Customer Reviews

Mosaic: A Family Memoir Revisited

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Michael Holroyd had done much research in `Basil Street Blues' into the history of his family (see my Amazon review). But after he had published it in 1999, he discovered, in one way or another, a lot more about their lives and about those who were never, strictly speaking, formally members of the family - enough to make this book, published five years after the first. He says in his preface that he has composed it "so that anyone can follow the narrative without having read, or remembered, the earlier book." That does mean that anyone who had recently read the first book (or indeed anyone who reads the edition in which the two books are printed in one volume) will find some repetition - not only of events and characterizations, but also of the author's own attitudes. So, for instance, near the beginning of the present volume he rages again against the bureaucracy that follows a death of his aunt Yolande (who had still been alive - just - when he wrote "Basil Street Blues"); the previous volume had had a similar tirade after the earlier death of his father.

However, there is certainly a lot of new material. He tells us what readers of `Basil Street Blues' have written to him, some of which gives him information he had not had before. One of his readers, the novelist Margaret Forster, had said that in the previous volume he had revealed relatively little about himself. This leads first to his ruminations about how, as a biographer, he probably hid his own personality behind those of his subjects. He first seems to evade describing himself by setting a class of students he had at one time in the United States an assignment to describe how he appeared to them.

But then he does reveal quite intimate things about his life, including his sex-life and, in detail and in a chapter taking up a quarter of the book and spanning three decades, his relationship with Philippa Pullar, whom he had not mentioned at all in the first volume. She was spell-binding, passionate, eccentric, wildly creative in life and literature (she, too was a writer: one of her books was called "Consuming Passions" - the title refers to an apparently chaotic history of food, but it might as well have referred to her temperament) and at one time seriously unstable. She was exasperating, but she always had many discerning friends. Michael and Philippa lived together, perhaps for a decade or so (he does not give dates), then parted, each deeply wounded by terrible things they had said to each other; but eventually they resumed friendly contact, and he describes the weird, wonderful and creative things she got up to in later life. When Holroyd married Margaret Drabble in 1982, the two women became, touchingly, close friends. Philippa died fifteen years later, and, as one might expect, she had an unusual funeral, beautifully described.

The next long chapter, over 100 pages long, is the account of how Holroyd sought to discover more than he had been able to tell us in the first volume about Agnes May Babb, who had been his grandfather's mistress for six years and for whom he had during that time deserted his wife. Holroyd launched an appeal for more information, and is sent a bewildering number of identifications. He eventually sorts out all the relationships which are then set out in all their complexity and interconnectedness in three family trees at the back of the book. They involve not only the several marriages of Agnes Mary Babb, but also the four marriages of Henry Haselhurst, the one-time lover of Holroyd's aunt Yolande and whose subsequent marriage to wife No.3 plunged Yolande into the embittered spinsterhood that was related in the first volume. The romantic Captain Haselhurst, it appears, had lied to Yolande and to all and sundry about his place of birth and his schooling (at the Hull Municipal Technical College, but he claimed to have been at Eton), even about the spelling of his surname (which was why Holroyd had not been able to track him down earlier in his researches).

These discoveries were all very exciting and ultimately satisfying to Holroyd. They are an immense tribute to his persistent detective work, told in great detail. No trouble in tracking down information, for years on end, was too much for him. But while the extraordinary story of Haselhurst is told with panache and wit, he knew none of these people personally. Despite all those multiple marriages, they were not particularly interesting; and their lives as told here make for very dry reading - quite at variance with the sparkling chapters in which Holroyd reveals so much about himself.