Running with the Woolfs.

Freeman, Chris

Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian

by Julie Anne Taddeo Harrington. 192 pages, $19.95 (paper)

VIRGINIA and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey--these early 20th-century luminaries (plus a few hangers-on) comprise the legendary Bloomsbury Group, which has become, in literary studies and in artsy popular culture, something of an industry. A new study of Lytton Strachey revisits Bloomsbury and offers some important new ideas about the radical, modernist nature of this group. Julie Anne Taddeo, a historian who works in gender studies, focuses on some of the men of this circle, suggesting that the proto-feminist and modernist edginess that these figures have been credited with doesn't quite hold up upon closer examination.

Taddeo's revisionism is based on the access she had to Strachey's unpublished writings, including his letters, diaries, and manuscripts. This new material makes her study an important supplement to Michael Holroyd's biography of Strachey in the late 1960's, and to other work on the men of Bloomsbury. In her lucid introduction, Taddeo claims that "the vast bulk of Strachey's unpublished prose, poetry, and correspondence ... reveals a disparity between his desire to be 'modern' and the actual extent of his sexual, literary, political, and social avant-gardism." In chapters on the Brotherhood of the Apostles at Cambridge, on Strachey's opinions about the sexually exotic and about women, and on his views of modernism itself, Taddeo argues convincingly that Strachey was deeply conflicted about his sexuality, his radicalism, and his straddling of identities between late Victorian and modern iconoclast.

Strachey's days at Cambridge form the beginning of Taddeo's analysis. In 1902 he was invited to join the Brotherhood of the Apostles, a secret society that first appeared around 1820. Upon his induction, he wrote to his mother, "It is a veritable brotherhood--the chief point being personal friendship between the members. The sensation is a strange one." The depth of these "personal friendships" varied, but officially the group--or at least some of its more Grecophilic members--articulated and adhered to what they called the "Higher Sodomy," a code of homosocial behavior that recognized the superiority of "manly love" while insisting on its purity and chastity. She quotes one Apostolic brother, Ralph Hawtrey, as saying that "the Apostles talk about copulation, but 'no one practices it!"' Taddeo follows the post-Cambridge lives of a number of the Higher Sodomy's members, some of whom wound up marrying while others practiced a more hands-on version of the Greek ideal. Among the better-known members of the group were Leonard Woolf and John Maynard Keynes.

Like his contemporary and fellow Apostle E. M. Forster, Strachey was much more candid about his sexuality in his private writings than he ever was in any public forum. His exotic imperialist fantasies, for example, share a kinship with some of Forster's posthumously published stories in The Life to Come. Strachey hardly records any of his more erotically-charged material in his diaries, opting instead for the veil of fiction to distance himself from his own struggles with the flesh and to explore his sexual fantasies. Taddeo suggests that "Strachey tried to limit the lower pleasure to the unpublished page."

The atmosphere of Bloomsbury allowed both men and women to interact outside of their more usual same-sex contexts. The talented, accomplished women of the circle, instead of showing their male counterparts what women were capable of, seem to have motivated the men to resist the equality of women. Taddeo argues that Strachey and his fellows were by-and-large misogynists who saw women as the baser sex and who were in general repulsed by thoughts of the female body. One of Strachey's Apostle talks, titled "Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder?," pointed out the "disadvantages of marriage," suggesting that "boredom and lust defined such a union, and by far, the 'commonest condition in which married people spend their lives is ... the condition of the vegetable or the cow."' Despite those feelings, Strachey at one point proposed marriage to the young Virginia Stephen, beating Leonard Woolf to the punch. Taddeo quotes Woolf's diary about the potential of such a union: "Had I married Lytton, I should never have w ritten anything. ... He checks and inhibits in the most curious way."

Artist Dora Carrington did enter into a domestic partnership of sorts with Strachey, sharing a home with him and becoming, in Taddeo's view, a kind of servant, more than a companion, who sacrificed her own career in service to the great genius she saw in Strachey. Shortly after Strachey's death in 1932, Carrington wrote a letter to Phillipa Strachey, Lytton's sister, saying: "Nobody will ever know how kind Lytton was to me, a Father, and a complete friend. I am his debtor." Not long after that, Carrington committed suicide, leaving a note that said, "He first deceased I she for a little tried / to live without him / liked it not and died." Virginia Woolf saw it differently: "[Lytton] absorbed her, made her kill herself."

Painter Roger Fry once claimed that he and the Bloomsbury circle, rather than being the first new thing, were "the last of the Victorians." With interesting new insights and important new information, Taddeo makes a similar claim, at least so far as the men of Bloomsbury are concerned, suggesting that "the rise of the New Woman was not matched by the coming of the New Man but was instead identified with a crisis of masculinity."

Chris Freeman teaches in the English department at St. John 's University in Minnesota.