Free All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

convert to left-wing politics—then a rising political star, not yet the face of fascism in England—encouraged him to go to the United States to study advanced capitalism. Strachey was in the middle of a steady affair with the young literary editor of The Spectator , Celia Simpson, who was part of his group of Labour-affiliated friends, but as he prepared to travel to New York in the autumn of 1928, a colleague remarked, “I suppose you’re going to the U.S.A. to look for a rich wife.” A few months later, in February 1929, Esther and he were engaged. “Bachelor Heiress to Wed Kin of Lord,” announced a headline in the New York American .
    In 1936, still working overtime as a spokesman for his moment, Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.” This often-repeated dictum about the late teens and twenties may have described him, but it ignored the politics of the Harlem Renaissance, left-wing organizing and publishing, temperance and Prohibition, and feminist and anti-feminist activism during those years. Esther was not one of those American literary figures who first found a social conscience with the Great Depression, and in Strachey she responded to the offer of a life if not in politics, then as a partner in his promising career. Like her, he was an intellectual child of privilege who had embraced progressive politics. She had recently been commissioned to write the life of Lady Blessington, and her publisher, Joseph Brewer, was a young American who had studied at Oxford and worked on The Spectator ; it was probably he who introduced her to Strachey. She may have thought that living in England would help her to write this book. She already felt her “inabilities to act,” which she confided to Strachey, and she told him how much she needed his confidence in her. But joining forces with him also made it possible for her to avoid writing and to throw herself into work that was wholly different. It may be that it was only as a political wife that she could conceive of being in an intimate couple with a man. Certainly agreeing to marry him was an attempt to stop pining for a woman who kept in touch with but still disdained her: Barney countered the “startling and revelatory” news of her engagement with skeptical congratulations. “I must rejoice with you that you not only foresee but experience happiness,” she wrote. “I am glad that you recall our meeting not too bitterly.” And she asked, pointedly or obliquely, whether Esther had already slept with Strachey: “Just how your nature may sanction this nouveau régime is a thing already ascertained?” Esther’s nature inclined mostly toward women, but she was also profoundly lonely. “She dreamed of being appreciated,” said Sybille Bedford.
    Strachey was motivated by a mixture of opportunism and genuine fondness. He was ambitious and wanted a career in politics, but did not have the money to finance it. His father had died in 1927, and he and his mother were not close. There was a real chance of a Labour victory in the 1929 election—not just in the working-class, traditionally Tory district of Birmingham, in which he would run for Parliament, but in enough other parts of the country to bring in a left-of-center government—and he insisted on a large dowry from Patrick Murphy, to make his campaign possible. He admired Esther deeply and, knowing about her feelings for Barney, still convinced himself and was convinced by her that their marriage would work. He told her that he wanted to give her “a sort of keel…some heavy fixed centre against which your superb talents could get a purchase” and wrote with kind apprehension about her drinking and their shared tendency toward depression. He saw her strengths and faults clearly, yet he objectified her: “You are truly moving because you have lived and suffered,” he wrote. “I need you very much Esther. You have very much that I