The Warm-Hearted Detective: Michael Holroyd’s Basil Street Blues

There is nothing like a long lonely journey for a spot of introspection. On this basis, I am convinced that I chose the right read for my latest trip on the eurostar. Here I am curled up in a corner window seat, with the flats of Northern France whipping past the train window and a copy of Michael Holroyd’s Basil Street Blues, just finished, sitting in front of me. I am on my way home, mostly on family duties and so I feel that this was a timely book to pick up. Basil Street Blues is a family saga and a work of fascinating autobiography, written by one of the great biographers of our time. In this book, Michael Holroyd turns the scholarly scepticism, searching curiosity and profound human sympathy that we know from his biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw onto his own family and on to himself. Basil Street Blues is a thing of many sides and many pleasures.

First and foremost it is a family saga of colourful characters, eccentric households and their faltering passage through changing times and changing fortunes. It illuminates that corner of the human experience that we all know: where those we love manage to be both outrageously unpredictable and infuriatingly consistent. The story focuses on Holroyd’s parents, the frustrated entrepreneur Basil and the beautiful, hyperactive Ulla. We see his parents through the prism of their own parents and ancestors, from English Earls and tea importers to Swedish army majors and overbearing heiresses. Through the parents we come to know, tangentially the endless string of step parents whom Holroyd describes as passing in and out of his life “like minor characters in a badly managed melodrama”. We add to this the figure of Holroyd himself, who emerges from the narrative of his family, blinking into the light of adulthood with intelligence, thoughtfulness and humour.

As a detective of his own family, Holroyd discovers all sorts of truths. Amongst incidents of suicide, adultery, third class degrees and professional failures, he explores the gaping cavity which often exists between family legend and reality. Many of his characters – from the stoic family heroes to the bad tempered ladies of leisure – turn out to be not quite as they seemed to be. Every personality has an explanation although sometimes, we cannot quite get at it. Holroyd presents what is at times a lament for their lives and attitudes, whilst also celebrating their colour and interest. He skilfully maintains real intimacy with both his reader and the subjects of his detection.

The writer’s role as detective and biographer is another major concern of Basil Street Blues. For Holroyd, writing biography became a way of being invisible, and in many respects this book explores the space between visibility and invisibility in life and in writing. One of the most hilarious episodes of the book sees Holroyd, the confidante and scribe of both his mother and her estranged third husband, conducting a 18 month long correspondence with himself. He is central – and yet it is somebody else’s story. His account of the early years of a biographer and the moral dilemmas that emerge from life writing are engaging and amusing.

As well as being a super yarn. Basil Street Blues is also extremely funny and extremely touching. It plays with chronology enough to add interest and enrich its themes. It is written with an extremely light and self-effacing touch. What is more – it causes me to think, about my own family and where I come from and what my identity is. Not everyone has come a family like the one in Basil Street Blues, but we can all look at our relations and see a lot of ourselves. Who can look in the mirror and not see some shade of their parents, their grandparents, relations who may be legion, the places of childhood and the dramas of family? Michael Holroyd has written an excellent book about a universal human concern.

I have included as illustrations a couple of examples of lalique glass – one of several ill fated commercial enterprises taken up by the Holroyd family and treated, with suitable humour, in Basil Street Blues.