Basil Street Blues [Hardcover]

This is largely an autobiography, but it is subtitled "A Family Story", and the first 80 pages or so are largely concerned with Holroyd tracing back the story of his ancestors back for six generations to the second half of the 18th century, much of it his own research in public records. He even troubled to track down in the archives of the Meteorological Office that it was raining heavily on the day his parents were married! His parents had told him very little and often what they had told him turned out to be incorrect. As so often in biographies, these early chapters are fairly heavy going as the reader tries to keep track of people whom the author did not know and whose personalities cannot really be fleshed out. There is the occasional witty remark; but by and large I have found nothing particularly interesting in those pages.

The book comes to life, and most stylishly so, when Michael Holroyd could observe his family personally: his grandfather Fraser, his neurotic grandmother Adeline, their daughter Yolande, his father Basil and his mother, the Swedish-born Ulla ("Sue"). The family had come down in the world, from Brocket, an Edwardian country house near Maidenhead, to small flats in London, from the knighthood of an 18th century Judge of the King's Bench, through a Major-General, to running the British agency for Lalique glass which eventually fell out of fashion: the agency was plunged into bankruptcy in 1939. Michael was four years old at the time. Basil would then earn a meagre living as a salesman.

When the war broke out, Michael and his parents moved into the Fraser's household in the smaller house, Norhurst, into which Fraser, Adeline and Yolande had moved from Brocket. They were all embittered by a sense of failure, and there was continual and noisy quarreling in the family. It must have been hell for a small only child, but Michael took refuge in reading as soon as he could read, and in this book he wittily and poignantly recounts these quarrels (as he had done in a roman à clef - A Dog's Life - which had given deep offence to Basil).

And then of course there is Michael's own life. There is the prep school to which he was sent although his father had hated it there. His parents' divorced when he was eleven (Basil and Ulla would each marry twice more, all four marriages also ending in divorces. Michael will describe his mother's somewhat rackety life with filial indulgence). Basil was earning a meagre living as a salesman (and later would start up optimistically a whole series of businesses - the last one when he was approaching eighty - which never took off), but financial help first from an uncle and then from his mother's second husband enabled Michael to go to follow his father to Eton. There he fitted in fairly unobtrusively, as he had into his prep school.

There follow two boring years as an articled clerk to a solicitor, and then - hilariously described -two years of National Service.

Michael had always wanted to be a writer. Already as a boy he had read a lot of biographies, including the one by Hugh Kingsmill of Frank Harris. He became so fascinated by Kingsmill that he decided to write a biography of him. He got in touch with two of Kingsmill's friends: Hesketh Pearson and William Gerhardie, both then well-known on the literary scene. With the help of these two he broke into that scene himself, though it took him six years to find a publisher (1924). A little frustratingly, he says nothing about the process of research, or about what he lived on until he finally broke through with his famous biographies of Lytton Strachey (two volums, 1967/8), Augustus John (two volumes, 1974/5) and Bernard Shaw (four volumes, between 1998 and 1992). He says nothing about his life during those years in this book other than recording harrowing stories of the sad last years of his grandfather, of his aunt (though she loses her bitterness in her extreme old age), and of his parents. He rages against the bureaucracy he had to deal with over and over again at each stage of their decline and indeed after their deaths. And with their deaths he brings to an end this Family Story.

In 2004 Holroyd published a complementary volume to this one, called 'Mosaic'. See my Amazon review.

A fascinating insight into the upper middle-class background of the Holroyd family (Holroyd is married to Margaret Drabble) which made its early money in tea from India, and held onto that for the best part of a century. Basil, the youngest son, was Michael's father and by far the most interesting of the family with his rocky business sense and indefatigable imagination. He married twice, the first time to a Swedish beauty, Ulla, who brought with her to England her formidable mother Kaja. His second marriage was to a mysterious working class voluptuary Agnes Babb. Michael's efforts to trace this lady, who left his father and disappeared after marrying a richer man, extend to a reward notice in the back of the book.

A mounting unease and later despair is the situation of the older members of this family, as Michael succeeds in becoming one of the foremost biographers of the genre. Grandmother Adeline, daughter Yolande, their old nanny (called Old Nan) and intermittently Basil and his eldest brother Kenneth, inhabit the family home along with a number of ageing dogs These people are prone to arguing and fighting with miserable results, presumably the dogs are similarly neurotic. For an outsider this strikes one as marvellously funny, since most of the arguments seem to centre around who is and who isn't allowed to do the washing up, but I expect it wasn't that much fun for any of them.

The story of their childhood traumas, their schooldays, their marriages, their business disasters and their deaths makes sometimes gruelling reading and at times Holroyd seems a little too obsessed with detail, leaving the reader's attention to wander, especially towards the end of the book. On the whole, however, this is a good read.

It beats me how this book was so widely praised, except of course that Holroyd is a member of the log-rolling literary mafia. It is a tedious, self-regarding, self-important account of family and personal trivia, delivered without wit or style. I advise Amazon customers to avoid it.