An oppressive heat, a bit of rain and a lot of A. S. Byatt

It is my last couple of days in France until September and it is seriously steamy here. Boiling hot days and nights have given way to the odd few hours of torrential rain and for what seems like moments we have been cooled slightly before the sun re asserts itself. It is the kind of weather that makes you slow. On the whole, the last week has been a good time to read A. S. Byatt’s doorstop The Children’s Book. Its long, its complicated, its detailed, it should possibly have been short listed for the bad sex award as well as the booker, but at the end of the long hot day, I think I liked it.

The Children’s Book is a sort of fictional collective biography which starts in the late Victorian age and ends in the trenches of the Somme over 20 years later. It weaves together the lives of three interlinked families together with a host of other associates and the outcome is a cast of what feels like thousands. One of Byatt’s greatest achievements in this book is that she keeps each of these characters in focus and well defined whilst also creating the feel of a community. And what a community they are; we have artists, craftsmen; writers; thinkers; Fabians; revolutionaries; poets; female doctors; suffragettes; museum keepers; rational dressers; nudists; feminists. They are linked by ties of blood, sex, childhood and the powerful ideas of the Victorian and Edwardian avant garde.

If there is a centre to this intricate and disparate tale then that centre is Olive Wellwood. Olive is a writer of children’s stories, an expert on fairy tales, the chatelaine of a ramshackle rural family home, a philanderer’s wife and a working class refugee in an upper middle class world. More than anything, she is an emotional but disengaged mother to 7 children. For each of those children she writes a story that is constantly embellished and enriched with re-writings and new elements. The length and complexity of each story reflects the grossly variable love that she feels for each of her children and as the reader will see, the dark corners of her family history and her marriage.

One of Byatt’s chief concerns is the tension between domesticity and art and this is explored in several characters. Olive is a woman who chooses art. Her sister keeps house for her and cares for the children day to day and the two women are as co-dependent as they are resentful of one another. Her children underpin and inspire her best work, but she fails to engage with any of them on a non-fictional level. Byatt’s comment here on the home lives of artists would feel hackneyed if it were not so well documented. Olive is partly based on E. Nesbitt and of course there are many other examples of the same phenomenon.

Fans of Possession will know how much Byatt loves to write of worlds within worlds and The Children’s Book is no exception. The novel is littered with Olive’s stories, plays, puppet shows, museums, craft fairs and general symposiums in which our characters perform. More than this, there is an inside-outness about childhood and adulthood. So many of the adults in the story are childish – they decline to take on adult responsibilities; they do not demand adult behaviour from their children, even when they are adult. At the same time, the children respond to the chaos of the family life with a sort of desperate maturity.

This is a novel with a powerful sense of history and a feeling for the history of ideas. Byatt captures how ideas can fire people and lead them to new vistas. She seems to hold in easy reach both the idealism of early free thinkers and the absurdity of people who talked always of sexual freedom but did not think to educate their daughters.

So why do I only think I like it? Well, Byatt’s fine tale of artists within families almost dies under a welter of detail and digression. Byatt is a self consciously intellectual writer and as well as weaving complex plots she likes to digress into cultural soliloquies. In Possession, I loved this and was happy to sit back and be taught, but I felt that The Children’s Book went a lecture too far. With endless digressions on social movements and moments of history, there was a lot of showing off in this particular education. There was an over reliance on the already well documented life stories of various artists and writers. Olive is based on E. Nesbitt while her near neighbour, the demented and depressive potter Benedict Fludd is manifestly based on Eric Gill. The spindly-fingered sexual predator Herbert Methley is an almost straight incarnation of D. H. Lawrence. Fictionalisation can be a brilliant way of telling life stories, but not this time. For me the presence of these real lives made the book feel too predictable; reading certain passages was like reading yesterday’s newspapers.

The Children’s Book completely divides opinion, so a potential reader may enjoy consulting a few more. There are excellent reviews at Dovegrey Reader; Farm Lane Books; Random Jottings; ANZ Litlovers Lit Blog; Things mean a lot; The Indextrious Reader; Alone with each other; Maud Newton; Medieval Bookworm; Passionate Booklover; and finally the splendid Booksnob.

I have included a picture of the beautiful front cover as well a pictures of A. S. Byatt and her muses Edith Nesbit, Eric Gill and D. H. Lawrence.

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.

A brilliant way to treat entangled lives: "A Crisis of Brilliance" by David Boyd Haycock

I am standing in our kitchen wondering why I chose David Boyd Haycock’s A Crisis of Brilliance as the first book I read at our new home in France. Only tiny traces of the massive snowfall that greeted our arrival remain in the garden and half remembered schoolgirl French is slowly coming back to me. I do still feel like a bit of a newbie – a student on an exchange trip rather than a permanent resident. So maybe that is the reason behind choosing such a quintessentially English book for my first read.

A Crisis of Brilliance is that rare and excellent thing: a collective biography. It traces the lives of five British artists of the early twentieth century – Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler and Richard Nevinson. These artists all entered the Slade School of Art by wildly divergent routes at approximately the same time. They met, fought, loved and formed there and they are rightly associated with one another. When Britain went to war in 1914 they would be shattered apart – never to be reunited – never to recapture the glory days of their youth. For each of them the war would mean something different – alienation; disintegration; fear; grief; development; fame. For all of them their best work would emerge from the horror of conflict. The images that they produced, of landscapes torn asunder and men treated like machines have become standard ways of looking at the Great War – but at the time they were groundbreaking.

There are too few collective biographies in the world. Thinking about people in groups makes so much sense – we all live love and work in groups and the traditional format of the cradle to grave individual biography is often limiting. The subjects of Haycock’s book were drawn inexorably together and so Haycock has treated them together. They were all brilliant subversives who rejected the ordinary and the respectable. Individually and collectively, they lived for their art. In some cases they are already well known. Anyone who has seen “Carrington” will know the tragedy of Dora Carrington’s end as well as the unlikely subject of her most abiding love. Visitors to Cookham will know of the gentle, gauche Stanley Spencer whose paintings have come to represent so much of English identity. The brilliance of Haycock’s book is that he shows the staggering level of entanglement between these people.
This tale is a whirlwind of passion, repression, love, intelligence and alienation. Although it is non-fiction, Haycock’s prose reads effortlessly and often has the power of a novel – it moves from one scene to another, taking in a vast array of colourful characters. In many respects the beguiling, enchanting, often dishonest Dora Carrington, or “Carrington” as she preferred to be known stands at its centre. Crop haired, charming, confused, deceitful, she attracts almost everyone but struggles to respond to their affections. Mark Gertler, the Jewish émigré artist is the brooding, difficult heathcliffe – tormented by his visceral love for Carrington. Paul Nash stands aloof: courteous, urbane and thoughtful. Stanley Spencer, that genius of the English countryside is locked into a world where the verge of Jordan meets the Thames valley. Richard Nevinson is the angry, difficult young man who pushes away those whom he loves the most. Although we have all heard about them before, because Haycock has been brave with his format and approach, they come alive afresh on the page.