Lytton who immediately wrote off to Lamb (4 January 1912):
‘Ka came and talked to me yesterday, between tea and dinner. It was rather a difficult conversation, but she was very nice and very sensible. It seemed to me clear that she was what is called “in love” with you – not with extreme violence so far, but quite distinctly. She is longing to marry you. She thinks you may agree, but fears, with great conscientiousness, that it might not be good for you. I felt at moments, while she was with me – so good and pink and agreeable, – that there was more hope in that scheme than I’d thought before. But the more I consider, the more doubtful it grows. I can’t believe that you’re a well-assorted couple – can you? If she was really your wife, with a home and children, it would mean a great change in your way of living, a lessening of independence – among other things a much dimmer relationship with Ottoline. This might be worth while – probably would be – if she was an eminent creature, who’ld give you a great deal; but I don’t think she is that. There seems no touch of inspiration in her; it’s as if she was made somehow or other on rather a small scale (didn’t you say that?). I feel it’s unkind to write this about Ka, and it’s too definite, but I must try and say what I think … Henry, I almost believe the best thing she could do now would be to marry Rupert straight off. He is much nicer than 1 had thought him. Last night he was there and was really charming – especially with her. Affliction seems to have chastened him, and he did feel – it was evident… they seemed to fit together so naturally – even the Garden-City-ishness.’
This letter has the ring of truth and exonerates Lytton from any Machiavellian plotting against Rupert. Though he felt rather two-faced about receiving Ka’s confidences and then making use of them to dissuade Henry from marriage, and though it is just possible – if unlikely – that this advice was partly coloured by his own feeling for Henry, there can be no doubt that he was endeavouring to act honourably. One fact which appears to have been forgotten by everyone is that Lamb was still married to Euphemia. Far from recommending marriage, Lytton strongly advised both of them against even having an affair, on the grounds that it might break up Ka’s much more suitable relationship with Rupert. ‘If you’re not going to marry her,’ he wrote to Henry (6 January 1912), ‘I think you ought to reflect a good deal before letting her become your mistress.
‘I’ve now seen her fairly often and on an intimate footing, and I can hardly believe that she’s suited to the post. I don’t see what either of you could really get out of it except the pleasures of the obelisk. With you even these would very likely not last long, while with her they’ld probably become more and more of a necessity, and also be mixed up with all sorts of romantic desires which I don’t think you’ld ever satisfy. If this is true it would be worth while making an effort to put things on a merely affectionate basis, wouldn’t it? I think there’s quite a chance that … everything might blow over, and that she might even sink into Rupert’s arms. Can you manage this?’
Characteristically Lytton felt closer to Rupert in his misery and frustration. ‘The situation, though, seems to be getting slightly grim,’ he told Henry in another letter (5 January 1912).‘… Rupert is besieging her – I gather with tears and desperation – and sinking down in the intervals pale and shattered. I wish I could recommend her to console him…
‘As for Rupert – it’s like something in a play. But you know his niceness is now certain – poor thing! I never saw anyone so different from you – in caractère. “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” I sometimes want to murmur to him, but I fear the jest would not be well received.’
By February, Henry was being treated by Dr J.M. Bramwall, a specialist in hypnosis and a pioneer psychotherapist. He had earlier ‘cured’ Jacques Raverat (who was later discovered to have been suffering from multiple sclerosis) by ministering to his ‘subliminal self’. Over Henry he performed ‘a mumbo-jumbo game of quackery’ and recommended outdoor exercise. But Henry, who obediently went riding with Leonard Woolf in Richmond Park, kept falling off his horse. Lytton and Ka, applying fomentations, were the ‘kindest nurses’, but he was trying ill-humouredly to follow Lytton’s advice and had decided that Ka was ‘too good & a tiny bit slow & plodding’.
So Ka turned back to Rupert. He had been taken by Jacques Raverat to see the psychiatrist, Dr Maurice Craig, who had attended to Vanessa Bell’s headaches and whom Leonard Woolf later consulted over Virginia. He was a man of ‘the highest principle’, Leonard judged, who ‘knew as much of the human mind and its illnesses’ as any mental specialist in England – which was ‘practically nothing’. For Rupert, Dr Craig prescribed early bed, no work, but plenty of milk, stout and what was innocently called ‘stuffing’, that is eating ‘all sorts of patent foods’. Ka was again an excellent nurse, feeding and cosseting Rupert who turned out to be even more difficult and demanding than Henry. He looked to her to restore his sanity and achieve his manhood – after which he would be ready to go off, marry Noel Olivier, and be a great poet and dramatist. But Rupert’s self-dislike, which seemed to go back to his very conception, followed the course of his semen and once it had entered Ka (while they were safely in Germany), and she was emotionally allied to him, he projected his dislike on to die contaminated Beatrice who had led him from his ‘mountain height’ into die ‘mist and mire’.
He was even more irrationally aggressive towards Lytton who, in Rupert’s paranoid outbursts against women, homosexuals and Jews, featured as a pseudo-jew and carrier of typhoid. ‘I’m glad Lytton has been having a bad time,’ he wrote to Ka (27 February 1912). ‘Next time you have one of your benignant lunches with him you can make it clear to him I loathe him – if there’s any chance of that giving him any pain.’ In his moral confusion, he could still write to Lytton (27 March 1912) proposing to ‘abduct Bryn [Olivier] for Sunday to the Metropole at Brighton – and go Shares’, and still count on James’s sustaining loyalty. ‘You know how the Stracheys feel?’ he asked Ka (3 March 1912). ‘James is better than the rest. But one can’t tell.’ By the summer Rupert’s hatred of Lytton had overflowed and poisoned his friendship with James. ‘To be a Strachey is to be blind – without a sense – towards good and bad, and clean and dirty,’ he upbraided James (6 August 1912); ‘irrelevantly clever about a few things, dangerously infantile about many; to have undescended spiritual testicles; to be a mere bugger … It becomes possible to see what was meant by the person who said that seeing you and any member of the Olivier family together made them cold and sick.’
‘The explosion’, James reported to Lytton (12 August 1912), ‘has had every motive assigned to it except the obvious one … the dreadful thing is that he’s clearly slightly cracked and has now cut himself off from everyone.’
Rupert longed to regain the simple Neo-Pagan life that Bloomsbury had corrupted. The Stracheys “are parasites, you know, all of them’, Gwen Raverat confidently declared (27 March 1912). ‘… I for one am a clean Christian & they disgust me.’ Rupert too was disgusted by the suppressed part of himself represented by Lytton, and the incomplete part of himself mirrored by James’s love of Noel Olivier. But he knew that such disgust was not ‘clean’ and ‘Christian’. ‘God damn you,’ he had written to James (14 March 1912). ‘God bum roast castrate bugger and tear the bowels out of everyone … You’d better give it up, wash your bloody hands. I’m not sane.’
This sickness persisted for much of 1912 and was superficially cleared up by what appeared to be a complete change of character. In mid-October he gave the Apostles a statement of his new creed. A ‘passion for goodness and loathing of evil is the most valuable and important thing in us. And therefore it must not be in any way stifled, nor compelled to wait upon exact judgement. If, after ordering your life and thoughts as wisely as possible, you find yourself hating, as evil, some person or thing, one should count five, perhaps, but then certainly hit out… I see the world as two armies in mortal combat, and inextricably confused.’
Though Rupert acknowledged that ‘one cannot completely distinguish friend from foe’, he treated Lytton as a foe for the rest of his life. On 18 June 1914, at the Drury Lane première of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol, he began talking in a perfectly friendly way to James who, noticing that Lytton was approaching them, said jocosely: ‘I believe you know my brother Lytton,’ to which Rupert replied, ‘No!’ and walked away. ‘The number of beastly people at Drury Lane is the only good reason for going there,’ Rupert wrote afterwards. ‘One can be offensive to them.’ Noel Olivier had been there and Ottoline Morrell; and James felt ‘decidedly awkward because it happened in an extremely visible place, with everyone one knew standing round … this showed very plainly Rupert’s paranoia, though I was so ignorant then that I had no notion of it.’
A few weeks later, at the beginning of the war, Rupert’s paranoia (or wish to be offensive) resolved itself into a patriotic loathing of the ‘pro-German’ Stracheys and pacifist Bloomsbury. His series of five war sonnets published at die end of 1914 amounted to what D.H. Lawrence called a ‘great inhalation of desire’ for death. ‘Let them know the poor truths,’ Rupert honourably pleaded at the end (17 March 1915). But by 1915, ‘with his felicities all most promptly divinable’ as Henry James wrote, his disordered mind was being mythologized and made a symbol of clean-living militant young England. ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed,’ Winston Churchill was to write, ‘with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be …’ 15
Landmarks in French Literature, dedicated ‘to JMS’ (Strachey’s mother), was reviewed not widely but well. Publication date in Britain was 12 January 1912 (it came out in the United States three months later) and by April 1914 twelve thousand copies had been sold worldwide. After the war, demand for this ‘Shilling Shocker’, as Ottoline called it, was to increase with Strachey’s growing fame. It went through eight new impressions during his lifetime, was translated into Hungarian and Japanese, and was still selling fifty years after his death. ‘Oh so good,’ exclaimed E.M. Forster (6 February 1912). H.A.L. Fisher too wrote of it as Lytton’s finest book, a critical tour de force, and John Lehmann praised it as a ‘luminous little masterpiece of interpretative criticism’. In The Whispering Gallery (1955), Lehmann recounts a conversation which he had during a train journey from France to England with an unknown travelling companion who identified herself on reaching Calais as Dorothy Bussy. ‘It taught me, as no other book could have,’ he told her, ‘how to find excellence in the French tradition even if one were a devoted believer in the English tradition, and why Racine was a great poet and dramatist even though his greatness was so totally different from Shakespeare’s.’
Landmarks in French Literature is impressionistic criticism, brilliant in its powers of summary and attractive in the imagery Strachey uses to convey his admiration. Baudelaire is ‘the Swift of poetry’, Marivaux is ‘Racine by moonlight’; Chénier’s poetic world is ‘that of some lovely bird flitting on a sudden out of the darkness and the terror of the tempest, to be overcome a moment later, and whirled to destruction’; Saint-Simon’s historical Mémoires are like ‘a tropical forest – luxuriant, bewildering, enormous –with the gayest humming-birds among the branches, and the vilest monsters in the entangled grass’. There are some surprising omissions (Mérimée, Nerval, Mallarmé, Zola) and the occasional burst of dislike –Victor Hugo’s Hernani is ‘a piece of bombastic melodrama, full of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation’. But the shortcoming of the book, partly occasioned by the series, lies in the fact that it is really the criticism of simile rather than metaphor. Eventually these similes become interchangeable (literally so when Lytton uses the same elaborate culinary likeness to describe La Fontaine’s Fables as he had used for Molière’s comedies five years earlier in the Spectator) and this makes some pages resemble what Desmond MacCarthy called ‘a little textbook of enthusiastical critical clichés’. It is the congestion of similes, too, that gave Ludwig Wittgenstein the impression of short difficult breathing in the prose style; like the gasps of someone suffering from asthma. Opposition to the book was led by D.H. Lawrence. ‘I still don’t like Strachey,’ he told Ottoline,‘– French literature neither – words – literature – bore.’
To Dorothy Bussy, who thought highly of Landmarks, Lytton wrote (6 February 1912): ‘James of course says that it’s rubbish, Ottoline that it is a work of supreme genius, Virginia that it’s merely brilliant, Woolf that it is bluff carried a little too far for decency, and Clive that it is almost as bad as “Sainte-Beuve” (I haven’t heard him say so, but I’m sure he must have).’
Landmarks in French Literature marks a point of transition in Lytton’s career. Later in the same letter to his sister he observes: ‘For the last year I have been going through a Spiritual Revolution – which has been exciting and on the whole pleasant. I had feared that after 30 one didn’t have these things, Ah! – But now I shall be glad of a little recueillement.’ He was determined, he added, to do some ‘creative work’ and still dreamed of it being poetic drama. The phrase, Spiritual Revolution, was intended by Lytton as a joke – but a joke with some meaning. Over the last twelve to fifteen months, he had found himself pitched into a bohemian environment that represented a break with Cambridge and was more anarchic than Bloomsbury. The change was precipitated by a number of other events. His brother Oliver, who had always led a knock-about sort of life, was badgering him for spending ‘all your life between Cambridge and the Reading Room of the British Museum’. There was also the effect of Dostoyevsky, whose powerful character analysis presented Lytton with a new attitude to human beings and opened his mind to subconscious forces in himself. He was beginning to see life more in terms of motives than morality, with good and bad impulses irrationally mixed. Dostoyevsky’s novels suggested how literature might be liberated from traditional forms, and how the unexplored elements in human behaviour could be conveyed by the power of humour which was not simply reductive, as the English believed, but re-creative.
Lytton had entered upon a period of his literary development which, beginning with a rhapsodic acclamation of men and women of letters, would lead to his flank and rear attack on the reputation of men and women of action. It was a time of advancing confidence in the application of his own powers. Scattered throughout the pages of Landmarks in French Literature are signs and assurances of this counter-attack. In a passage describing the formation and influence of the French Academy, he goes out of his way to expound his opposition to the indifference shown by the English establishment towards the arts.
‘The mere existence of a body of writers officially recognized by the authorities of the State has undoubtedly given a peculiar prestige to the profession of letters in France. It has emphasized that tendency to take the art of writing seriously – to regard it as a fit object for the most conscientious craftsmanship and deliberate care – which is so characteristic of French writers. The amateur is very rare in French literature – as rare as he is common in our own. How many of the greatest English writers have denied that they were men of letters! – Scott, Byron, Gray, Sir Thomas Browne, perhaps even Shakespeare himself. When Congreve begged Voltaire not to talk of literature, but to regard him merely as an English gentleman, the French writer, who, in all his multifarious activities, never forgot for a moment that he was first and foremost a follower of the profession of letters, was overcome with astonishment and disgust. The difference is typical of the attitude of the two nations towards literature …’
Lytton seldom misses an opportunity of asserting that literature expresses more richly than any form of transitory action the history and genius of a nation. ‘Montesquieu’s great reputation’, he writes, ‘led to his view of the constitution of England being widely accepted as the true one; as such it was adopted by the American leaders after the War of Independence; and its influence is plainly visible in the present Constitution of the United States. Such is the strange power of good writing over the affairs of men!’
Elsewhere, he joins in the acclamation which greeted Voltaire’s last appearance in Paris, the like of which is reserved in England for military and political figures. The scene is presented as a dramatic curtain-call to Voltaire’s life and work.
‘One day, quite suddenly, he appeared in Paris, which he had not visited for nearly thirty years. His arrival was the signal for one of the most extraordinary manifestations of enthusiasm that die world has ever seen. For some weeks he reigned in the capital, visible and glorious, the undisputed lord of the civilized universe. The climax came when he appeared in a box at the Théâtre Français, to witness a performance of the latest of his tragedies, and the whole house rose as one man to greet him. His triumph seemed to be something more than the mere personal triumph of a frail old mortal; it seemed to be the triumph of all that was noblest in the aspirations of the human race. But the fatigue and excitement of those weeks proved too much even for Voltaire in the full flush of his eighty-fourth year. An overdose of opium completed what Nature had begun; and the amazing being rested at last.’
Like Voltaire, Lytton wished to devote himself to a humane and polemical art. His destiny did not lie in penning tiny verses in Ottoline’s vellum manuscript book; it was to be more iconoclastic and contentious. He felt, too, the need to clarify what underlay his languid manner, and disabuse his friends of misconception. ‘You understand a great deal, and very wonderfully,’ he wrote to Ottoline (24 February 1912). ‘But perhaps there’s one thing that you don’t quite realize about me –I mean what I feel about my work. Perhaps you don’t see that the idea of my really not working is simply an impossibility. Sometimes you have admonished me on the subject, and I think I have been rather curt in my answers; it was because I felt so absolutely sure of myself – that you might as well talk of my not breathing as not writing. It’s so happened that just the last month or two, when we’ve been getting to know each other, I’ve been having a time of transition and hesitation … And then my health has been a vile nuisance – You see I’m making quite a case for myself! But I want you to understand this. From my earliest days I’ve always considered myself as a writer, and for die last ten years writing has been almost perpetually in my thoughts.’
In an address he delivered to the Apostles that spring (11 May 1912), entitled ‘Godfrey, Cornbury or Candide’,16 Lytton explained his newly-developed beliefs. Essentially, they were a method of eradicating self-abasement and transforming himself into the sort of person he could admire. It was a move away from the good states of mind inculcated by Principia Ethica towards justification by work. In the course of his paper he points to three main motives which shape our ends – the thirst for pleasure, the desire to do good, and the need for self-development. Though sensitive to the force of these first two impulses, Lytton places himself in the third category of human being, whose satisfaction may come through literary achievement. It was a Voltairian creed. ‘It seems to me that I live neither for happiness nor for duty,’ he told the Apostles.
‘I like being happy. I scheme to be happy; I want to do my duty, and I sometimes even do it. But such considerations seem to affect me only sporadically and vaguely; there is something else which underlies my actions more fundamentally, which guides, controls and animates the whole. It is ambition. I want to excel, to triumph, to be powerful, and to glory in myself. I do not want a vulgar triumph, a vulgar power; fame and riches attract me only as subsidiary ornaments of my desire. What I want is the attainment of a true excellence, the development of noble qualities, and the full expression of them – the splendour of a spiritual success. It is true that this is an egotistical conception of life; but I see no harm in such an egotism. After all, each of us is the only person who can cultivate himself; we may help on our neighbour here and there – throw him a bulb or two over the garden wall, or lend a hand with the roller; but we shall never understand the ins and outs – the complication of the soils and subsoils – in any garden but our own.’
*
In May 1912, Max Beerbohm, who had recently returned to England after a two-year stay in Italy, was lunching at the Savile Club when he first caught sight of Lytton, seated at a table with Duncan. He saw:
‘an emaciated face of ivory whiteness above a long square-cut auburn beard, and below a head of very long sleek dark brown hair. The nose was nothing if not aquiline, and Nature had chiselled it with great delicacy. The eyes, behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, eyes of an inquirer and cogitator, were large and brown and luminous. The man to whom they belonged must, I judged, though he sat stooping down over his table, be extremely tall. He wore a jacket of brown velveteen,17 a soft shirt, and a dark red tie. I greatly wondered who he was. He looked rather like one of the Twelve Apostles, and I decided that he resembled especially the doubting one, Thomas, who was also called Didymus. I learned from a friend who came in and joined me at my table that he was one of the Stracheys; Lytton Strachey; a Cambridge man; rather an authority on French literature; had written a book on French Literature in some series or other; book said to be very good. “But why”, my friend asked, “should he dress like that?” Well, we members of the Savile, Civil Servants, men of letters, clergymen, scientists, doctors and so on, were clad respectably, passably, decently, but no more than that. And “Hang it all,” I said, “why shouldn’t he dress like that? He’s the best-dressed man in the room!”18
During these early winter and spring months of 1912, Henry was embarking on his series of portraits.19 ‘Do come as early as you can,’ he summoned Lytton to his Vale of Health studio in the first week of January. ‘I want to make an elaborate drawing to scale, so that I need only have to paint hands & face from you.’ Though he planned to do much of the painting away from his model so that Lytton need visit him at ‘decently rare intervals’, he would lose his temper whenever Lytton deserted him for too long (‘you’re a bloodier ass and a feebler one than I imagined’). This was to be Henry’s largest, most ambitious picture. Its progress was agonizingly slow ‘and I get unduly spleenful and impatient’, he admitted. His impatience was exacerbated by Lytton’s ‘perpetual raising of die question of our relationship’, though it was die strangeness of their relationship that ultimately gave these portraits their peculiar tension.
Early in 1913, after some fifteen months, Henry ordered a new stretcher for the giant canvas and completed a ‘colour rehearsal sketch’. He was ‘dying to leap ahead’ and believed that three or four days ‘should be enough’. By the spring it was ‘very nearly finished’. It ‘fills me with incredulous pride – that I could ever get it so far complete … You would scarcely believe how amazingly unified the later operations have made it look …’ He felt confident that his surreally formal style was exactly right for Lytton’s italicized looks. Suddenly in April he discovered that the picture ‘became finished at an unexpected juncture’. Despite all manner of obstacles, ‘I watched, prayed, starved & took Sanatogen and did somehow manage to wind the thing up to a sort of conclusion … I have hardly dared to look at it since.’
When he did look closely again a year later, he saw that though there was indeed ‘a sort of completeness … the whole thing must be repainted in quite another vein’. In fact, he concluded, ‘it will be a new picture’, needing ‘a multitude of studies’, which meant of course extra sittings. Lytton would sometimes bring along his brother Oliver, sometimes Saxon Sydney-Turner. ‘I believe that the proper attenuated & subtle expression of the piece will prevail the stronger for it,’ Henry encouraged him. The sittings went on during the spring and summer of 1914 while Henry replaced a pot and brushes with a chair and hat, made fresh studies of the trees and bushes in the background, recoloured the floor, re-marked the tartan rug, and instructed Lytton to bring his brown slippers and new reading glasses in place of the original pince-nez. ‘The picture goes forward very slowly and I have never had a fair opportunity to do another head on it,’ he complained that summer. But on 28 August 1914, a few days before he enlisted for wartime medical duties, he saw that it was ‘alarmingly complete’…20
… But not absolutely complete. After the war, from 1919 to 1921, he continued making minor adjustments until in 1922, its colour somewhat sunk, it was exhibited in his first one-man show at the Alpine Club, and then loaned to the Tate Gallery. Here it immediately divided the generations, provoking a similar set of reactions to Eminent Victorians. The young Stephen Spender went to see it with his father, die author Humphrey Spender, who stared in silence at die sinuously reclining figure in front of the toy-like landscape. ‘Then hatred for the painter suddenly clicked in his mind with hatred of die most irreverent and iconoclastic of modern essayists, as he said in a loud voice: “Well, Lytton Strachey deserves it! He deserves it!” And he strode away, meditating on the poetic justice which had ordained Henry Lamb to place Lytton Strachey in the inferno of those rooms which my father labelled “the lunatic asylum” in the Tate.’21
Sir George Sitwell was another member of the older generation provoked by Lytton’s formidable looks. ‘In an age when people tended to look the same,’ explained his son Osbert, ‘his [Lytton’s] emergence into any scene, whether street or drawing-room, lifted it to a new plane, investing it with a kind of caricatural Victorian interest.’22
Henry himself had hovered between thinking the portrait ‘far below our collective deserts’ and believing its existence was ‘to the immortal glory of us both’, until at length he came to resent the way it outshone his other work in the public imagination. In the later version, though there are the same boneless interminable legs, the same spade-like beard, the same astonished eyebrows, die face has grown less thin, the figure appears a little less enfeebled, die eyes, though not so sad, stare yet more alarmingly. Lytton still reclines, apparently without energy, on die edge of a basket-chair, a green and black plaid rug over his arms, against a view of ordered parkland. But he is no longer quite alone. In the background, two figures have emerged from behind a tree and are wandering along a path away from the house – perhaps Mrs Humphry Ward and St Loe Strachey, having called to inquire after his well-sounding new book. In both portraits Henry displays a mingling of affection and irony from which Lytton emerges, in the words of David Garnett, as ‘an etiolated plant soon to die for lack of fresh air, light and the watering-can’. The lofty room and vast window give the impression of a case in which Lytton is preserved as a rare specimen of the Bloomsbury culture, what Virginia called ‘the essence of culture … exotic, extreme in every way’.
This vision of a ‘major Bloomsbury idol’ has, in Osbert Sitwell’s words, the ‘air of someone pleasantly awakening from a trance … a pagod as plainly belonging as did the effigies to a creation of its own.
‘Humour and wit were very strongly marked in the quizzical expression of his face, and also, I thing a kind of genuine diffidence as well as a certain despair and, always, a new surprise at man’s follies … It is important to look the part one plays, and he gave consummately the impression of a man of letters, perhaps rather of one in the immediate past: a Victorian figure of eminence, possibly. Yet … he would have been at ease in the England of an earlier age, when his beard might have been tinted a carnation hue. It was an Elizabethan as well as a Victorian head that peered aloft.’
Before his Spiritual Revolution, Lytton’s dependence upon those he loved had been absolute. Now he was less wholly vulnerable. After the terrors and quarrels between him and Henry, there came, not the cringing apologies he had offered Duncan, but explanations that placed their differences in a more reasonable context.
‘I know I’m exaggerated and maladif in these affairs,’ he wrote to Henry after one reconciliation (19 February 1912). ‘I wish I could say how I hate my wretched faiblesses. But I think perhaps you don’t realise how horribly I’ve suffered during the last 6 or 7 years from loneliness, and what a difference your friendship has made for me. It has been a gushing of new life through my veins – enfin. I sometimes get into a panic and a fever, and a black cloud comes down, and it seems as if, after all, it was too good to be true…’
Similarly, he would write off to his confidante, Ottoline (25 January 1912): ‘He [Henry] has been charming, and I am much happier. I’m afraid I may have exaggerated his asperities; his affection I often feel to be miraculous. It was my sense of the value of our relationship, and my fear that it might come to an end, that made me cry out so loudly die very minute I was hurt.’
These letters to Ottoline are not so full of perdition and recrimination as those to Maynard. While they celebrate the value to him of Lamb’s affection, which Lytton was never sure of retaining for long, yet one is made aware of a feeling – as one seldom was in the Duncan Grant affair -that, when the final separation comes, life will go on and that all kinds of new experiences lie in wait for him.