And Another Thing | 12 March 2008

The Letters of Lytton Strachey, which I have just been reading, are a mixed joy. Odd that a writer supposedly so fastidious in the use of words should have produced effusions in the 1920s using ‘divine’ or ‘divinely’ half a dozen times in a single letter, just like a Bright Young Person from Vile Bodies. On the other hand, they provide nuggets of discreditable facts, chiefly about the sexual tastes of the Great and the Good, such as the Labour Lord Chancellor, Jowett. He also relates how he himself was pleasurably crucified by the young Roger Senhouse, an elaborate business which involved making a blasphemous ‘cut’ in his side. More interesting, really, is the fact (new to me) that when, during the reign of moral terror set up by Sir William Joynson-Hicks in the 1920s, the police raided an art gallery showing D.H. Lawrence’s ‘obscene’ paintings, they also seized a drawing of Adam and Eve by William Blake.