Lytton Strachey

Speaking Volumes of Lytton Strachey

By Don A. Keister

and Victorians brought popularity and money. His output, however, remained low, and the scope of his work limited.

In England the first volume of Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey: The Unknown Years 1880-1910 appeared separately last year. In this country it arrives together with the second: Lytton Strachey: The Years of Achievement 1910-1932 (Holt, Rinehart & Winsion; 2 vols., boxed; $21.95). Eying these two imposing tomes holding over 500,000 words, the reader may well hesitate. Strachey himself required only a fifth as many for Queen Victoria, even fewer for Florence Precarious health was Nightingale and the other partly responsible. More so "Eminent Victorians." But was some fundamental feelthe skeptic is soon trapped ing of inadequacy: "He and held by a fascinating wanted to be a superman mass of detail about a wonand he felt he was a freak. derful collection of people, Besides, his complicated and many with familiar names, often frustrated love life and he goes on turning used up much time and emopages, finding one good tional energy. Still, he manthing after another, amused, aged to be pretty activesurprised, astonished, to the parties with the Bloomsbury end. set (the Woolfs, the Bells, E. M. Forster, et al.) and London socialites, weekends at country places, travel abroad-and over the years other papers accumulated. a great mass of letters and

WHEN Lytton was born, his father was 63. His mother kept him in petticoats when he should have been in knickerbockers. He grew up long, lanky, a real beanpole, always ailing, but precocious and different. At Cambridge he joined a group of brilliant young intellectuals, gained a "sinister reputation for pagan decadence and wickedness." and cultivated a "brash, pornographic pessimism." Like his friend and sometime rival in love, the economist Maynard Keynes, he was homosexual.

After Cambridge (though all his life he kept going nostalgically back) he began to write professionally. The wit and pungency of his reviews and articles got him a modest reputation; his irreverent biographies of Victoria

HOLROYD has made excellent use of this material,

He quotes generously, and Strachey and his numerous correspondents were usually worth quoting. Towards the end, with the novelist's sense of character, his eye for detail and feeling for form, he builds through the complications of the curious Strachey menage, with its relationships too complicated for summary here, to the agonizingly slow but moving and impressive dying. "Was there ever such a world?” exclaimed Strachey in one of his letters. "Such lives? such pecularities?"