Julian Maclaren-Ross: Selected Letters
edited by Paul Willetts
352pp, Black Spring Press, £9.95
There are several books that ought immediately to be put into the hands of any fresh-faced 20-year-old who has ever imagined that it might be nice to write for a living. One is Pierre Coustillas's edition of George Gissing's gloom-stricken diaries. Another is Anthony Powell's chilly dispatch from the late-1940s literary frontline, Books Do Furnish a Room (1971). Instantly eclipsing both these chronicles of Grub Street despair comes Julian Maclaren-Ross: Selected Letters (1912-64), of which it might charitably be said that set against this portrait of mid 20th-century literary life, marine underwriting looks like a heaven-sent balm and loss adjusting a future that no prudent school-leaver could decently ignore.
The Maclaren-Ross revival has been going on for some time. Kicked into gear by Penguin's 2002 reissue of his vacuum-cleaner salesman novel Of Love and Hunger (1947), it has since taken in Paul Willetts's painstaking biography, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia (2003), and volumes - all edited by Willetts - of his short fiction, "collected memoirs" and miscellanea. As to what, strictly speaking, is being revived, there is no sustained point of focus. The essence of Maclaren-Ross lies in the mood piece, the fragment, the three-page sketch and the radio story. The tragedy of his working life was that, barring a few lucky breaks and subsidised furloughs, he never found the time to concentrate on a single project. The great novel that would establish his reputation always languished behind the radio drama booked to pay the butcher's bill; the Person from Porlock - in Maclaren-Ross's case usually a dun or an outraged landlord - lurked forever on the lodging house stair.
In the wake of Willetts's researches, and earlier portraits by Anthony Powell, Alan Ross and Dan Davin, the outlines of Maclaren-Ross's shaky transit around mid-century Fitzrovia are fairly well known. His background was unconventional for the time, taking in a continental education and a period spent living with his parents on the French riviera. The spending of a certain amount of family money was trailed by near-destitution on the prewar south coast until Cyril Connolly made his name by printing "A Bit of a Smash in Madras" in Horizon. But the real boost to his career, it turns out, was conscription into the army. The stories of barrack-room life collected in The Stuff to Give the Troops (1944) poured out in an unstoppable flow - in September 1942 he told New Writing's John Lehmann that he had written 15 pieces in the previous three months. On the other hand, army discipline baffled him and there was a grim interlude in a psychiatric hospital awaiting court martial before his eventual return to Soho (the Maclaren-Ross locus classicus) to pick up the threads of a lifestyle that he was to pursue, with ever diminishing returns, for the next 20 years.
Each of these compartments has been expertly plundered to construct Selected Letters: prewar efforts to write radio plays for the BBC; blitz-era dealings with literary editors; piteous entreaties to his publisher, Cape's Rupert Hart-Davis, during the army debacle (February 4 1943: "It's no good - you can't do anything right: work for them night and day, put your personal life aside, sink yourself in an unimportant, stupid job, and when you go absent for the best of motives ... then you get treatment usually meted out to deserters ..."). From an early stage the central dilemma of Maclaren-Ross's creative life is bleakly apparent. To function as a writer he needed a reliable patron - to Connolly and Lehmann could be added Anthony Powell of the TLS and later Punch - and yet the irregularity of the Maclaren-Ross lifestyle, those serial, debt-enforced treks from one seedy hotel to another, and the Maclaren-Ross temperament (touchy, egotistical, liable to take offence at a moment's notice) meant that each of his professional relationships was doomed to end in failure.
A Marxist critic who examined these bouts of anguished self-justification would probably deduce that Maclaren-Ross was the vulnerable and perpetually harassed victim of an economic system designed to exploit his talent for minimal financial reward. That Marxist critic would be wrong. A trawl through the 1950s correspondence with Hart-Davis, now conducting his own imprint after leaving Cape, confirms both the nightmare Maclaren-Ross was to deal with and the ominous behavioural pattern that ran alongside. He begins with a string of exacting requests: to be paid in cash, say, or for the publisher to act as his banker. Should the book get as far as publication, there follows a series of rebukes about inadequate sales. Pretty soon extreme personal umbrage gets taken, followed by savage insults. One sees instantly how irked Hart-Davis must have been by the letter of February 26 1953 ("I have thought over what you said from all points of view, but with all possible allowance I cannot pretend to understand your attitude") or the harangue of May 19 1953, after publication of The Weeping and the Laughter, which complains about delays in forwarding post, the absence of advertising and his landlady's inability to buy a copy at the Kensington branch of WH Smith.
If all this makes Maclaren-Ross sound like the worst kind of comic grotesque from the book-world memoir, the sort of windy self-obsessive who believes that a publishing firm exists simply to keep him in funds, then the reality is sometimes sharply different. Even at his most hardline ("I consider the tone you have adopted to be arrogant and presumptuous, and where you express sorrow for appearing 'censorious', you should in my opinion apologise for being impudent" - again to Hart-Davis) one sympathises with him, because the awareness that, to use Orwell's phrase, he is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain a pint at a time weaves through the letters like loosestrife through a hedge. The scent that rises off his fraught existence is unlike anything else in modern English literature: gamey, ground down (despite occasional irruptions of high spirits), farouche, piqued; relieving itself in a series of letters written against time with the tramp of the bailiff's boots echoing on the stair and the laundry lying impounded in the hotel strongbox. March 1947: "Dear Tony [Powell] ... Things are absolutely desperate with us: in fact we've been living for the last few days selling books, pawning clothes ..." February 19 1948: "Dear Dan [Davin]: Look, I'm in a mess. Can't pay the bill, danger of being kicked out, clothes etc seized." August 23 1954: "Dear John [Lehmann]: I have just lost girl, home and everything else at a moment's notice."
As the references to "us" and "girls" discreetly convey, this wasn't quite the solitary pen-pushing solipsist's life that a straight reading of the text can sometimes make it appear. Powell pointed out that the appurtenances of the Maclaren-Ross lifestyle - the faithful ladyfriend, the precarious Bayswater-area menage - kept up till the end. Come the 1960s, there was even a promising new patron in the shape of Alan Ross, Lehmann's successor at the London Magazine. But the last decade of Maclaren-Ross's life makes even grimmer reading than the years that preceded it - work steadily going downhill, love affairs ever more hopeless (the memorials from a calamitous mid-50s obsession with Orwell's widow, Sonia, seem scarcely sane); the changes of domicile ever more down-market. By July 1961, after his second wife, Diana, had walked out on him with their infant son, he fled to an Albany Street studio whose ongoing demolition denied him even a lavatory.
By November 1964 he was dead at the age of 52. Given his heroic intake of cigarettes, booze and amphetamines, the miracle is that he lasted so long. Willetts's editing of his letters is, as ever, punctilious to the point of mania. Far more so than some of the Attlee-era scamps and hangers-on with whom he is occasionally compared, Maclaren-Ross is literature's solitary, embattled conscience, the man for whom the compulsion to put words on paper dwarfs all other interests and whose absorption in his craft eventually leads him to destroy himself. Symbolism aside, Selected Letters is also a work of stark historical significance. Among other things, it shows that even half a century ago the life of the rackety freelance, a feature of English literature since the days of Johnson, was growing steadily less tenable. Here in the age of Richard & Judy and the Waterstone's three-for-two, it is virtually extinct.
· DJ Taylor's Bright Young People is published by Chatto
