This is the post of a woman fixin' to write a novel about these assholes

[breathedout]

As for Keynes–I can’t help recognising that, in the obvious and proper sense, he is my friend. Yet sometimes, when he says something, the whole thing seems to vanish into air, and I see him across an infinite gulf of indifference. That there should be anyone in the world so utterly devoid of poetry is sufficiently distracting; and, when I reflect that somebody is Maynard, I can’t be surprised at my cracking jokes on him with the Corporal about empty biscuit-boxes, and yet. How well I know that he’d do most things one could think of for me, and his eyes—-!

—Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, 5 December 1906

I…pretty much ship them. Or at least I am ENDLESSLY FASCINATED BY THEIR DYNAMIC in a way that makes my writing fingers itch.

A year and a half after the above letter (21 July 1908) Keynes “steals” away the supposed love of Lytton’s life, Duncan Grant, and Lytton writes to him:

Dear Maynard, I only know that we’ve been friends for too long to stop being friends now. There are some things that I shall try not to think of, and you must do your best to help me in that; and you must believe that I do sympathise and don’t hate you and that if you were here now I should probably kiss you, except that Duncan would be jealous, which would never do!

I mean.

Then two days later Strachey writes to his brother (!) James:

There was an interview last night with Maynard–it went off on the whole as well as could be expected. He wept, and I had an erection, and that was all.

That was all? THAT WAS MOST CERTAINLY NOT ALL. Also, who writes to their own brother about getting erections? Jesus, Lytton.

I’m getting tipsy and maudlin. Maudlin about English frenemy-lovers from the Edwardian era. One more Lytton-related (re)blog and I’ll stop.