The winter of 1963–4 was for me a crucial one. After two years’ work, and a further two years of waiting, I had had my first book published: a biography of Hugh Kingsmill, the novelist, biographer and critic. But two weeks after publication I was being theatened with an action for libel. The situation seemed perilous. My chief witness, Hesketh Pearson, who had encouraged me to write, suddenly died. I could muster other supporters, but they would hardly figure as star witnesses. There was Malcolm Muggeridge, who had contributed a marvellous introduction to my book, but who had elsewhere attacked the Queen and whose appearance in court was guaranteed to stir up violent antipathy in a jury. There was John Davenport, the critic, who at that time had chosen to wear a prejudicial black beard. And there was William Gerhardie, the distinguished novelist who had not actually published a novel for the last quarter of a century and who, besides denying that he spoke with a slight Russian intonation, would certainly turn up at the wrong courtroom or on the wrong day whatever precautions I took.
Altogether it was not a pleasant prospect. Yet my publisher, Martin Secker, who was nearing eighty, appeared to find the predicament wonderfully invigorating. It brought back to him, evidently, the good old fighting days of D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas and early Compton Mackenzie, all of whom he had published. While the old man seemed splendidly rejuvenated, I, still in my twenties, tottered towards a nervous senility. For nights on end I would start awake from dreadful courtroom scenes – rhetorical but unavailing speeches from the dock – to the dreary horror of early morning and the next batch of solicitors’ letters.
But out of this nightmare something had been born. The first of the sixteen publishers to whom I had submitted my Kingsmill manuscript was Heinemann. Fortunately it had fallen into the hands of James Michie, the poet and translator. He had liked it, had sent for me, and gently explained that were his firm to make a practice of bringing out books about almost unknown writers by totally unknown authors, it would very soon be bankrupt. However, I might become better known myself were I to choose a less obscure subject. Had I any ideas?
This was the opportunity for which I was looking. Kingsmill was said to be one of those biographers who had imitated Lytton Strachey and so helped to bring his literary reputation into disrepute. In order to demonstrate the injustice of this charge I had examined Strachey’s books in some detail. To my surprise I found there was no literary biography of him. Was there not, I wondered, a need for such a book? James Michie agreed there was, and a contract was drawn up in which I undertook to make a re-evaluation of Strachey’s place as a biographical historian. It would be about 70,000 words long and take me, I estimated, at least a year.
A year later I had read everything published by and about Strachey, and I had produced an almost complete manuscript. But I had come to the conclusion that Strachey was one of those non-fiction writers whose work was so personal that it could be illuminated by some biographical commentary. It was impossible, from published sources, to reconstruct any worthwhile biography. As for unpublished sources, Clive Bell had sounded an ominous warning. ‘Lytton could love, and perhaps he could hate,’ he had written.
‘To anyone who knew him well it is obvious that love and lust and that mysterious mixture of the two which is the heart’s desire played in his life parts of which a biographer who fails to take account will make himself ridiculous. But I am not a biographer, nor can, nor should, a biography of Lytton Strachey be attempted for many years to come. It cannot be attempted till his letters have been published or any rate made accessible, and his letters should not be published till those he cared for and those who thought he cared for them are dead. Most of his papers luckily are in safe and scholarly hands.’1
This passage conjured up an almost impregnable stronghold into which I had to make a breach. But I had no doubt that within these fortifications lay solutions to many of the problems that my literary researches had raised. I knew none of the surviving members of the Bloomsbury Group, but I had been given the address of a certain Frances Partridge, a friend of Strachey’s who had collaborated with him on the eight-volume edition of The Greville Memoirs. To write to her out of the blue and ask for assistance seemed as good a start as any.
I wrote. In her reply she explained that the person I should first get in touch with was James Strachey, Lytton’s younger brother and literary executor. He was the key figure to any critical and biographical study such as I wanted to write. For if he were prepared to cooperate then she too would be ready to help me, and so also, she implied, would most of Lytton’s other friends.
I met James Strachey a fortnight later. In the meantime various unnerving rumours concerning him had reached me. He was a psychoanalyst, who had been analysed by Freud, had subsequently worked for him in Vienna, and who, during the last twenty years, had been engaged on a monumental translation of the Master’s works. This twenty-four volume edition, with its maze of additional footnotes and introductions, was said to be so fine as a work both of art and of scholarship that a distinguished German publishing house was endeavouring to have it retranslated back into German as their own Standard Edition. He was married to another psychoanalyst, Alix Sargant-Florence, author of The Unconscious Motives of War, a once brilliant cricket player and dancer at night clubs. Together, I was inaccurately informed by Osbert Sitwell, they had rented off the attics of their house to some unidentified people on whom they had practised their psychoanalytical experiments so that these wretched tenants no longer knew anything except the amount of their rent and the date it was due.
It was with some qualms that I approached their red-brick Edwardian house, set in the beech woods of Marlow Common. I arrived at mid-day, prepared for practically anything – but not for what I found. Though it was frosty outside, the temperature within the house seemed set at a steady eighty degrees Fahrenheit. No windows were open and, to prevent the suspicion of a draught, cellophane curtains were drawn against them. There was an odour of disinfectant about the rooms. I felt I had entered a specially treated capsule where some rare variety of homo sapiens was being exquisitely preserved.
James Strachey was almost an exact replica of Freud himself, though with some traces of Lytton’s physiognomy – the slightly bulbous nose in particular. He wore a short white beard because, he told me, of the difficulty of shaving. He had had it now for some fifty years. He also wore spectacles, one lens of which was transparent, the other translucent. It was only later that I learnt he had overcome with extraordinary patience a series of eye operations that had threatened to put an end to his magnum opus. In a more subdued and somewhat less astringent form, he shared many of Lytton’s qualities – his humour, his depth and ambiguity of silence, his rational turn of mind, his shy emotionalism and something of his predisposition to vertigo. As he opened the front door to me, swaying slightly, murmuring something I failed to overhear, I wondered for a moment whether he might be ill. I extended a hand, a gesture which might be interpreted either as a formality or an offer of assistance. But he retreated, and I followed him in.
Of all his Stracheyesque characteristics, it was his silence that I found most dismaying during the hour’s ‘interview’, as he called it, before lunch. I could not tell whether he produced these silences spontaneously, or whether they were in some manner premeditated. Had he heard what I said? Or did he disapprove? Or again, was he pondering, indefinitely, upon some singular reply? It was impossible to tell. To fill the vacuum, I began jabbering nonsense.
His wife came in, austere and intellectual, very thin, with a deeply-lined parchment face and large expressive eyes. We all drank a little pale sherry and then moved in procession past Stephen Tomlin’s bust of Lytton to the dining-room.
Lunch was a spartan affair. Though generous in spirit, my hosts were by temperament ascetic and lived frugally. We ate spam, a cold potato each, and lettuce leaves. In our glasses there showed a faint blush of red wine from the Wine Society, but I was the only one who sipped any. After the spam, some cheese was quarried out from the cold storage, and some biscuits extracted from a long row of numbered tins ranged like files along a shelf in the kitchen. Everything, spam, potato, lettuce, cheese and biscuits, was, like the windows, swathed in protective cellophane.
During lunch we talked of psychoanalysis – not the subject but the word, its derivation and correct spelling. Should it have a hyphen? Did it need both the central ‘o’ and ‘a’? It was a topic to which I could contribute little of brilliance.
After lunch, Alix Strachey excused herself. She was going upstairs to watch a television programme for children. Recently she had decided to learn physics, she explained, and found these kindergarten classes instructive. James said nothing. In silence we filed back the biscuits on the shelf, dashed the rest of the wine down the sink, re-inserted the cheese into its wrappings and its frozen chamber. Then James announced that we were to visit the ‘studio wilderness’, a large building with a stone floor, standing some ten yards to the rear of the house. He put on boots, a scarf, gloves, a heavy belted overcoat down to his ankles, and we started out on our journey.
The studio wilderness housed much of Lytton’s library and collection of papers. The bookcase along one of its walls was filled with French and English volumes going back to the year 1841. In the middle of the building were two great wooden tables piled high with boxes and files, and on the floor were littered innumerable trunks and suitcases – all full of letters, diaries and miscellaneous papers. Cobwebs and a pall of dust blanketed everything. Spiders – of which I have a particular horror – scuttled about the walls and floor, or swam suspended from the ceiling. James stared at this carefully accumulated debris with fascinated wonder. He had made Herculean efforts to organize it all, but it had got the better of him. Sometimes he felt like putting everything in the fire, or sending it all to the archives of some far-off university. Meanwhile he stored every item, however minimal, and had persistently done so for the last thirty years. He was waiting for a time when civilized opinion had advanced far enough to make the revelations which these papers contained acceptable to the public. One of the ways he would determine whether such a time had arrived was to be the reaction of any potential biographer. I was not the first to approach him. Several years before, Guy Boas had done so. But it had not worked out since Boas considered the material too scandalous for publication. James Strachey suggested he might get the book printed in Holland, but Boas, not liking to risk it, had backed down. Then Michael Goodwin, editor of Twentieth Century, had applied, and even been permitted to start his research, but had soon vanished driven, in James’s expert opinion, insane by the project. Much pioneer work had been done by Professor Charles Richard Sanders in the United States. Then Professor Gabriel Merle had come over from Paris and taken back a large number of confidential microfilms of Lytton’s letters in order to compose a thesis for the Sorbonne. So what I saw in front of me was only some of the source material. There was still more besides, James added, in his study. We must go there now.
We travelled back and went upstairs. The study was a long rectangular room surrounded on three sides by books and gramophone records, with a narrow window running above them. At the farther end of the room stood a desk on which lay the intimidating engines of James Strachey’s oeuvre. Two massive metal radiators, to which I politely extended my hands, turned out to be stereophonic loudspeakers – James was an authority on Haydn, Mozart and Wagner, and contributed notes and commentaries for Glyndebourne programmes. Above the fireplace hung a portrait of Lytton relaxing in a deck-chair, painted by Carrington. Next to the fireplace was an armchair, draped in cellophane. James showed me more papers, including his own correspondence with Rupert Brooke, and several reels of microfilm. ‘Do you still want to write about Lytton?’ he at length inquired. I replied that I did. ‘I see,’ was all he said.
I left the house late that afternoon in profound depression. The mass of unpublished material made my previous year’s work seem futile. But I could not think I had made a good impression. It appeared likely that I had been wasting my time.
Forty-eight hours later I received a letter from James. He and his wife had decided to assist me so far as possible. But there were practical difficulties. Since ‘this Freud translation business is in a rather specially hectic state’, they were both bound to avoid being diverted. Therefore, I would have to bring my own food and drink each day. There was also the problem of travel. I should have to journey up and down by a relay of trains and buses. However, if I could face such horrors as these, I was free to start whenever I liked – preferably before the snow set in. I would be allowed access to the studio wilderness and permitted to inspect anything in the house itself.
So began what, for the next five years, was to prove not simply the composition of a large book but a way of life and an education.
I started work at Marlow in October 1962. The hexagonal room where we had first had lunch was given over to me, and as soon as I entered it I would strip off as many clothes as I thought practicable, begin reading through the correspondence, copying out sections, taking notes. From time to time there was a knocking at the hatch which communicated with the kitchen. I would open it to find a steaming cup of coffee and a numbered biscuit, presumably left by Alix. From time to time James would quietly manifest himself in the doorway on the other side of the room, stand there awhile regarding me, deposit some notebook or sheaf of papers he had come across, then disappear. Apart from this there was little to disturb me – occasionally some music from the radiator-like loudspeakers upstairs, and very occasionally the sound of scuffling feet as the top-floor tenants descended the stairs. Nothing else.
Very soon I realized that this must be one of the major caches of literary papers in modern times. Lytton was never a voluble conversationalist and had disliked the telephone. But he had loved to write and to receive letters. Here, in holograph, typescript and microfilm, were very many of his letters, preserved since the age of six, and the correspondence of his Bloomsbury friends.
All this was tremendously exciting. But it posed for me equally tremendous problems – problems of how to treat this colossal quantity of unpublished documents and of how to organize my life around it. Near the outset I had to make the difficult decision that the subject was worth several years’ labour, and I had to persuade my publisher that I had made the right decision. James Michie had left Heinemann, but I was fortunate in that David Machin, his successor, was equally sympathetic. I outlined my plan. I wanted to accomplish four things – to provide a selection of the best of Strachey’s letters; conduct a reappraisal of his work; present a panoramic view of Bloomsbury life; and write a modern biography. I would endeavour to shape all this into a conversation piece around the figure of Lytton Strachey. ‘Discretion’, he had said, ‘is not the better part of biography.’ I should not be discreet.
I had received from Heinemann an advance on royalties of fifty pounds, and although this was double what I had been paid for my life of Kingsmill, I could see that there would be something of a financial shortfall if my plans were to go ahead. There were no Arts Council bursaries in those days, no authors’ Foundation grants, for British authors to buy the extra time they needed to write their books. It was difficult, too, for my publisher to pay me very much more since Bloomsbury was so unfashionable. E.M. Forster’s reputation had not then been revived by the film industry; Virginia Woolf was not yet the inspiration she was to become, with the rise of the feminist movement; the art criticism of Clive Bell and Roger Fry was considered somewhat insignificant; the paintings of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant lay in the cellars of many galleries; even the professional reputation of Maynard Keynes was in retreat before Milton Friedman and the Chicago economists.
The best day’s work I did for my own economy was at the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square, looking through lists of fellowships that offered money to non-American citizens for work done outside the United States. By the end of the day I had found two: the Eugene Saxton Fellowship2 and the Bollingen Fellowship. I applied for each in succeeding years and, by virtue, I imagine, of there being no competition whatsoever, was given both of them. The trustees seemed disturbed by my approach and shortly afterwards closed down both institutions. But their grants enabled me to live and work, with the odd job thrown in, for some three years.
Part of a biographer’s research can have about it an inevitable sameness. When one has examined ten thousand letters, one may be forgiven for eyeing the next ten thousand with a certain lacklustre. While I was examining Lytton’s early and most plaintive correspondence, with its microscopic details of faulty digestion, neurasthenia, apathy, self-loathing and other unhappy qualities that made up what he termed ‘the black period’ of his life, I did feel seriously infected with many of these same ailments. If symptoms like these were posthumously contagious, then my next subject must, I resolved, be someone of astonishing virility and euphoria. However, I soon became absorbed in this life, and over the years I was writing my book I do not think I was ever more than half aware of the outside world. The world in which I lived was that of the Bloomsbury Group during the early part of this century. My work held something of the excitement of an archaeological discovery. The vast terra incognita represented by the Strachey papers seemed like a lost way of life that was gradually emerging into the light.
Fortunately the routine of my research was widely variegated. One of my most interesting finds took place in the basement of 51 Gordon Square, the Strachey family’s home from 1919 to 1963. The house was being vacated, having been bought by University College, London. But I had been given authority to explore everything. On my first visit I noticed a tablet in the entrance hall listing the various members of the family with the captions ‘In’ and ‘Out’. The word ‘Out’ had been slotted against those who (some of them half a century ago) had died. By the time I finished reconnoitring the basement, the dustmen had turned up to carry off the rubbish for burning, and I won a fierce tug-of-war with them for Lytton’s bulky long-lost Fellowship dissertation on Warren Hastings. Among other things I came across was a letter in the near-illegible Gothic hand of Sigmund Freud, written on Christmas Day 1928, and giving his thoughts on Elizabeth and Essex.
The research was enlivened, too, by a great deal of travel. One of the first things I did on leaving Marlow was to fly to Paris. There I met Gabriel Merle, a charming taciturn French scholar, who handed me the microfilms he had been lent by James. These microfilms contained Lytton’s correspondence with his family, with Virginia Woolf (unabridged) and with Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes. Having negotiated the Customs and returned home, I hired from Kodak a huge black machine, like an astronomer’s telescope, and fed the reels of microfilm into it. For two months my life orbited round this monstrous object, which stood in the centre of my one-room flat, dwarfing the furniture. I ate, slept, washed and dressed under its shadow. And for twelve or fifteen hours a day I would sit projecting the films on to a screen, and copying down anything I needed.
Later on I travelled through France to La Souco, the house overlooking Monte Carlo which had belonged to Lytton’s brother-in-law, the painter Simon Bussy, and where Lytton had often stayed and worked. It was deserted when I called, with a notice that it was up for sale. So I boldly made my way in and looked round until captured by a voluble French neighbour who accused me of being a burglar. My French not being up to providing a truthful explanation, I gave her to understand that I was a prospective purchaser, and in the guise of a man of wealth was lavishly entertained.
A number of people had disliked Lytton Strachey – Harold Nicolson for instance. I went to see him in his rooms at the Albany one evening. He was sitting in a chair when I entered, open-eyed and apparently examining me critically. He said nothing. I stood before him shuffling my feet, shifting my weight from one side to another, murmuring something about the uncontroversial weather. He continued to glare. Suddenly a sort of convulsion ran through him, and he blinked. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been asleep,’ he said. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I said that I would. But the question was apparently to satisfy his curiosity rather than my thirst. We began to talk. Lytton, he told me, had resembled a bearded and bitchy old woman, rude rather than witty in society, injecting with his unnaturally treble voice jets of stinging poison into otherwise convivial gatherings. After about a quarter of an hour he looked across at his own large empty glass, which stood on the table between us, and asked: ‘Another drink?’ Hesitantly I agreed. But once again he made no move, and since I could see no sign of drink in the room, we went on talking. Ten minutes later his gaze again fell on the glass, this time with incredulity. ‘Do you want another drink?’ His tone was so sharp I thought it prudent to refuse.
Next day I told this story to Duncan Grant. without a word, he leapt up and poured me a strong gin and tonic. It was half-past ten in the morning.
Another near-contemporary of Lytton’s who was reputed to disapprove of him was Bertrand Russell. He invited me to Plas Penrhyn, his remote house in North Wales, high up on a hill overlooking the Irish sea. There, in the drawing-room, he regaled me with mildly indecent stories of Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde, showed me the typescript of his then unpublished autobiography and several Strachey letters. Had he disliked Lytton? I asked. No, he answered, never. And so smiling, diminutive and gently nostalgic did he appear that it was difficult to believe that he had upbraided Lytton for having degraded G.E. Moore’s ethics into ‘advocacy of a stuffy girls’-school sentimentalizing’ – a piece of invective that earned him a rebuke from E.M. Forster.
Frances Partridge had intimated that James Strachey’s approval would guarantee me the help of many other friends, and so it turned out. Over the years I met or corresponded with over a hundred people, and the great majority of these generously helped me. This was all the more remarkable in view of the controversial material involved. For here was I, a stranger from a different generation, proposing to investigate their past with probing intimacy. I was setting out to give Lytton’s love-life the same prominence in my book as it had had in his career, to trace its effect on his work, and to treat the whole subject of homosexuality openly – in the same way as I would have treated heterosexuality. But my plan depended on the cooperation of a band of mercurial octogenarians. It was for all of us a daunting prospect. ‘Shall I be arrested?’ one of them asked after reading through my typescript. And another, with pathos, exclaimed: ‘When this comes out, they will never again allow me into Lord’s.’ In particular, it says much for the courage and integrity of Duncan Grant and Roger Senhouse that they did not censor what I had written. Each of them had been central to an understanding of part of Lytton’s life. But neither, perhaps, had known the full extent of the role he had played in Lytton’s emotions until he read my account based largely on what Lytton wrote to other friends. It was hardly surprising that this should be the cause of some agitation. But neither of them put any obstacle in my way, and Duncan Grant set his seal of approval on the first volume by drawing for its jacket a portrait of Lytton based on an early photograph, and giving it to me.
By the crucial winter of 1963–4, I had reached in my first volume what is for me one of the most difficult stages in a book. I was two-thirds of the way through it. A great deal remained to be done, but the temptation to relax slightly, together with the accumulating strain of the Kingsmill affair, made the last third very arduous. I had often been haunted by fears that I would not be able to do the book, that it was beyond me. Now these fears multiplied. I inched my way forward, writing in the mornings, typing or doing extra research work every afternoon. This last section of the book took me almost a year to finish, and by the time I had done so, my two index fingers, the only ones I used for typing, were numb.
I returned to Marlow in the autumn of 1964, taking with me the typescript of volume one. While James unhurriedly read through it in his study, I worked below preparing for the second volume. Occasionally, in late afternoon, the electricity supply would fail, and the regime became candles in champagne bottles. James did not say much while he was reading the typescript, but when he had completed it his reaction was devastating. I had, he felt, been far too hostile to his brother. He suspected that I harboured an unconscious dislike of him, probably on moral grounds. This suggestion seemed to me fantastic, but there is no appeal against the accusation of an unconscious attitude. One’s natural rejoinder – that one is unconscious of it – seems only to corroborate the allegation. For my own part, I had come to feel that James resented any criticism of Lytton, to whom he had been intimately attached. ‘I’m in a bit of a conflict,’ he told me. On the one hand, he explained, he had grown rather friendly towards me, but on the other he rather violently objected to many passages in the book. He didn’t enjoy being unpleasant to someone he quite liked. What, therefore, were we to do?
What we agreed to do was to go through the book sentence by sentence trying to hammer out a mutually acceptable text. In return for what he called ‘a bribe’ of five hundred pounds, I agreed not to publish this first volume until I had finished the whole work. Both volumes could then be brought out together or with only a short interval between them. Despite James’s generosity, this was undeniably a setback. I felt like a marathon runner who, on completing the course, is asked whether he wouldn’t mind immediately running round it all over again.
I returned to London, to my portable typewriter, and the start of another quarter of a million words. Over the next two and a half years, James went through both volumes, in microscopic detail, twice. I stayed with him and Alix a number of times in Marlow; he occasionally came to London; we exchanged a hundred letters; he sent me many pages of closely written notes. When he was especially cross, I noticed, he would switch from blue to red ink, and on one fearful occasion the envelope itself was addressed in red. Nothing escaped his attention. One character had ‘short’ not ‘small’ shin bones; ‘extrovert’ was a word that derived from Jung and was meaningless; another person’s ability was not ‘considerable’ but ‘very considerable’; ‘pratter’ was a mistyping of ‘prattle’; and so on. These notes, queries and comments took up an infinite amount of James’s time. But they were of incalculable value to me. By nature he was uncommunicative, yet now he was being provoked into divulging all sorts of information known to almost no one else that would greatly enrich the biography. Sometimes, of course, we did not agree. In these cases I stuck to my guns and put James’s dashing comments in the footnotes.
In April 1967, shortly after having completed his final notes, James died suddenly of a heart attack. I felt stunned. I had thought he would live to be at least a hundred. Although he would on occasions criticize me sharply over something I had or hadn’t written, our differences had been argued out in the best of spirits. His mind and scholarship could appear daunting, but they were mixed with a humour and gentleness that were unforgettable, and that made working with him a lesson in civilized behaviour.
Readers of the biography might well deduce from some of the footnotes that James greatly disliked the book from beginning to end. He was never one to cover up opinions so that I knew it was true when he told me at the end he appreciated the seriousness of purpose and approved of the structure and length of the book. The figures and situations, though not always as he saw them, had seemed to force their way through, he added, by a continuous pressure of permeation, and some of the narrative, especially towards the close, he liked. Since I had never blindly accepted his opinions, and since I knew his approval was extremely hard to win, nothing could have pleased me more.
*
The above preface was written for the first paperback edition of this biography in 1971. To preserve the reputation of the binders, I had divided the biographical narrative from the literary criticism (which appeared as a separate publication) and reduced the original two-volume baggy monster to a slim 1,044 pages. It was this version, with a few revisions made in subsequent reprints, that went marching through the next twenty years until, unable to endure any longer slinking past bookshops which stocked it, I hurried to my publishers one day and begged them to put it out of print. It was an unusual scene and needs some explanation.
Reviewing Lytton Strachey on its first publication in 1967, Raymond Mortimer had called it ‘the first post-Wolfenden biography’. Some readers today may need to be reminded that, ten years after the Wolfenden Report on prostitution and homosexuality was published in 1957, the Sexual Offences Act became law. This replaced the Labouchère Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 under which Oscar Wilde had been sentenced to two years’ hard labour, and legitimized homosexual acts in private between consenting adults over twenty-one years of age – providing they were not in the armed services. The ten-year delay between the Report (which was not unanimous) and its legal implementation gives an indication of how sensitive the subject was still felt to be at the time my biography first appeared.
The amiable habit publishers have of copying out the most favourable passages from reviews and reproducing them on the jackets of books can produce a rather sentimental impression of how those books were actually received. Even a reader such as Frances Partridge, who could not ‘see any sense in biographies that suppress or distort the truth’, has recorded in her diary ‘a sort of horror’ as part of her reaction to reading my typescript. ‘Perhaps he has probed too unmercifully,’ she wrote (28 March 1966), ‘even the bedrooms and beds are explored for data.’
Everyone agreed that I had written Lytton Strachey in prose and not in verse; but after that opinions divided sharply. ‘Rather wonderful & terrible how all that can now be said,’ Nancy Mitford wrote (2 March 1968).3 I was charged with ‘cruelty’ and praised for ‘candour’. W.H. Auden and Sir Roy Harrod, biographer of Maynard Keynes, believed the book should not have been written. Dame Helen Gardner declared it to be a ‘directory for consenting adults’. My mail became filled with apoplectic accusations and curious invitations (one poet even composed his envelope in verse as if he were Lytton Strachey addressing Roger Senhouse). ‘I have been reading your book on Lytton Strachey,’ volunteered another enthusiast from that pre-Aids world, ‘and I do think you have done a service to humanity in general by showing how far degradation can go … One can only be truly thankful that one never met him … he set the worst possible example. Homosexuality is not being “civilised” or “rational”. It is the filthiest trick ever devised by man: it is anti-social, it often leads to cancer.’
What particularly incensed some people was the revelation that Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories had revived Western capitalism in its fight against the ‘red menace’ of communism, had been an active homosexual. I was said to have given comfort to the enemy, to have subverted the Free World. When President Nixon announced in a public speech: ‘We are all Keynesians now,’ there was a ripple of laughter round the world. Not very long afterwards he left office.
‘I don’t suppose Lytton will ever, or should ever, get explained to the general public,’ E.M. Forster had written to Ottoline Morrell (27 January 1932). within Bloomsbury, reactions to my typescript were so hostile that it seemed doubtful for a time whether it would be published. As Virginia Woolf indicated in her diary and letters, James Strachey believed that, had his brother lived longer, he would have turned what was implicit in his biographies into an explicit autobiographical campaign to achieve the same treatment under the law for homosexuality as for heterosexuality. I can see now, though I did not see it then, that he would have liked my biography to perform something of the work Lytton might have done between the 1930s and 1950s. He did not tell me that his first idea in the 1930s had been for himself ‘to set about a very long life of Lytton with all the letters’, and, as Virginia Woolf explained in her diary (5 April 1935), for her to ‘write a character of Lytton as introduction’. But Virginia knew a different Lytton and doubted James’s prediction of the things, such things, his brother would have done. He was evidently disappointed that Virginia never wrote this ‘character’ of Lytton, and in a letter to me he dismissed her judgement of character with much the same finality as he swept aside many of my own judgements. James was disappointed with my book partly because, though I made no moral distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality, I did not offer as a subtext the unfulfilled life he had foreseen.
Yet, as many letters I was to receive show, the book was read by homosexuals. Kenneth Williams in his diary (13 January 1969) wrote of being deeply moved by ‘this strange, gentle, unhappy and wonderfully civilized man who was so unable to find complete & shared love, and who was, at the end, surrounded by love. I think there are things in this book which have affected me deeply … I think this book will go on affecting me, and will reverberate for the rest of my life.’4 I believe this would have silently pleased James.
When James was confronted by something particularly idiotic from me, he would go pink in the face and fall silent. David Garnett, on the other hand, seeing something outrageous, grew full of ‘red-faced truculence, and talk about libel actions’, so Alix Strachey said. His objections were precisely the opposite of James’s. His own autobiography had been enlivened by many amorous exploits, but he had confined himself on the page to heterosexual exploits. My revelations, he believed, would be incalculably harmful to anyone associated with them. So, in the summer of 1966, he ‘violently entered the lists’, Frances Partridge records, ‘in favour of wholesale suppression’.
Fourteen years later, having heard a radio broadcast I made on Strachey, David Garnett wrote to me to explain that there had been two reasons why he so disliked my biography. He thought that I was ‘quite wrong’ about Lytton’s attitude to his family, and that I had given an ‘inaccurate impression of the Apostles’ at Cambridge. He may have been right, but since these subjects were covered in less than one twentieth of my book, they hardly constituted grounds for ‘wholesale suppression’ – indeed they were not really the main cause of his antagonism. But his latter was, I believe, signalling something else. Written a year before his death, it saluted a change in the climate of opinion, a change that had started in the late 1960s.
This change profoundly affected what was seen as admissible material in non-fiction. In 1968 an article appeared in the Spectator warning biographers of the dangers of further advances in Stracheyesque indiscretion. People likely to be the subjects of such biographies would, it was argued,
‘destroy their most intimate letters and be very careful what they write in their journals. Diarists will be identified and suspect. The very keeping of a diary will be regarded as an unsocial act. So the private records of our times, perhaps the most articulate in history, will be paradoxically sparse unless we impose on ourselves some sort of limitation on what is to be published and when.’
The author of the Spectator article, called ‘A Problem of Discretion’, had recently edited his own father’s diaries for publication. ‘My only cause for hesitation’, he wrote, ‘was whether to reveal my father’s racial prejudices and my mother’s extreme conservatism.’ But a number of readers reacted in horror when, in 1973, this same author revealed his father’s complaisance and his mother’s sexual radicalism by publishing and adding to his mother’s autobiography, in a now famous book called Portrait of a Marriage. It was ten years since his mother’s death; five since his father’s; and one year since the death of Violet Trefusis about whose love-affair with his mother, Vita Sackville-West, the book tells. In his Foreword, Nigel Nicolson wrote: ‘Let not the reader condemn in ten minutes a decision which I have pondered for ten years.’ This ten-year span includes the year in which Nigel Nicolson wrote ‘A Problem of Discretion’ for the Spectator, and what is more significant than praise or blame is the barometric change this decision registers in modern non-fiction.
Besides the changes taking place in biography itself, there were other changes, in newspapers and the arts, that were to affect my book. Frances Partridge had noted, with some qualms, the confidence of my literary judgements. I remember this as being little more than a confidence trick to help me over the obstacle course before publication. ‘I think on the whole Holroyd has got it right,’ Frances Partridge concluded (20 November 1968). But none of us had foreseen, in an age of growing journalistic power, the aggressive use some reviewers were to make of the biography, all the more difficult when praising me in order to season their disparagement of Bloomsbury. ‘I have just seen [Malcolm] Muggeridge’s sniggering review of your book on Lytton Strachey,’ Geoffrey Keynes wrote to me (1 October 1967). ‘… I do not know your motives but I cannot regard them, whatever they may be, as creditable.’ I pointed out that writers of books are not responsible for the reviews of their books, but Geoffrey Keynes regarded this as a trivial point. I had given these reviewers an opportunity for exercising a venom and malevolence they would not otherwise have had. ‘The harm is done’, he wrote (4 October 1967), ‘& there’s no more to be said.’
The second development we had not foreseen was that, as the performing arts began to enjoy a renaissance, there would be proposals from Christopher Hampton, Peter Luke, John Osborne, Ken Russell, Gore Vidal and others to make films and plays, and even a musical, from the Strachey and Carrington story. ‘The book was made possible by the collaboration of the many who lent Holroyd letters,’ Noel Carrington protested to the BBC (2 December 1968) on reading that Oliver Reed was flexing his muscles to take on the part of Strachey. ‘… I am sure that most of us would have declined to let him have such access had we known that a film dramatisation of the characters was to follow … I feel there is a valid distinction between a biography and the televised dramatisation of a life, especially one that ended in tragedy still exceedingly painful to those concerned.’ Neither Noel Carrington nor Alix Strachey nor Frances Partridge objected to a documentary. But a fictional dramatization was for the time being unacceptable because, as Frances Partridge explained, ‘no actor’s performance, however good, can be other than grotesque to those who knew the originals intimately’.
Had my biography been published ten years later, it would have had a much less bumpy ride. Angelica Garnett, for example, whom I saw while doing my research and who came to the American publisher’s launch of the book in 1968, had, unknown to me, been adamant that ‘one couldn’t publish such things about living people’. Duncan, she told Frances Partridge, ‘has a lot of conventional friends who’ll be horribly shocked’. This was the same reason that had been given by her mother Vanessa Bell for maintaining the pretence, while Angelica was growing up at Charleston in the 1920s and 1930s, that Clive Bell was her father. My biography did not then reveal Duncan Grant as her real father, but it was perhaps a useful prologue to the remarkable and necessary autobiography, Deceived with Kindness (1984), that she began writing in the 1970s. This book set her free from a deception practised for the benefit of an ‘innocent and conventional’ generation of people, such as Clive Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s parents, and posthumously restored Duncan as her father.5 The question that confronted her and others in the 1960s was whether such pretences spring up inevitably and indestructibly from generation to generation, or whether Bloomsbury had helped to reduce the need for them.
Having been handed such unsettling material by James Strachey and having worked on it in private for almost five years, I assumed far too innocently that everyone would naturally agree it should be published. I knew little of what was going on after I circulated my completed typescript round Bloomsbury in 1966 – and indeed I did not fully realize the alarm it was causing until the publication in 1993 of Frances Partridge’s diaries, Other People 1963–1966. It was fortunate for me that she felt strongly in favour of unbowdlerized biographies. Feeling ‘uneasy at the thought of the chopper ready to fall’ on my head, she was prepared to defend my book in principle at a time when others ‘had not a good word for it’, arguing that Bloomsbury should have the courage to uphold its own standards publicly. ‘I’m more than faintly surprised’, she wrote, ‘at their [the homosexuals’] secretiveness just when their position seems to be about to be legally ratified.’ Nevertheless, she acknowledged the subject to be ‘complicated and difficult’ because of the personal feelings of those directly involved. Eventually, when everyone had had their say, it was agreed that the main people in question, Duncan Grant in the first volume and Roger Senhouse in the second volume, must have the last word.
An atmosphere of fatalism prevailed. There was a pause, and as the pause lengthened so the publishers themselves became agitated. On the advice of their lawyers, I was asked to get written permission from both Duncan Grant and Roger Senhouse. When I approached Roger Senhouse, he immediately asked me down to stay the weekend with him at his house in Rye. There would be no difficulty, he assured me, over permission, and he repeated this assurance while placing the vital piece of paper to one side during the first evening I was there. Over the next forty-eight hours, at breakfast, or out walking, and again in his library (where I saw the books Strachey had left him), I would produce this paper like a policeman producing a warrant, and Roger would greet it with genial familiarity before passing on to more entertaining subjects. He was determined to see me off at the railway station on the Sunday evening. As we got into the taxi I apologetically flourished the permission statement once more, and he eagerly seized it. Then, as we got out of the taxi I retrieved it from the seat and, on the platform, as my train was coming in, presented it yet again – and he finally signed it, saying with a smile that it was ‘a fair cop’. What he had to put up with from me I only came to see some half-dozen years later when, endeavouring to do some small favour for the novelist William Gerhardie, I received from Gerhardie a portrait of myself conveying what it was like to be on the receiving-end of my attentions. In short I appeared as ‘a smilingly impenitent, pig-headed, bloody-minded, bigoted, intolerant, unyielding, inelastic, hard, inflexible, opinionate, fanatical, obsessed, pedantic, rook-ribbed, unmoved, persistent, incurable, irrepressible, intractable, impersuadable, cross-grained ruffian – no offence implied’.6
Roger Senhouse also, miraculously, took no offence. Only now do I appreciate quite how painful was his and Duncan Grant’s position,7 or understand the indignation towards me of those who rallied round them. ‘I think you will agree, it puts Duncan Grant in a rather awkward position,’ Quentin Bell explained to me (11 July 1966).
‘He is certainly not an enemy of historical truth or, I think, at all ashamed of his erotic adventures; but I don’t think that anyone could fail to be rather taken aback by contemplating the publication of such very intimate details of his early loves, and, what is more, of his very youthful expressions of feeling … he is very much torn between a desire not to be unfair and obstructive and a natural reluctance to see very private emotions made so very public’
A Bloomsbury compromise was proposed based on Strachey’s own treatment of Florence Nightingale’s early love which ‘tells one practically nothing and yet says everything’. I was not very happy with this, and Duncan finally decided to ask for no excisions. So, as the art historian Richard Shone later wrote, he made ‘his own contribution to the emancipated climate of the Sixties just as he had participated in a similar movement half a century before’.8 Not all of us have our principles tested in this awkward fashion late in life, and none of us can feel confident of passing such a test. At the time I did not quite realize how difficult their decision must have been, and not knowing what was happening while I anxiously waited, did not adequately acknowledge the courage needed to make that decision. This act of acknowledgement I now belatedly perform.
Immediately after publication, my book received its most torrid greeting from a number of heterosexuals and their families. Lady Ottoline Morrell’s daughter, Julian Vinogradoff, had guardedly shown me Lytton’s correspondence with her mother and praised my first volume, the severity of which she picked out for special commendation. She also lent one or two Bloomsbury pictures in her private collection for a party given by Miss Dillon, the owner of Dillons bookshop, to mark the completion of my second volume. I sent Mrs Vinogradoff what is called a ‘complimentary’ copy of this second volume but, finding nothing complimentary in it about her mother, she arrived early at the party and, to the delight of various waiting journalists, removed her pictures from the wall.
Her objections, which were strong and sincerely felt, burst into the Times Literary Supplement and found loyal support from such eminent littérateurs as Lord David Cecil. This resentment was still simmering six years later when the second volume of Ottoline’s memoirs, Ottoline at Garsington (1974), was published with a nine-page introduction by its editor, Robert Gathorne-Hardy, attacking the ‘derisive and derogatory’ portrait I had drawn of Ottoline comprehensively based on ‘every misleading source’. What Ottoline had suffered in her lifetime at the hands of so many writers from D.H. Lawrence to Aldous Huxley, and so many artists from Henry Lamb to Augustus John, was now being gratuitously visited on her family: that was the feeling of Julian Vinogradoff’s friends. In preparing this revised edition of my biography I have looked carefully at these objections, re-examined the correspondence, read two new biographies of Ottoline and made whatever corrections, reinterpretations or amplifications I have come to feel are genuinely needed. But I cannot guarantee their acceptability to those who knew and loved Ottoline.
Among the several solicitors’ letters I received, the most threatening came from a firm representing Bernard Penrose, known to everyone as ‘Beacus’. What I had usually done was to send pages of my typescript to anyone who appeared in them and who might find them hurtful. However I had not been able to send anything to Bernard Penrose because he had been seriously ill in hospital. On the advice of a solicitor, I therefore invented a new name for him and added a few fanciful touches, as if I were an unbridled novelist, to conceal his identity. He then came out of hospital fighting fit and demanding to know through his lawyers whether I could deny that he was the ‘Piers Noxall’, nicknamed ‘Snipe’, who I claimed had made Carrington pregnant in the late 1920s. I could not deny it, and though Carrington’s diary made it clear that he was the father of her unborn child, I could not prove the truth of this to any lawyer’s satisfaction forty years later. Here was an example of the maxim ‘the greater the truth the greater the libel’. To my relief, Bernard Penrose did not want damages. What he wanted was for me to publish an extended apology drafted by his solicitors in the reprint of my biography, and to rewrite the passages referring to himself, using his name but eliminating him as Carrington’s lover and leaving her pregnancy suspended mysteriously in the narrative. This I was obliged to do. ‘Honour is satisfied!’ he wrote cheerfully after I had paid for the insertions and amendments together with his solicitor’s costs (equivalent to £2000 in 1994).
Later I found out that this legal action had been primed by Bernard Penrose’s wife who, though not married to him at the time, had never been told of his early relationship with Carrington and resented having to learn of it from a book. Bernard Penrose’s refusal to ask for damages perhaps reflected his unease at the situation, and the help he was to give me over my biography of Augustus John during the next couple of years was his way of making things up to me.
There is no doubt that Beacus made Carrington pregnant. In his unpublished autobiography, which he wrote in 1987 and I read in 1993, he virtually claims as much. ‘When I fell in love with another woman,’ he wrote, ‘Carrington was nearly 40. I found out only later that she had become pregnant and had an abortion. I wished I had married her, but she said she did not believe in having children.’
For this edition I have removed the lawyer’s apology and rewritten the pages in which Beacus appears, using a good deal of material that I had not seen all those years ago.
Some of my other pseudonyms were so successful that they took on lives of their own. I have met people who claim to have known these creations and told me vivid stories of their exploits. They also found their way into a number of later publications. In a scholarly work published in the United States, for example, one of them enjoyed an enterprising relationship with his non-fiction original. This game has gone on long enough and since the need for such devices has now passed, I have done away with all pseudonyms.
Not everyone with whom James Strachey had been in contact agreed to help me. For instance, Leonard Woolf. James had lent Leonard Woolf the letters Leonard had sent Lytton from Ceylon between 1904 and 1911 to help him prepare the second volume of his autobiography, Growing, which was published in 1961. James asked Leonard to show me Lytton’s correspondence over this period. Leonard agreed to see me, but showed me nothing. ‘I am very doubtful about lending the letters,’ he wrote to me (2 December 1962); and again (3 April 1963): ‘I have looked through such letters as I have and I cannot at the moment find anything which would be of any use to you.’ When my first volume came out in the autumn of 1967, he reviewed it in the New Statesman (6 October 1967), congratulating me on my ‘conscientious industry’, but regretting that I had wasted a ‘wonderful opportunity for writing a first-rate biography’. Later he told Professor Bernard Blackstone that he had thought better of me than I evidently did of him, quoting what Voltaire had said in a similar circumstance: ‘Perhaps we are both wrong.’9
It is possible, though I was unaware of this, that Leonard Woolf’s initial unhelpfulness had prejudiced me against him. In any event, I was surprised to receive a generous letter from him at the beginning of 1968 telling me that he was reviewing my second volume. I was delighted to hear that he thought it in every way much better than the first. ‘A few weeks ago in turning out some papers,’ he wrote the following month (1 February 1968), ‘I found some letters from Lytton to me and also some of his poems in his own handwriting. I have had them typed and I thought it may interest you to see the typescripts.’ These were the letters that James Strachey had asked him to show me over five years earlier. I slipped something from them into the 1971 edition of my biography, and have been able to see and use more of that correspondence now.
Leonard Woolf’s second review in the New Statesman (23 February 1968) was one of those happily chosen by the publisher to advertise my book. I can say of his criticism what he said of both volumes of my biography: that it was honest criticism throughout. He was honest, too, when asked why his autobiography had silently passed over the fact that so many of his friends were homosexuals. The editor of Encounter sent round a questionnaire to a number of authors, from Roy Harrod to Maurice Bowra, who had written biographies and memoirs of those times asking them this question. Was it oversight or suppressio veri?10 Leonard Woolf replied that his friends’ homosexuality was irrelevant to the subject treated by him in his autobiography and, since he himself was not homosexual, irrelevant to his relation to them. Furthermore, ‘when I wrote, it was still unusual to reveal facts which might be painful to living people unless it was absolutely vital to mention them.’ No one else who was sent this questionnaire from Encounter replied.
There is one criticism of my biography made by Leonard Woolf that I still don’t accept. ‘I do not think that he [Lytton] had any very strong passions or emotions,’ he wrote,‘… he was hardly ever completely serious when he had a pen in his hand, writing the tragedy or comedy of his perpetual love affairs to Maynard Keynes, James [Strachey], or me … Mr Holroyd should remember what Rosalind said some 350 years ago: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’”
It is true that in the air of pure romantic comedy which fills the Forest of Arden, there are no deaths for love. But we cannot go far into Shakespeare’s tragedies without coming across both men and women dying for love. In Lytton Strachey’s life, comedy and tragedy were not separated, nor does his sense of humour imply a lack of seriousness – indeed quite the contrary. Homosexuality was ‘irrelevant’ to Leonard Woolf and, to my mind, he underrated its significance in releasing Strachey from lonely confinement in his own body. He also underrated the intensity and precariousness of Strachey’s passions during the long shadowy period of history that followed Wilde’s imprisonment. In the ‘mausoleum talks’ after Strachey’s and Carrington’s deaths, with what later appeared a tragic irony, Leonard Woolf described Carrington’s suicide as ‘histrionic’. But however much one may not like it, her ending (which is the end of my biography) conclusively refutes Leonard’s use of Rosalind’s happy assertion.
It is a risky affair, meddling with a book that is remembered with affection by some of its early readers in order to hand it on to a new generation. The present version is still long, but not so immensely long: in short, it is almost 250,000 words less long than my original double-decker publication. Part of this reduction was made in 1971 by simply removing the literary criticism and sewing up what remained. The present operation has been far more complicated. Although the book comes out at 100,000 words shorter than the 1971 edition, it also contains 100,000 new words. The miracle which I am attempting to bring off is the creation of a comparatively shorter book with much more in it.
‘There is a chagrin of authors, not realised by readers and ignored by librarians,’ wrote William Gerhardie in the Prefatory Note to a new edition of his novel Of Mortal Love (1949), ‘a pious wish, for ever thwarted, to withdraw from circulation earlier, unpurified, inferior texts and versions of his books, to be replaced by a revised edition, and frustrate the nonsense of first editions.’ Such acts of piety and purification are looked on with considerable suspicion by critics. Writers, they feel, should live with their mistakes (which may well be more enlivening than embalmed texts), and their endeavours to eliminate these errors from their past arise from either the vanity of altering our appearance or the ambition to control history.
The precedents of those who have famously rewritten their work are certainly not encouraging. George Moore, it is said, in a mad act of justification, remodelled his paragraphs so that their last printed lines, beating back the invasion of blank spaces, exactly reached the margin of the page.
Henry James, that terrified revisionist, imposed his late manner on his earlier novels as a process of what he called ‘beautification’. But this fingering of the past from the near side of the grave, intended as an enhancement of textual detail and surface expression, is generally seen now as a self-deluded attempt at regaining access to early emotions and exerting authority over them – elderly improvements which actually smothered the life from his prose.
W.H. Auden, too, in his determination to weed out the ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’ that had entered his work through the influence of Yeats (‘a symbol of my own devil of inauthenticity’) repeatedly revised some poems and omitted others ‘false to my personal and poetic nature’ from the canon of his work. But his claim to know his poetic intention better than his readers aroused the ire of those readers’ ‘minders’, the critics, who levelled accusations at him ranging from insensitive and wilful misunderstanding of his past work to political reworking of the facts.
1 refer to these distinguished examples because, as I hurried past the bookshops to my publisher, I was well aware of the lesson they presented against ever turning back. Such warnings seemed relevant because I too felt what Henry James had felt when he said about Roderick Hudson: ‘the thing is positively in many places vilely written!’ I also recalled what Auden wrote when he set about revising his Collected Shorter Poems, ‘gnashing my teeth at my clumsiness in the old days. To-day, at least, I think I know my craft.’
But there was also the matter of scholarship, and in this respect the precedents of revised biographies – Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Leon Edel’s Henry James, George Painter’s Marcel Proust – are more auspicious. Part of my embarrassment came from the fact that in some places my biography had grown categorically misleading. Over more than twenty-five years there has been a great deal of new and informative Bloomsbury non-fiction published in the letters of Max Beerbohm, Vanessa Bell, Carrington, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Bertrand Russell and Leonard Woolf; in the correspondence between Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, Lydia Lopokova and Maynard Keynes, Ralph Partridge and Gerald Brenan, James and Alix Strachey; as well as in Ottoline Morrell’s diaries and the diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf. In addition to this primary source material there have been numerous valuable and authoritative memoirs and biographies. This accumulation of material, together with a good deal of unpublished documentation now in public collections, has enabled me to correct simple errors of fact, alter some sequences of facts, and reconsider my interpretation of facts. Some letters that I saw in private in the 1960s seem to have disappeared; other letters, such as those from Lytton to Sebastian Sprott, I have seen for the first time. I have been able to build up the subsidiary characters and sometimes hand over the narrative to them. Describing the triangular relationships in which Bloomsbury specialized I often used correspondence from only two sides. Now I am able to complete the triangle and give a multi-faceted account of what was happening.
I have taken advantage of these opportunities to give new accounts of Carrington’s early life, in particular her involvement with the painter Mark Gertler, and of Lytton’s long-lasting friendship with Virginia Woolf. I have also attempted to chart Bloomsbury’s changing relationship with some of its neighbours: its attitude to Henry James’s world and the world of D.H. Lawrence; its dalliance with the bohemianism of Augustus John and its mingling with Rupert Brooke’s Neo-Pagans, as well as its scepticism and growing interest in the advance of psychoanalysis. Above all I have been able to re-examine what Carrington called the ‘Triangular Trinity of Happiness’ at Tidmarsh and Ham Spray House and show, as I could not do before, the parts that many men and women played in this comedy of manners and the changes made to their lives as it developed into tragedy. Finally, I have tried to demonstrate that Bloomsbury’s belief in ‘a great deal of a great many kinds of love’ was an essential part of Lytton Strachey’s point of view as a historian.
The question may be asked as to whether Lytton Strachey is worth all this extra labour, and whether a new generation will be interested in his life and work. I believe that the extraordinary story of his life holds a continuing interest and that this interest is reinforced by the lasting change he brought to the craft of biography, technically and also culturally, by smuggling in deviant behaviour as part of our heritage.
Dr Johnson suggested that fame was a shuttlecock that needed determined play from the opposite side of the net to keep it in contention. If this is true, then Strachey has been doing well enough. ‘with his pacifism, his homosexuality and his bohemianism’, his anticipation of the modern plea ‘Make love, not war’, he might, the historian Piers Brendon suggests, have been clearly seen as a patron saint of the 1960s ‘flower power’. But this was obscured by the influence of F.R. Leavis who during the previous decade, Dr Brendon remembers, would tell his Cambridge pupils that Strachey had been ‘responsible, through his malign influence on Maynard Keynes, for the outbreak of the Second World War’.11
It is the reward of a successful ironist to be paradoxically acclaimed in such grand style. In his book, A History of the Modern World (1983), Paul Johnson pictures Strachey, ‘the unofficial leader of Bloomsbury… [and] a propagandist of genius’, as an English equivalent to Lenin, who used G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica as Lenin used J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism, to ‘create and fashion a new God’. In Paul Johnson’s view, Strachey aimed at an intellectual takeover of the modern world. We see him grasping the principle of power and running the Bloomsbury coterie with ‘an iron, though seemingly languid, hand’ until it grew into a mafia which was ‘far more destructive to the old British values than any legion of enemies’. The influence of this ruling mandarin reaches, in Paul Johnson’s pages, ‘upwards and downwards by the 1930s to embrace the entire political nation’. In some respects this is a similar interpretation of his influence to James Strachey’s, though from the very opposite standpoint. For Paul Johnson accuses Lytton Strachey of destroying the virtues of patriotism and leaving behind a national emptiness which became the homosexual recruiting-ground at Cambridge for Soviet espionage.12 It is perhaps appropriate for a work identifying Strachey’s parental attack on the generation brought up on Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship as one of the most powerfully decadent forces of the twentieth century, to be dedicated to the influence and achievements of the author’s father.
For a biographer to write about another biographer presents peculiar layers of complexity that become more mysterious when the Life is unpicked and restitched many years later. The situation lends itself to one of those Max Beerbohm caricatures in which the Young and the Old Self confront each other. In our case we met as strangers. This has been part of the fascination, not to say the exasperation, of the exercise. My obstinate and opinionated Young Self has insisted on retaining passages which I would never write today but which, despite their deformities, still have (he maintains) some irregular beat of life in them. The Old Self, arguing for a new aesthetic, has patiently explained that the original plan to contrast Strachey’s ‘black period’ with the ‘Spiritual Revolution’ that led to his illuminating success is too simple and has the initial disadvantage of beginning with 300 pages of blackness.
Emerging from that blackness, the Young Self learnt to write biography rather as people learn to skate, by making mistakes, falling down, picking himself up, trying again and stuttering on until, somewhere near the end, he could move with fair fluency. The Young Self allows that quicker and less haphazard progress can now be made, especially since more is known about Bloomsbury by the general reader. But he is suspicious of the Old Self’s professional tricks. Changing the metaphor, he impatiently asks what is the point of ring craft and shadow play, the use of ropes and clinches, if no knock-out blow is ever delivered. Eventually we were able to work out an accommodation because we had a similar end in view.
What I hope to have done is to approach nearer to writing the book I would like to have written all those years ago. Reading the early chapters in 1964, Alix Strachey complained that there was something ‘froglike and unfeeling’ about them. This is my final attempt to change that frog into a prince.