At the QI Club (Oxford) last night for a party and dinner to celebrate Paul Levy's edition of Lytton Strachey's Letters. Great fun and a pleasure to meet so many people — old friends and new.
I thought I'd read just about most of what there is to read about the Bloomsbury group, but there are many new things in these letters. (Times review here, Observer review here.) This is what Paul also discovered when he started on the project five years ago. For one thing, as Hilary Spurling noted in the Telegraph, what 'a comprehensive sexual odyssey' this selection of letters presents.
The last four paragraphs of Hilary Spurling's Telegraph review capture much of my own, far from straightforward reactions to Strachey and the Bloomsbury group (though this was too varied and complex a network to be intelligently subsumed under one umbrella title):
Strachey's contempt for women and his predatory accounts of children make dismal reading. So does his emotional amnesia in the 1914-18 war, when the sense of moral superiority engendered by his own and his friends' struggles to avoid serving in the Army seemed to blank out any sense of the illimitable catastrophe engulfing their contemporaries. Strachey spent the war carrying on pretty much as usual; reading, writing, visiting friends and doing the rounds of country houses ("Altogether it's been more like a campaign in Flanders than anything else," he wrote after a hectic social weekend at Garsington Manor in the summer of 1916, midway between the battles of Verdun and the Somme.)
His gossip is priceless. No one can pinpoint human failure, pretension or pomposity more brilliantly than Strachey, although it often takes close study of Levy's copious and complex notes to work out exactly who is up to what. Literature comes in a poor third. Strachey read voraciously all his life in French and English, and the relatively sparse comments included here are almost invariably spot-on. "It's the lack of copulation - actual or implied - that worries me," he said of Virginia Woolf's novels, and, of another old friend, E M Forster, "there always seems to be a touch of Weybridge in his style, whatever the subject may be".
Strachey himself became a celebrity overnight in 1918, when Eminent Victorians articulated the revulsion of a whole iconoclastic generation in the final convulsive stages of the war. Duchesses took him up, the Asquiths invited him for weekends, and a tea-party in Grosvenor Square with Mrs Astor struck awe into his heart. Someone even suggested summoning him to explain himself to the House of Commons ("I suppose I should be met at the door by the Speaker and Black Rod," Strachey wrote with satisfaction: "And the House of Lords. Are they doing anything? And His Majesty? Not a word from him.")
Nearly 40 years after his death, he became seriously famous for a second time, when Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey initiated a golden age of biography in the 1970s. Strachey himself may have hoped that publication of his letters would enhance his reputation further still, but the tone of this correspondence - catty, heartless, knowing, hugely entertaining and relentlessly flip - has more in common with Piers Morgan's The Insider than with the warmth, humanity and the subtle depths of feeling revealed in Holroyd's extraordinary biography.
