Basil Street Blues [Paperback]

Michael Holroyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2000

Michael Holroyd - the most famous biographer in Britain - turns his attention upon himself and his own family in BASIL STREET BLUES (the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s.) Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn't stand living together. (His grandparents' marriage provided no better model - his grandfather having had a four year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother). Towards the end of Holroyd's parents lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and researches he has written this moving and self-revealing book.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'A subtle, courageous book' - S. Tel. '[Holroyd] has written an original, unforgettable book' - D. Tel. 'Tense, fraught, uneasy, but mining that unease to poignant effect...an extraordinary piece of work' TLS 'I have no hesitation in awarding Basil Street Blues the full 5 stars. In the genre of autobiography, it is right up there in my personal pantheon...[a] haunting & beautifully understated tragi- comedy' M. on Sunday

About the Author

Michael Holroyd is the author of numerous biographies including Lytton Strachey, August John and George Bernard Shaw.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Abacus (August 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0349111340
• ISBN-13: 978-0349111346
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #886,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Witty and poignant, September 25, 2011

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Basil Street Blues (Paperback)

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 preparatory 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 companion volume to this one, called "Mosaic" (see my Amazon review).