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.