Bloomsbury delivered

OUR image of Bloomsbury, casual and perhaps fading by now, is of a Neverland where a self-selected group of artists and intellectuals ran both wild and tame from around 1910 to the start of World War II.

Part toyland and part wildlife preserve, part perpetual salon and part musical bedrooms, it was conspicuously a place of wit, superior certainties, cabals and servant trouble, marked by a 30-year spate of talk and letter-writing and a kaleidoscope of highly varied liaisons.

Easily and frequently mocked as an indulgent refuge, it was also, less conspicuously, a place from which a few sallied out to do real combat in the real world, among them Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories are still put to work (“We are all Keynesians now,” Milton Friedman once said), and E.M. Forster, the enduring novelist of a no longer enduring time.

Most of all, there was Virginia Woolf, whose terrors and illuminations, template for the demanding darks and lights of art, paid home visits. (T.S. Eliot, no slouch at terrors, was mainly a weekend caller to Bloomsbury, welcomed and sometimes condescended to.)

Others never ventured very far from toyland, yet managed to earn varying degrees of contemporary success. By now, though, the painters Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell -- Woolf’s sister -- and Duncan Grant bulk fairly small.

A little bulkier is Lytton Strachey, who didn’t have to sally very far, or at least no farther than the British Library, to write his still provocative and artfully shaped “Eminent Victorians” and “Elizabeth and Essex.” Mainly, he sallied to cruise for beautiful young men. He came closest to the outside world’s perilous reality when, at the National Gallery, he prepared an end run, fortunately aborted, on a rosy blond. His quarry turned out to be the future Edward VIII.

Like many other Bloomsberries, Strachey bent the Descartian phrase to “I write letters, therefore I am.” Now, Paul Levy, an executor of his estate, has selected 650 pages’ worth of his correspondence, which he presents in “The Letters of Lytton Strachey,” along with extensive notes.

Strachey was a prime and beloved star among Bloomsbury’s eccentrics. Here, of course, even the term “eccentric” needs a caveat: The group’s very center lay in being off-center, in serious counterpoise to the Victorian constrictions its members inherited and later to the severities of a world shattered by the First World War.

Strachey’s tall and emaciated fragility, long beard, languid wit and delicately modulated gay outrageousness both amused and reassured his band of fellow iconoclasts. (The best-known example of his drollery was his retort to an official board querying his claim to be a conscientious objector. Asked what he would do if a German soldier tried to rape his sister, he suggested attempting to squeeze himself between their bodies.)

The letters demonstrate some of this sensibility. When a fellow tourist sermonizes the Trinity to him, Strachey rallies aesthetics (fraudulent) to caricature sublimity. “I said that purely as a matter of taste four in one pleased me rather more than three in one,” he observes, “and seven in one most of all.” Later, he has a telling description of young Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf trying to cope with the tizzies of Leslie Stephen, their Victorian lion of a father. “He is well kept in check by them, and they are well bustled by him.”

But amused disdain wears thin. So do the incessant reports of Strachey’s crushes and lusts, among them fairly graphic accounts of lovemaking with Duncan Grant and sadistic mutilation by the publisher Roger Senhouse. There is something of the arrested adolescent in the way he describes his perpetual arousal at any stray set of male buttocks passing by or at faces glimpsed in a crowd. His extensive reports on what his circle called the Higher Sodomy threaten a Lower Tedium.

By and large -- and this is surprising -- Strachey did not excel at letter-writing. Finely honed attitude, in the long run, is no substitute for attachment and attack. Unlike Woolf in her extraordinary correspondence, he wrote to declare rather than to discover, to pronounce more than to question.

Even the greatest letters are in part performances, but they perform the self, up against or down away from the world. All too often, his are impersonations. When Woolf’s beloved brother Thoby died, Strachey, though deeply moved, was unable to engage his wit to his emotions; his note to her is commonplace.

There is one striking exception: Strachey’s correspondence with Dora Carrington, the young painter who was deeply in love with him, so much so that she killed herself shortly after he died. He loved her as well, though was unable to manage sex with her more than once, when he apparently took her virginity.

Thereafter, through all the ups and downs of their erratic relationship, they lived together -- even when she was briefly married to another man -- or in close proximity. Among his many letters to her are a few that express a profound cherishing, quite unlike the flamboyant voicings of physical pleasure, pain and jealous recrimination in his writings to male lovers.

“Do you know how difficult I find it to express my feelings either in letters or talk?” he writes to her. “It is perhaps much easier to show one’s peevishness than one’s affection and admiration! Oh my dear, do you really want me to tell you that I love you as a friend! -- But of course that is absurd, and you do know very well that I love you as something more than a friend, you angelic creature, whose goodness to me has made me happy for years, and whose presence in my life has been, and always will be, one of the most important things in it.”

In the main, though, the quality of the letters collected here is such that instead of creating interest in Strachey, they depend upon whatever interest we already have. Certainly there is some, but not enough to occupy us. It took an extraordinary biographer, Michael Holroyd, to give us Lytton Strachey, the man. “The Letters of Lytton Strachey,” on the other hand, reveal a man who cannot give us himself. *