Lytton Strachey
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Lytton Strachey Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Was this life really so interesting?
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It is indeed a courageous undertaking to write the biography of the man who reinvented the genre. But, going by all the praise lavished on his life of Lytton Strachey, Holroyd has succeeded. And surely he cannot be faulted for his style of writing, which is lively, expressive, subtly humorous, and makes inventive use of metaphor. And yet, and yet... I became interested in Strachey not so much through reading his "Queen Victoria" which, frankly, I found rather boring and surprisingly humourless; but after seeing the movie "Carrington", based on Holroyds biography; - and much as I hate to say this, I liked the movie better.
The main problem simply is that Strachey's life was too uneventful to command attention for nearly 700 pages. What you end up with is this image of an old-maidish, pampered, and astonishingly self-centred man forever reading books in the aloofness of his country cottage while unaccountably being the object of universal adoration. The final and supposedly climactic love-affair with Roger Senhouse might have provided some eleventh-hour excitement, but honestly doesn't amount to more than the clichA of the unattractive (but intelligent, rich and famous) middle aged man infatuated with the vapid, reluctant and opportunistic (but very pretty) much younger man.
Surely Holroyd is a bit to blame as well for not gaining full hold of our (well, at least my) attention. Here we have The Apostles and the "Bloomsberries" in their heyday, with Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the likes casually thrown in as well. An incredible collection of brilliant and colourful people; and yet all they seem to occupy themselves with is bourgeois bickerings, common gossip, parties, parties, parties, and amorous obsessions of a peculiarly puerile nature. Where is all the wit and dazzling conversation that is frequently reported by Holroyd, but rarely demonstrated? We're told about a lot of people and things, but they remain abstractions. Even a character as bizarre as Ottoline Morrell remains a mere cipher. The frequent trips to France and Spain read like depersonalised itenaries from a travel agent's brochure, and we are kept in the dark about their meaning in Lytton's life.
Unfortunately Holroyd reverts to an overdose of Freudian psycho-analytical blabla to lend depth to his characters. This largely obsolete approach to psychology remains a staple of biographers, probably because it offers such metaphorically appealing instant explanations of all relational problems and personal obsessions. Seeing rather too much of Mama lately? - hello Oedipus! Such off-the-peg explanations add very little to our understanding of the person. Actually I didn't find this book all too insightful psychologically speaking. E.g., the bouts of anxiety and depression that troubled Carrington in her final years pop up out of nowhere as a rather too hasty prelude to her suicide. Her complicated relationship with Strachey is underplayed, so that at times she emerges more like a luxury housekeeper with a talent for painting than as Strachey's ticket to survival. For clearly it was she alone who saved him from utter and desparate loneliness (as well as he her). Gretchen Gerzina's biography of Carrington, in all its compactness, is much closer to the essence and tragedy of both Carrington's and Lytton's personalities, and the peculiar chemistry between them, it seems to me.
Another strange thing is that we get to know just about nothing about Strachey's sexual pursuits. Now call me unhealthily curious if you like, but Lytton himself was known to speak disparagingly of Virginia Woolf's books because of their 'lack of copulation'. So where is his own? How can you write 700 pages about one of the most notable and visible homosexuals in England at the time, and yet in the end leave the reader uncertain whether the man ever had any sexual contacts with anyone at all???
And the other, more troubling question that remains in the end is: why would this man deserve so much attention? His lasting output amounts to no more than three books. And Strachey may have thought Forster (another spectre relegated to the sidelines by Holroyd) a dreary 'old maid' (projection, the dedicated Freudian might wonder?), but himself certainly never mustered the courage or conviction to write something like "Maurice", let alone anything else approaching Forster's novelistic output! And output aside, Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster has shown in her collectors-item biography of Brian Howard, who was in many ways Strachey's extroverted counterpart, that you can even write a fascinating book about somebody who produced literally nothing at all of worth during his lifetime (could somebody please reprint this book!). Starting on Holroyds book I expected a classic like Furbank's Forster or Ellman's Wilde. Alas, it wasn't so; which is partly due to the fact that Strachey was simply a more superficial and less tragic or extravagant figure than either of these; and partly to the fact that Holroyd fails to make the most of the brilliant company he associated with. |
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