... having been breathed out

A number of people had disliked Lytton Strachey—Harold Nicholson for instance. I went to see him in his rooms at the Albany one evening. He was sitting in a chair when I entered, open-eyed and apparently examining me critically. He said nothing. I stood before him shuffling my feet, shifting my weight from one side to another, murmuring something about the uncontroversial weather. He continued to glare. Suddenly a sort of convulsion ran through him, and he blinked. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been asleep,’ he said. 'Would you like a drink?’ I said that I would. But the question was apparently to satisfy his curiosity rather than my thirst. We began to talk. Lytton, he told me, resembled a bearded and bitchy old woman, rude rather than witty in society, injecting with his unnaturally treble voice jets of stinging poison into otherwise convivial gatherings. After about a quarter of an hour he looked across at his own large empty glass, which stood on a table between us, and and asked: 'Another drink?’ Hesitantly I agreed. But once again he made no move, and since I could see no sign of a drink in the room, we went on talking. Ten minutes later his gaze again fell on the glass, this time with incredulity. 'Do you want another drink?’ His tone was so sharp I felt it prudent to refuse.

Next day I told this story to Duncan Grant. Without a word, he leapt up and poured me a strong gin and tonic. It was half past ten in the morning.

—Michael Holroyd, from the double preface to Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, on conducting research for the first volume of his book, in 1963 or 1964.

OH DUNCAN, basically, is my takeaway here.

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.