Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  He saw almost no one else, for he was intensely shy. ‘I had no love affairs,’ he confessed to Frank Harris. Late in 1877 Shaw came across a letter he had written to Agnes, describing what he was to call ‘The Calypso Infatuation’, and referring to a girl he had met in 1871. He does not seem to have fallen in love with her until the beginning of May 1875 when he was almost nineteen. A retrospective diary note he made under the heading ‘The Lxxx [Love] Episode’, in which he records burning his letter to Agnes two days after finding it, ends with ‘The Catastrophe, or the indiscretion of No. 2’, and is dated at ‘about the beginning of August’. He celebrated this aborted romance with a hymn to stupidity. The ‘indiscretion of No. 2’ may have been her scheme to engage him to a sister after her own marriage to another man, for the poem tells that ‘she succumbed to the cruel old fashion’ and went to live with her husband not far from Torca Cottage. The poem ends with a tribute to the spell she had laid on him.

  I thought her of women the rarest

  With strange power to seduce and alarm

  One beside whose black tresses the fairest

  Seemed barren of charm...

  Then farewell, oh bewitching Calypso

  Thou didst shake my philosophy well

  But believe me, the next time I trip so

  No poem shall tell.

  He felt most when he was rejected, because that was the only love he knew. But he recoiled from searching for happiness in others because their rejection of him carried behind it the annihilating force of his mother’s initial rejection.

  Work became his mistress. He kept no other company. McNulty, who was employed by a bank, had been sent to Newry. ‘Shaw wrote to me every day. Otherwise I was absolutely alone.’ The written word was threaded into their friendship. At school some of their favourite reading had been a boys’ paper called Young Men of Great Britain. McNulty recalled that ‘it was meat and drink to us and almost as vital to our existence as the air. We awaited each weekly instalment with feverish impatience.’ Here Shaw sent a dramatic short story, involving piracy and highway robbery, that had as its main character a wicked baritone with a gun. He also wrote, in September 1868, asking a question, to which the answer was: ‘Write to Mr Lacey, theatrical publisher, Strand, London W. C.’ A neighbour remembered him sitting alone ‘absorbed in the construction of a toy theatre’. He had a play (perhaps part of Henry VI) for this theatre about the fifteenth-century Irish rebel Jack Cade, for which he would cut out scenes and characters bought at a shop opposite the Queen’s Theatre. Among his own early works was a gory verse drama, ‘Strawberrinos: or, the Haunted Winebin’, full of extravagant adventures in which our hero Strawberrinos is constantly bested by a Mephistophelean demon.

  At the Theatre Royal in Dublin he had been used to seeing pantomimes, farces and melodramas involving villainous disguises and the convolutions of dense intrigue. In 1870 the great touring actor, Barry Sullivan, had arrived. George joined the crowds, emerging from the theatre with ‘all my front buttons down the middle of my back’. Of all the travelling stars, Sullivan seemed to him incomparably the grandest. A man of gigantic personality, he was the last in a dynasty of rhetorical and hyperbolical actors that had begun with Burbage.

  ‘His stage fights in Richard III and Macbeth appealed irresistibly to a boy spectator like myself: I remember one delightful evening when two inches of Macbeth’s sword, a special fighting sword carried in that scene only, broke off and whizzed over the heads of the cowering pit (there were no stalls then) to bury itself deep in the front of the dress circle after giving those who sat near its trajectory more of a thrill than they had bargained for. Barry Sullivan was a tall powerful man with a cultivated resonant voice: his stage walk was the perfection of grace and dignity; and his lightning swiftness of action, as when in the last scene of Hamlet he shot up the stage and stabbed the king four times before you could wink, all provided a physical exhibition which attracted audiences quite independently of the play...’

  This was not a spectacle to George, but an experience. He could feel his blood quickening during the performance, his mind beating, hurrying. This was vicarious living at its most vigorous, where ‘existence touches you delicately to the very heart, and where mysteriously thrilling people, secretly known to you in dreams of your childhood, enact a life in which terrors are as fascinating as delights; so that ghosts and death, agony and sin, became, like love and victory, phases of an unaccountable ecstasy’. He forgot loneliness in this palace of dreams. When he came to write plays himself, he instinctively went back to the grand manner and heroic stage business he had seen from the pit of the Theatre Royal.

  In 1874 George spent his summer holidays at Newry with his friend McNulty. McNulty had developed what he called ‘a morbid condition of nerves’. He was so sensitive to the earth’s rotation that he could not trust himself to lie down on a sofa without falling off. ‘I fancied I could see the sap circulating in plants and trees,’ he wrote. George’s scepticism, though not always comfortable, helped to reduce this tension. On their second day the two of them had their photographs taken and they talked of the inevitability of fame. Every evening they would write something different – ‘a short story, a comedy, a tragedy, a burlesque and so forth,’ McNulty remembered, ‘and the real joy of the event lay in reading and forcefully criticizing each other’s work. This series we called: “The Newry Nights’ Entertainment”.’

  The following year McNulty was transferred back to Dublin and the two of them saw a good deal of each other. McNulty would call round at Harcourt Street to stagger through duets on the grand piano. George, he observed, ‘took little or no notice of his father who still spent his evenings poring miserably over his account books’. Otherwise, his glasses low on his nose, his head tilted back, he browsed before a newspaper or smoked his one clay pipe a day, breaking it when he had finished and throwing the fragments in the grate: ‘a lonely, sad little man,’ McNulty concluded.

  George had resolved never to allow the diffidence he shared with his father to cripple him. He looked to his father as a warning; otherwise, like Lee, he looked to London.

  His opportunity came early in 1876. Agnes, suffering from consumption, had been taken down to Balmoral House, a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight. Though he was now getting £84 a year at Uniacke Townshend, George felt more than ever unsatisfied there. One of his colleagues, an old book-keeper, had confided that he ‘suffered so much from cold feet that his life was miserable,’ Shaw recorded. ‘I, full of the fantastic mischievousness of youth, told him that if he would keep his feet in ice-cold water every morning when he got up for two or three minutes, he would be completely cured.’ Shortly afterwards the man died. To his horror George was then offered his job. Charles Townshend wanted to install a relative as cashier and boot George upstairs to make room for him. But George refused and had to be moved, with an increased salary, to the position of general clerk. On 29 February 1876 he gave a month’s notice. ‘My reason is, that I object to receive a salary for which I give no adequate value,’ he wrote. ‘Not having enough to do, it follows that the little I have is not well done. When I ceased to act as Cashier I anticipated this, and have since become satisfied that I was right.’

  This letter shows the paradoxical device of his new authority. It has the regretful air of an employer dismissing an employee. Its succinct superiority must have been galling. But anxious not to offend George’s Uncle Frederick at the Valuation Office, Charles Townshend offered him his job back as cashier. George thanked him – however ‘I prefer to discontinue my services’.

  In retrospect G.B.S. applied a blinding Shavian polish to his arrival in England. Armed with the English language he proposed to advance on London and become ‘a professional man of genius’. ‘When I left Dublin I left (a few private friendships apart) no society that did not disgust me,’ he wrote. ‘To this day my sentimental regard for Ireland does not include the capital. I am not enamored of failure, of poverty, of obscurity, and of the ostracism a
nd contempt which these imply; and these were all that Dublin offered to the enormity of my unconscious ambition.’

  ‘Like Hamlet I lack ambition and its push,’ he wrote. Yet it was not ambition he lacked: it was (like Hamlet) advancement. He insisted that he never struggled, but was pushed slowly up by the force of his ability. ‘It is not possible to escape from the inexorable obligation to succeed on your own merits,’ he confessed. He did not cross the Irish Sea for love of the English. ‘Emigration was practically compulsory,’ he told St John Ervine.

  Agnes died of phthisis on 27 March. Between the two opportunities offered by her death and that of the book-keeper, George had never hesitated. Looking back on his twenty years in Ireland he summed up: ‘My home in Dublin was a torture and my school was a prison and I had to go through a treadmill of an office.’

  He packed a carpet bag, boarded the North Wall boat and arrived in London. It was a fine spring day and he solemnly drove in a ‘growler’ from Euston to Victoria Grove. Shortly afterwards he travelled down to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight following Agnes’s funeral there. The family selected a headstone and an epitaph to be cut on it: ‘TO BE WITH CHRIST WHICH IS FAR BETTER’ – from a passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians where Paul compares the folly of living with the wisdom of dying. Nearly sixty years later Shaw was to write to Margaret Mackail, exposing what he felt about his own childhood: ‘as the world is not at present fit for children to live in why not give the little invalids a gorgeous party, and when they have eaten and danced themselves to sleep, turn on the gas and let them all wake up in heaven?’

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  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to many individuals and organisations in the preparation of Basil Street Blues. Among the former are: Margit Andréen, I. V. and A-M. Attwell, David Benedictus, Jeffrey Bowman, Christopher Capron, Anne Chisholm, Anders Clason, Keith Clements, G. C. Frowde, Viola Germain, Hilda Gledhill, Winston Graham, Vicky Hall, Leslie Hodgson, Jennifer Holden, John Holroyd, Sessie Hylander, Jeremy Isaacs, Robert Lescher, Maureen Levenson, Richard Magor, John Mein, Niall McMonagle, Michael Ockenden, Anders Öfverstöm, Roger Packham, Griffy Philipps, Merle Rafferty, Michael and Moussie Sayers, Michael Seifert, Michael Sevenoaks, Ronald Stent, Lena Svanberg, Richard Vickers, Mary Young.

  I am most grateful to: Head of Administration, the General Council of the Bar; Mary Stewart, Clinic Secretary, Family & Child Guidance Service, Royal County of Berkshire; County Solicitor, Royal County of Berkshire; R. J. Ewing, Bircham & Co, solicitors; Jonathan Barker and Alastair Niven, Literature Department, the British Council, London; Michelle Appleton, the British Council, France; Clare College Archive, Cambridge; Mark Nicholls, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cambridge University Library; Timothy H. Duke, Chester Herald, College of Arms; Naomi da Silva, Family Proceedings Department, the Court Service, Somerset House; P. Hatfield, Eton College Archivist; Mike Waller, Gallerie Moderne; P. Berney, Registration Directorate, General Medical Council; R. Simpson, Suprevisor, Glasgow Necropolis; Avril Gordon, Glasgow City Council; Mark Jones, Deputy Librarian, Gray’s Inn Library; Nadene Hansen, Company Archivist at Harrods; Peter Hunter, Librarian, Harrow School; the Insolvency Service; Elizabeth Stratton, Assistant Archivist, King’s College, Library, Cambridge; T. Shepherd, Regulatory Enquiry Services, the Law Society; Office for National Statistics; N. P. Willmoth, Senior Financial Services Officer, Life & Investment Services, Nat West; Colin Matthew, editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography; Jean Rose, Library Manager, Reed Book Services Limited; V. J. Baxter, Local Studies Librarian, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames; Royal Air Force Personnel Management Agency; the Sandhurst Collection; Scottish Record Office; S. J. Berry, Senior Archivist, Somerset County Record Office; Anthony Howard, Obituaries Editor, The Times; Jonathan Smith, Manuscripts Cataloguer, Trinity College Library, Cambridge; J. P. Rudman, Archivist, Uppingham School; Le Secrétaire Général délégé, Vernet-les-Bains; Patrick Mclure, Secrtary, Wykehamist Society.

  To Sarah Johnson, who is now the only person in the world who can read my handwriting, especially when it appears between the lines of my typing, I owe special thanks for putting everything on to immaculate disks. I am also grateful to Philippa Harrison for her editorial sensitivity and thoroughness, to Caroline North, and to Kate Truman.

  Quotations from Eton Renewed: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (1994) by Tim Card are reproduced with the permission of the publisher, John Murray. Lines from Nevill Coghill’s translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde are reproduced with the permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of Nevill Coghill. Copyright Nevill Coghill 1971. Glass sculptures by René Lalique, photographed by Andrew Stewart: Perche (Contents page), Longchamp (page 1), Renard (page 99), Tête de Paon (page 115), Tête de Coq (page 301).

  Appendix: Four Family Trees

  About Basil Street Blues

  Michael Holroyd – the most famous biographer in Britain – turns his attention upon himself and his own family in Basil Street Blues (the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s.) Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn’t stand living together. (His grandparents’ marriage provided no better model – his grandfather having had a four-year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother). Towards the end of Holroyd’s parents’ lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and researches he has written this moving and self-revealing book.

  Reviews

  LYTTON STRACHEY

  "Holroyd’s prose... is as elegant as ever. He is one of the few biographers who has retained a pronounced sense of humour.”

  The Times

  "Masterly: full of new insight."

  Sunday Express

  "You will be won over by Strachey’s originality, independence and humanity; by his hatred of humbug and prudery; by his life-saving gift for comedy."

  Evening Standard

  AUGUSTUS JOHN

  "An entertaining, essentially comic story.. Holroyd tells it with great skill and elegance.”

  Sunday Telegraph

  "One of the most entertaining lives ever written... Very funny... thought-provoking."

  Mail On Sunday

  "A wonderfully engrossing, entertaining and even moving book."

  Daily Telegraph

  BERNARD SHAW

  "A masterly exercise in biographical magic.”

  Spectator

  "This elegant volume gives the quintessence of Shaw...[it does] justice to a great Irishman."

  Irish Independent

  "A man whose art rested as much upon the exercise of intelligence could not have chosen a more intelligent biographer."

  The Times

  BASIL STREET BLUES

  A subtle, courageous book...

  Sunday Telegraph

  [Holroyd] has written an original, unforgettable book

  Daily Telegraph

  Tense, fraught, uneasy, but mining that unease to poignant effect, Basil Street Blues is an extraordinary piece of work

  TLS

  I have no hesitation in awarding Basil Street Blues the full five stars. In the genre of autobiography, it is right up there in my personal pantheon...[a] haunting and beautifully understated tragi-comedy.

  Mail on Sunday

  A BOOK OF SECRETS

  "A subtle paean to the art of biography. It is a biographical experiment, but a deeply humane and sensitive one. It glows with the energy of lives investigated, restored, reanimated and celebrated."

  Sunday Times

  "Here, he has given us the distilled essence of biography and a fitting end to what he evokes as ‘the comedy of life’."

  Observer

  "As is always the case with Holroyd, the reader comes away equally inspired, equally curious, and la
vishly entertained by a story-teller of the first rank."

  Scotsman

  "A small gem of humanity, curiosity and observation with a wonderful, rolling undercurrent of comedy"

  Sunday Telegraph

  "Scintillating... Holroyd’s book is a sly, inconclusive and utterly bewitching dance through the elusive narrative echoes that make up the biographer’s art"

  Metro

  MOSAIC

  " A lovely blend of mirth and melancholy…

  this memoir ranks with the finest records of the period"

  Waterstones Books Quarterly

  "An absolute tour de force of brilliant writing."

  Telegraph

  "Holroyd is a marvellously sour wit and an observer who never misses a good detail, even in extremis."

  Sunday Times

  "Mosaic is restless, interrogative, hungry for knowledge and resolution.”

  Guardian

  About Michael Holroyd

  Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He was president of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003–2008 and is the only non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.

  Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs

  1 – Basil Street Blues

  Michael Holroyd – the most famous biographer in Britain – turns his attention upon himself and his own family in Basil Street Blues (the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s.) Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn’t stand living together. (His grandparents’ marriage provided no better model – his grandfather having had a four-year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother). Towards the end of Holroyd’s parents’ lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and researches he has written this moving and self-revealing book.