Bed-hopping with the Bloomsbury set

The Letters of Lytton Strachey edited by Paul Levy

LETTERS are the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don't they?" Lytton Strachey once wrote to his friend Ottoline Morrell. "Giving the facts" was an obsession for Strachey, both in his myth-busting biographies and even more in his private life.

He was a keen recorder of his own social and sexual adventures and an inveterate gossip about everyone else's, delighting in bitchiness and scandal. The result is an engagingly flippant sort of correspondence (if this new selection, apparently about a sixth of the available material, characterises the whole), in which the author of Eminent Victorians is always more likely to dwell on rent boys, dowager duchesses or the pretensions of the bourgoisie than risk boring his friends with weighty opinion or critical insight.

Strachey had been one of the Cambridge "Apostles", the undergraduate secret society whose influence seeped right through public and intellectual life in the early 20th century. Four of them, Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Adrian Stephen, were the friends around which the Bloomsbury group formed, and it was always in some set or other that the gregarious Strachey felt most at home.

He was a great raconteur, in a dry, cynical vein, and loved an audience, using his own oddities - squeaky voice, camp mannerisms and outrageously waspish wit - to make himself into one of the most recognisable figures on the London literary scene, though not the best-loved.

Strachey's letters chart all the notorious bed-hopping of the " Bloomsberries" with amused relish. Duncan Grant was one of his early passions (until he was stolen by Keynes), Virginia Stephen so puzzlingly attractive to him that he thought in a mad moment he might marry her, but urged Woolf to do so instead.

In the menage Strachey set up with the painter Dora Carrington ( probably the only woman he ever had sex with) and his lover Ralph Partridge, he was cheerful about the complications that evolved when the other two married: "Ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up, too. Where will it all end?" Carrington's-Viking, Pounds 30) devotion and dependence on him (which led to her suicide at his death) brought out a rare tenderness in a man who otherwise seemed to take satisfaction in being callous.

"Do you know how difficult I find it to express my feelings either in letters or in talk?" he wrote to her. "It is sometimes terrible - and I don't understand why it should be so. It is perhaps much easier to show one's peevishness than one's affection and admiration!"

Strachey's misogyny and anti-Semitism won't make him many new friends among readers today, though everything rather pales in shockvalue next to the gleeful accounts of his sex life, which, as Paul Levy warns in his excellent introduction, "will startle even those who regard themselves as unshockable".

He doesn't mean the sodomy - Strachey makes that sound positively quotidian - but Strachey's interest in coprophagy (described to his brother James as a "perfectly darling" pastime) and sadomasochism. "Your faithful Zebra" is how he ends one letter to his last lover, Roger Senhouse, who, in perhaps a suitably sadistic gesture, sold the correspondence describing their recreational floggings and crucifixions to the Berg Library after Strachey's death. But the deftness and wit of the letters outweigh this somewhat troubling degree of self-revelation.

STRACHEY could be nasty, but never dull. He had a novelist's eye, describing Lady Randolph Churchill as "tremendously big and square - a regular old warhorse sniffing the battle from afar.

She was dressed in a shabby grey dress, which she from time to time rearranged, with an odd air of detachment", while Clive Bell's stomach "has now burst all bounds: it has pushed its way through waistcoat and trousers into public view clothed in nothing but an ancient shirt".

Henry James, spotted at a window, looked like "an admirable tradesman trying his best to give satisfaction. I think it's very odd that he should have written precisely [his novels] and look precisely so". It was just the sort of musing that made Strachey more than just a gossip, and a great biographer.

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