Michael Holroyd, having written widely acclaimed biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw, has now to undertake to atomise the most difficult subject of all: himself.
For this poignant yet gently amusing autobiographical work, he has evidently exerted himself as asssiduously as usual, bringing to bear his long-refined techniques of research and analysis, delving into public and private archives, tracing intimate journals ansd correspondence, and eliciting testimony from members and friends of his extensive, dysfunctional family, legitimate and illegitimate, to discover how he got the way he is.
He says he attempted long ago to achieve invisibility, with a good deal of early success, as an outsider observing other people. He did so with tolerance, sympathy and good humour. Now, at last, his image is visible to us readers. It is clearly that of a very nice man. His niceness - and hard-earned professional competence - have enabled him to steer irreproachably mid-way between the extremes of boastfulness and confessional apology that mar so many autobiographies. This one is objectively revealing, as far as it goes, and subjectively modest.
The introductory genealogy is rather more thorough than necessary for such an informal family portrait, but there is more than ordinary genetic complexity to account for. His mother was Swedish; his father considered himself to be English (with infusions from Ireland and Scotland). They separated when Michael, their only child, was young. The divorce was unwittingly only half-completed. As there was no decree absolute, their subsequent marriages, two more each, were illicit.
Holroyd makes up for a slow start. He tells a story of upper-middle-class poverty - but it is not at all harrowing. The Holroyds' preferred school was Eton, and the fees had to be scraped together, no matter how. Michael's father was an old Etonian who believed that friends made there would help Michael gain financial security afterwards, even though Holroyd Senior's own series of failures in the building trade showed there is no guaranteed magic in the black tie with the narrow paleblue stripes.
There have been countless autobiographical reminiscences of an Eton education and reluctant, compulsory peace-time service in the British Army. Holroyd manages to make his account of both well-known experiences freshly entertaining. There are less light-hearted passages about a favourite aunt's blighted lovelife., his beautiful mother's promiscuity and his father's valiant, hopeless decline. The family's roller-coaster emotional vicissitudes inspired Michael to write his only novel, A Dog's Life, and eventually to become, as he notes, what James Joyce called a "biografiend".
Why the title Basil Street Blues? Holroyd was told he was conceived in the Basil Street Hotel. That's no mean venue, just behind Harrods. But Michael Holroyd offers only sparse hints of happiness. He does briefly mention that he is married to Margaret Drabble, but there is no picture amongst the book's many family portraits.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic