Little, Brown £17.99 pp283

In the course of his work on this book, Michael Holroyd and his wife Margaret Drabble spent two days in the Worthing reference library. While Holroyd pored over out-of-date telephone directories and electoral rolls, Drabble helpfully scanned microfilmed lists of death registrations. Finally, having failed to track down the latest address of a character of whom Holroyd was in pursuit, they traipsed up and down a street where she had once lived, ringing doorbells, accosting strangers and inquiring in banks, estate agents, undertakers. “For Maggie,” writes Holroyd, it was “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”.

The comment, at once ruefully self-deprecating and elegant of expression, is characteristic of this book, whose scrappiness is both an index of the tentative spirit in which the author approaches his subject matter and an unashamed insistence on the potential value of biographical bits and pieces.

The title is over-optimistic: in a mosaic each piece is a part of a bigger picture, but this follow-up to Basil Street Blues, Holroyd’s marvellous memoir of three generations of his family, is not so much a sequel as a series of appendices whose parts don’t add up to anything more than their sum. Holroyd is celebrated as the assiduous author of lengthy books about leading figures: this is a small book about publicly insignificant people. “Some may think it eccentric,” he writes, “I prefer the word original.” I would call it odd and uneven, but also poignant, finely written and tellingly evocative both of a little-explored patch of mid-20th century British social history and of its author’s own emotional life.

Its last and longest section concerns two people who played important if negative parts in his family’s history: Agnes May, the woman for whom his grandfather abandoned wife and children, and Henry Haselhurst, the man who exchanged love letters with his aunt for a decade before jilting her. Each of them was bad news for his family, but in writing about them Holroyd eschews rancour, giving a detached and quizzical account of their parallel careers, each of which involved multiple marriages, extravagant feats of self-invention and so many name changes it is small wonder Worthing’s record keepers were unable to keep up.

Haselhurst was a first-world-war pilot and a lifelong fancier of cars, boats and planes. Agnes May was a woman whose greatest recorded talent was for putting together exquisite teas and who succeeded in living off her charms all her life. Both of them left home early, cut off all contact with their families, lived far richer than their discernible means of support seemed to allow and erased their working-class origins so thoroughly that surviving acquaintances could scarcely credit that either could have begun their social ascents from such unpromising starting positions. What Holroyd finds out about them is pretty slight, but in chronicling their changes of address and shifts of identity he opens a narrow but revealing window on a society both impoverished and stimulated to change by war and economic flux — a snobby, seedy, convention-bound but chronically unstable culture, a very small world, but one plenty big enough to get lost in.

One of the least successful pieces included here is an attempt at self-portraiture. Holroyd confesses to diffidence in writing about himself. For all that, this is a frankly self-revelatory book. Its second large component part is an account of his love affair with the writer Philippa Pullar, a narrative in which he is inevitably one of the main characters. Besides, he is of the school of autobiographical biographers, one who “explores others through myself”. Whatever his ostensible subject, he tells us as much here about the process of his research as he does about the information it yields, showing himself not only as a lover and friend but also as a hard-working writer.

The spectacle is, indeed, “rather dreadful” — all those futile trawls through tedious records, all those tense interviews with cagey contacts. But Holroyd is a marvellously sour wit and an observer who never misses a good detail, even in extremis. Discussing arrangements for his aunt’s funeral he notices that the undertaker, concealing a cigarette behind his back, is giving off smoke like a devil newly arrived from hell. In Pullar’s conservatory he is struck by the goldfish, so “fiercely tame” they seem to want to sit on people’s laps. In his big biographies he transformed a welter of petty information into the very stuff of life, so here his account of his own delving is transmuted and vitalised by the exquisite exactitude of his prose and by his rare qualities of awareness — self-awareness and awareness of the piquancy of other people’s complicated, often disreputable, invariably interesting lives.

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