The biographer's autobiography

BASIL STREET BLUES: A Family Story by Michael Holroyd (Little, Brown, 17.50)

IN order to become a writer these days, it does no harm to have difficult parents, if only to provide subject matter. The family has always been meat for literature, of course, ever since Adam begat Cain, but the parental memoir is a distinctively modern kind of writing. It combines two popular preoccupations: the search for identity and the need to allot blame.

Contemporary writers seem especially addicted to the latter - our version of original sin, perhaps? Some of these memoirs are distasteful, not least when they are designed to show their authors emerging victorious from the havoc wreaked by inadequate parents, inferior persons whom their wronged offspring are now in a position to patronise and even pity. Discretion, reticence and loyalty go by the board in favour of self-dramatisation and confessional therapy. Were Cain with us today, he would write a book blaming his problems on Adam and make a handsome profit from it in the process.

Others are more generous. Their purpose is not accusation but understanding. Michael Holroyd belongs to this second category. After a lifetime trawling through the darker secrets in other people's closets, he shows himself in this autobiographical sketch to be characteristically mild and forbearing about his own family. Occasionally, he is even dull. In context, that is not necessarily a fault. Much of Holroyd's book tells a familiar English tale of decayed gentil-

ity. This is the world we know from the novels of Anthony Powell and Angus Wilson. There is also something Pow-elline about his style: poised between the formal and the colloquial, it suits perfectly the somewhat Pooterish story he has to tell about minor public schools, suburban villas, failed businessmen and flighty women. The cen-

tral characters are his mother and father, and the narrative turns on their initial attraction, gradual alienation and final incomprehension - of each other, themselves and everyone else - as they slide from youthful ardour to baffled old age.

One might suppose that the main purpose of Basil Street Blues is to tell us who Michael Holroyd is and how he became that person, but the book has a subtler scheme. Though the facts of his background and early life are dutifully recounted, we learn comparatively little about Holroyd. Instead, going against the grain of his usual practice as a biographer, he raises trails, only to let them cool. His lengthy Lives take great trouble to tell us everything there is to be known about their subjects, but in this book he is confronted by mysteries at every turn. There is a darkness in the people closest to him and, perhaps, he suspects, in himself. Proximity obscures the view, forcing him to confront the limits of his art as a biographer.

Being Holroyd, he does this quietly and humorously: there are no shattering revelations. But that is the essence of his story: whatever discoveries we make about one another, whether or not we are biographers, they are usually partial, fragmentary, inconclusive, provisional and almost invariably too late. It is a disturbing moral for a biographer to draw and a lesson for the rest of us.

Copyright 1999
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