An enchanted forest of family trees

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.