Books: Eminent Oddball

LYTTON STRACHEY by Michael Holroyd. Two volumes, 1,229 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $21.95.

We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization. We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the 18th century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks. What is hidden from us? We have mastered all We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illumination in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love.

The year was 1904, and scattered about Europe half a dozen men, unacquainted with one another, were lighting the fuse of the post-Victorian revolution—Einstein, Freud, Lenin, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky. But they didn't matter at all. For in Cambridge, England, 24-year-old Lytton Strachey was loudly proclaiming that he and his fellow members of the Apostles, a small society of intellectuals, were about to inherit the earth. They never quite made it, but in their later guise as the Bloomsbury Group—Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell among others—they did become the most powerful extra-Establishment gang that England has seen in this century.

In Lytton Strachey, English Biographer Michael Holroyd argues that the author of Eminent Victorians belongs in the forefront of the Bloomsberries, and then substantiates the claim through 1,229 improbably fascinating pages. Strachey's is one of the legitimately original voices of the era, and it has suffered from a conspiracy of ear plugging. Though his work has always been read, especially in the U.S., his reputation after his death in 1932 was increasingly demeaned by historians, who dismissed his readability as shallowness, his hyperbole as untruthfulness, and his point of view as malicious bias. In Eminent Victorians, Strachey provided four desecrating portraits of some of the era's most sacred cows. Admirers of the work are well reminded, as Cyril Connolly wrote, that "it might be described as the first book of the twenties. He struck the note of ridicule which the whole war-weary generation wanted to hear, using the weapon of Voltaire on the creators of the Red Cross and the Public School System. To the postwar young people it was like the light at the end of a tunnel."