An enchanted forest of family trees
Hilary Spurling
MOSAIC by Michael Holroyd Little, Brown, £17.99, pp. 304, ISBN 0316725056 Michael Holroyd describes the first copy of his last book of memoirs plopping through the letterbox, the kind of moment that might have called for champagne anywhere but in the Holroyd household, which celebrated the book's arrival with macabre revulsion: 'I seemed to see, clambering through its pages, a troupe of ungainly, poignant, gesticulating clowns (my own relations) whose griefs and disappointments, as they tumbled over one another, rang out in sidesplitting farce.' Holroyd shuddered and shut the book, which was Basil Street Blues, shortly afterwards hailed in three continents as an autobiographical masterpiece.
With Mosaic he is back again wandering through the same thickets in pursuit of more or less the same companions (his parents, his aunt and her unsatisfactory lover, his grandfather's elusive mistress). 'We live in a forest of family trees,' Holroyd writes, 'and the branches reach out in complicated paths over unexpectedly long distances.' Henri Matisse said there were two ways of drawing a tree. One was by copying it literally according to rules taught in his day at every art school in Europe. The other was the Chinese method, which meant following the feelings suggested by the tree at first sight and on contemplation, paying particular attention to the dynamics of flow and the spaces between the leaves. Holroyd, who belongs by temperament and training to the Chinese school, proceeds eccentrically or rather concentrically with energetic sideswipes at the kind of contemporary academic biography which is the equivalent of the strict copyist's drawing:
Never has there been such a colossal apparatus got ready — such an array of scaffolding, cranes, pulleys and tackle — to raise into place, with much pomp and sometimes the trumpeting abuse of lesser scholars, one quotation, complete with its groundwork of notes to inform us who else has used it, where and to what inferior effect.
Like a painted Chinese tree, Mosaic starts at the bottom and grows upwards organically. That is to say, it begins where Basil Street Blues left off, with Holroyd senior responding to his own sense of life as an exploding minefield by gathering all conceivable obstacles together and thrusting them (like an armful of barbed wire') at his son, who retaliates in a memorable passage like a modern prose sequel to Ovid's Metamorphoses by looking in his shaving mirror half a century later, and seeing his father's face staring back at him with an expression of carping and querulous consternation.
This book is mined with traps and reversals. For one thing practically everyone in it is dead, except the author, who spends his working hours in an underworld of bookstacks, probate ledgers, bulging cupboards and cabinets, patrolling the aisles of municipal reference libraries or ransacking suburban cemeteries for epitaphs (Here is genuine massed sadness, like a vast chorus, but inscribed without the language to express it'). Language has never been a problem for Holroyd. Nor is vitality. He pictures himself as wayward, ineffectual, evasive to vanishing point and 'almost aggressively mild'. But in no time at all he has marshalled a vigorous company of dead relatives and live readers, weav
ing in and out of one another in brisk, surprising and entertaining patterns among the hospitable gaping tombs and cracked crazy paving of Holroyd's imaginary graveyard. The nearest thing in this book to a conventional memoir is his account of an exuberant ten-year love affair with the writer Philippa Pullar which ends, after her splendid death and stately burial, with the author pushing her out into the unknown like Cleopatra in her barge or King Arthur drifting downstream to the sea.
It is typical of Holroyd that his next courtship took place in the gruesome hinterland beyond Notting Hill Gate in the early 1980s, before the tides of fashion had washed southwards down Ladbroke Grove, then a place of violence and dereliction where the lovers strolled together on summer evenings under the motorway to the distant thunder of reggae, past the chained-up corpses of dismembered bicycles and dead pigeons lining the gutters, or through concrete communal gardens, 'avoiding their slippery puddles of vomit, their glistening patches of shattered glass, reading the plastic police notices politely requesting information about local murders ...'
The triumphant outcome of this urban serenade was marriage to the novelist Margaret Drabble, after which the book's pace quickens, workwise, on the frontier between their respective territories of fiction and what Holroyd calls 'that most mysterious category', non-fiction. 'Oh how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel!' he writes plaintively but with no real conviction. Once the couple set out together on a biographical research trip to Worthing, following up clues, looking for non-existent pointers, even knocking on doors in fruitless search for the long-dead adventuress who broke up Michael's grandfather's marriage, before returning to London where each settled back thankfully into his or her own writing category. Tor Maggie it had been a rather dreadful glimpse into the biographer's life — so banal and disappointing the work, a mixture of arid drudgery in the library and pointless effrontery in the streets.'
One of the many extraordinary things about Holroyd's career has been his ability to push biography forward further and deeper into imaginative territory formerly occupied by the novel. By his own account Holroyd treats even lecture tours as a challenge, ending each talk in fierce competition with his audience as to who can put forward wilder, weirder or more dysfunctional relations (`Even abroad, in Chicago
or Montreal, my own family performed very well in these contests'). Mosaic confronts the breakage and messes of human life with equanimity, humour and honesty in a performance it has taken a lifetime to polish. Biographically speaking, Holroyd himself has turned into the juggler of genius described by Matisse, who compared learning to draw with trying to keep two balls in the air, then three, four, five, until in the end the performer can add in a spoon for luck before throwing his own hat in the air and very likely his coffee cup and saucer as well.
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