On Stracheyan passions

[breathedout]

There is one criticism of my biography made by Leonard Woolf that I still don’t accept. ‘I do not think that he [Lytton] had any very strong passions or emotions,’ he wrote, ’… he was hardly ever completely serious when he had a pen in his hand, writing the tragedy or comedy of his perpetual love affairs to Maynard Keynes, James [Strachey], or me…’ […]

[But] In Lytton Strachey’s life, comedy and tragedy were not separated, nor does his sense of humour imply a lack of seriousness—indeed quite the contrary. Homosexuality was 'irrelevant’ to Leonard Woolf and, to my mind, he underrated its significance in releasing Strachey from lonely confinement in his own body. He also underrated the intensity and precariousness of Strachey’s passions during the long shadowy period of history that followed Wilde’s imprisonment.

—Michael Holroyd in dialogue with Leonard Woolf in the preface to Lytton Strachey: The New Biography

Holroyd’s careful attention to the ways in which humour and seriousness coexisted (and even intensified each other) in Strachey’s life is one of the things I really prize about this biography, and about Lytton as a character. Unpacking this question of how intensely he felt things, and the exact nature of the things that he intensely felt, is both tricky and fascinating given that his self-presentation was habitually both extremely hyperbolic and also in some ways oddly understated.

Me being me I tend to read a lot of this as a mechanism for covering a fundamental mismatch between innate character, self image, and available social categories—he was, for example, obsessed with love affairs, obsessed with the idea of being in sexual-romantic love; I can’t read his letters and come away in any doubt that he had genuine passion around the activity “having love affairs.” But a lot of the time, that genuine passion actually manifests more in his relationships with people other than the supposed love object. The love affair is still generating the passionate response, but sometimes it’s as if the passionate response is sort of… displaced, and experienced more in his interactions with people he thinks of as friends or rivals (though in point of fact he was often also sleeping with them, at least sporadically). I can see how that would read as cold or dispassionate, but I don’t think it was; I think it was more just a non-standard triangulation of love and desire and passionate interpersonal connection. And I suspect that some, at least, of the hyperbole in his manner was a mechanism that sort of… disguised the non-standard boundaries and manifestations of his passionate attachments.