Against Lytton Strachey

Like the rest of Bloomsbury, he was a mean spirited, literary temper tantrum

Why is Lytton Strachey so venerated?

Eminent Victorians sparked off nothing other than a series of biographies in his style that no-one reads anymore. The Twentieth Century owes much more to Froude’s Life of Carlyle (which is, in many ways, a much better book). Apart from his brilliant, lapidary style, Strachey’s great work amounts to what a lot of the other work of Bloomsbury amounts to: a big literary temper tantrum. Much talked about, but not much acted on.

There are some principles from Strachey’s preface that biographers love to quote. His purpose is more to illustrate than explain, he will attack his subject from the flank, and so on. And they praise his revolution of style: no more were those giant two or three volume Victorian biographies the accepted form.

Except they are. Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher is three too-heavy-to-hold volumes. The new Sylvia Plath biography is about a thousand pages. Other massive biographies this year have covered Mozart, Lincoln, Sylvia Pankhurst. They are all the sort of books you don’t want to drop on your toes, and are all praised to the rafters.

This is to say nothing of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey, a ground-breaking work from the 1960s, which initially weighed in at two well-fed volumes. It has since been rewritten and revised down to a (dense, albeit entertaining) seven hundred pages, plus footnotes and supplementary volume about the works. And that too is excellent.

We seem to enjoy big, detailed biographies. So much for Strachey’s ‘brevity’, or his dismissal of ‘scrupulous narration.’

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What about the depth charge Strachey is supposed to have laid under public morals?

Didn’t Eminent Victorians expose the hypocrisy, repression, and sheer meanness of the nineteenth century? Up to a point, Lord Cropper. Strachey said it was his business to ‘lay bare the facts of the case… dispassionately, impartially, without ulterior intentions.’ The idea is that by laying it all out plain to see, the hypocrisy would speak for itself.

The trouble is, this is rubbish. He was out to expose everything he hated about his own society. And to do this he distorted the facts, exaggerated the circumstances. Each change is minor, and defensible (on rather weak artistic grounds), but the accumulation of these minor unforced errors shows fairly poor form.

He was not, for example, above changing someone’s dying words. Nor did he think it wrong to conflate and intermingle the content of two letters to make one quote, that Holroyd says, ‘leaves out all the implied compliment’ of the remarks. (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 204). There’s also a sentence about Manning and Miss Bevan where Strachey says they walked in the shrubbery. Holroyd calls this ‘interpretive colour’, a ‘slight and subtle manipulation of the evidence’ which cannot be called inaccuracy unless ‘any paraphrase of an original source is to judge as such.’ (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 172)

No dice. This wasn’t a paraphrase or a manipulation of the source. Strachey made it up. Nothing in the source suggested or implied the shrubbery. It was pure invention. There was nothing to paraphrase or manipulate. It might not be technically inaccurate, but it sure as heck isn’t accurate either. It’s minor, but characteristic both of Strachey’s attitude towards facts and Holroyd’s masterly ability to defend him on plausible-sounding but irrelevant grounds.

In other examples of this genre of supposedly innocent invention, Strachey wrote that Florence Nightingale lay in a shaded chamber, when his source says it was sunny. This is relevant because she was an advocate of sun in treatment, and he wanted to undermine her medical credibility. Holroyd calls this ‘mischievous fancy’. Not exactly the words I would use of someone who is happy to claim that light is dark, and dark is light. (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 206)

He also says the house was full of people trying to visit her, portraying her as ‘a solitary, awesome, even godlike image upstairs.’ You guessed it, the hoards were in fact carefully managed and visited by appointment. Apparently this is ‘not wholly misleading’. Oh good. (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 207)

In the essay on General Gordon he outright dissimulates, which Holroyd admits while simultaneously pleading in mitigation:

The biography does contain several inaccuracies. In addition to his tampering with Gordon’s Journals, Strachey makes no mention of a vital telegram… He gives the somewhat erroneous impression [note the Mandarin tone of obfuscation] that Gordon was produced from obscurity overnight by a sinisterly exploited journalistic stunt… And he repeats a mistake… confus[ing] two communications (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 222)

About that tampering. Holroyd tells us Strachey ‘significantly edits’ the journals to ‘paint [Gordon] as a wild man.’ These days, that would be enough to call Strachey’s reputation into question, if not stall his career.

There’s also the issue of Gordon’s alleged drinking. Strachey heavily implied he was a soak. Holroyd tries to defend this, rather desperately, saying there’s insufficient evidence that Gordon was teetotal, and that Strachey never said Gordon was a steady drinker. Of course, when your are defending someone who works in implication, innuendo, and caricature, it’s difficult to mount a defence based on precision.

The point is that the evidence points both ways, isn’t always reliable, and has unreliable sources, but Strachey uses it strongly in one direction to suit the tone of his polemic.

It is no defence of Strachey’s camp tone (that seriously implies Gordon was a neurotic drinker) that there were rumours to this effect. The very fact Holroyd has to dedicate something like half a dozen pages to the issue shows you how lackadaisical Strachey was.

This is very much like the mishandling of information about Florence Nightingale’s childhood. He invents a pet dog and lies about the way Nightingale pretended to be its nurse. These are facts he deliberately distorted from his source material in a ‘hackneyed attempt to find some dark, psychological significance in the growing child’s every day activities.’ (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 194)

This sacrifice of information for art was part of the modus operandi. Cardinal Newman is the thematic foil for Cardinal Manning and is presented as sweet natured and calm. In fact, he had a sharp temper ‘and a tongue that could clip a hedge.’ What a perfect Strachey-esque phrase, apart from the fact that it doesn’t fit his agenda. So much for illustrating rather than explaining. (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 185)

And when poor old Florence Nightingale might expect some leniency for her good works, despite the valid criticism that she was ‘the legendary humanitarian, cut off from humankind’, Strachey declines. The reason is that he simply wasn’t interested in her as an individual.

In the preface he made this bold claim, ‘Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes.’ And yet, Holroyd tells us, the errors, dissimulations, amends, omissions, and distortions Strachey introduces into the material are because

Strachey was not simply interested in his subject as an individual person, but in the interaction between her and the abhorrent age in which she lived. (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 198)

We are barely a third of the way through the book and one of the most daring and original claims made on behalf of biography — the sort of thing that people claim gives him major influence over the genre, and elevates him to the status of a Plutarch or a Boswell — has been not just trespassed on, but ridden roughshod over and left behind. Some Plutarch. Some Boswell. (Holroyd, Bloomsbury, p. 241)

This is emphatically not a new departure for biography. It takes the old hagiography and merely inverts it.

In fact, you begin to feel that his aim is merely to write a glittering book. If he really wanted to expose the evangelicalism of the Victorians, why did it have to be like this? He would have done much better to do for Darwin what he did for Queen Victoria. But that would have involved a lot of research, and Strachey didn’t like research.

One of the main impressions you take away from Michael Holroyd’s biography was that Strachey was a fairly lazy man. He even moaned about the inconvenience of not enjoying hard work. No wonder he chose to write polemics rather than ‘scrupulous’ biographies.

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The real problem with Strachey — as with most Bloomsburys — is that he misunderstood the world.

He is supposed to have joked when asked why he wasn’t participating in the war to defend civilisation, ‘Madam I am the civilisation they are fighting for.’ Not the worst, as far as imitation Oscar Wilde goes.

But when you compare it to some of the truly horrible things he wrote, said, and believed about the working class, the joke loses its shine. For all his professed liberalism, he was in fact a relatively nasty snob. You can choose to see the Bloomsbury aesthetic as an elegant form of elitism, but in reality it’s myopic.

The real revolution taking place while Strachey wrote Eminent Victorians was happening elsewhere. Twenty million people died in the First World War. I imagine that did a lot more to shake society out of its Victorian slumbers than a polemical biography of a half-forgotten cardinal.

We can skim over, as well, the political changes Strachey was living through — House of Lords reform, Lloyd George’s people’s budget, the suffrage movement, The Irish Home Rule debate — and look at the real glaring omission. Science.

Strachey lived through an age of wonders. The list of inventions that were produced during the 1880 - 1918 period is enormous. Bicycles, steam turbines, zinc-carbon batteries, ballpoint pens, diesel engines, wireless radio, plastic, vacuum cleaners, aeroplanes, tanks.

And there are even more wonders when we look at scientific breakthroughs in the same period. These were the years when we discovered viruses, x-rays, radioactivity, electrons, Brownian motion, special relativity. It ought to pull us up short when we sing the praises of Strachey the disruptor to realise he was alive and working at the same time as Einstein, Rutherford, Curie, Marconi, and the Wright brothers.

After Darwin, the whole world was different. And Lord Salisbury was right when he said the country changed more in the 1880s than it had done in the preceding century. And yet the hero of modern biography has nothing better to do than take witty, elegant pot shots at a nurse, a headmaster, a priest, and a soldier. For all the literary brilliance he achieved, you start to realise there’s something rather tabloid about the whole thing.

Of course, the one issue where Strachey had some impact — and Michael Holroyd had a lot — and for much good, was on sex. There was a horrible, damaging sexual repression in England that ruined many lives. Holroyd’s book (itself modelled more on Froude than Strachey, and not just in terms of length) was the first biography to ‘lay bare the facts of the case’ on sexuality. It was, as Holroyd says, a post-Wolfendon book.

Unlike Strachey, Holroyd takes an expansive, liberalising view. He opens the topic up, rather than cutting his subject down to size. If anything, he is absurdly defensive of Strachey, never allowing a single error to go undefended. But what he cannot see is that brilliant though he was, Strachey was also myopic, somewhat unimportant, and deserves a niche not a pedestal.

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The only Bloomsbury who had any real lasting impact on the world was Keynes.

His Essays in Biography, much influenced by Strachey, is a far better book because it was written from direct experience and it was current. Keynes’ view of Lloyd George, for better or worse, was the standard view for two or three generations. Strachey enabled Keynes to say in writing what he would otherwise only have said in conversation. (Holroyd, p. 428).

The most influence Bloomsbury had on him was his polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book that wouldn’t have been written in its explosive form without Lytton Strachey’s example. But Keynes’ polemic, like the model he worked from, generated more heat than light. Keynes was right that the reparations were too steep; but they were cut. The mistake was fairly easily corrected. As Tyler Cowen says, it’s not at all obvious that Keynes’ famous book was entirely a good thing.

Didn’t Keynes in fact lend some credence to the notion that Germany had been stabbed in the back by the Allied powers, by Britain’s most prominent intellectual endorsing the notion? He had somewhat of a political critique, but on the economics he was wrong.

What exactly did all that wonderful prose achieve? Polemics are exciting and sometimes justifiable. The example of the appeasers is a case where dramatic expose was the best approach. But on the issue of progress — supposedly something Strachey and Keynes were interested in — a myopic elitism that is more concerned with snobbish aesthetics than actual, mundane progress can be counterproductive. It might also bring you dangerously close to thinking about (and God forbid, writing about) the sort of people who would use all those vacuums and radios and x-rays.

The trouble with modern views of Strachey is that they import this lofty Bloomsbury attitude. Why can’t we say that it’s a marvellous book that isn’t as important as it thinks it is? Why do we have to venerate the art that hieratic sect produced without admitting that the world was changing in much bigger, more important ways — and admit that the impact of all that clever talk was fairly limited?

It was the age of economics — and they were friends with Keynes! — but none of them was interested.

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One wonders what Strachey would have made of himself.

What would he have said of someone of his class and education, mixing in elite circles, who invented a quotation ‘from a Master’, in the preface? Or what about the fact that while the worst war in history was going on across the sea, the Bloomsbury set were holding parties and picnics at Charleston, relying on maids to cook, clean, and do childcare? (Holroyd, p. 396)

When he was called up, Strachey tried to get himself excused. He would have been cleared on medical grounds very easily (as he later was, and for good reason) but he felt morally obliged to try and get himself excused as a conscientious objector. He put on another imitation Wilde pose, with a few forgettable bon mots, and the tribunal gave him a pending verdict sending him to the medical examiner.

Later on he had to go back to the tribunal, where he wanted Phillip Morrell in the room with him. Morrell was an MP, well connected with the establishment as a result of the hedonistic parties he and his wife Ottoline (who was having an affair with Bertrand Russell) threw at their Oxfordshire house, Garsington. He didn’t want Morrell there for any reason other than for the Chairman to see he was ‘“well-connected”, which as it was he didn’t grasp.’ (Holroyd, pp. 391-2)

Imagine how that would have been presented if Strachey himself were one of the subjects of Eminent Victorians.

There he is, the great liberator, the man working on a book to expose the Victorian claim to moral superiority, trying to pull the strings of his elite connections (who he knew primarily for their orgiastic country house parties) while millions were wounded or killed.

Just about excusable, you might think, until you remember what he wrote to his brother at the start of the war.

One solution is to go and live in the United States of America. As for our personal position, it seems to be quite sound and coherent. We’re all far too weak physically to be of any use. If we weren’t we’d still be too intelligent to be thrown away in some really not essential expedition, and our proper place would be — the National Reserve, I suppose. God has put us on an island, and Winston has given us a navy, and it would be absurd to neglect these advantages — which I consider exactly apply to able-bodied intellectuals. It’s no good pretending one isn’t a special case. (Holroyd, p.308)

The man who is praised for puncturing the horrible bloated Victorians is here pleading that he is a special case during war. (Aside from the disgusting inhumanity of this idea, it fails on its own terms. All he had produced of any note at this point was a history of French literature.)

I wonder if the men who were suffocating in the mud at Verdun would have happily assented to the idea that Strachey was ‘the civilisation they were fighting for.’ Just imagine the fun he would have had in this context with the following quotation, which he wrote in a letter to Ottoline Morrell after being medically excused from the army.

It’s a great relief. Everyone was very polite and even sympathetic — except one fellow — a subordinate doctor, who began by being grossly rude, but grew more polite under my treatment. It was queer finding oneself with four members of the lower classes — two of them simply roughs out of the street — filthy dirty — crammed behind a screen in the corner of the room, and told to undress. For a few moments I realised what it was like to be one of the lower classes — the appalling indignity of it! To come out after it was all over, and find myself being called “sir” by policemen ticket collectors was a distinct satisfaction. (Holroyd, p.349)

An appalling indignity indeed.

Trying to recreate refined fin de siècle wit about men who lived difficult and miserable lives and might, for all he knew, be about to go and die on his behalf, makes Strachey look more like the pompous fools he was trying to expose than the great epigrammatist he was trying to emulate.

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He wasn’t the only Bloomsbury to think poorly of his fellow man.

Keynes was a eugenicist for most of his life who was concerned with the quality of the population as well as its quantity. He wrote, in 1936:

In most countries we have now passed definitely out of the phase of increasing population into that of declining population, and I feel that the emphasis on policy should be considerably changed, – much more with the emphasis on eugenics and much less on restriction as such.

In an earlier letter, Keynes had crossed out the phrase, ‘Quality must become the preoccupation’. And yet, as Phillip Magness points out, you will search in vain for a proper honest discussion of this — Lytton Strachey style — in any of the epic biographies written about Keynes.

And Virginia Woolf is a well-documented horror. Finding unforgivable quotes from her diaries and letters is like shooting fish in a barrel. The poor are ‘detestable’, ‘imbeciles’ ought to be ‘killed’, traveling down Kensington High Street she almost vomited ‘with hatred for the human race’. There’s also a passage where she compares black people to ‘chimpanzees’. That’s not the worst of it, and I am not going to reprint it here. The point is, she’s vicious.

But her biographer Hermione Lee is so defensive as to want to praise this nonsense. She cites the ‘licence of private speech’ and that old fall back ‘the prejudices of the era’ (they were, by the way, often casual anti-semites). If that wasn’t bad enough, Lee says:

I want to praise her for her malice and see it as a vital aspect of her energy and style. Stroll through the pages of the letters and diaries and you come away with handfuls of shining aphorisms. It is like reading Oscar Wilde, or Dorothy Parker. (Batchelor p. 144)

Oh come on. Comparing sentences about killing people because they are poor, or comparing people to monkeys because of their race, to the wit of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker is ridiculous. I wonder how many of the misogynistic remarks in the diaries of Woolf’s contemporaries Lee would be willing to praise as ‘shining aphorisms’? If Lytton Strachey taught us anything, wasn’t it that we ought to be happy to condemn this trash when we find it? Not for Lee.

The same energy which powers an ‘offence’ [why the distancing, questioning, quote marks?] … pours into her heroic satires on patriarchy and censorship. Yet we object to the former and praise the latter. (Batchelor p. 145)

This is literary criticism so detached as to be deluded. Woolf was concerned enough about her views to question them and self-censor them from her more public remarks. Equally, fighting the good fight of feminism — and, hilariously, socialism — seems somewhat diminished in light of the fact that Woolf might have been arguing mainly on behalf of other girls from nice families like her, who had an income of £400 a year but weren’t educated at the same elite schools as their brothers. Like E.M.Forster she seems to think, ‘We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.’

If we defended the sexism Woolf so rightly excoriated in the same terms as this, we would feel awkward, if not downright ashamed. Biography has to be able to accommodate people’s dark sides. The ‘licence of private speech’ would be a poor defensive for any of Strachey’s subjects to make. The same is true of Bloomsbury.

Perhaps we can finally put to bed Virginia Woolf’s ludicrous claim that the Bloomsbury group’s

triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed. (Lee, p.268)

‘Corrupt’ and ‘sinister’ and ‘merely intellectual’ seems to be inadvertently apposite. If her comments quoted above aren’t sinister I don’t know what is.

These people were living through times of upheaval. War, invention, economic growth, depression. And yet they feel stuck in the past. For all the supposed innovations they created in their art, they are as insulated from the real happenings in the world as the patriarchs they dismiss.

When you know nothing about economics and innovation, it is hardly surprising that you are obsessed with updating the aesthetic standards of people who belong to a pre-Darwin, pre-Einstein, pre-Marshall world view. Keynes said, writing about Marshall in Essays in Biography, an economist must be, ‘as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.’ It was the earth that Bloomsbury was afraid of.

Exposing the Victorians starts to look more and more like a preoccupation to avoid the inevitable exposure of their own terrible and somewhat deranged political opinions.

It is a preoccupation their biographers are, largely, all too happy to play along with.

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Here we start to realise the real problem. The Victorians had already been exposed.

Froude was merciless about Carlyle, calling him a child and unsparingly revealing the details of how his wife suffered until she died early. He talks about Carlyle’s selfishness, his complete lack of empathy, his cruelty, his tantrums, his hypochondria. The book was shocking and destabilising.

And Wilde had punctured the old windbags of society quite effectively in his plays of the 1880s. What is Lady Bracknell if not a forerunner of the sort of caricature Strachey was trying to do with his subjects a generation later? Didn’t Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance cover the same ground as Eminent Victorians when it came to evoking the hypocrisy and pseudo moral superiority of the late nineteenth century? And as for sex…

The more you lean about Strachey’s superiority — the main effect of Eminent Victorians was to get him invited to tea parties with duchesses, which he was not at all averse to — the more his project seems not just myopic but positively unpleasant. It seems like he had no idea what he was doing or what was happening in the world around him. And little did he care.

I suspect that if he had been able to see just how insular, superior, and out of touch he was — how similar to the subjects of his famous book — he would have parodied himself and his group rather harshly.

There’s recent research suggesting that, ‘elites are arguing from their class and demographic biases (a bias can be positive, to be clear), not from their expertise. That lowers the marginal value of expertise, at least given how our world operates.’

Doesn’t that just sum Lytton Strachey (and other Bloomsburys) up. The ultimate problem is that Strachey was an Eminent Edwardian and he didn’t have the wit to see it.

It doesn’t matter how much of a good read Eminent Victorians is. (And it is splendid.) It’s about time someone debunked him properly.

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Books

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey (US link), marvellous prose, read with caution

Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey (US link) his best book

Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd (US link), the updated one volume version

Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury Group: his work and their influence, Michael Holroyd, (US link), the supplementary volume on the works

Froude’s Life of Carlyle (US link), this is Clubbe’s one volume edition which preserves 90% of Froude’s text

Essays in Biography, Maynard Keynes (US link), under rated

The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Maynard Keynes (US link) over rated?

The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor, for Hermione Lee’s essay ‘Virginia Woolf and Offence’

Blogs, articles, podcasts, tweets

Are the elites worse than you think?, Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen, December 12, 2020

No, Keynes Did Not “Sit Out” the Debate on Eugenics, American Institute for Economic Research, Phillip Magness, December 04, 2020

Zach Carter on the Life and Legacy of John Maynard Keynes, Conversations with Tyler, December 02, 2020 

Samuel Watling

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