Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Ploughboys, Postboys, and Arabian Nights: Lytton Strachey's Imperial Adventure"

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Julie Taddeo
Temple University
jtaddeo@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu

"One's amours are very like the British Empire--all over the shop, in every sort of unexpected ridiculous corner. One plants one's penis on so many peculiar spots." (Lytton Strachey to John Maynard Keynes, 7/1/1906)

Writing to his fellow Cambridge graduate and close friend, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey referred to the endless possibilities for sexual fulfillment which surrounded them. The so-called "lower orders" and "black races" that lived within the borders of England and its empire surely existed for their amusement. Strachey's boast seems to contradict the reputation he later established for himself with his 1918 bestseller, Eminent Victorians. While he publicly denounced the political and financial costs of imperialism, he privately enjoyed its erotic opportunities. As a homosexual, Strachey did, however, occupy a less secure position within the homeland than most upper middle-class men, and his path to the empire often was strewn more with guilt than pleasure.

The story of the wealthy European male who planted his penis in foreign terrain has been well documented in recent historical and literary studies. Equating male travel with a "spermatic journey," Eric Leed describes how European men used their foreign vacations to fulfill "primal needs" with exotic partners. For the upper and middle class homosexual at the fin de siecle, the "journey to sex" was further necessitated by the threat of public exposure and incarceration. As Stephen Adams points out, in the late 19th century, "going away" was the more likely starting point than "coming out" in the homosexual's assertion of his identity. At various stages in his career, Strachey played with both bourgeois (normative) and queer styles of masculinity; shooting at stags and wearing tweed suits, or donning the high heels and scarves of his female Bloomsbury colleagues, Strachey frequently blurred the boundaries between these two supposedly separate male identities. Reluctant to accept the confining medical/legal label of "homosexual," Strachey sought idealized unions with younger men of his own class, while displacing his desire for them onto foreign and working class youths. His model of male-male love ultimately rested on differences of age, class, and race.

The letters and stories examined in this paper highlight some of the problems that confronted Strachey as he sought to express and enjoy male desire in post-Wildean England. Despite the Bloomsbury credo of experimentation and sexual license, Strachey found his own spermatic journey littered with legal, social, and personal obstacles. He relegated most of his sexual "adventures" to the written page, and in his diary, correspondence, and unpublished fiction, he satisfied his passions with various youths from London's East End to the Arabian deserts. In his travels to these regions and in his literary fantasies of travel, Strachey replicated imperialist discourse, creating a male Other onto whom he projected what he sometimes called his own "unnatural desires." His writings revealed his inability to reconcile his "higher" (spiritual) with his "lower" (physical) selves. Ultimately, the unpublished page seemed to offer the safest arena in which to acknowledge and act out desire, or as Strachey put it, to provide "a safety valve to my morbidity."

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Julie Taddeo
jtaddeo@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999