... having been breathed out

In the night, as Swithinbank lay in bed, Keynes sat with him. On the bed, talking, long after lights were out. How often this happened! Perhaps, for all I know, every night. And then, when their talk was ending, Keynes would lie down on the bed, and embrace him and kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, again and again; and so they would part at last. I don’t know—the image of our ugly Keynes makes all this rather ridiculous—and rather pathetic too. The vision of the dark room and the white bed and the curious ecstasy there I find attractive—soothing in a strange way.


These last three pages are I suppose unparalleled in the annals of known correspondence. How many persons do they put under criminal imputations? What scandals! What disclosures! And yet Heaven knows there’s nothing abnormal in the whole account. It’s only that I happen, for the first time, very likely, in the world’s history to give the account. And aren’t you touched by it? Poor little Swithinbank could never quite believe that he wasn’t doing something wrong when he let himself be kissed. The brutes! The devils! To such a length have they carried their abominable* perversions of things! There were the best moments of his life.

—Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, 28 February 1905

This little quote encapsulates so much of why I find Strachey compelling. His friend/frenemy Keynes confides in him personal and at-the-time prosecutable reminiscences about Keynes’s time at Eton. Strachey turns around and not only re-tells these stories with great gusto to their mutual friend Leonard Woolf, but goes on to dissect which parts of Keynes’s story (and person!) he finds repellent and which attractive.

But then, just when I’m torn between queasiness and amusement at his cattiness, he comes out with something truly touching and eloquent, and even elegant in its simplicity. “They were the best moments of his life”: yet taboo and, at the time, criminal.

On top of all this, in the midst of his impassioned final paragraph, he footnotes the modifier “abominable” and assures Woolf in the margin: “I really must put it in for the swing of the sentence.”

***

Also, god. INTERESTINGLY, the next year Strachey made an extended stay at a house-party where Swithinbank was also staying. He found Swithinbank overwhelmingly charming (in spite of? because of? this story) which in turn made him reevaluate his ideas about Keynes’s unattractiveness. He then spent the whole, like, fortnight, in a kind of vicarious sexual obsession with the ideas of Keynes, Swithinbank, and Keynes/Swithinbank. Lucky Leonard Woolf, who got to hear all about it!