Julian Maclaren-Ross is hardly a name to conjure with nowadays, apart from a sympathetic review in a few issues ago in Slightly Foxed, but he was once spoken of with Powell, Betjeman, Waugh, Greene and Connolly. He is a bohemian figure who typifies the image, if not the reality, of raffish literary life before, during and just after the war, and although his output was not large – he died at 52, after a life which included failed marriages, imprisonment and insanity – he is certainly not negligible. His biography has been written by Paul Willetts, and although I have not read it, the title promises much: Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.
His output is largely short stories, with the novel Of Love and Hunger published in 1947. I have been reading a selection of the short stories, edited by Paul Willetts, drawn from a number of sources, including several written for Punch or Horizon, which Cyril Connolly was editing throughout the 1940s. The prose is compelling, a fierce and immediate language which seizes your attention but feels very natural, very unpolished, but which he can adapt for the common soldier or the middle class expatriate. Memories of Hemingway are stirred, but there are also other, more demotic echoes – Dalshiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler: this is prose which looks simple, free of ornament, plain, but which is in fact taut and sophisticated, and which leads you to conclusions as a punched fait accompli rather than inviting discussion or, even less, coming to conclusions of its own.
The stories are varied in locale and protagonists, but they are often bleak: I Had To Go Sick and Through The Usual Channels are about getting 'arsed about' by the army, and there are other compelling army stories, about the accidental death of a comrade, about the domestic and local trivia of army life away from the war. A Bit of A Smash in Madras recalls Orwell’s stories about Burma, as an expatriate manages to get off any punishment despite almost killing a local while driving well and truly drunk; Maclaren-Ross passes no judgement, but conveys the smug hypocrisy of a little big man, insidious corruption, and his own despairing distaste without pulling any punches. In the oddly titled Welsh Rabbit of Soap, he tells the story, miserable but funny, of a rapid bar room engagement which ends when the girl - a fantasist and a centreless character - just disappears. The main character, going home, late and probably drunk, after realising that he has lost her, says (in a paragraph which is not typical, yet conveys well his cosmic despair and emptiness, with a distinctly unusual literary reference):
So that was that; just another neurotic; neurosis followed me out of the ‘phone-box into the violent noisy night – drunks singing, shouts of Taxi, the rumble of a rocket exploding in the suburbs; neurosis, not happiness, lay in wait around the corner: my own neurosis, augmented by a succession of psychopathic girls, transmitted through the mind and through the blood, playing hide-and-seek, now dodging ahead, now pacing a step behind, waiting its chance to catch up: the hooded stranger, the shadowy third, of T S Eliot and the arctic wastes.
His other great strength is his dialogue. Here’s a passage from Death of a Comrade:
“Lennox...Fair haired kiddy from Cambridge. He got drowned today.”
“Drowned?”
“They ain’t found his body yet.”
“Good Lord. How’d it happen?”
“...Current got him, I reckon. He didn’t ought to’ve done no bathing in there: it’s too bleeding deep.”
“Well”, I said, “It’s too late to stop him now.”
“Too bleeding true it is”, the orderly sergeant said.
“Lennox. What was he like?”
“Blowed if I remember”.
“Neither do I.”
And it worried me, not being able to remember. Working in the army office I must have seen him scores of times ... Lennox, Lennox - I knew the name from typing out nominal rolls, but I couldn’t fit it to any face.
And why do I say he has the X factor? Because he is often regarded as the primary model for X Trapnel in Powell’s Books Do Furnish A Room, a writer of prodigious talent, much wasted, of strong and not always comfortable views, and of personal tragedy.
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