Maurice once told me that his brother, Jimmy who spent
years researching a group of (I’m relying on memory here) 19th
century Jesuit scholars in Paris, felt in some ways closer to them than to
anyone in his present-day world. I truly can understand this phenomenon. There
are people, often the late/great, with whom I have connected in a singularly
profound manner simply by reading their works. Sometimes the work is fiction,
though this is rare. Usually the work is biographical, especially
auto-biographical. And, go figure, these people are quite universally of the
male gender. It’s not that I fail to be impressed and moved by women authors. I
can admire and seriously stand in awe before their articulation of the human experience.
I think for example of Virginia Woolf’s capacity for moving into the intricacies
of personal thought and emotion, and of the breadth of scholarship and
understanding shown by Alexandra Richie in her remarkable History of Berlin.
But the relationship that I enter into with these women is markedly different
from what happens when I encounter a male author who in some fashion speaks to
something deep within me.
I think that this phenomenon must have its source in
the difficulty my father had in relating to me in any articulated fashion. Some
years ago my mother told me that when I was young she would say to my father that
he didn’t talk to me. This was not something that I realized myself; her saying
the words placed this piece of the family puzzle into a previously empty slot
and I felt instinctively that it was true. My dad had a twin sister of whom he
was very fond. This affection was clearly directed toward my sister, Linda,
just 19 months my senior. He had a pet name for her – Plum. When she was a
moody teen he gave her a day book with his message, SMILE, written into each
page. I knew without reflecting too much on it that they enjoyed a special
relationship. I had adored him when I was his really little girl. I have had
some thoughts about why that early love did not blossom into a deeper rapport between
us as I grew into awkward adolescence, but shall not pursue those here.
Suffice it to say that I grew up with a man from whom
I was estranged emotionally, not recognizing until much later how I longed for
and needed the love and guidance of a father. Into this space have entered a
number of male writers whose works have engendered in me not just respect and
interest but truly a love that has been healing and self-affirming. It is as
though I have internally fashioned a father, or a group of fathers, who have
spoken to me in various voices, teaching me things of value, all the while
giving me something of themselves that I could understand and with which I
could empathize.
In the last couple of days I have read Basil Street
Blues, a small book by one of these authors, Michael Holroyd. I came across his
work in the early 1990s after seeing the movie Carrington. Doris Carrington was
a student at the prestigious Slade School of Art when she met and fell in love
with Lytton Strachey, an older, bi-sexual (mainly homosexual) writer (mostly
biographies); as his friend she entered into the loose confederation called the
Bloomsbury group in early 20th century London. Holroyd’s extensive
biography of Strachey, indeed of the entire Bloomsbury gang, was clearly a
reference point for the makers of the film.
All that he had written of these people was of great interest to me. Reading
his book felt like slipping down into a delicious and privileged place beside
this amazing group of people, people who were not just talented but who were
endeavouring to find their own ways of being – intellectually, artistically,
emotionally, and sexually -- in a world just emerging from the Victorian era.
Holroyd was able to convey his immersion in this world, the fruit of his
extensive research, at once sympathetically, and, historically objective. Writing
of Strachey and his circle, he conveyed much of his own intelligence and
sensitivities. Like absorbing the music of a loved composer or the art of a
talented painter, I took in not just the product but the producer himself,
feeling myself connected to him by bonds of mutual sympathies and interests.
Since then I have read his biographies of Bernard Shaw
and Augustus John. I came across a copy of the latter in a used book kiosk in
Bangkok, days before leaving for a tour of northern Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam
in the year 2000. I knew nothing of Augustus John at the time; the book was bulky
and expensive for a used copy but Holroyd’s name on the cover convinced me to
purchase it anyway. It saved my life on that strange and exotic trip. The small
tour group, led by a rather taciturn Australian chap (unusual for an Australian!),
percolated with hard-to-process emotions that rumbled among its disparate members
dwelling for long stretches in quarters so close as to eliminate any sense of
privacy. This was true particularly for the three days (staying over-night in
guest houses along the route) that we motored south on the Mekong River from
northern Laos to its ancient capital, Luong Prabang, all eleven of us encased
in a seat-less, wooden boat about 6’x25’. My own discomfort, more psychological
than physical, was intense.
Ah, but my travel mate was Holroyd! In the end I did
not find Augustus John an especially likeable character. Nonetheless, his artistic
world opened and examined for me by Michael Holroyd gave me an interior,
entirely private quarter of escape from the awkwardness and discomfort in which
I travelled on the Mekong. {I have just reviewed my journal entries for those
three days. In the event I mentioned only reading, not the subject or the
author, and I diagnosed my troubles to be caused by a state of mild depression.
Talking in the evenings with Mark who experienced none of my hyper-sensitivity
to the group’s collective atmosphere, and finding comfort in reading, I made it
through. Most of the entries made during those days relate to the sites visited
along our route. How many different experiences we are able to have
simultaneously, none of which rule out the others.}
One set of feelings that I have held
over the years about people like Michael Holroyd relates to an incipient sense
of envy of those who benefitted so clearly from a really good education and
were able to translate these benefits into solid, excellent, and interesting
work. I saw myself in contrast as someone who had in some ways grown up in an
emotional and intellectual jungle, with little direction or purpose, who stumbled from one phase
of life, one involvement after another, finding some semblance of a path for myself
only in middle age. What a waste! What might I have done with my
life had I had the advantages of some? Reading Holroyd’s Basil Street Blues
showed me, not at all for the first time, how foolish such an attitude is. This
book is family biography, a tale of Holroyd’s own family and his path through
their various financial and relational calamities, even as he was educated in
Britain’s finest “public,” i.e., private schools, complete with masters who
caned boys for minor offenses and senior boys who took seriously their
assignment to “toughen up” those younger than themselves through humiliation
and beatings. Like most of us Holroyd took what was good from his early circumstances and gradually found his way through that which was painful and thwarting, finding a path for himself. His tale spares no one but is singularly lacking in bitterness.
His love for all of his fractious family and his understanding of their
individual attempts to find lives for themselves shines through his text. My
response to his story is one of compassion and love, sensing in the work not
just his considerable ability to convey moods and eras, but his own humanity
and lack of pretentiousness. It is men like him that I have adopted for my own.
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