Michael Dirda

Lytton Strachey is best known for his wicked biographies, but his letters are a gossipy celebration of life.

THE LETTERS OF LYTTON STRACHEY

Edited by Paul Levy

Farrar Straus Giroux. 698 pp. $40

"Allow me," says the Reviewer, "to quote a passage at random." At random? Does anyone, above the age of 12, believe this? Those sparkling or barbed sentences will have been chosen with immense care and after much searching, to prove a point, advance an argument or sometimes just to brighten up the critic's own lackluster prose. But The Letters of Lytton Strachey really is almost nothing if not quotable on every page, spilling over with enthusiasm, ironic playfulness and waspish observations about the civilized pleasures of life -- reading, friendship, love and sex, travel, dinner parties, concerts and art galleries, gossip, walking in the woods. These intimate letters present a picture of cultivated enjoyment.

Today Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) is chiefly remembered as a leading figure in Bloomsbury, that circle of British artists and intellectuals who traded quips and sexual partners, whose members included the novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the political thinker Leonard Woolf, the painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the literary journalist Desmond MacCarthy and the art critic Clive Bell. As undergraduates at Cambridge, most of the men belonged to the Apostles, a secret society that tended to choose its members for their intelligence or looks. It was largely homosexual, though nearly all the Bloomsberries proved readily bisexual. The leading ladies, Woolf and Bell, were sisters -- daughters of the formidable Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography .

Strachey, an astonishingly omnivorous reader all his life, started his writing career as a literary journalist, reviewing new books, writing profiles of historical figures and eventually producing the brilliant Landmarks in French Literature (1912). It is still the most winning introduction to its subject. But then, in 1918, the young bohemian brought out Eminent Victorians and changed the face of biography.

While the 19th century produced monumental lives-and-letters in multiple volumes, Strachey offered compact pen portraits of four pillars of the British establishment: Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale and Gen. "Chinese" Gordon. Instead of being reverent, he was ironic (some said cynical); instead of shoveling in all his research, he shaped and organized his material as if it were a work of art. His model may have been Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets , but the classically elegant style was more like that of Voltaire. For instance, Strachey could summarize in a single sentence the character of Florence Nightingale, who revolutionized nursing:

"It was not by gentle sweetness and womanly self-abnegation that she had brought order out of chaos. . . . It was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will."

Before his death in 1930 at the age of 52 (of undiagnosed stomach cancer), Strachey went on to produce a bestselling life of Queen Victoria (1921), followed by Elizabeth and Essex (1928), an account of the Renaissance queen and her favorite courtier. But most readers today prefer the "shorter" Strachey -- especially the biographical and historical essays in Books and Characters (1922) and Portraits in Miniature (1931) -- for he is at his most charming when concise, epigrammatic and personal.

Which he is throughout this very handsome volume of letters. They are, moreover, true letters, intended to amuse as well as inform, and they are mostly gossip. The tone is always slightly high-pitched and artificial, that campy British style that runs from Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank through Nancy Mitford and Quentin Crisp. But here it is leavened with phrases from the Bible and beautiful lines from Racine (Strachey's favorite author).

To give some small sense of Strachey's particular flavor, let me quote a few passages that struck me, though any reader will find plenty of others to choose from.

To the young Leonard Woolf, who has taken a diplomatic post in what was then Ceylon: "On Sunday I called at the Gothic mansion, and had tea with Vanessa and Virginia. The latter is rather wonderful -- quite witty, full of things to say, and absolutely out of rapport with reality. The poor Vanessa has to keep her three mad brothers and sister in control. She looks wan and sad. I don't wonder."