"Of course he did, and it was the only occasion I have ever seen him really furiously angry with Lytton."Īside from correcting misimpressions or revising chronology, though, does the material really justify a new biography? Oddly enough, the answer seems to be yes.
The new biography, however, benefits from Frances Partridge's "Memories," which gave a very different view: "If Lytton supposed Ralph wouldn't show me this letter he betrayed unusual lack of understanding of his character," she indignantly remembered. Holroyd notes that "it was practically impossible for Ralph to turn his back on such a modest appeal, so diffidently - so effectively - expressed," and implies that circumstances were to some degree improved by their subsequent discussion. He quotes, for example, a letter from Strachey to Ralph Partridge asking him gently not to bring his lover (later his wife, Frances Partridge) so often to visit. In some cases, he had the disturbing experience of finding that he had misread events or relationships. Michael Holroyd has, in his new version of "Lytton Strachey," interlarded a great deal of this new material, along with disclosures that he says he was prevented from making in the earlier biography because many of Lytton's friends and lovers were still alive. Holroyd's book, along with Quentin Bell's biography of Virginia Woolf, was responsible for igniting the mania for Bloomsbury that has fueled an apparently inexhaustible stream of memoirs, published letters and diaries, plays and academic treatises excavating the private lives of Vita and Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa, Clive, Duncan, Maynard, Carrington, Roger and a host of minor satellites, children and grandchildren. The Swinging 60's saw in Bloomsbury's adamant rejection of convention and in its polymorphous carryings-on a model for its own liberation. Holroyd's biography was clearly a revelation whose moment had come. Holroyd tells us one of them asked after reading his typescript. And to complicate matters, many of the people he was writing about - who had furthermore generously given him interviews and papers - were still living. Holroyd cited chapter and verse - with footnotes. "Discretion," Strachey himself had remarked, "is not the better part of biography." But where Strachey slyly insinuated, Mr. Before then, the 1885 law under which Oscar Wilde was arrested and sentenced to two years' hard labor had still been in effect. Holroyd reminds us in his preface to the new version, the first of the two volumes came out in the same year - 1967 - that the Sexual Offences Act became law, decriminalizing homosexual unions between consenting adults. In its own way, "Lytton Strachey" was as shocking when it was first published as "Eminent Victorians" had been early in the century.
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Instead, he fell upon an enormous cache of biographical dynamite: Lytton Strachey's correspondence, full of ribald witticisms, scandalous revelations and intimate details of the many homosexual love affairs that were at the center of his life. Holroyd intended to rehabilitate him critically. Feeling that Strachey's contribution to historical biography was under-recognized, Mr. Holroyd began his research in the 1960's, Strachey's reputation had waned and Bloomsbury itself fallen out of fashion. Michael Holroyd's "Lytton Strachey: The New Biography" is a substantially reworked version of an earlier, definitive, two-volume life of Strachey published nearly three decades ago.
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It is ironic, then, that Strachey himself should be the subject of a biography of doorstop heft whose attitude is, while not entirely free from criticism, largely reverential. Strachey also set out in "Eminent Victorians" to rescue biography from its entombment, under Victorian practice, in the standard two volumes of "ill-digested masses of material." Distillation, he argued, is essential to the art of biography: "A brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant - that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer." Bringing irony, insinuation, caricature and high drama to bear on his task, Strachey revealed the savage underpinning of Victorian pieties and in so doing gave birth to debunking biography. IN 1918, with the publication of "Eminent Victorians," Lytton Strachey unleashed on biography a voice hitherto unheard: it spoke in the deceptively reassuring tones of Cambridge, but its true purpose was to lift the veil of hagiography in which the previous generation had swathed its exemplaries.
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