Read Basil Street Blues Online
Authors: Michael Holroyd
Basil Street Blues
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
Chapter 1: Two Types of Ambiguity
Chapter 2: With Virginia Woolf at Sheffield Place
Chapter 3: The Swedish Experiment
Chapter 5: The Breves Process: Tea into Glass
Chapter 6: The Coming of Agnes May
Chapter 7: A Triumph and Disaster
Chapter 9: Some Wartime Diversions
Chapter 10: Notes from Norhurst
Chapter 12: Scaitcliffe Revisited
Chapter 13: Three Weddings and a Funeral
Chapter 15: Legal and Military
Chapter 16: The Third Mrs Nares
Chapter 17: Flight into Surrey
Chapter 18: Scenes from Provincial and Metropolitan Life
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
An Invitation from the Publisher
My grandparents with their children at Windsor: Kenneth (left), Basil (middle) and Yolande.
My Swedish grandmother, Kaja, Stockholm c.1913.
The schoolboy at Eton.
The novelist in London.
Brocket in the 1920s.
My father with his schnauzer puppy.
Ulla, my mother, when she arrived in England c.1934.
My mother during her cancer treatment.
Haselhurst c.1940.
My aunt Yolande in the 1920s.
The author of
Mosaic
(photograph © by John Foley).
Philippa: while writing
Frank Harris
.
Agnes May: the hand-painted photograph commissioned by my grandfather c.1928.
Illustrations of two light fittings by the author’s father.
‘The past puts a fine edge on our own days. It tells us more of the present than the present can tell us.’
William Gerhardie, ‘An Historical Credo’
The Romanovs, An Evocation of the Past as a Mirror for the Present
Two Types of Ambiguity
Towards the end of the nineteen-seventies I asked my parents to let me have some account of their early lives. I had never been interested in my family. My career as a biographer probably arose from my need to escape from family involvements and immerse myself in other people’s lives. ‘We don’t go to Heaven in families any more – but one by one.’ I remember how struck I was when I came across this sentence in Gwen John’s correspondence. That was certainly how I felt. I also remember quoting in my first biography Hugh Kingsmill’s aphorism: ‘Friends are God’s apology for families,’ and feeling a chord of agreement.
My parents, who had long been divorced, and gone through a couple of subsequent marriages, each of them, as well as various additional liaisons, were by the late nineteen-seventies living alone in fragile health and meagre circumstances. They appeared bewildered by the rubble into which everything was collapsing. After all, it had started so promisingly.
The accounts they wrote were very different. This did not surprise me. They had seldom agreed about anything, not even the date of my birth. As a gesture of tact I preserved two birthdays forty-eight hours apart, one for each of them. This had begun as a joke, grew into a habit and finally became a rather ageing conceit which will enable me to claim by the year 2000 the wisdom of a 130-year-old.
My parents’ marriage was something of a mystery to me. What did they have in common? After the age of six I seldom saw them together and could imagine few people more dissimilar. What few scraps of memory I retained brought back echoes of reverberating arguments that floated up to me as I lay in a dark bedroom in the north of England – echoes that, to gain popularity, I would later assemble into dramatic stories for the school dormitory. A breadknife flashed in the dark, a line of blood suddenly appeared, and we shivered delightedly in our beds. But I have few actual memories of my very early years, few recollections of my childhood I can trust, and not many of adolescence. There were probably good reasons for this erasure, though I am hoping that some events may stir from their resting place and rise to the surface as I write.
I was born in the summer of 1935. My mother was Swedish, and my father thought of himself as English, though his mother actually came from the south of Ireland and his paternal grandmother was Scottish. All I knew was that my parents had met on a boat in the North Sea, got along fine on water, then fairly soon after striking land, dashed their marriage on the rocks. I had been conceived, my mother once remarked as we were travelling by bus through Knightsbridge, at the Hyde Park Hotel where King Gustav of Sweden (calling himself Colonel Gustaveson) often stayed. I remember her laughing as we swayed into Sloane Street and travelled on. At another time, in a taxi, she pointed to the Basil Street Hotel with a similar laugh before turning into Sloane Street.
I was largely brought up in the Home Counties by my paternal grandparents and a tennis-playing aunt. But there were irregular intervals, sometimes at odd places abroad, with unfamiliar step-parents who, like minor characters in a badly-managed melodrama, would introduce themselves with a flourish, a bray of trumpets, and then inexplicably disappear. Perhaps the peculiar enchantment that sustained and integrated narratives, enriched with involving plots, were to hold for me sprang from my sense of being brought up by so many characters – parental, step-parental and grand-parental characters – who seldom met, showed little interest in one another, and apparently possessed no connecting story.
In some respects my father had a ‘good war’, or so I believed. But he could not adjust to the peace afterwards. Though increasingly impoverished, he somehow found (I never knew how) the money to send me to Eton College because he had been there himself at the end of the First World War. He spoke of his time at Eton with unconvincing jollity and was evidently looking forward to a second, vicarious, innings there.
My mother didn’t mind where I was educated. She did not have an ideology and simply wanted me to be happy, preferably without too much trouble. She never regarded education, which was full of awkward exams, as an obvious route to happiness. But probably such things were different for men.
They certainly appeared different to my father who had the air of a man acting responsibly on my behalf – as, he implied, his own father should have acted for him. By the time I was sixteen, he judged the moment had come to take me to one side and explain the main purpose of my education – which was to retrieve the family fortunes that would otherwise descend on me, he revealed, in the form of serious debts. Eton was providing me with many valuable friendships that could catapult me, he believed, to success. It did not occur to me to ask why Eton had not provided him with such vaulting associations. He gave the impression of someone who had overshot success and landed somewhere else. In the event, I failed comprehensively in this romantic quest he had assigned me (my average income between the mid-nineteen-sixties and mid-nineteen-seventies was to be £1,500 a year). I did not even know how the exotic family fortunes I was to rescue had originated or where they had gone. Was it all a mirage?
Lack of money was very evident in my parents’ last years, when my father was living in a rundown flat in Surrey and my mother in a one-room apartment in London. I thought that the exercise of exploring happier years and travelling back to more prosperous times might bring them some release from their difficulties. From being their only child, the sole child from five marriages, I was to become their guardian and a barely-adequate protector. Having, as it were, commissioned them to write for me, I proposed paying them some commission money. After hesitating, my mother accepted the money with eager reluctance. She had always associated men with money, but understandably had not associated me with it, and was worried that I did not have enough. But times were improving for me, as if I were sitting on the opposite end of a seesaw from my descending parents. My
Lytton Strachey
had eventually been brought out as a paperback and after one very good year, when my
Augustus John
was published, I settled down at the end of the nineteen-seventies to annual net income of between four and five thousand pounds. I could afford to hand over a little money. Besides, I explained to my mother, she would not take my request seriously unless it was put on a business basis. Desperately needing the money, she gave me a kiss and took it.
