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Julian MacLaren-Ross

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Julian Maclaren-Ross(7 July 1912 – 3 November 1964) was a British novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, screenwriter, and literary critic.

Background

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He was born James McLaren Ross inSouth Norwood,London, in 1912, the youngest of three children.[1]His middle nameMcLarenwas a tribute to the family's landlady Mrs McLaren, who had helped his mother during his birth.[2]His mother, Gertrude, was once described as being from an Anglo-Indian family of English blood, and as "a magnificentIndianlady and the obvious source of his male beauty ". His father, John Lambden Ross, came from a prosperous part-Scottish,part-Cuban family that owned a shipping company called the Thistle Line. Although this family money enabled John Lambden Ross to survive without working, it never afforded his family a high standard of living.[3]Together with their two children, they lived in a series of rented houses and flats variously in south London,Bognor Regis,and theSouthbournedistrict ofBournemouth.[4]Their time in Bournemouth is described in Maclaren-Ross's memoirThe Weeping and the Laughter(1953).

Lured by the lower cost of living, the family moved to the south of France in August 1921. There, Maclaren-Ross received his only formal education.[5]At the age of 21 he drifted back to England, determined to make a career as a writer. With the help of a modest allowance from his grandfather, he initially lived in London, where he first sampled the bohemian world ofSohoandFitzrovia.[6]

In 1936 he married a young actress and moved to rented accommodation in Bognor Regis, but the marriage did not last long. When his allowance was cut off in 1938, he earned a living as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman. He continued to write in his spare time. At that time he concentrated on writing radio plays, one of which was broadcast by theBBC.[7]

His breakthrough came in 1940 whenHorizonagreed to publish his short story "A Bit of a Smash in Madras". Shortly after its publication, he was conscripted into the army. While stationed in a series of English coastal garrisons, he produced a string of satirical short stories about the army. These appear inHorizon,Penguin New Writing, English Storyand the other leading literary magazines of the period, earning him a reputation as one of the rising stars of English writing.[8]

He deserted from the army in January 1943. Upon being gaoled, he suffered a breakdown. He was then sent to a military psychiatric hospital in the Northfield district of Birmingham.[9]After a brief period of imprisonment, he settled in London where he soon found a job as a scriptwriter on government propaganda documentaries, working alongside poetDylan Thomas.Meanwhile, in July 1944Jonathan Capepublished Maclaren-Ross's first book, a collection of short stories entitledThe Stuff To Give The Troops.[10]These stories prompted novelistEvelyn Waughto declare that "Mr Maclaren-Ross's work… shows accomplishment of a rare kind."[11]

Through the post-war 1940s, by which time he had become a ubiquitous and flamboyant presence in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, he established himself as a respected literary critic, writing forThe Times Literary Supplement.He published two more short-story collections, in addition to the novelOf Love and Hunger(1947), whichAnthony Powellrated as highly as the work of Patrick Hamilton and F. Scott Fitzgerald.[12]Powell was not alone in admiring Maclaren-Ross's fiction; other prominent fans included Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, John Lehmann, V. S. Pritchett, Olivia Manning, andJohn Betjeman,the last of whom described him as 'one [of] the most gifted writers of his generation ".[13]

Maclaren-Ross's career was, however, undermined by his boozy,amphetamine-fuelled, spendthrift way of life. In search of rapid financial rewards, he devoted more and more time to journalism, screenwriting, and French-into-English translation work. The mid-1950s represented the low point of his life. Obsessed byGeorge Orwell's glamorous widowSonia Orwell,he ended up homeless, sleeping in the waiting-room atEuston station,on underground trains, and on friends' settees. He also had a brief spell in prison for non-payment of debts. Still, his resilience and determination enabled him to rebuild his life over the next few years.[14]

In 1958 he married Diana Bromley,Leonard Woolf's rackety bohemian niece. She gave birth to his only child, Alex. Maclaren-Ross had by then reinvented himself as a writer of popular BBC radio drama, notably thethrillerseriesUntil the Day She Dies,which was broadcast on theLight Programme.He also began writing a series of reminiscences forLondon Magazine.These were conceived as part of what he called hisMemoirs of the Forties.Only part of this had been completed when he suffered a fatalheart attackin November 1964 aged 52, his demise probably hastened by years of alcoholism, amphetamine-taking, and stress.[15]

In his obituary inThe Timeson 6 November 1964, the paper said MacLaren-Ross "was a dedicated and highly professional writer who never quite found the right vein for his talents". It added that his short stories:

took him into the wartime literary world, where he became a conspicuous figure in Soho and Fitzrovia, blossoming out after his demobilization as a tall, slightly theatrical-looking gentleman with a silver-knobbed stick. This appearance, and the formal manners that went with it, were somewhat misleading. His stories of Soho, though aimed at a less important target than their predecessors, were still ironic, often tightly compressed and usually very funny. At the same time he was starting to work as a script-writer in films, a subject which always passionately interested him. Then he turned his attention further back: first to his unhappy prewar period as a salesman, which became the subject of his one really serious novelOf Love and Hunger(1947) then to his childhood as son of a none too prosperous Scottish father, dividing his retirement between France and a melancholy-refined English seaside.The Weeping and the Laughter,the first volume of this autobiography, appeared in 1953 and only took him up to the age of 11; unfortunately it was never followed by others, and from then on he was driven to do a great deal too much occasional work to fulfil his very real potentialities. Unfortunately for him perhaps, he was an admirable contributor of occasional articles and parodies toPunchand a valued reviewer forThe Times Literary Supplement,The Sunday Times,and, more recently,The London Magazine.He also did occasional film work and at least two thriller-serials for the Light Programme of the B.B.C. But in spite of his interest in, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, the thriller form in both novel and film his own incursions into the medium were never really successful, either in the artistic or in the commercial sense. His reviews made more demands on him; at least they showed his very wide literary knowledge and interests, which included much that was relentlessly highbrow in both French and English. It was only quite lately that his publisher managed to induce him to embark onMemoirs of the Forties,of which an admirably promising instalment appeared inThe London Magazinefor November. It was about half finished at the time of his death. For his best and profoundest book wasOf Love and Hunger,which was recently republished as a paperback. It is a short, tragic work somewhat in the vein ofPatrick Hamilton,but deserves to live in its own right. The army stories were collected inThe Stuff to Give the Troops(1944): they are minor historic documents as well as very funny stories. Apart from the autobiography none of his seven other books comes up to this level, but anything he wrote has a certain distinction. His manuscripts were unforgettable, tiny neat writing with a slight slope and the odd baroque decoration, written perhaps in the Mandrake Club or in a pub. Ironic, self-controlled, slightly stilted, yet giving nothing away, they were very like the man himself.[16]

In the wake of Maclaren-Ross's death, his uncompletedMemoirs of the Fortieswas published by Alan Ross under the London Magazine Editions banner. The book was a critical and commercial success. The reviewer forThe Timesstated, "He wrote with economy and a formal elegance that marvellously suited his detached attitude to whatever in his surroundings seemed odd, ridiculous or wild; down it all went in curt graphic dialogue and deadpan description. There is nothing else that so conveys the atmosphere of bohemian and fringe-literary London under the impact of war and its immediate hangover. The book is comic, nostalgic and at times even moving, all without the least sense of strain."[17]

Over subsequent years he went on to enjoy a strange, posthumous career as the model for characters in other people's books. The best-known of these are the bohemian novelist X. Trapnel inAnthony Powell'sA Dance to the Music of Time(v.10Books Do Furnish a Room) and as Prince Yakimov inOlivia Manning'sThe Balkan Trilogy.

Prompted by the publication ofFear and Loathing in Fitzrovia,Paul Willetts's much-praised biography, all of his finest work came back into print, attracting praise from the likes of D. J. Taylor,Lucian Freud,Philip French,Virginia Ironside,Sarah Waters, andHarold Pinter,who dramatised a couple of his short stories for BBC radio. "It was a great treat to discover the writing of Julian Maclaren-Ross. Witty, smart, eccentric—he never ceases to entertain", wrote Sarah Waters.[18]With comparable enthusiasm, critic and novelist D. J. Taylor hailed Maclaren-Ross as "one of the great unsung heroes of the literary 1940s and at his best a figure to rank with Orwell, Connolly and Waugh".[19]

Works

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Further reading

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  • Bakewell, Michael,London's Bohemia(1999)
  • Davin, Dan,Closing Times(1975)
  • Cronin, Anthony,Dead as Doornails(1976)
  • Willetts, Paul,Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia(Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2003; revised 2005)
  • Waterstone's Guide to London Writing(1999)

References

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  1. ^"The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography".Oxford Dictionary of National Biography(online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004.doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37717.ISBN978-0-19-861412-8.(Subscription orUK public library membershiprequired.)
  2. ^Selected Letters,Julian Maclaren-Ross, 2004, p. ix
  3. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 13–30.
  4. ^http:// julianmaclaren-ross.co.uk/chronology.htmlArchived26 August 2015 at theWayback Machine[failed verification]
  5. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 30–43.
  6. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 43–46.
  7. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 43–81.
  8. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 85–143.
  9. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 117–138.
  10. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 139–160.
  11. ^Letter from Evelyn Waugh to the Royal Literary Fund, 4 July 1950.
  12. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.p. 203.
  13. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 239–240.
  14. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 203–289.
  15. ^Willetts, Paul.Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia.pp. 289–358.
  16. ^The Times,6 November 1964
  17. ^The Times,23 September 1965
  18. ^Dustjacket quote on Julian Maclaren-Ross'sSelected Letters(Black Spring Press, 2008)
  19. ^Dustjacket quote fromJulian Maclaren-Ross: Collected Memoirs(Black Spring Press, 2004)
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